Ryan Deiss Recommends A Social Media Manager

Perry: They can’t hit the Buy button fast enough.

Ryan: The value proposition is so huge. It’s free when they sign up for the membership site, but nevertheless they want the training.

The membership site at that point, “Hey, whatever. Maybe I’ll check it out. Maybe there will be some other good stuff in there. I don’t care.” Which is exactly what you want them thinking. They don’t know that it’s really hard to sell these membership sites on their own.

I know people are going to ask, “How do I do the billing for these things and stuff like that?” Go to www.DrivingTraffic.com/vendors and I will include credit card processors and shopping cart companies that will allow you to do monthly recurring billing.

Perry: It doesn’t cost a lot of money. It really does not cost a lot of money to set up these things. Its peanuts compared to what you can make.

Ryan: I’ll just throw this out there right now. While it’s not the one that we use or recommend, www.ClickBank.com can get you set up for $50 and you don’t have to get your own merchant account or anything. You can process recurring orders through them.

Another one is www.Paypal.com. Again, it’s not the one that we use or recommend but they will work.

Perry: If you want a cool strategy too, we’re working with people right now on some of our membership sites where you don’t have a lot of front end offers. We’re going out to people who sell one thing and they don’t have a back end or a membership site.

If you don’t have a membership site completed you should go out and look for partners. Look for other people that sell related products and say, “How would you like to sell my membership site on the back end of your products and split the revenue.

It doesn’t cost you a cent more. If you have one member or one million members, well, within reason. You’d have a little bit bigger hosting bill but so what! That’s a problem to have.

Ryan: That’s a great problem to have.

Perry: It won’t cost you any more to deliver that content to one person than it will to deliver it to a thousand people, so if you can find people that have front end offers you’ll be helping them out by giving them a back end to sell and giving them monthly recurring income. They’re helping you out by giving you front end sales.

The one thing I know Ryan meant to touch on but maybe didn’t was that every month when you record this new recording and create your content, you’re creating brand new front end. You’re creating multiple front ends.

What is probably going to happen is that one or two of those front ends are going to sell better than all the other front ends. But the good news is that you get to constantly test that.

Ryan: So every month when you do a new interview, for example, that’s a new thing that you can go out there and sell all by itself to roll people into your continuity program.

Perry: You might hit a button with people that that’s the one thing that turned them on. Maybe they weren’t into your pot roast recipe but they’re digging your taco chicken, or whatever.

You get to hit multiple veins because you’re basically introducing a new product every month even though that new product is super, super, super, easy to produce.

Ryan: I’m so glad that you said that about going out and getting other people in your industry, in your market, who don’t have membership sites, who don’t have subscription services at all and are saying, “For everybody who buys your product give them 30 days free to my membership site?”

It’s a value add for them. For you, you won’t get paid within the first 30 days but what do you care? If it’s a membership site it’s bits and bites. It doesn’t matter.

You might even say, “For everybody who signs up for your program give them this free CD.” They get to send all their customers, or they can even tell people on their list. They don’t even have to be customers.

You can go out to them and say, “As a special deal why don’t you send an email out to your list and promote my free CD?” You’ve probably seen this done before where they send an e-mail out to their list telling their list about this great new interview that you did.

You still get people to pay shipping and handling. That way you’re not out any money, and then 30 days later you start billing into continuity and you pay them a commission on it.

Here’s another little super-secret ninja trick. If you want to get people to promote for you one of the easiest ways to do it is to interview people that have lists.

If you have a monthly interview program and you interview somebody who has a list who is in your market, when they’ve taken the time to do an interview with you, wouldn’t it make sense once the interview is over and the CD is done for them to now promote this interview that they’ve done to their own list?

Perry: I hope you guys got that. That is absolutely golden.

If I’m doing a product for Ryan on the back end I may ask Ryan if he would like to contribute an article as a contributing writer every now and then to my membership site. That way he gets to put his touch on it so if he’s sending his people to it, it has his touch on there, but it also gives me information or tools inside my site that come from a very reliable source in the marketing industry.

One hand washes another.

Ryan: Along the same lines, when we started membership sites we’ve gone out to other known experts in our market and asked them to be, just like you said, content contributors.

We’ve gone out to other (1:00:00) and saying “Hey, we’re starting this membership site and we’re going to fill it with a lot of people. Do you have any articles or interviews that you have done that you want to provide?”

Perry: Most of these people have stuff lying around.

Ryan: Yeah, they have stuff that’s lying around. If they have provided some of the content for your membership site, in a way they have a vested interest in the success of that site because their content is in it.

It’s kind of a subtle psychological thing that is at play there, but if you go to them first and ask for content for your membership site, number one you’ve given them an ego stroke. You’ve told them “I recognize that you’re an expert and I respect what you’re doing. I’d love to have some of your content that you already have lying around to put in my membership that is going to give you some exposure.”

Now when you go back to them and say, “Everything is going great. The membership site is going well. Would you be interested in promoting our site? Promoting one of the offers to your people?”

In their own mind they’ve already lent some level of validation and credibility to your site because they are a contributor to it. It’s going to be hard for them to say they have zero interest in promoting that site where their content is in it.

Does that kind of clear it up, Perry?

Perry: You see this used a lot in product launches. A friend of ours, John Carlton, did a copywriting course not too long ago. He interviewed almost everybody in the business to go into the course. Guess who promoted the course once it was out? Everybody in the business that he interviewed.

It’s a really cool thing to do.

Ryan: You’re sort of double-dipping on these people.

Perry: It’s good for them, too.

Ryan: Either they don’t realize or they don’t care.

Perry: It gets them exposure.

Ryan: In that you’re killing two birds with one stone. You’re getting content and you’re getting affiliates to promote it.

There have been whole membership sites, whole subscription programs that we have built just using that model right there. Just using the affiliate model even in markets where we’re not known experts.

I’m not talking about doing this in the Internet marketing field. We’ve done this in the fitness field. We’ve done this in the financial markets, in currency trading. Some people know I have stuff in currency trading.

Perry I know you’ve done it in the small business markets and some of your other goofy niche markets. It works across the board.

Perry: Let me ask you a question. I know it’s not on here so forgive me if I jump outside of the outline.

What if you’re not an expert in anything? What if you’re sitting on the couch saying “I don’t know nuthin’.” What do you do?

Ryan: That’s what this whole interview and expert model is about. As I’ve heard you talk about before, you become a reporter, or as I like to talk about, a publisher.

I own a membership site that is related to fitness. If you could see you would see I am not in particularly good shape.

Perry: He’s not kidding.

Ryan: I’m not kidding at all. I’m not in particularly great shape and I have this membership site but I’m not the one that’s providing the content. I’m joint venturing with other people who can provide the content.

They provide the content, they provide the expertise. If you go over to www.DrivingTraffic.com/continuity you will see a video on there called the “Continuity Publisher Model” where I talk about that in particular.

That’s why I’m telling you to go out there and interview the experts. Be a reporter. Don’t feel like you have to be the expert. Be the reporter. Be the content aggregator.

There is another great membership site continuity program out there that is targeted to the financial services industry called www.HorsesMouth.com.

Whoever runs the site, all this person does is get other experts in that industry to provide content. They all do it for free because they want exposure. This person gets the content for free and he gets people to pay him for content that other people have provided.

How brilliant is that? For all I know they know nothing about the financial service market.

Perry: Have you ever seen the cute little girl on CNN that’s interviewing the Wall Street, gray hair, pin-striped types? You know that you don’t necessarily have to have a great deal of expertise in what you’re promoting.

Ryan: I’ve heard you tell the story about Napoleon Hill. The funny thing about Napoleon Hill is that people now associate him with being a true, great prosperity thinker.

People associate Napoleon Hill with wealth but what they don’t know is that before he went out and started writing Think and Grow Rich he was broke. If you know that story, Andrew Carnegie hired him as a reporter, functionally, to go out and interview all of the rich people about what they know.

Napoleon Hill wasn’t rich. He wasn’t successful. He wasn’t prosperous. He was a reporter. He asked questions.

Interestingly enough, after the book came out and it was a huge success and it made a lot of money, he still ended his life relatively broke. He was not a successful prosperous human being.

He had some good things going on in his life but he was not this amazingly successful person that we would all associate the author of Think and Grow Rich.

It is probably the single best, most highly respected, highly regarded, best-selling book on prosperity and wealth that there is, is that right?

Perry: Yes.

Ryan: It was the halo effect that came from him being the reporter that allowed him to do that, so even if you’re not an expert you’ll eventually be perceived as that.

Perry: There is sort of a rung on the ladder for every interview that you do. It gets better and better as you interview bigger and bigger people either in your niche or in general.

I’ll give you two examples right now. If you asked most people to make a list of the top ten most powerful women in the world right now, probably Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters would be right on the top of that list. You can almost be sure of it.

What have each of them done in and of themselves? For the most part they’ve interviewed other people.

Ryan: A lot of them, especially in the case of Oprah.

Perry: She’s done a lot of humanitarian work and all sorts of media.

Ryan: She’s leveraged her fame and celebrity into much bigger and greater things, bigger and greater media.

But what was she functionally when she got started? She was a reporter.

Perry: And really still is. Her bread and butter is still reporting and interviewing. Barbara Walters is incredibly powerful based on being a great reporter.

Ryan: To answer your original question, what if you’re not an expert? I’d say that’s a good thing. If you’re not an expert you’re going to be more curious, you’re going to ask more questions.

All you really need to know how to do is how to find experts, which I’ve already taught you to do. How to compile the information into a sellable format which I’ve shown you how to do with the CD-of-the-month program or a membership site, and then how to sell it, which again, I’ve shown you how to do.

The big secret there is of going out and productizing your content, selling your content, rolling your people into continuity.

Do you have anything else?

Perry: I don’t have a lot. I think that you’ve covered so much for people. Don’t try to make it overcomplicated.

Ryan: That’s what I wanted to show you in this short training. You really can set up your own passive recurring income machine in 48 hours or less.

I’ve shown you the importance of creating daily income and how to change your mindset, to get away from the whole “sell a product once get paid once.” That’s stupid.

Why would you sell a product once and get paid once when you could sell a product once and get paid over and over and over again. Hopefully I’ve convinced you of that.

I’ve shown you how you can get the two models that I prefer most. The CD-of-the-month model and the membership site model.

I’ve shown you how you can get these models set up in 48 hours or less. I’ve shown you the common elements that go into membership sites. The difference between premium content and filler content and how you can get tons and tons of filler content very, very quickly, easily and free.

And we talked about how to sell subscription offers. The principle of it where we’re talking about selling premiums and not selling subscriptions, and some additional tactics and strategies when we talked about working with affiliates and getting them to give away 30-day trials and stuff like that.

I’ve told you enough here to hopefully get you started but if you want to know my exact system for how I do it check out www.ContinuityBlueprint.com. I have some additional training there that you might find interesting.

Again, www.DrivingTraffic.com/continuity is where you’ll be able to see some videos that I’ve posted there. Some really, really great training videos that show everything from my kind of continuity business model and how that works to the continuity snowball effect, and I talked about doing the publisher/reporter model and how I’ve done that.

That’s where I will leave you.

Perry: If I could kind of throw in one last closing question. What would you say the future is like in the continuity business versus being in a normal information publishing business?

Ryan: It’s a great question. From what I’ve seen happen recently with the Internet; traffic costs have increased, competition is getting more and more tough, and customers are more confused than ever. They have so many options they’re not as loyal.

It’s not that people are disloyal it’s that they don’t even remember who they bought from half the time.

It’s my strong belief and opinion that if you want to have an online business, and you want to have an online business for the long term, you really need to have some kind of subscription monthly income element to it.

It’s hard right now to go out there and sell a product and get paid once and make money doing that.

When I first got started back in 2000 traffic costs were cheap, there was no competition, and I could go out and sell $20 e-books and make money.

Now I can’t do that. Traffic is too expensive. Competition is too fierce. If I want to go out and make money I need to have a subscription element to it.

The whole concept of the Automatic Daily Income System of creating your own recurring income machine is not just a good thing. It’s not just a desire. I would say it’s a requirement.

Certainly over the next couple of years I think it’s going to be virtually impossible for you to make a living online, to have an online business, if you don’t have one of these passive recurring income machines in place in your business.

Now is the time to do it, really. It’s only getting harder. It’s only getting more expensive out there. Now is the time to build your subscription empire, to build that Automatic Daily Income and get that wealth rolling in.

I beg of you, take action now. Don’t wait. Don’t let this linger. Don’t think about this and overanalyze this stuff. I promise you, you really can get one of these things set up in 48 hours or less if you’ll just get out of your own way and take action.

Along those same lines though, I want to congratulate you and thank you for listening all the way through this training. So many people will invest in training and their education, and sadly, it stays in the shrink wrap or it never makes it into their CD drive.

Thank you for not only investing in it, for not only listening to it but completing it. Now the next step is just to take some action. That’s where I’ll leave it.

Perry, do you have any final words?

Perry: I just want to thank you, Ryan, for taking the time today for me to listen to all of this and for you to share this with the listeners out there and for basically the gift that you give it at www.DrivingTraffic.com/continuity.

I know there is probably an hour-and-a-half of videos there that are honestly the best advanced training I’ve ever seen on continuity programs. Just in those three videos better than any product I’ve ever bought online and I’ve bought tons of products online about building continuity programs.

You really go above and beyond moving (1:11:39) to free line, moving the free line. You give away so much information there and I really suggest that people go watch those. They are a great gift.

Thank you, again, for being here today. I enjoyed it.

Ryan: Thank you

{ 1 comment }

Perry: You want to trickle in content so there is always something new there when they log in.

Ryan: Maybe every month you add three new articles and two videos.

Perry: Then you take the rest of the day off. [Laughter]

Ryan: Then you call that done. Membership site done. Seriously, this whole issue of “I don’t know how to come up with content” or “I don’t want to have a membership site” or “I don’t want to have a subscription offer or CD-of-the-month program because I don’t want to have to keep coming up with content on a regular basis,” look, you don’t have to come up with the content. People have already done it. It’s on the Internet.

You become a content aggregator. That’s the value that you provide, and in addition you bundle in your other premium content and then you have something that is worth paying month after month for.

That’s how we go about creating these Automatic Daily Income streams.

Perry: A lot of times, even on premium content, I’ll be able to take three articles that I really like on a subject but I want to add a little twist to, I can literally take those three articles and send them over to a ghost writer and say, “I like these. Will you read the three of these and write me a new article with this twist to it?”

Maybe it’s “Three Magic Tricks Article for Sales People” and they are just magic trick articles but I want them rewritten for sales people.

You can have your ghost writer write it, and it usually costs me somewhere around $25 to get a US ghost writer to write me a really nice piece. You can do two or three of those a month.

It’s ridiculous the amount of money that you can make from these sites and deliver killer unique value.

Ryan: I’ll move on because we’re still talking about common elements found in membership sites. Just to reiterate, we’ve talked about special reports and newsletters, and we’ve talked about interviews, we’ve talked about articles and videos.

Another aspect of a membership site is a Members Only Forum. There are a lot of free forums out there. If you go to www.WordPress.org and you go to their plug-ins areas, there are WordPress plug-ins where you can drop in a free forum or that will allow you to have a forum off of your WordPress site. That can be something that you want to have.

Just to kind of warn you, forums can be a bit of a hassle. You do need to moderate them because you’ll have the occasional knucklehead get in there and start saying something stupid.

If you’re not moderating it, one bad apple could ruin the bunch and you could lose your people. Most of my membership sites don’t even have a forum, but I know people ask about it, they want to do it so I throw it out there.

Me, personally, if you want to know what I do, I don’t have forums because they are kind of a pain to manage. They don’t really seem to affect stick rate. They don’t seem to help your stick rate so I don’t hassle with them but I want to mention it because some people do.

Another good thing to have in a membership site is  Recommended Resource links. Already in this training we’ve thrown out a dozen recommended resources. I’m sure you’ve found value in that.

I’m sure that if you’ve never heard of www.ExpertVillage.com, a site where you can go and grab all these free videos, you found that valuable, or www.wikiHow.com, or some of these other resources that we’ve given you in this training, that’s a very valuable thing to have.

Again, it gets into the whole content aggregation thing. Including Recommended Resources in your members’ area; it’s amazing. You’ll have people stick around just so they can continue to have access to that type of thing.

Perry: Sometimes we’ll do membership sites, I know you do too, that are partially free, partially paid kind of sites. That is basically The Wall Street Journal kind of site.

If you go to The Wall Street Journal site you can read today’s paper. They’ll let you see today’s paper, but if you want to read yesterday’s or read an article from last week you have to be a member. A lot of times they’ll protect their archives and that’s really simple to do. I think you cover that in the video.

Ryan: If you go to www.DrivingTraffic.com/membership you’ll see the video where I show how to protect a membership site in 12 minutes or less. That video is perfect for what you just described.

It’s perfect for having some free content on your WordPress blog or on the front of your Web site and then protecting an archives area.

Perry: If you’ve ever been to one of those articles where you get a paragraph into the article and it says, “Click here to read the rest of the article,” it’s that cliffhanger. You can place that little piece of code anywhere you want to where the biggest cliffhanger is.

If you drop it where the cliffhanger is, “There are only three big secrets…” or “There is only one big secret to doing this and here it is…” drop in the code and they can’t read the rest of the article. When they hit that button they see “You’re not authorized for this. You need to be a member to get to this premium content.” A lot of people use that.

Ryan: It is a really, really solid strategy.

Perry: Let’s say we have our shell now, right? We have our data in the shell and we have our membership site. How long do you really think it should take? A full 48 hours, that’s about it right? At the most?

Ryan: At the most, yeah. Think about it. I’m not including the time it takes you to find somebody to interview, but what does that really take? An afternoon to go and research someone who is an expert and then you go and book it and get some time with them.

After you do that interview, you call somebody, you record the interview, you interview them for an hour or so, you hang up the phone and you go out there and start building these things in your membership site. You could literally do it all within one day.

If you want to take your time, 48 hours, sure, but it really shouldn’t take you longer than 48 hours.

Perry: If I build my membership site, if I build it they will come, right? Lots of people are going to come to the door and throw their credit cards at me and I’m going to be rich, right?

Ryan: That’s amazing. That’s the big secret. Just build it. Just build it and you’re rich. No, absolutely not.

Perry: How do you sell subscriptions? I would think selling subscriptions is hard. Once you have it how do you get members?

Ryan: You’re actually right in one of the things that you said. Selling subscriptions is hard. If you go out there and you decide, “Okay. I’m going to create a CD-of-the-month program” or “I’m going to create a membership site” and then you go out there and you try to sell your membership site, or you try to sell your CD-of-the-month program, you’re going to have a very hard time doing it.

I hope you didn’t just click the Eject button and throw this CD out the window, because, fortunately, that’s not the end of the story.

Perry: Tell them the good part.

Ryan: I’ll tell you the good part. The example that I gave before was Video Professor. He did not try to sell a monthly computer training library.

Think back to the golf DVDs that I bought. They did not try to sell a monthly DVD-of-the-month program for golf tutorials.

What they sold me was how to add an additional 20 to 30 yards to my drive. That is what they sold me, and what I found out when I bought it – they didn’t hide it, it wasn’t a secret where I got scammed – they said that I was going to be able to get this DVD, which would normally be $47, for free. Just pay shipping and handling when you try out our DVD-of-the-month program.

It was genius. It was brilliant. That is what I suggest what you do.

Perry: That is exactly the way Video Professor does it.

Ryan: Yeah. That is exactly the way Video Professor does it. They go out there and he says, “Wouldn’t you love to learn how to sell on eBay? Everybody is talking about eBay. eBay is all the rage, wouldn’t you learn to love to sell on eBay? Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to send you my free CD on how to make money selling on eBay. You can have it for free. Just pay shipping and handling.”

When you sign up for that that is when you get into their subscription program.

Perry: One of the most famous examples that I can think of is Columbia House Records. If you’ve ever flipped through a magazine, if you’ve not been living under a rock somewhere, there is a big ad in there for Columbia House Records.

“Get 10 CDs for a penny.” They make you some really irresistible offer and they tell you straight up that you are going to be sent a CD every month. You can send it back if you don’t like it, if you like it you keep it.

They bring in millions and millions and millions of subscribers every year to that service by making an irresistible offer on the front end with an “Oh, by the way” of the continuity program.

I think that is the big takeaway. You have to “productize” the front end. Where do you get profits?

Ryan: You just said it right there. You need to “productize” the content that you already have. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s talk first about the CD-of-the-month program. You went out there and you recorded an interview with somebody. Now, ideally, that interview was on a particular topic. You didn’t just talk about the weather and how many kids they have the entire time.

Ideally, and you need to make sure as the interviewer that your interview stayed on topic and that there was a big, big thing that somebody could get out of that particular area.

Can you give an example of one of the Entrepreneur’s Club interviews? A good topic that somebody might learn? Like they might learn something about how to get people into their restaurant, or something like that.

Perry: Oh, sure. We’ve got products for the restaurant business that are 24 add-ons that can pay your rent, basically. We might do an interview with somebody who does a really good job with add-ons to their menu. They pay all the bills and pay all the overhead.

We take that interview, change it to a product, “25 Add-ons for Your Restaurant that Can Pay Your Rent and All of Your Overhead” and sell that as an individual product.

The big secret is that the first one is always cheaper than the membership. Here’s this great thing that you’re selling like a product, you build up its value like crazy, and then you say “Hey, here it is and you can have it for $1” or $5 or some irresistible amount.

Ryan: “You can have it for free, just pay shipping and handling.”

Perry: Some totally irresistible offer that they can’t pass up on, and don’t try to hide in the fine print somewhere, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to sign you up for…”

That will just make people really, really angry with you. If you’re delivering good content to them on the first piece, and it’s important that you do, and you’re honest with them, most people are willing to give you a shot.

Let them know, “Hey, just let us know before the end of the first 30 day billing cycle if you decide you don’t want this to opt out.” That way you are being as honest and forthright as you can possibly be, and that’s incredibly important. You have to be transparent and straight up with folks.

The only way you can screw up everything that Ryan is telling you right now is to try to be sneaky.

Ryan: Absolutely. I cannot stress enough to you, do not try to be sneaky about this.

In kind of the same way that it would work with the CD-of-the-month program, is just what you said. Take that offer and say, “Here it is. Here’s my first interview.”

You would “sell” that first interview. You wouldn’t sell the program. You wouldn’t sell the subscription. You would sell the value of them listening to that first interview.

We “productized” our first interview and you mentioned giving an outrageous offer, what I like to tell people is, “Normally this would cost $27” or $47, or $97, “but I want to give it to you for free.”

Again, it’s the Video Professor model. I want to send you this valuable CD where you’re going to learn this and this  and this, for free, and the reason I’m willing to give this to you for free is that I want you to test drive my CD-of-the-month Club.

Are you seeing the difference there? Instead of selling people that you have a CD-of-the-month Club, “You’re going to get this CD-of-the-month on these different topics and these are going to be great and you’re going to love it.”

That is not what you do. Instead you say, “I have this CD, this training. You’re going to learn this and this and this and I want to send it to you for free” or “I want to send it to you for a vastly reduced price when you try my monthly program.”

Another good example, if you want to bring it back to the real world that a lot of people might understand, especially men listening to this, think about the Sports Illustrated offers.

Sports Illustrated is a sports magazine, and if you notice they never sell subscriptions to their magazine. What they do instead is sell things like football phones, fleece pullovers.

Perry: Or the calendar with the hotties on it.

Ryan: Yeah, the swimsuit issue. They’ll sell these premiums and the idea is that you’re going to get this football phone for free when you try Sports Illustrated.

You’re doing the same thing with your training. “You’re going to get this great CD” whatever the interview was that you did “you’re going to get this great training for free when you try the monthly program.”

That’s the outrageous irresistible offer that allows you to get people into a subscription. Remember, you do not want to sell subscriptions. I cannot make that any clearer.

If you started listening to this and you said, “I’m going to hear what this guy has to say, but hey, I’ve tried that whole subscription thing/membership site thing. It didn’t work. I couldn’t sell it. Nobody wanted to buy it.”

Perry: You’re right. You’re probably right.

Ryan: Nobody probably wanted to buy it. This is how you go about selling it. This is the secret sauce to making the Automatic Daily Income System work.

This is the secret sauce. You do not sell subscriptions you sell products and you bundle subscriptions with it.

So how does it work with the membership site? It’s basically the same. You take whatever the premium thing that you have, maybe it’s a report that you wrote, and you “sell” that premium report on whatever the topic is.

You give people the opportunity to buy this report, maybe you want to sell it for $27 and give them a free 30-day trial to your membership site and then they get billed for $27.

Or you can say, “Take it for free” and then you bill them 30 days later for your membership site.

Perry: We just did this with a product that we launched a couple of months ago called “43 Split-tests.” It’s a marketing product, a business to business thing. If you’re not really into marketing it wouldn’t be of great value to you, but if you are into marketing it’s very valuable.

It’s called “43 Split-Tests” and we took the product and were going to create it and sell it just one time and instead we decided to give the product away if people tried our $97 a month membership site.

It is really for marketing professionals, advanced in the marketing business. The test showed we actually sold more by giving it away then we did by selling it outright.

Instead of making $97 for the one time for the product which is what we intended to sell it for, we got members in at $97 a month. Every sale that we made, if we keep the member an average of four or five months, every sale is worth $400 or $500 versus, at best, $200 on the front end.

It’s a whole lot harder to sell on the front end if you’re selling a 200 product.

Ryan: You’re absolutely correct.

That’s the big model. Don’t sell membership sites. Pull out your most valuable aspect, the report, the interview, the audio, whatever is the most valuable aspect of your training that you know is super good and that you know you want everybody to go to and watch or read first because you know they’re going to get tremendous value out of that.

Pull it out, sell it on its own, and tell the people, “Look, you can have this for free when you test drive the membership site.”

Let’s say you have a $27 a month membership site, which is a great price point and one that we use a lot. If you have a $27 a month membership site and you tell them you have this awesome report where they are going to learn this, this, and this, and they can have it for free when they test drive the membership site.

You charge people $27 today, and then $27 again in 30 days. They’re signing up for your membership site and that is how they are getting your training.

That is one of the best ways that we have found. If you want to see an example of how that is done go to www.43SplitTests.com. You can see an example of how we sell a product while at the same time rolling people into a membership site. It’s a really, really neat subtle thing.

Perry: You have to sell that free product or that cheap product just as hard as if it were $200. That’s the whole idea. You don’t want to say, “Hey, this is free. Go get it,” assuming that people will.

You still need to sell the benefits of it and show people.

Ryan: The reason that this works so well is that you’re selling them this “product.” They’re reading your copy and saying, “Oh, my, gosh, this is such a valuable thing,” they’re expecting it.

By the time you get down to the bottom at www.43SplitTests.com you expect this thing to be $200, $300, or $400. Then you find out that it’s free!

{ 1 comment }

Ryan: Yeah. That’s where you get your content and that will take about a day. Let’s say that takes a day to interview and tape somebody.

The way that I suggest you do the interview, and this is very, very simple, go to www.FreeConferenceCall.com and schedule a conference call. It is 100% free as the name suggests.

What they will also allow you to do is allow you to record your conversation for free, so set up a line at www.FreeConferenceCall.com and give the number to the person that you are interviewing.

They will dial into the number and so will you and when you start talking everything gets recorded. When you hang up the phone they send you an mp3 of the interview that you just did. Product finished!

It’s a simple as that.

All you need to do is send off this mp3 to a company like www.Kunaki.com. There are a lot of them but basically you want a company what can do short run CDs. Send it over to them and they do all the work for you.

A lot of these services will even design a cover or label for it, things like that. I know Kunaki is not the only one.

If you go over to www.DrivingTraffic.com/vendors we’ll put in some of our other recommended CD duplicators and label designers and things like that.

Hand it off to them and start selling your subscriptions. Send your list of subscribers over to them and say, “Okay, send all these people a CD.” They print them up and ship them out. It’s as simple as that. All the work is done for you. You don’t need to have any technical skills or anything whatsoever. It is handled 100% for you by these CD duplicators and warehouses.

Perry: You’re going to get to the how to sell it part in a minute, right?

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. We’ll talk about how to sell it but for now I want to talk about how they can get it done in 48 hours or less. Obviously, if you can’t sell it none of this is worth anything to you.

That’s how you get a CD-of-the-month program set up. The coolest thing about a CD-of-the-month program is you record one interview and you’re done. You’re ready to get started. That’s all you need.

You have another 30 days before you have to record even one other interview. And like you pointed out Perry, you can record a handful of interviews in a month. You could conceivably in a week or two record all the interviews you would need in an entire year and you’re done.

Perry: Yeah. It’s actually easier to create a membership site after Ryan has turned me on to this. I mean, it’s actually easier to create a membership site for somebody starting from scratch than it is to create a product.

If you want to create a product, a book or whatever, you have to write 10 or 12 chapters to the book. If you have a membership site you can basically write chapter one and turn it on and start selling. That’s the part that nobody gets, and you get paid every month to write the new chapter. It’s really awesome.

Ryan: That’s the best point.

You mentioned membership sites so let’s talk about membership sites.

With a membership site it’s a similar deal. You write a premium report or even hire someone else to write a report; ghostwriters or license somebody else’s content, whatever you want to do, but get some premium content.

Write a report, or you can also do an interview. We talked about doing an audio interview with the CD-of-the-month program and I know some membership sites where all it is, and in fact I happen to have one, is where the entire membership site, every month the only thing that gets posted is that mp3 interview.

I don’t know about you Perry, but I think that’s pretty cool!

Perry: It’s like a CD-of-the-month club without having to ship the CD, which is really cool. Believe it or not, like Ryan said, the perceived value of that members’ area of content can sometimes be a higher perceived value than actually getting the CD in the mail. Then it’s information. It’s hard to compare information to information.

A CD has an inherent value. People can put a tag on it. “I wouldn’t pay any more than $40 or $50 for a CD.” When they get into a membership site it can be worth practically anything depending on the value of the information.

Ryan: You’re exactly right, especially when you start bundling other content.

You have whatever your premium content is, a report or an audio interview or both, and you also bundle in some filler content, and we’ll talk about where I get filler content in just a little bit, but you bundle this into a WordPress blog.

That’s what I recommend you do is get a WordPress blog. It’s free to get set up, it’s free to use, and it will allow you to easily add new content.

We basically use WordPress blogs for all of our membership sites. If you go to www.DrivingTraffic.com/blogging you’re going to see some additional training on there on WordPress.

The subject of Setting Up a Blog and Adding Themes and things like that to a blog are kind of beyond the topic of this training so you can go there and check it out. It’s not difficult at all.

Once you have the blog and you have your content in the blog, the final step is just to password protect it.

Perry: Are you going to tell them the secret ninja trick here?

Ryan: As far as password protection and pseudo login thing?

Perry: [Laughter] Yeah.

Ryan: I will tell that story.

When I’m talking about needing to password protect a lot of people think, “Oh, I’ve got to go out and get some expensive subscription or membership management script” or things like that.

You can literally go out there and get a membership management platform that will cost you $5000. If you really want to blow it out and have an ultra-complex turn-key membership site built, you can get it done for $5000 and you’ll have a really, really cool rock-solid membership site.

We had a membership site that was doing about $30,000 a month. Here was our password management. Are you ready for this? This is something worth paying attention to if for some reason you kind of checked out.

We had a login form and it had a field for Username and it had a field for Password, and then it had a Login button. The interesting thing about that Login button is that it wasn’t a real button.

The Login forms? Those were real form fields but it didn’t matter what you entered in to it because that Login button wasn’t a real button. It was just an image that looked like a button and when you clicked on the image it instantly gave you access to the members area

Perry: Did you have a lot of people that tried to hoodwink or that went around?

Ryan: The funny thing about it is nobody noticed it. We let everybody pick a Username and Password we just didn’t actually store it anywhere. People would enter in their Username and Password and click the Login button and as far as they were concerned it worked just fine.

Perry: Did you get a lot of “I forgot my Password” e-mails. [Laughter]

Ryan: It always managed to work! Some people say, “Oh, my, gosh! It was actually unprotected? All your content was actually unprotected. I can’t believe that you would leave it out there for people just to stumble across.”

You know, how often do you go to Login pages and just click the Login button to see what will happen? From now on you may do it, especially if you’re at one of my sites, but most people didn’t do that.

In the two years that we had that site up, before we ever got it converted over to one of those more professional, fancy formats, we only had one person contact us to say, “Hey, I think your Login page is broken. I clicked the Login button and it let me in without having to enter anything.”

Perry: How much was your total cost for software and hosting and for all of that? I’ve seen your first membership site. How much did it cost you to put up your first WordPress and all that?

Ryan: Hosting was the big expense. It’s going to cost you about $5 or $6 a month. In fact, if you go to www.DrivingTraffic.com/hosting we will provide a list of some recommended hosting providers.

Perry: That’s worth a billion dollars because there are some guys in the hosting business that are total yohos.

Ryan: There are a lot of absolute chuckleheads out there, but there are a lot of great services that you can get. We found a service the other day that we’ll put up, what was it again? It was like $5 or $6 a month?

Perry: It was $6 a month and it has something in it called “fantastico.” If you’re not a programmer it has like 50 or 60 programs, free programs in it with WordPress being one of them, where you literally hit a single button and it says, “Bingo! Your WordPress blog is now set up” and you’re done.

Ryan: Literally, it is $6 a month and it’s a great hosting platform. Six bucks a month is all you need to spend. That takes care of hosting. That’s the big cost.

Aside from that, WordPress, which was the platform we used to run our content, basically it was our membership site. That is approximately $0.

Perry: Don’t think because it’s free that, “Oh, no. I want the good one.” WordPress is rated by almost everybody in the world as the very best content management in the world right now. It’s absolutely free.

Ryan: Yeah, it’s the one that we use for all of ours so if you want the best, if you want the one that we use, it is going to cost approximately $0.

The membership management password protection functionality that I just described, again, that is also $0. It cost you nothing to get that set up. All it is is an image. It’s a Login button.

If you go and take a screen shot of somebody else’s Login button and copy it on your page and then have that linked to the Members Area, you’re done. That costs nothing.

You can literally have a membership site set up and running for $6 a month. All those steps that I just described can be done easily within a day.

In fact, I did a video at www.DrivingTraffic.com/membership, and I’ll show you how you can password protect your WordPress blog in 12 minutes or less.

There is some other information in there about setting up membership sites and things like that, but one of the links in there is to a video on how to set up a free membership site in 12 minutes or less.

Those are the steps. You’re pretty much done.

When I talk about doing this in 48 hours or less I’m not messing around. You can easily go out there, get your content, and piece it together in 48 hours or less.

Perry: What are the things that you want to put inside? Let’s say you have your shell now. You went out there and did what Ryan says. You went through the 12-minute video and you’ve set up your WordPress membership site, and I know you’re thinking right now, “There is no way I can build a Web site in 12 minutes.”

I’m telling you, you can build a Web site in 12 minutes. It’s crazy but this WordPress platform is a game changer. It changes everything about this business. You really can do this.

Now, Ryan, let’s assume I’ve got my shell set up, what do I put in it? I need stuff, that’s the whole idea. I have to have content.

Ryan: You have to have some premium content. With the CD-of-the-month model, that’s just one piece of content where you do an audio interview with somebody and that’s it. That’s your premium content and you’re done.

With a membership site you also need some aspect of premium content, and that could be an interview and that’s your custom premium content, but you also need some other filler content.

A membership site is going to look a little thin if all you have in there is an mp3 audio download every month. I like to throw in things like special reports.

This can be a report that you write or you could outsource it and have somebody else write it. I’ve already talked about doing expert interviews. To find people to do expert interviews go to www.RTIR.com.

Another great, great source to find experts to interview is to go to the article directories like www.EzineArticles.com, www.ArticleCity.com. These are all people who write articles and host them on directories because they want to be found. They want to be found and perceived as experts so they’re great people to find.

In addition to using these article sites to find people to interview, you can also take these articles and copy and paste them into your own members’ area. It’s perfectly legal and ethical. That’s why they post these articles. They want you to come around and find a great article.

Let’s give you an example. One of my favorite article sites is a site called www.wikiHow.com. Really, what we should probably do is have you go to www.DrivingTraffic.com/articles and we will put up a listing of other articles directories, but www.wikiHow.com is one of my favorite new article directories.

I found one on this site the other day that was “How to Kill Bad Breath in 10 Minutes or Less.” It was a great article.

You might be thinking, “How am I going to use content like that?” If I had a dating Web site, men, they’re interested in stopping bad breath so I could use that article on that site.

If I had a membership site that was targeted to sales professionals and I had a monthly interview program that I sold to sales professionals and I interviewed top sales trainers, inside of my membership site I could also have this bad breath article. Sales people can’t afford to have bad breath when they’re trying to close a sale.

There are articles and content all over the place that will fit in your market that you can just grab. I’ve heard Perry say before that one of the most profitable phrases in the entire membership site business is “Copy and Paste.”

That’s exactly what we’re talking about here.

Perry: There are probably people right now listening to this recording thinking, “Oh yeah, I’m going to take a bunch of free stuff and put it inside an area and make people pay for it.”

Yeah, that’s what we’re telling you. That’s what all continuity programs do. If they didn’t they couldn’t possibly produce the mass information they do.

I’ll prove it right now. Go pick up your local newspaper. Is that a continuity program? Do you pay for a subscription to have the newspaper brought to your house every day? Maybe, maybe not, but let’s say you do.

If you do that’s a continuity program. Open it up and see how many articles in the paper were written by the staff writers at the newspaper.

Usually it’s 10-20%, and that’s what you should shoot for too, 10-20% premium content. That’s the stuff you’re going to put on the front of the page and really show out there.

Everything else comes from the Associated Press or syndicated article writers or cartoonists. On the Web it turns out to be richer content. It’s articles, it’s videos, it’s images, and all that content, tons of it out there, is ready for you to Cut and Paste. Nothing is unethical about that. Absolutely nothing unethical about it.

Ryan: No, there is certainly nothing unethical in terms of the author. The authors want you to syndicate their column, that’s why they’re doing it.

From the perspective of your subscribers, how long would it take them to go out there and find all of this content.

Perry: You’re basically out there aggregating it.

Ryan: Yeah, you’re aggregating content which is a tremendous value. I’m not saying, and I know you’re not either, Perry, that you go out there and you just Copy and Paste a bunch of articles that are on other sites into your members’ area and call it done.

No, you do need to have some custom premium content and that’s the 10-20% that Perry was talking about. Interview an expert every single month.

Perry: Your site is going to look awful skinny with only 10 or 20% in there. You definitely can complement. Don’t just Cut and Paste stuff without watching it, without reading it.

Make sure that it is consistent  with your core philosophy, things that you use and you find helpful.

Ryan: By being that filtering agent for your subscribers, and you’re out there scouring the Internet for other good articles, and you read 20 articles and only three of them are worth reading, that’s a value. That’s a service to your people that they probably never would have found to begin with, and even if they had you’ve filtered that content for them.

You mentioned videos, Perry, and that’s kind of where I was going next. In addition to being able to grab these articles out there on these sites like www.EzineArticles.com, www.wikiHow.com and www.ArticleCity.com, there are also sites like www.ExpertVillage.com, www.MetaCafe.com, www.YouTube.com.

I’m sure everybody has heard of www.YouTube.com but www.ExpertVillage.com is one of the greatest sites I have ever seen in my entire life.

Basically, the way that this Web site works is that experts create series of videos, and these are amazing, high quality videos.

I did a search earlier for magic tricks. Let’s say I want to have a membership site around magic tricks. Here’s a great little idea for anybody if they want to do this.

For a lot of people in the business world it would be handy for them to know some magic tricks to use as an opener to get in; a sales person or a presenter.

What about going into the sales world and teaching them a magic trick of the month? I don’t know. It’s not a bad idea.

If you go over to www.ExpertVillage.com and look for magic tricks you’ll see that there are 3000 videos, over 3000 videos where expert magicians have posted videos of themselves doing magic tricks and telling you how they do those tricks.

Over 3000 videos! They’re all free for you to take and drop on your Web site. They want you to do this. There is nothing illegal or unethical about it.

Just think now, if all you do is one interview a month which is your premium content, and then you go out and scour the article directories that I’ve already told you about; www.EzineArticles.com, www.wikiHow.com, www.ArticleCity.com, www.GoArticles.com, they’re all over the place, grab some other content, update that content regularly, add some more content in, and then go over to www.ExpertVillage.com, www.MetaCafe.com, www.YouTube.com, and other video sites and start grabbing videos and plopping those onto your members’ area.

Don’t think that you need to go and put 100 articles and 100 videos on day one. Heck no, you’ll overwhelm your people.

{ 1 comment }

Perry Belcher: Hey everybody. This is Perry Belcher. I’m here with my friend Ryan Deiss, for the Automatic Daily Income System.

Today Ryan is going to be talking to you about how to create your own passive recurring income machine in 48 hours or less.

Before we get started I wanted to throw in a couple of disclaimers. As you can probably tell already, this is not a super professional recording. We’re not doing this in a big fancy studio anywhere.
The idea here is to generate great information for you and get the points across to you that we want to in the recording time. We want to get all the information from Ryan that we possibly can in the short period of time allotted.

If you hear a “Ew” or an “Ah” or a cough or a sniffle it’s not going to be cut out. It’s raw. You get it all just the way it came out of the microphone.

Ryan Deiss: Or into the microphone. However it happened to go down.

Perry: Either way. Secondly, any talk about income or money made in here, or non-income claims, we’re not saying that you can get this recording and once you get it, stuff it under your pillow and wake up in the morning and be rich.

It doesn’t work that way. You do have to put in some effort. We don’t make any guarantees to what your results are going to be. It all depends on the amount of effort and the skin that you put in the game.

Lastly, and we always make this general disclaimer, if we talk about legal issues, accounting issues, tax issues, anything like that, those are areas that we are not experts in. I’m not a licensed attorney, neither is Ryan.

We’re not CPAs, psychiatrists, doctors.

Ryan: Pretty much nothing that involves any type of edumacation.

Perry: I barely have a drivers’ license.

Ryan: [Laughter]

Perry: We’re not licensed in any of those things so please defer to the professionals.

With all that being said, Ryan what are you going to show people today? What are they going to learn from this recording? What should they take away from this?

Ryan: As the title suggests, I’m going to talk about how to create an Automatic Daily Income System in your business. A lot of people go out, and it’s very popular and common, and do these big launches.

If you’re familiar with the Internet marketing world, people are going out there and selling products, selling content, selling information, and it’s all good, it’s all great, but what’s a whole lot better than selling something once is selling something once and getting paid over and over and over and over again.

This whole concept of daily income, of recurring income, of subscription income, whatever you want to call it, continuity income, there are a lot of different ways to put it, it seems to be a mystery to a lot of folks and more than that, more than it being mysterious, people seem to think that it’s hard to do.

I’m going to talk about the different models out there, two in particular, the two I recommend that people go with if they want to create a daily income system in their business.

I’m going to talk specifically about how you can set up each one of these models in 48 hours or less. That’s the key there. I believe if you can’t do it quickly you’re not going to do it, because that’s how I am.

What you are going to hear is how you can set up one of these daily income streams in 48 hours or less. I’m going to talk about some of the common elements found in these different daily income systems and how you can actually sell these subscription offers, or continuity offers, once you have them in place.

That’s what we’re going to cover in the short time we have. It’s a lot so why don’t we jump right in.

Perry: Let’s start at the beginning, well, you have to. We’ll do like Ross Perot, “We’ll start with a clean sheet of paper.”

How can someone create their own Automatic Daily Income System? What do you have to do first? What is Step 1?

Ryan: The first thing that you need to have is a mind shift, a mindset shift. You really need to switch from the notion of selling products to thinking about selling subscriptions.

That’s what a lot of people think. We think, and even speak about it in terms of product creation and how do I create products?

I think we probably make the mistake of saying that sometimes, and I think it is a mistake. You shouldn’t think of what you’re selling in terms of product. You should think of everything that I sell is a subscription, or it leads to a subscription.

The deal is, you can make a lot more money off of a lot less customers. You can make a whole lot more money off of a whole lot less sales if you’re getting paid not just once for that sale, but over and over and over again.

After you hear this, if you still don’t adopt some kind of continuity model I think you’re kind of crazy. If you want to see what we call the “continuity snowball effect” and how it takes place, go to www.DrivingTraffic.com/continuity.

I’ve created some other videos there and one in particular, The Continuity Snowball video you are going to want to look at. Just see how you can make so much more money off of so few sales.

Getting back to this whole mind shift, the mindset shift that has to take place. When I first had this mindset shift, and you were in the room, Perry, you remember when we were talking to a good friend of ours?

He sells software and for years he sold software and he sold a lot of software and made a lot of money selling it. One day he realized, “I’m selling all this software,” and he’d sell it for $100 or $200 and one day he realized, “I ought to just tack on a $10 a month subscription so that when you buy the product you also need to pay $10 a month.”

It didn’t change his conversions at all, yet now one sale was worth considerably more. Now he creates daily income from this. That is the big thing we are trying to create here, this daily income.

Today is the 13^th of the month. If last month somebody bought something from me on the 13^th that was subscription based, this month they are going to get charged again. That is the initial thing we need to get across here.  That’s the mind shift that needs to take place.

Perry: It’s not just about making money, either. If you’re thinking, “Well, that doesn’t seem real fair to the customers,” it’s extremely fair to the customers. A good friend of ours in the software business told us a couple of days ago that information products are software for humans now.

That’s a really interesting twist on things. As fast as the world is changing and as fast as the economy and businesses are moving right now, it’s almost a disservice to publish one flat product and sell it to somebody.

What works in that product today may not be applicable in six months or a year. If you can show the benefit to your customers to become a subscriber of yours, you can keep them up to date and it’s a better value for them. You’re actually doingee a better job for your customers.

Keep that in mind. A lot of people look at continuity programs and say, “Ew, I don’t want to do that.” It’s a great benefit to the customer if you’re delivering good value.

Ryan: It absolutely is. There is no doubt about it.

The two types of subscription offers that I’m going to be talking about in this training are: CD-of-the-month programs and membership sites.

There are lots of other subscription offers out there. You can sell software and all different kinds of things.

What I’m assuming is that you’re not a technical person and that you want to get started really, really quickly. Remember, I said at the outset, the promise I made is that I was going to show you how to create your own passive recurring income machine in 48 hours or less.

If you want to do it in 48 hours or less then the CD-of-the-month and the membership site are going to be the best ways to do it.

A CD-of-the-month program is simpler and a little bit easier to put together than a membership site, but a membership site is going to have a higher perceived value and a better stick rate.

We’ll get into them and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Perry: What’s a stick rate? What do you mean by stick rate?

Ryan: Obviously the idea here, if we’re selling a subscription program – think about it the same way you subscribe to a magazine or if you subscribe to any other kind of monthly service like cable – if somebody buys our product or subscribes to our monthly service, we’d like to think that they’re going to stick around forever.

That’s not going to happen. Some people are going to try it for a couple of months and drop out, or credit cards get declined, whatever happens people don’t stay around forever.

So stick rate means, how long are they going to stick around?

Perry: I didn’t mean to stop your funky flow there.

Ryan: No, that’s fine.

Perry: I just didn’t want a word out that people didn’t understand.

Ryan: That’s great. We’re looking for people to stick six to eight months at a minimum. That’s what we mean by a stick rate.

Perry: You’ve talked a lot about how Jeff Johnson has switched over a lot of his models from single products to software subscriptions. Are there any other stories that you can talk about where that applies with CD-of-the-month clubs?

Ryan: Absolutely. I’ll give you two examples that I personally bought into. One of them is the Video Professor model. If you’ve watched TV you’ve probably seen a Video Professor commercial.

He goes out there and he basically says, “Here, let me show you. I’m going to give you this tutorial on how to use Windows, or how to sell on eBay. I’m going to give it to you for free.”

When you sign up for his service you are going to get put into a monthly continuity program where he is going to send you a new training CD every single month.

There is nothing illegal or unethical about it. He tells you that this is what you’re doing, that he is going to allow you to build this computer learning volume.

I actually signed up for another one. I’m a big golfer. I love to play golf. I signed up to get a DVD for golf training. It was about how to add 20 or 30 yards to your drive. When I signed up for this program I now get a new golf training DVD every single month.

Those are just two examples that have personally influenced and affected me. Do you have any that you want to share?

Perry: Yeah, I have a personal story. I have a couple of sites; one that sells mobile food, like food vending services, and another that sells an import/export product and a few other things like that. Small business, blue collar start up things.

I didn’t think that I could have a membership site because I had so many different kinds of leads coming in but I realized that all my people were all entrepreneurs basically, so I started an Entrepreneurs Club, a CD-of-the-month program where we interview an interesting entrepreneur every month and send out a CD.

I added that to the back end of all my products. Once people have bought something, we voluntarily let them come in and become a member of the Entrepreneurs Club.

Now we pick up 100 or so new members a month. I think it is $17 or $27 a month. We make a lot more money off the continuity program than we make selling the front courses. It’s a great value.

In that particular case the information is good, but there is a lot of inspiration. There are different reasons people want these CDs.

That particular program, they’re mainly success stories. All we do is an interview a month with somebody interesting and different. I’m sure the people learn from those interviews, but more than anything else they’re inspired that they can do it. If these people can do it they can do it. That’s a big part of it.

Ryan: That’s a great example. A good example of taking something that was already selling and creating an Automatic Daily Income system within that.

Perry: It didn’t cost me another nickel. Nothing.

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. That’s the whole point here. This is a no-brainer if you haven’t got started yet. If you have gotten started and you do have a product out there that you’re selling, you’re absolutely crazy if you don’t do this.

Perry: A special kind of stupid, as I say. [Laughter]

Ryan: A special kind of stupid.

A lot of people understand the CD-of-the-month concept, but since a lot of people don’t understand the whole membership site concept I’ll talk a little bit about what that is.

Basically, a membership site is a content based site in which members pay a monthly fee for access, okay? Just think about it as a normal everyday Web site, but instead of being able to stumble upon it and click around you have to pay for access to it.

Everybody should be familiar with this. The Wall Street Journal at www.WSJ.com has a premium members only area where you have to be a subscriber to the print newspaper to view the articles on their site; www.ESPN.com has a similar deal. They have an ESPN Zone.

The whole membership site model, where people pay to access the premium content, it’s nothing new. It’s being done out there. My suggestion to you is, if the big boys are doing it so can you. That’s how that whole thing works.

Perry: It sounds pretty complicated. You made a big claim at the beginning of this, that in 48 hours you could start somebody in the membership site business, or somebody could start a membership site.

I could see where you could do it with the CD-of-the-month club because that’s pretty simple, but a membership site in 48 hours sounds kind of impossible.

Ryan: It’s not, and I’ll tell you how to do it. I will go ahead and talk about the CD-of-the-month program first because this is so simple.

If you don’t have a business yet, listen up because I’m not only going to put you in a business, I’m also going to show you how you can have a recurring subscription based business in 48 hours or less, alright?

What you need to do is pick a topic. Pick any topic you’re interested in, have some kind of passion for, where you know other people out there that are also interested in buying some content on it.

Go to a site called, www.RTIR.com, Radio Television Interview Report. On this site you will see a listing of experts. These are experts who are basically saying, “I want to be interviewed. I want somebody to call me and interview me.”

You can go and search all the different topics and see all the different experts there. They even list the topics that they are willing to speak on. Call them up, or shoot them an e-mail since that is available on there as well, and say, “Hey, I’d like to interview you for a subscription service that I offer.”

They don’t have to know that this is brand new and that they’re the first person you are interviewing. If they ask somebody might say no, but I’m telling you, the vast majority of the people on there are going to say yes if you ask them.

The big thing is, you don’t have to pay them for this. They want the exposure.

Perry: They’re actually paying to be on the Web site, is that right, Ryan?

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely.

Perry: They’re paying for the exposure, right?

Ryan: Yeah, they’re paying for the exposure. When they get a call from somebody who found them through the Web site, they want you to call. For you to access this Web site is totally free.

Another great source of finding someone to interview and that is what I’m suggesting with the CD-of-the-month program. The easiest way to create an audio CD-of-the-month is to create an expert.

A great example is the one that you just gave, Perry, with your Entrepreneur’s Club. I happen to know that you’re not going out there searching high and low to find these entrepreneurs.

A lot of people you’re finding through www.RTIR.com. People who have written books on entrepreneurship and different topics, and you just called them up and interviewed them.

Perry: It’s a good idea that if there is not a book or a magazine out there about the topic that you are about to create, you ought to scratch yourself on the head and make sure that’s what you want to do.

Chances are that if there is not a magazine or a good number of books out there, there is probably not a whole lot of a market. Fortunately, almost everything that you find to be a justifiable market is probably going to have trade publications.

People who write for trade publications get paid very, very little money, so those people are usually willing to do interviews. They’re trying to get notoriety. They’re really writing for the trade publication usually, to get notoriety.

Place like www.EzineArticles.com and www.ArticleCity.com are really good ones, too. Those are for people going out there writing articles just to get noticed.

Ryan: Yeah. Experts are all over the place. That’s a big point that I want you to understand. Experts are all over the place, content is all over the place, so you just need to be the reporter, the person who goes out there and interviews these people. That’s what becomes your product.

More importantly, now you’ll just do one interview every single month with a new person and you’re good to go. That’s your business.

We have a mutual friend, Perry, who is in the real estate niche and whose entire subscription model is to find experts, people all over the country, because his stuff is specific to the US, people who do real estate deals. He calls them up and interviews them. That’s his subscription model.

Perry: The cool part of it is that he does four or five of those in a day and does not have to worry about that for six months. Don’t be surprised that you won’t always have to dig for experts.

Local people case studies are just as good. Local people who have done well are great. As a matter of fact, I like those better.

I can do an interview with some hotshot author or entrepreneur, but they’re slick and they come off as slick and they know exactly what they’re talking about and they’re scripted but my subscribers like that.

I get most of the feedback from when we interview somebody that is totally unknown. Some little mom and pop somewhere that have a really cool ideas and they tell their rags-to-riches story and how they stumbled across the answers to this or that.

People really dig that because it’s back to the inspiration model and the truism of it all. People want to believe what they’re listening to. Those small mom and pops stumble and ooh and ahh a little bit and don’t really know how to do an interview well, but they know their business well and are way more believable than the slick authors.

They’re both good. A mix of both is always awesome. Don’t look past the people that are in your inner circle, in your local community.

{ 1 comment }