[
Note: this is (one of) the last section(s) of a book I'm compiling on the Elevation Income release. References to a "Resources Page" is a link which at this writing doesn't exist. It will show up when I publish the book - or when I come back to update this post...]
Mike Dillard has used this one concept to make
multi-millions – and continues to do so today.
You can, too.
That was the whole point of Elevation Income –
how to get you started right now with your own home business, so
you'd have more money to invest in other
passive income streams.
The elegant solution for Mike was getting
joint-venture affiliates to push his memberships. Very
elegant, once you know how that's done.
Dillard loosely defined an “elegant solution”
as
having the biggest yield possible for the least amount of cost
and effort.
In short - it’s easily and highly leveraged.
Your time and money goes a lot farther. A lot. Like potentially
millions back for each and every
penny invested.
The elegant part of it is to set it up so you have
to do little management of it, and have minor payments every month to
maintain it. It should generate as much income as you feel you want,
off as little that you want to spend in terms of time and money.
And it can. It's all up to you – and how much
you want to invest in your own education and experience, as well as
building an online virtual assembly line which can deliver valuable
content to paying customers.
Not that you won't have to work to get it set up –
but once it is, then you should be able to spend as little time and
money as you want. So you can spend your time with family, friends,
or setting up additional passive income streams. Or even sell that
membership (or a majority equity share) for profit.
Mike Dillard's “Elegant Solution"
How Dillard did it, with both
Magnetic
Sponsoring and
Elevation
Group, was to set up a membership site and sell information
projects there. This isn’t something new. Clubs and Memberships
have been around since before the
Web was created and are practically
the basic model for earning income over the
Internet. Your hosting
company is one of these. Any paid service on the Internet is one of
these. If you include any business which asks for your email or a
regular fee, that’s just about everything going out there. This is
just an extension of various “clubs” which are used in the brick
and mortar world to get repeating sales from customers.
Unfortunately, Dillard doesn’t go into setting
up and running a membership in much detail in his recent Elevation
Income release. His solution was to move everything over to
Infusionsoft and
Kajabi - which is way out of most people’s budget
when they’re just starting out.
But then,
Evolution Group was set up based on a
single product. And Magnetic Sponsoring was and is an affiliate
marketing members-only club with a set series of products, plus a
blog.
Your own membership will be what you create it to
be. What I'm covering below just lays out the broad strokes and how
you can get started.
Again – don't take my word for anything. Test
everything to see that it makes sense for you and that you can make
it actually work. Which means that it makes money.
While I did this research for my own use, I'm
publishing it for everyone to see. Some of the examples I'll go
through will be figuring how to apply it to my own scene as I plan
out my own first membership.
As I go, I'll link to places and people who have
done this successfully. Just so you can check them out for yourself.
No two memberships will be the same. Just like
their creators are different. Individuals. So read, check, test.
That's your success route.
How are Memberships “Elegant Solutions?”
1. Passive, Recurring Income
Recurring income is one of the outstanding aspect
to running a membership. Most other online
businesses lack this
capability. They survive by selling a couple of products and must
make ends meet by selling many of these each month. This alone tells
you why bloggers are renown for not “making money” online.
Your membership gives you a new focus. Instead of
working to sell products to new customers every month, instead you
work on retaining the clients you have and keeping them satisfied.
First-time subscribers breathe life into your membership, but
renewing clients keep it alive and well – producing recurring
income.
Of course, it's not any instant or magic outcome.
You will have attrition on your membership, fluctuation in the
numbers of members you have. However, as Jay Abraham notes, serving a
client is far cheaper than finding new customers constantly. His
insistence on the word client tells a lot about how you treat your
members – you are their to help them improve their lives. And they
will stay with you until you are no longer able to help them in their
quest.
If the content of your site has sufficient depth,
you'll be helping them for years – while they pay you monthly for
the privilege.
A paid membership gives you a steady income,
depending on the quantity and quality of work you put into your site.
Delivering valuable, consistent-quality content on your site
regularly and timely will be your own guarantee of regular income.
Because that content is “write once, publish
many times” and basically on automatic drip (much like an on-demand
coffee maker) – you are able to serve many more people than you
would by making cups of coffee one at a time as they showed up to
your stand. Your content is mostly set up to start once they sign up
and then is sufficiently interesting to keep them going right through
to the end – and then sign up for more and additional products,
which are also delivered automatically.
You can see how this scales and is the answer to
any business demands. Practically, any brick-and-mortar would be
smart to build an online version of their business as a membership,
utilizing the knowledge they have and delivering it to their regular
clients – as well as being able to expand beyond the local
community they serve. Practically, if it weren't for the joy in
helping people directly, a well-run membership could replace your
main income from that business.
This is called “retirement.”
Because you can charge whatever you want – based
on the perceived value you offer – you are practically unlimited as
to the amount of income you can bring in monthly.
For instance, if each member of your paid site
pays $25 a month and you have 100 members to your site, you can
expect about $2500 a month from this one site. Just 50 members will
bring you $1200 per month. Dillard got several thousand paying him
$97 per month – and made millions “over night.”
As well, once you have your first membership
automated and running well, you can the build additional sites for
extra streams of income. Quickly this ramps into 5-figure income per
month, and 6- or 7-figures per year. (Dillard makes 8-figure incomes
from both of the two businesses he runs.)
We then have the economy of scale with
diversified, passive income.
2. Increased Authority or “Pre-eminence” as a
Market Leader
Yaro Starak seemed to hit on the same concept as
Dillard has about Alpha's as leaders:
“Preeminence is
essentially a perception. It simply means that people believe you
are the best or one of the best or at least better than most
others, at what you do.
“It’s because
of preeminence that people choose your business over the
competition, that you can charge higher prices and why people seek
you out instead of you needing to solicit clients through
aggressive selling.
“It actually
doesn’t matter if you really are the best at what you do - that’s
a subjective point of view no matter how you look at it. What counts
is that you appear superior in some way, in the view of the people
you are trying to influence.
“You want
preeminence because it will convince people to join your membership
site and make it easier to find partners who will promote your
membership site.
“Preeminence is
established by association with other people who have preeminence,
by placing yourself in a position to create the perception of
preeminence (for example coverage in the media, speaking at an event)
or by delivering so much value that people refer to your materials
as definitive.
By going the “extra
mile” to create a membership for your audience, it lends you the
authority and pre-eminence in your field, and practically lays out
easy ways for people to follow your lead. As long as your content
continues to be excellent value, they'll continue to follow your
lead.
Of course, that means
your average value per member increases – since they'll be buying
more products from you with cross-sells.
What you need before you start.
In short - you have to know where you are going
and how you are going to get there.
As Mike Dillard covers (and devotes an entire
video to) is that you have to figure out your niche.
- You have to have a problem which is worth
solving, because people will pay you for the answer to it. You have
to know how those people want their solution delivered.
- You also are fascinated with solving this, so
it aligns with your passion, your bliss. You can't really get
“burned out” on something you love to do.
- The final point is that you have assessed
your own talents and skill-sets to know what you are capable of.
There are many types of membership models to
choose from. (We'll get to these shortly.) Which one you select will
be determined by the three points above.
Those points will also predict the price-point you
choose.
So have them sorted out completely, and work them
out with paper and pencil until you are completely certain about each
and know the answers cold.
Begin with the end in mind.
This is straight out of “Speedwealth” by T.
Harv Eker.
The point is to plan on how you can set this
business up so it's truly passive income and you don't have to
constantly work at maintaining it. You want to envision your end and
work toward it.
Often, an entrepreneur will be able to build and
then sell a membership once it has been streamlined and systemized so
that it is truly passive and not just another “J.O.B” (just over
broke.)
You want multiple streams of passive income, not
lots of jobs to do.
Memberships can be nearly put on autopilot.
Nearly. And then you have time (and money) to invest in additional
passive income streams. That is where your true financial freedom
will come from.
See Eker's book for more about this – and he
also gives seminars yearly based on that book.
Planning what membership you want to build
The membership type you'll build depends on how
you answered those three points above.
What does your niche want, how do they want it,
and what skills do you have to deliver that valuable solution to
them.
Types of memberships:
There are a few ways of looking at membership site
models.
From reviewing
half-a-hundred different PDF's and articles
on the subject, this description seems to be the best.
Payment: How to charging for the value you
deliver.
-
Free
- Trial
- Single payment
- Fixed payment for a fixed-term
access
- Subscription (Continuity)
Delivery: How members receive and access
their content (benefits)
- Emailed
- Dripped
- Micro-continuity (regular posting of small
content bits)
- Time-limited access
- Unlimited to the same content
- Unlimited to new content
Content Based: The kind of content,
materials, instruction, services you will deliver. You may choose to
focus on a particular category or offer a mix.
- E-books / virtual products
- Physical products / merchandise
- Interviews
- Self-study or live training
- Coaching
- Community
The choices you make in these three areas
determine what kind of a membership site you’ll have.
It’s a little like choosing from a Chinese menu.
One from column A, one from column B, two from column C. Just like
choosing a meal, some combinations work better than others.
It's
really based on how you want to take advantage of your own skills and
how fast you want to get started.
You can also use multiple choices from each
column, such as mixing free and trial. Or marketing your fixed term
as “lifetime access.” As well, a blog as part of the site would
naturally lend itself to being re-purposed into courses, which could
then be sold and delivered via your autoresponder.
Pricing points
You can also have combinations of the above. This
is particularly true with pricing.
A free membership will always be a great way to
bring people in for a taste. They'll be in your autoresponder, so you
can then keep them updated on new content. Of course, they'll need to
upgrade in order to experience it.
Any free trial will be giving them a taste before
they commit. At certain price points, this will be a smooth
transition – hardly noticed. Price is more affected by expected
quality of content and perceived value than what it costs to create.
If you want more income, you have to increase the
perceived value. That's marketing, and goes back to Dillard's point
about being an Alpha type.
Getting Started
Here's where you need to know what you're going to
call things. This is covered in Dillard's Video 6: Ready, Set, Go!
Once you know what your niche-community wants -
and how they talk about it - you'll know what you want to call it, as
well as the domain name you should use.
Then you get decent hosting.
Once you have your hosting, then you get into the
Control Panel and install Wordpress.
Why Wordpress
Wordpress is an open-source software which is
widely supported by a huge global community. Essentially because its
very easy to set up and run.
There is a great deal of documentation and classes
available on line, both free and paid, so you can master how to run
it. Wordpress.com will even give you a free blog so you can learn by
using the platform.
You are going to have to install the program
itself on your own domain hosting in order to install the necessary
membership plug-in. Just the way it is. If you're going to make
money, you are going to run your own shop.
But if you ever do run into trouble, you can
always get technical help for a fee, since so many people install and
maintain Wordpress installations.
Why a membership plugin?
A plugin changes Wordpress to be able to make
security and other tweaks to your subscribers and make a Membership
happen. There are tons of plugins, both free and paid, which change
all sorts of points within Wordpress.
But
they don't all play nice together. The advice is to keep it simple.
Whatever membership plugin you choose (I recommend
Insta-Member)
do some research on conflicts before you start adding any additional
ones.
While you can get other scripts which can be
installed outside of Wordpress, you should really be prepared to do
(or pay for) the technical work needed to support setting these up.
If you do the steps of 1) Install Wordpress, and
2) Install your membership plug-in – then it should go smoothly.
Then check on the plug-in company's site for information about any
others you have or shouldn't have.
Mostly, you can get going right off the bat with
just those two steps.
When WP and your plugin are limiting your
expansion, you should have sufficient recurring income to afford the
Infusionsoft/Kajabi solution that Dillard recommends.
Getting your autoresponder service and merchant
account.
The last point, if you don't already have them, is
to get Aweber or some similar autoresponder service. Because you are
going to be doing list-building, and this is the tool to do it with.
While I could go into a lot more detail about how
to utilize autoresponders (and Aweber has a ton of free PDF's on it's
site to learn how), I've put these links on the Resource page so you
can look them up at your leisure.
A merchant account is so you can accept credit
cards. Start with PayPal. When you need an additional account of your
own, you'll be ready to do the needed homework for this. Dillard has
a few links on this in his Resource page. All you need to get started
is PayPal.
Cost? Next to Zip
Your business should pay for itself. Sure, you can
“loan” it some start-up funds, but the point is that the less you
have to invest up front, and the quicker you can get it running and
producing income on its own, the faster you'll be making profits.
I've gone over this earlier. But let's lay it out:
- Domain Name: About $14 per year.
(Don't swallow the upsells. Just get a single domain name.)
- Hosting: About $10 per month.
- Wordpress: Free with hosting.
- Membership plugin: Insta-member
is about $47, a one-time purchase. (Others are more, and some
are hundreds per month – the best have the same features. Cheaper
and free ones won't.)
And that's it. The rest is your own sweat-equity
in getting content uploaded, as well as writing sales pages and so
on.
Note: If you can swallow the Infusionsoft/Kajabi
pill and set yourself up for a $400 monthly fee – go for it. They
are the best. My approach above is to get you started tonight as you
read this with what you can afford from any day job you may have.
Getting Discovered
I'm not going to cover getting your content ready
and uploaded to the site. On the Resource page (linked) I'll give you
a linked-list of various PDF's I've found which cover this, as well
as any other materials you may need which have shown up in this
research.
Once you have your Membership up and running, you
are going to have to get people to sign up for it. That means they
are going to have to be able to find it.
If you don't already have an email list, then you
have to use additional means to get people to find your membership.
While there is all sorts of ways to do this, let's
review the most effective:
- Free info product (or free membership)
– this is something you will give away in exchange for their
email. See the Resource page for ebooks on how to create these.
- Video – particularly YouTube. If you
utilize the description, you can link directly to the landing page
(or any page) which has your opt-in on it. (I have some write-ups
on the Resource Page.)
- Joint-ventures with affiliates –
giving a sizable commission (50% is the norm, and what Dillard does)
can get them to send your offer out to their list. Again, there is
more about writing emails to get JV partners (see the Resource
page.) But they will also write them for you. Also, list your offer
on JVZoo and DigiCipher (both free and can be integrated with
Insta-Member)
so affiliates can find you.
- Paid Ads – while most people think
this is Google Adwords, there are also other options, such as
Facebook. The most effective per cost is probably StumbleUpon, which
actually sends traffic to your page.
- Blogging – it's own subject. Works
if you can get traffic to your pages and Google puts your pages up
in the rankings so people can find them. If you don't already have a
blog, then try the others first.
Your End Game – Where to from here?
While I've skipped the mundane topic of how to
maintain your Membership. Yaro Starak (see Resource page) has an
excellent write up on how to start and build your membership. Dillard
covers the metrics (see Video 9) you should be tracking. If you look
that lesson over carefully, you'll see that these are from his
membership site dashboard:
Once you have it automated, you can consider
selling it for a handsome profit. Let's borrow from Starak's
excellent PDF on this (get your free copy from the Resource page):
How To Automate Your Marketing
Once you systematize the creation and maintenance
of your membership site, you can spend time automating the marketing
process. If you can automate both the value you offer through
systematization and outsourcing, and also the marketing processes
you use to bring in new members, you effectively have a money making
machine, which has a high resale value or can simply be an ongoing
profit-center for you.
The most common way I know of in today’s
Internet marketing world to automate marketing is to strategically
insert promotions into automated process. This can be email
autoresponders, landing pages, thank you pages, packaging your free
product as bonuses in other people’s products - essentially
back-ending your free value into the funnel of another related
business (incentivised with referral commissions, by doing contra
deals or made possible by leveraging relationships).
Selling your membership site is a real option and
worth considering as an exit strategy.
Consider this, a business usually sells for
somewhere between one and ten years net profit.
Here is a list of the metrics you should collect
and provide in a concise document, which you can give to potential
buyers who demonstrate serious interest in your site.
1. Revenue - How much raw money your
membership site generates each month. Provide data for as far back
as you can. If you can demonstrate regular income over a long period
and a positive growth curve, you will get more for your site. Also
be sure to show exactly where revenue comes from, so if you have
different membership levels, break down how many members are in each
level and how much money is generated. The more specific you are the
better.
2. Profit - Revenue is usually the most
important metric, but buyers want to know how much profit there is
at the end too. In particular, if you can break down the exact
source of expenses, potential buyers can determine whether they will
be able to reduce the costs after taking over the site and thus
calculate potential profits if they become the new owner.
For example, if a buyer already has a dedicated
server for hosting, they could move the site to their servers and
remove the hosting cost component of the expense figures, thus
increasing the potential profit. If they don’t know the source of
expenses, then they can’t do calculations like that, which could
impact the final selling price of your membership site.
3. If you treat your membership site like a
business then you have accounting records. If you can
generate a profit and loss statement for at least the previous year,
and a version broken down month by month, then you have the ideal
documents to show potential buyers all the details they need to know
about revenues, expenses and profits.
Warning: Don’t disclose this data to just
anyone, make sure they demonstrate their seriousness and ability to
source the funds to buy your site. Don’t put your profit and loss
statements into a document you release to the general public, just
reveal summary figures and save the details for the serious
potential buyers.
4. Traffic Statistics - Buyers want to know
how much traffic your membership site gets, including unique
visitors, page impressions, traffic sources, traffic trend data,
country breakdown, how much bandwidth the site consumes and various
other website data.
The best way to provide most of this information
is to use the Google Analytics service and print out reports and
screenshots. Google Analytics has become the de-facto standard for
web stats and buyers trust the data because it is from a third
party. You can also provide data from your server logs and statistic
packages like AWstats, Webalizer or any stats package currently on
your server.
5. Source of new members and conversion data
- Since your site is a membership site, how much traffic you get
won’t matter as much as how you source traffic and what conversion
rate you get. You need to break down exactly how you attract new
members, how many members convert from a given amount of traffic by
source, and if possible, how long on average members stay in your
program given each source of traffic.
It’s possible to get quite detailed when
collecting data on traffic and conversion and as always, the more
information you can provide the better. As a bear minimum, include
how you drive traffic to your membership site (the marketing
techniques you have implemented) and an average number of
conversions per 1,000 visitors.
6. How much work is required to manage your
site - Buyers want to know how automated your membership site is
and whether there are people and/or systems in place to run the
site. It’s important to talk about how many daily/weekly hours is
required from the owner in order to keep the site running and what
exactly needs to be done. A buyer needs to consider whether they can
do what is required, whether they are prepared to invest the time,
and how easy it would be to hire someone to perform the roles for
them.
7. Attrition Rate - How long, on average, a
person stays a member of your site is a really important metric
although what buyers want to know is the lifetime customer value,
not necessarily a time period members stay in your program. If you
have a well developed membership site, perhaps with different priced
levels of membership that you move people through (a sales funnel),
you can ramp up the lifetime value of each customer. This is an area
where experienced Internet marketers shine. Your resources and data
collection practices will dictate how much information on attrition
and customer value you can provide.
(Starak has an entire chapter devoted to the
subject of dealing with attrition, which is beyond the scope of this
article. See Resource page to get your free copy.)
- - - -
Once you have your membership up and running, then
work on getting all the content filled out, as well as the
autoresponder integration so you systemize everything you can.
Practically, it's possible to set this up to need very, very little
attention once you've done the hard work of setting everything up.
That doesn't mean you don't need to keep tweaking
the pages and delivery so you improve the conversion rate and lower
your attrition as much as possible. Obviously, expanding the number
of Joint-Venture affiliates will increase your monthly income
markedly. Again, these are beyond the scope of this article. All I
have found that's useful is linked on the Resource page.
As covered earlier, this model can be repeated
through any number of profitable niches.
Because this model is extensible across the
Internet. Your only limits are those you've accepted for yourself.
As Napoleon Hill said,
“Whatever a person can
conceive and believe, they can achieve.”
The basic problem is that they don't know what they don't know.
People are mostly mis-trained about marketing and "making money". 
People starting out in online marketing, weather it's multi-level-marketing or anything else, can fall into the trap of thinking they have to spend a lot of money - that they don't have - in order to "drive traffic to them". Great sums are spent on advertising in the hopes that the numbers will turn in their favor. 
That's where it all started to turn around for Mark Hall. He had been working around his MLM company for literally a decade. When he came across Dillard's work, he was able to quickly get 4 people sponsored on his own and saw how this fantastic system would work for anyone. 
The rest of it is providing the additional needed tools and training to streamline what you are now doing to quickly build and lead your own team of marketers. Which means you can duplicate Mike Dillard's success and become a millionaire in a few years or less.
