Flexible Memberships:

The Low Maintenance Option

Now a moment ago we talked a little bit about if your product suited to a membership site, i.e. is it long enough to sustain long periods and bring you the returns that you want? You may have noticed already that a lot of the differences between membership sites and single sale are pure presentation, how you present your product, how it brings you the cash and how quickly you can put that to use using the time you have remaining.

This is no exception. If I’ve put you off membership sites so far, this is where they start fighting back and rearing their best sides. First off, I want you to think about the flexibility you have to present. A membership site doesn’t mean something that you’ll set up and leave running itself forever, at least it doesn’t have to. Of course I’m talking about limited memberships.

Rather than limiting the number of users or members as the name might suggest, the change is much larger than that, and offers your product over a set period of time, through which the members pay you a recurring income until that time is up.

This is an excellent choice, and a good mid-way between an everlasting membership site and single sale products, and is often the choice for the sale of information, or set courses. This one for example. If we didn’t go single sale this would have been the choice.

Not only does it allow those who can’t afford to pay up front all in one go to get their hands on it by paying smaller installments than they would with a three month pay plan, or even straight up front selling, but it also ditches the maintenance too. You’re not constantly updating or improving the content, you don’t need to. It’s a set creation, a set piece if you will.

Limited membership is just an alternative form of presenting a high ticket, single sale item, ideal for info product sales without the maintenance, and without the worry of ever running out of content to sell.

So why would you create a limited membership site out of the single sale product, when you could just make it single sale for the full course and pull in all the cash anyway? Well, high-ticket items, single sale products are often high in price, anywhere from $200 up to $10,000 and sometimes even more.

A limited membership allows for three things. First, it gives the power of the trial. It’s not easy to get people to commit to a high priced product, if they’re not bombarded by proof that it’s the best out there, and even then, some can be wary, especially if they haven’t spent this much on a single sale product online before.

The limited membership allows you to overcome this by offering a trial for the first section. It eliminates a massive amount of risk and boosts the confidence of the customers in you, furthermore it allows them to experience your work first hand before shelling out what is a large amount of cash to most people, something that even three or four installments for a high ticket item cannot achieve.

The second thing the limited membership allows you to do is establish a relationship with your customers. Turning first time customers into long-term customers has been and will continue to be a big focal point throughout this course. It’s something that allows you to profit again and again from the same resources without having to go out and acquire more every time you launch a product.

Have you ever bought a single sale product, downloaded it, and just maybe had a glance, had a little look, and then put it aside and moved on? Well that’s something that goes on a lot with single sale items, especially those that aren’t particularly expensive.

Of course if you spend a thousand dollars on something, you’re likely to use it for a long period of time, but when spending a hundred, two hundred, it’s all too easy to lay something aside and forget about it.

Within limited membership, because you’re effectively getting your product in installments, you begin to make a connection with the seller. You get to know a little about them, you follow their course, and through each installment, the connection and trust grows stronger and stronger, something that you don’t get with smaller ticket single sale products.  

What happens when you’ve made a connection with your customers? Well they begin to feel like this know you, they trust you, they’ll remember who you are because they’ve been receiving your product from you over a sustained amount of time, and this in turn paves the way for turning these customers into long term customers.

They’ll be more receptive to further offers, they won’t forget you in a hurry, they’ll begin to trust you and your products, and what’s more they’ll buy from you again and again in the future if they enjoyed this first installment.

It’s a pretty simple process, but using this method, but as you can already see, through that long term connection you make is very powerful, and after the first few installments, you’re no longer just a random person trying to get their money. Establish that connection, it’s immensely powerful.

We’ll talk more about establishing this connection with your customers later, for now though all I want to demonstrate is that it is easier to do through limited membership than single sale, without having the often large maintenance and unsuitability on a per product basis of the full blown ever lasting membership site, something to keep in mind when selecting from these three options.

The final advantage of this type of membership site is flexibility. Imagine you’re selling a single sale product for a thousand dollars. What kind of flexibility do you have to choose when to claim your income? Not a lot, people buy, you receive the money end of, but if you’re looking for a reoccurring solution the aspect of flexibility is extremely powerful.

 

Lets look at those limited memberships to start with. So you’ve sold your trial for the first section of eight for example, and your customers loved it, they know you, they know who you are, and they begin to trust you at this point. It’s immensely easy to sell something to people who have bought from you before compared to those who haven’t bought from you or experienced your products. We can use this here.

 

So your trial has gone out and you’ve gained the trust, but something comes up, and you decide you want that new car more quickly than you thought, or you plan another project that takes a lot of money, software development for example, and you can’t afford to wait that eight weeks for the whole cost of the course.

So now you have the trust, you don’t have to wait. In my experience, simply sending an e-mail to a people currently running in your membership site and saying something along the lines of ‘Well, you’ve had part one, and you loved it, why not get instant access to whole course immediately? What’s more, if you purchase the complete course in it’s entirety now, we’re going to knock ten percent off the total price for you’.

You see, playing on that advantage of the trust you’ve gained after the first installment, you have the flexibility to be able to go all out on the customers now. They know you’re for real, they know your stuff is good, and they’ll only be too glad to get hold of the course they were going to do in its entirety anyway for ten percent less, and what do you gain?

Well you gain the ability to pull a large amount of money up front if you need to, which is where the flexibility comes in. See, when something is single sale, it pretty much stays that way, but batting for the membership site, when you have a membership site, the people running through that site know and trust you, and you quickly pull a lot of sales through this type of offer, which in all actuality is turning your limited membership site into a single sale product.

Here’s an example of how I put this to use in my original site. The membership price was $15 when I pulled this off for the second time, and I decided I wanted a laptop. The last time I tried this I had a few active members but not many, so not realizing how powerful this was due to insufficient stats and experience at the time, I went and offered my now larger customer base 25 places in the year prepaid membership for $180 with a twenty dollar discount at $160 if they pre-paid.

I went to bed fully expecting to pull five of these sales off and buy a new laptop in the morning. Well, I woke up to an inbox full of orders, and I actually had to increase the total number I was selling, and send out a frantic ‘All places filled’ mail when I woke up. The final result? Enough for five laptops totally by mistake. Oops. 

This is how I personally learned of this power, something we’ll talk about later in several sections relating to different aspects and methods of online marketing.

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A Final Word