Summary

Greetings, and welcome to the first section of single sale vs. membership, where we'll be looking firstly at these two very different methods of creating products culminating in an educated decision by yourself as to how you're going to present the product that you're working on right now.

The reason for me writing this section, and why I enjoy writing and talking about this so much is my previous experience, my very first site was an ambitious script and content packed membership site, which is why the info I have to for you will provide real life and valuable hindsight and ammunition for your decision.

Much of this subject relies on a lot of factors. It depends on your product type, it depends on the type of income you have, your budget and the amount of time you have to spend at your computer working. As everyone will have different products coming from their ideas, I can't make this decision for you. Let’s take each factor one at a time and discuss them in turn to assist you in this all-important decision.

First, the time it's going to take you to create your product. When setting up a single sale, things are nice and straight forward and often making them easier and faster to create excluding the product itself.

The customer pays, the customer downloads. This is all straight forward single sale usually is. All that you have to do is set up your resource gathering methods, for your affiliates, your list, customers, long-term customers and your joint venture prospects. Create your follow-up, sales letter, payment processor, download area and that’s it. There you have your single sale product.

When it comes to membership sites things are slightly different. You still have your sales process, you still have your sales letter and your resource gathering tools, but the one big difference here is the maintenance factor.

Again, it depends on your product, but the general rule is single sale is harder to create, and memberships are harder to maintain. As you can see, when setting up a membership, not a lot has actually changed, and on the surface membership sites look just like single sale sites, which is why so many underestimate them and then find themselves in over their head (i.e. me five or six years ago for example).

Going back to the previous example about my first business, while the set up isn't very different aside from reoccurring commissions, which isn't exactly hard to do aside from flipping a switch with your payment processor to turn them on, there's more we have to consider to get the full picture.

It's a fact that members paying a monthly fee expect consistent quality from month to month. Aside from standard customer service which comes with all business, this long running quality may include new software, updating tools and software, updating information and so on to keep your members and stay ahead of the ever developing competition, something that with single sale is resolved by releasing multiple products, but through updates when looking at memberships.

Another aspect of this, again, depending on your product is things can go wrong. With a single sale product, it's a case of fix it and you're sorted. With memberships, and especially with software, you may have to bring in freelancers to fix problems, which is sometimes far from a quick thing to do.

Even if you're not selling software, if anything goes wrong with your affiliate system, fixing something like this with live, non-stop updating, re-occurring commissions is not the easiest, and not the least stressful job I can think of. One simple incorrect calculation can bring the whole system down.

While this is going on with your membership site, what’s going on with the single sale site? Well, the problems are fixed quickly, the customers are reading your sales letter, buying, downloading and going on their merry way. The only maintenance is minimal customer service if your product is of a high standard.

I know this might seem obvious or basic, but it gets me how many people start up membership sites thinking it'll be a cakewalk because they've been all over single sale for a while thinking it'll be a breeze, and admittedly, when looking into this for the first time, it does look like a breeze.

Nowadays membership sites can be fully automated in most cases, but there is more to think about when it comes down to maintenance, and some of the problems that arise are often harder to deal with in a live recurring membership environment than in a single sale environment.

We also have to consider how devastating these problems are. A slight delay in the members’ area of a single sale site is bad, but easily fixed, and with a little patching up, an apology and a personal mail to those affected, all is well.

With membership sites, a few hours of downtime when the members are relying on you for essential live tools to run their business, or even following a timetable that they can't deviate from because they're so short of time, whatever the reason, problems can be devastating because members will lose trust, and they will leave and head straight for the competition. We'll come back to this soon, but for now I just want to demonstrate the differences of the inner workings of each choice.

Moving on to the monetary aspect of things, from the point of the business owner, (that's you). Looking first at how you're going to be paid. To state the obvious, with single sale sites, you get your cash right away. Customers pay, money lands in your account.

Easy enough and with membership, your reoccurring income does the same, month after month, but this relies on you keeping your members right where they are to keep receiving this money, money that especially for a high ticket item you would have received up front with single sale, instead of opting to keep people paying you month after month, only to exceed the value of your products after several months, or even a year and upwards.

In my experience, it's very hard to keep people in a membership site for longer than a year, even when you've done everything right. People move on, do new things, get bored, change their minds, and go in different directions all the time. For this reason, once you've decided on your product you need to ask yourself, 'If I were to sell this as a single sale product how much would I charge?’.

Take that figure and divide it by twelve. Do you make more or less than you would have charged single sale, and would your membership price have to be ridiculously high to recoup that money? This product, for example. $1000 split over 12 months is $83 a month.

I don't fancy trying to keep 200 people in a membership site for 12 months at $83 per month compared to the single sale option. Even by today’s standards, $83 is a lot for membership sites relating to online marketing, $15-$45 per month being the most realistic figures to avoid your potential customers saying 'Wow that's an expensive monthly subscription'.

The fact is for this reason, membership sites are well suited to several low to medium ticket items instead of a one off big ticket item split into sections to pull as much profit from this as possible and to gain an advantage over the more focused single sale sites.

The next thing we're going to talk about is getting bogged down. Back when I started out, many of the people that I met in that first year were also creating membership sites, and now, six years later, only two in twenty of us have got anywhere. The basis of this aspect is membership sites, if you're not careful they can hold you back an unprecedented amount.

Getting wrapped in re-designs, re-works, re-models, re-launches, trying to please everyone, adding features and benefits as well as general maintenance. It was those of us who realized what was happening and sought to fix the problem that became successful, those that didn't, well, some are still in pre-launch over five years later after many re-releases and re-designs.

If I've put you off membership sites, I apologize. Now though, after looking at the monetary investment and getting a good look at the time involved, it's time to take a glance over at something more positive, and that's limited memberships.

Limited memberships are an in between. Not single sale, but a membership site that only goes on for a set period of time. This allows you to have a reoccurring income for a set amount of time, to spread an expensive product over time, and create membership sites for those high-ticket single sale products.

This is ideal if you're after a reoccurring income, because it also gives you a lot of flexibility in both presentation and how you receive your income. This is also great if your product isn't suited to an ever-lasting membership and you don't want to have to write reams of new content. Set it out as a six-month course; deliver it in parts, monthly, or weekly for a set period of time. Removing the dynamics of the situation make it a lot more straight-forward and much like a single sale site.

One advantage of doing this, aside from the obvious, spreading large costs over a period of time, is the control you have. For example, I remember sending a mail out to my members when I decided I wanted a new laptop.

It told the reoccurring members only part way through their membership that they could pay up front; receive the whole course in one go with a ten percent discount. I came away with enough for many more laptops than that I had originally planned for. A powerful technique, and the ability to control how you receive your income using the best of both worlds.

In addition to this, as your customers are receiving your product in set installments, you're making a connection. It's not a single sale product they're going to chuck aside; it's an ongoing thing for a set period of time. This builds a connection between you and the customer. It builds trust and paves the way for repeat sales from long-term customers.

This applies to unlimited memberships too, and is ideal if you're offering a low price intro product as an up sell, ready to create and sell them a large, high ticket item later. It may take longer than a single sale to filter customers to the high-ticket item, but the effect this has on sales is tremendous, simply because of the trust built over time, the power of which, I personally learned by accident.

Congratulations for finishing this section, you've already developed a solid base for your knowledge and should be close to making your decision. There are, however, a few more specific points I'd like to go through with you before we finish with single sale vs. membership.

Remember, it's about gathering the facts, looking at this report, looking at your product, and making an educated and informed decision as to how to present yourself and your business. You’re not constrained to one forever and there is no wrong answer. It totally depends on your product.

See you in part 2!

Next

Overview Sales vs. Membership, Part 2