Membership Site And Online Course Marketing: How To Make, Market & Monetize Online Digital Content - Subscribe Me At Subscrib

My wife Veena and I spent the last 3 days at one of the biggest internet marketing conferences in North America, called Traffic & Conversion, put on by Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher and the awesome team at Digital Marketer. It was really good. 3 days of non-stop sessions and talks. Of course, Veena and I, because we live in San Diego, just had to drive like 1/2 hour to get to the hotel where the seminar was being held. And on the 2nd day, we even took off early, came back home, watched most of a basketball game between Lebron James's Cleveland Cavaliers, and Kobe Bryant's LA Lakers. And then we went back to an awesome party later in the evening, which I'll tell you all about in a minute here. So here are some of my thoughts and ideas about the event itself, as well as my spiel on how to do an internet marketing conference well. #1) It was very telling that a room with seating for 500 was jam packed for a session about how someone is killing it with Periscope. And in the very next rook, it was mostly cri

In this episode, I'm going to talk about why, when it comes to finding a joint venture partner or an influencer or an affiliate to help you promote your product, you would be making a big mistake if all you did was try to go after just the biggest names in your market. And I'm calling this the "Don't go for the blonde" technique. Now, I mean no disrespect to brunettes, or blondes, or whatever color your hair may be. This is an equal-hair-color opportunity show. But what I'm referring to here, is a scene from the movie "A Beautiful Mind" where Russel Crowe plays famous mathematician John Nash, widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, who won a shared Nobel Prize in 1994. So let me set up this clip for you... In this scene, Russell Crowe is setting in a coffee shop with his friends. And in walks a stunning blonde, with 4 brunette friends. And that's where Russel's character John Nash, comes up with his Nobel Prize winning theory... Now listen to this clip (listen to the epis

In the last episode, towards the end, I was talking about the reasons why you should NOT make a 3rd party platform like Udemy your main course delivery platform. I talked about the first 3 reasons. Now here's reason #4 why you should NOT make a 3rd party marketplace your main course delivery platform. They have restrictions on what kind of emails you can send to your buyers. From what I've read, most of these marketplace platforms will not allow you to send your buyers links via email that lead back to your site. You cannot send out other offers of your own or affiliate links. Your access to your buyer's list is very restricted, and your email list that you build on such a platform cannot be downloaded, imported into another system, it cannot be sold as part of your company if you end up selling your company. So this rented list is not a true asset for your business. Reason #5: Instead of building your own business, you are essentially building THEIR business. They are the ones really getting a paying cus

Hosting your membership site on a third-party marketplace - like Udemy.com and SkillShare.com On Udemy, it is free to create a course. And whatever price you end up charging for it, if you do the marketing and send buyers to your own course page on Udemy.com, and the visitor buys your course using a coupon that YOU have provided them with, then you keep 100% of the revenue from the sales. Of course, they deduct about 3% for processing fees, but still, that's 100% of the actual revenue. If Udemy sends you customers via their own marketing efforts, then they get 50% of the sale. They have other service add-ons to help you with marketing, and opting in to those would net you less on each sale, but you can reach a wider audience because of the increased exposure your course would get from Udemy’s marketing efforts. There are a number of other course-creation platforms, and each one has its own place in the industry. But probably the most popular one, that I myself have purchased a course from in the past, is U

At DigitalAccessPass.com, we recently got an email from a prospective customer, who said this, in part (paraphrasing): Finally, I have built a course that I will use for content, should I host it on my site, or put it on Udemy and then give free coupons to my members to take it on udemy? And I'm going to break up my answer into multiple episodes. So in today's part 1, before I can answer that question about Udemy, we first need to talk about the 3 options you have for running a membership site. 1) Self-Hosted WordPress Site 2) A fully-hosted membership site, and 3) A third-party marketplace like Udemy.com Let's get into each of these in more detail... 1) Self-hosted WordPress site: If you listen to Episode 3 of this podcast - this is episode 14, by the way. So the title of episode 3 was "$1.5 Billion for a Membership Site? Membership Site Dream Team" - you can listen to it at subscribeme.fm/3/ , I have talked about having your own domain, the kind of hosting you should use, and how you should

Which One Should You launch First: A One-Time Product or A Recurring Subscription? If you have never launched a web site before or sold anything online, especially digital products, then I would NOT recommend starting with a subscription-based product right out of the gate. And on top of that, you should DEFINITELY not start with a high-ticket 1,000 dollar product. In the beginning, you will not have the copywriting skills, the marketing skills, the positioning skills, or the product development skills, or the ability to recruit JV's and affiliates, or the savvy to put it all together. No matter what kind of a superstar you've been in your day job, you simply won't have those skills when you are first starting out with your own membership site. Let me quickly touch upon the 3 basic monetization models. I call these DIY, DWY and DFY. DIY stands for Do it yourself, DWY stands for Done With You, and DFY stands for Done For You. DIY is the very basic level which is the basic fully automated online course where

When should you NOT drip content? Are there situations when content dripping is not right for your members? What do you do in that case? Do you simply allow access to everything from day 1 and risk getting ripped off? Or is there an alternative to content dripping? #1: If you want your members to feel that you are continuously creating NEW content, fresh off-the-press, fresh-from-the oven type of freshness, then you should NOT use Content Dripping to make it look like it's new or just created. That is NOT what content dripping is meant for. Your members will figure it out that the content that you are dripping was probably created a while ago - sometimes maybe months or even years ago, because there is bound to be some kind of a trail - like comments from other members, or references in the content to dates or events from the past. So DO NOT use content dripping to try to fool your members into thinking that the content is freshly created. You shouldn't do that with content dripping or with email autorespon

To drip or not to drip. That is the question. In this episode, I discuss 5 reasons why you may want to drip content in your membership site. 1) If you have a lot of content to deliver in your online course. 2) If you have a structured online course, where things have to be delivered in a certain sequence. 3) If you want to put in most of the work up front and set up the content to drip slowly over time. 4) The Halloween-Candy analogy: . You give it to them little by little. To extend the value of your content, even if your members know that it is already there, and you give them a sense of anticipation and excitement. You can even tease them what's coming up. Almost like a trailer for a move that hasn't been released yet. 5) Finally, two important reasons to drip content, is to prevent a) your members from feeling like they're getting ripped off, and b) to make sure YOU yourself don't get ripped off.

So, why did they even bother creating a type of content called a Post? Isn't everything just a Page? Why did posts even come into existence in the first place? To answer that, we need to do a quick 1-minute flashback to the time, when the word "blog" came into being. Did you know that the word "blog" is actually a short form for "Web Log" as in, a online log of events. Like a personal diary. On one of my web sites early in 2000 - a lot of web site owners did this - used to have a link in their menu called "Web Log". I certainly did, and it took the visitor to a page that had an online diary of sorts - the kind that we would publish on Facebook today. A typical WordPress blog shows all of your blog Posts, in reverse chronological order. And if your blog is set to show the latest 5 posts, and you keep publishing new posts ever week, if I go to your blog in 2 months, I will see an entirely new set of blog posts on the front page, assuming your front page IS your blog. So if I am on your blog, and I like one of

In today's episode, I give you all of my deepest, darkest secrets... about Fiverr.com - including the most awesome Fiverr freelancers that I've had a tremendous experience working with! In the last episode, I mentioned 3 of my favorite outsourcing web sites. Check out Episode #9 for that. In today's episode, I go deep into one of them, which is Fiverr. I've found some really cool uses for Fiverr, no matter what others tell you about fraud and low quality of work on Fiver. I've had nothing but great experiences working with Fiverr Freelancers, especially when it comes to unusual, wacky and odd jobs.

In today's Part 2 of my "Top 20 Favorite Tools" series, I get into more detail about outsourcing services and a couple of really neat tricks to get the biggest bang for your buck. In the last episode, I talked about tools that I use for communication, a 3-pronged data back up strategy, video creation, and finally Graphics and Image creation. So make sure you listen to that one first. Category #5. Outsourcing: There are 3 major sites we use for outsourcing work in our business. 1) Upwork 2) 99Designs & 3) Fiverr Each of them has a different utility. So when do you use which web site? And what is the best way to use them? All that and more in this episode. So be sure to check it out. Show notes available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/9/

In today's show, I'm going to list my top 20 tools, that I simply couldn't live without. And won't live without. Show-notes and links to everything mentioned on the show, are available at http://SubscribeMe.fm/8/ #1. Communication: Skype And for business communication, I use Gotomeeting. #2. Data backup: When it comes to keeping our business data safe and backed up, I use a 3-pronged approach. I use Carbonite, Google Drive and a local hard-drive. #3. Video creation: Camtasia Studio, Jing, Powtoon, iPhone, Audio downloaded from Audiojungle. #4. Graphics & Images: Canva, Box Shot King, Gimp, and Jing More tools coming up in the next episode. So stay tuned.   - Ravi Jayagopal http://SubscribeMe.fm/8/  

Why not simply use email to deliver content? Why bother with a membership site, membership software and all the setup & maintenance headaches? Let me first show you how to create the world's quickest membership site - in just 4 hours. Step 1: Signup for an account with Mailchimp. They allow you to have up to 2,000 subscribers on your list, and send out 12,000 emails per month. So that's about 6 emails per month. Go to subscribeme.fm/mailchimp, and get $30 in free credit to use when you exceed 2,000 subscribers. Step 2: Load up all of your course content into an email autoresponder sequence, set up these emails to go out once a week. You could even start with just the welcome email and content for module 1, since you will be dripping the emails over time. Step 3: Create a one-page landing page through a free WordPress.com web site. Step 4: Log in to Paypal, create a buy button, and put it on your free one-page sales page. That's it! You could be done with this basic membership set up in about 4 hours. A

In this 6th episode of Subscribe Me, I have a special interview. No, it's not me interviewing someone else. Instead, it's ME being interviewed on somebody else's show. I was a guest on the Thriving Entrepreneur Radio Show hosted by Steve Kidd. Steve has an amazingly gentle way of asking great questions, while offering his own perspective along the way. And Steve has a program called "Write Your Best Seller" where he helps you become known as an authority, get on TV, become an amazon best seller among a host of other promotional services. Check out his program by going to SubscribeMe.fm/authority/ . After he interviewed me, I wrote to him and asked him if I could publish the interview on my own podcast to my own listeners. And he very generously agreed. Thanks, Steve! So check out Steve Kidd interviewing one of the most awesome people I have ever met... that's ME! :-)

In this 5th episode of SubscribeMe, I pick the brains of Ryan Lee, a veteran online marketer from Connecticut, Host of the Freedym show at Freedym.com - and one of the earliest people to start a membership site online. Ryan started his first membership site in 2001. The previous year, in 2000, I had just moved to New York (from India) with my wife and daughter (my son was born in the US several years later). Ryan has seen the evolution of the Internet Marketing industry, and has launched many successful web sites. He has previously been a writer for Entrepreneur.com online magazine, and lives in Connecticut with his wife and 4 daughters. On the show, Ryan and I talk about the early Google, the now defunct Goto, ClickBank, Paypal, hustle, "Ask and you shall receive", the importance of building a recurring-income based business, personality-based marketing, emailing you list without worrying about unsubscribes, how much of yourself should you share with your audience, and keeping your members around for long

In today's show, we have a question from Michael Britt, a Psychology professor who has been super-successful at creating lots of content, has millions of downloads of his podcast and his youtube videos, but has not had much success at monetizing 9 years of hard work. A weak call to action, content all over the place, not focusing on one sub-niche at a time, trying to be everything to everybody, spreading yourself too thin. The problem might be that you've just kept creating content for years, without any kind of structure or specific goals. And you've been creating products without identifying who your target customer is. When I go to your web site, I can't really make out who it is really for. Is it for students studying psychology for a college degree? Is it for the casual person looking to learn about psycology? Is it for people who are looking to learn more about psychology because of a loved one who has an issue? The content is just too much, and it is all over the place, from what I can tell. You have a

Dream Team of 5 Tools You Need To Create A Membership Site. Let's do a quick flashback. Back in April 2015, LinkedIn purchased online learning website Lynda.com for a cool $1.5 billion. Lynda.com, at its very core, is nothing but a membership site offering online courses with videos and checklists and PDF document downloads. So when you have a membership site that earns recurring revenue, you increase the value of your business as a whole, and that makes it easier to sell your site to a prospective buyer in the future, if you ever decide to walk away from it all. So a web site with recurring revenue has greater lifetime customer value, which will help you sell your site for a lot more than if you had just one-time products. Which is why a site like Lynda.com could get a valuation of 1.5 billion. Of course, they had millions of members, but the point is, that they weren't just regular members, but members paying a monthly fee. And you too can create your own mini version of Lynda.com. Here are the 5 members o

So just how important are memberships and subscriptions? I read this article from marketwatch.com, which is a web site published by Dow Jones, and tracks the financial markets and apparently has more than 16 million visitors per month. And I'll link to this article in the show notes - http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-iphone-payment-plan-could-upgrade-the-stock-2015-09-16 So here's what it says - and I'm quoting verbatim here... The headline: Apple’s iPhone payment program could upgrade the stock The subheadline: Upgrade program, launching with iPhone 6S, could drive Apple shares above $200 So let me give you the context. Recently, with Apple's iPhone 6s and 6sPlus launch, they announced that they would offer new iPhones on a payment plan, and people can get a 1 year payment plan or a 2 year plan directly from Apple, and not worry about extending their phone contracts. So you basically pay the cost of the phone directly to Apple, and in return you can get a new phone from Apple every year, or 2, depe

SubscribeMe.fm is THE podcast that teaches you all about about creating a highly profitable, long-term business with online courses & membership sites, using recurring subscriptions. In this podcast, and I don't mean just this episode, but the entire series, I'm going to be talking about how you can build a successful business by creating subscription-based products and services that bring in recurring income month after month... where you don't have to go hunting for new customers all the time, where you can focus on creating a remarkable product - like Seth Godin would say - A product that your customers love, where they keep paying you to keep delivering your product or service, and where you get to actually focus on your remarkable product - and improving it and adding to it over time, and you get to focus on, quote unquote "Enchanting" your customers, like Guy Kawasaki would say. The main focus of this podcast will be how to make, market and monetize your online digital content. But here's a a list