Summary

Greetings, and welcome to single sale versus membership part two, where we'll follow on straight away from part one and compare the two methods of delivery, and introduce a third, very effective middle ground, and demonstrate just why this is so effective.

In the previous section we talked about the flexibility of membership and limited membership sites to turn customers into long term customers. Now, we're going to flip the table and look at something you can do with a single sale product far more easily and readily than you can with a membership site. As we noted in the previous section, much of this depends on your product.

A lot of your promotion will be coming from deals struck with other online marketers, whether they happen to be your contacts, your list, your affiliates, your customers, whoever they are, the usual thing to do is give them your product as a preview of the quality you're promoting, and sometimes even add value to the deal if the prospects are interested in your product.

When forming these types of deals, don't expect to be able to give away a membership as easily as you can give away a single sale product to secure a deal, and using single sale for this purpose makes it far easier to build trust and connect to your prospect.

That's not to say it's impossible with a membership site, but understand that if you go the membership route, it's going to be harder to pull joint ventures.

Lets briefly look at why, without overlapping the subjects. Many budding joint venturers on the lookout for that next sweetest deal with big names make the mistake of assuming their product is going to be valuable to their prospect.

More often than not, unless the product is very focused, specialized and targeted at a niche market, this isn't the case at all and the product is more of a preview of the quality of your product that they will risk their name on and promote to their resources.

Take it from me, when you're just starting out, if you have a membership site and are delivering products over time that aren't pre-written and require maintenance, it's not always easy to get your prospect to take your word and your product at face value.

It’s easier with single sale because you can say 'Here it is, this is it', and they can immediately judge whether it's of satisfactory quality, something that's not possible with a membership site.

You sure won't catch any of us legit marketers promoting unreliable services. Not that yours will be, but how do we know without extensive work on our part? This is the brick wall I hit very hard when I launched my first site.

The second point I'd like to make is about the value of the actual product. Again, it's far easier to say to someone 'Hey, here's my $1000 piece of software' than it is to say 'hey, here's a membership to my $30 per month membership site'. It just doesn't hold any real value with these types of deals.

Ok lets move on now and look at some of the tools you need to run each type of site, a checklist of sorts and a bit of a heads up to show you exactly what each entails. Lets start with the membership site.

The membership site. The first thing you’re going to need is an affiliate system capable of calculating recurring commissions.

The second thing you’ll need is a payment processor capable of processing the payments you’re looking to charge, which is not as easy to find as it sounds. Some won’t let you reoccur your billing forever, some have trial price limits, some don’t do free trials, some have a maximum recurring price.

Next you’ll need a membership manager, something that ties into the affiliate program and payment processor that revokes access from a member on auto when they cancel. With all of that maintenance going, you won’t have time to do all this yourself. (Again watch out for the mail. When this is finished you’ll be the first to know, and the first to get rather large discount).

Next up, you’re going to need your content. Whether it’s scripts, information, business admin, consultation services, whatever it is, it needs to be planted inside the members’ area.

Next on the list is your hosting. A massively important aspect due to the importance of keeping tools that are invaluable to your members and possibly even their businesses functioning at all times. Take into account your bandwidth if you’re offering audio, or if your scripts are particularly demanding.

Freelancers-on-demand. Create yourself an account at a freelancers’ site, Scriptlance or Elance, or similar sites. This is handy when you need emergency work doing. Set this one up even if you don’t have scripts as primary product, because it takes a real programming pro to make fixes in a live reoccurring system without screwing anything up, something I wouldn’t dare attempt myself. Once you have a good programmer it’s worth sticking with them.

An autoresponder system for the management of your resources, your list, your customers, your affiliates, your long-term customers and for follow-up purposes. You’re also going to need a system of this type for notifying members of changes to the site, cancelled memberships and so on.

That's it, that's all there is to a membership site. It isn't a huge amount when everything works, and it's also not expensive to set this up at all (I launched on day one with the most basic tools after having spent $600 on everything, bear in mind, none of which was one off, everything script wise was re-used over several sites, and ended up costing me $200 per site before I upgraded my stuff).

So single sale, what’s the difference? Let’s take a look. I won't repeat everything we just talked about, instead, we'll just make two simple amendments.

In single sale your affiliate system doesn’t need to be capable of recurring incomes.

A payment processor is much easier to find and use, and there will be no problems with trials, trial price and length, recurring limits and tying all of this into an affiliate system and access manager.

That really is all there is to it. There's not much more going on set up wise with membership compared to single sale, so through my experience, my advice would be don't let your budget dictate what type of site you set up.

This is even more important with membership sites than single sale, because quite simply if you want to deal with any aspect of single sale sites, you’re only dealing with them once per customer. When you’re looking at monthly or even weekly recurring membership sites, you might just find yourself managing a lot of people taking up your valuable product creation and development time to move your business forwards.

When your membership site is automated in every way humanly possible, it makes it a lot easier to be proactive and not get stuck in the infinite loop of maintenance.

Next up, long term commitments for membership sites. Be prepared. When I first started my membership site I had no idea that it would entail so much, and of course, when you're creating a product closing it down doesn't even cross your mind, but due to the heavy demand on the resources, unfortunately I had to do exactly that, and re-open later as a limited numbers membership site.

ahead a little better than I did, especially if you're looking at running scripts with an account per script per member, things can get out of hand very quickly. Again, it depends on your product here so I can't go into too much detail without writing a 1200 page guide on single sale and memberships, 99% of which would be irrelevant to your business, but look at your product, look at how much bandwidth people are going to be using, look at how much they'll be downloading every month and plan carefully in this sense, and you have a far greater chance of success.

The reason is quite simply the customers. There’s no way that you can keep your good name and pull down a membership site in a few days just because it’s eating up more resources or doing something unexpected that’s very hard or expensive to solve. It can take months to move customers along, as they slowly pull their resources from the site and find alternative services.

It’s not something I like to talk about, because it was big mistake on my part in my early days, and no one likes making mistakes, especially when it affects customers in this way. If you’re unsure whether or not a membership site will go well, it’s best to stick with single sale.

Next up, think about automation. Automate the heck out of everything if you're going the membership route. It’s quite possible to run a single sale site totally un automated (but definitely not recommended) but when membership comes into play, and you're potentially managing hundreds, or thousands of members on a monthly basis, that won't happen, and if you try, you will undoubtedly find yourself in an infinite loop of maintenance.

Some of the traits that you will need to successfully run a membership site are as follows:

You need to be technically minded or willing to learn, fast. Unless you have a big budget, when dealing with site updates, script modifications and updates (especially if scripts are part of your product) at the very minimum I'd suggest learning how to design and create a site if you can't already, adding into the mix a little PHP even if it's just for forms, which doesn't hurt ether. Also scripts. Got your own?

Great, upload and test them yourself, because the knowledge you gain will be invaluable. Most scripts come with instruction manuals and step by step install guides anyway, and believe me, if you've installed one, you've petty much installed them all. Doing this gave me a great insight into my scripts and allowed me to fix problems, and change their configurations after only one or two installs.

You don't have to be a wiz at it, but it really is that easy and worthwhile for long-term plans and prospects if you're on a budget. Not something you have to do right now, but keep it in mind.

Trait number two is you need to be quick to fix problems. If a problem arises with a long term membership site, especially if it’s with one of the primary tools, as we already discussed, you have to be fast to fix it, or the members, who are often using the tools either to run their business or an important aspect of their daily life, will lave for a more reliable service.

Number three relates to the first trait. That’s have spare cash just in case. Never leave that pot empty, even if it’s just a few hundred dollars, there may come a time when a job arises that needs to be fixed through live data or something that you haven’t yet learned. Sure it’s ok if you can build sites and web based scripts already, but for those of us (including me) who prefer to stick to marketing side of things, a few hundred dollars put aside in the pot as a backup find can never hurt, and often it can help a heck of a lot.

Trait number four is communication. Good communication and lots of it. Again, it totally depends on your product, but when running a membership site there’s many ways of building trust with your customers, keeping maintenance time down, and keeping members up to date without taking up a bunch of your time. Communication does all three.

For example, instead of just putting your contact details up (which is something I first did with my original site) take the plunge, put up faq’s or even short snappy step by step tutorials if you need to, especially when hosting scripts, and even a bit of guidance when hosting content in a membership site wouldn’t go amiss either. Members love this kind of straight- forward time saving tool.

It’s quick, it’s one off, finish it and it’s done, and it keeps customers in the know and severely cuts support requests, leaving you more time to work on your next project instead of answering e-mails all day.

Couple this cut in maintenance with a short note each week, site news, updates or additional info. This does three things; first it fills the membership area with your presence. The customers and members know you’re there, and the place doesn’t feel cut off and stagnant to them.

This alone was one of the prime aspects that doubled the length of time people were staying members and of course paying me also, and why many claim that memberships last a shorter time than they actually do. Five minutes of work per week to double your income? Not bad at all. Be a good communicator, but at the same time, the key is to keep maintenance low with automated pre written information for your members.

It never hurts to pop up every now and then and pull a simple update on the entrance page for the members either. A paragraph is all it takes.

 Finally, get it right, make it good, make it the best you've ever created no matter what you choose.

Ok that’s all we have for this section. I hope you’ve gained a little insight into each of the three types of sites and now have the ability to choose for yourself the method that best suits your product and your business.

Even though you may have stumbled across the odd bit of this section that screams obvious to you, take it from me, it’s amazing what you can miss until it hits you in the face, no matter how obvious it is. I want to make 100% sure that we’ve covered all bases with everybody so there’s as few mistakes and as many successes as possible.

Remember, there is no correct answer here. No one can decide but you.

To your success

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