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Million Dollar Memberships
The Secrets Behind Building A Multi Million Dollar
Empire With Membership Websites
Introduction:
Simon Hodgkinson, Jeremy Gislason and Terry Telford recently recorded a
tell-all TeleClass that showed attendees how to create a multi-million
dollar empire with membership websites. The following excerpts were taken
directly from the TeleClass.
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Brainstorming And Planning
Simon:
Just to correct you, Terry, it was $1.7 million in 7 days.
When it comes to the
brainstorming and planning, the first thing is, we have a good knowledge of
the market place. Jeremy and I spoke to people who have lost hundreds of
thousands of dollars marketing and promoting to markets they weren’t
familiar with. People that are incredibly successful in their own businesses
and their own market went somewhere they didn’t know, they hired knowledge
and it just did not work.
I think that’s one thing
that’s been a real advantage for us, we have a good knowledge of the
marketplace, because in reality we are our own customer. If you are you’re
own customer, it gets you fifty percent of the way you need to be to
brainstorm, because you know you want and by default, what the market wants.
I sell products online,
Jeremy sells products online, we know what the problems are and we now what
the issues are that affect our work. The people in our market place are
affected by the same issues we are. I know if something’s not working for
me, or if there’s something that I need for my business, there’s a very good
chance there’s going to be big demand for it.
What we do is not rocket
science. We sell information of physical products online or use the internet
to promote offline products. That’s all there is to it. If something is not
working for me, I know its not working for thousands of people out there.
That’s a great start. Know the market place.
But intuition can be risky.
The key thing is, listen to your customers. We ran a big survey a little
while ago. 3,500 people took part in the survey and gave us valuable
information about the market. They were doing the same thing as we were.
They were selling products online. So we asked how we could help them. What
didn’t they have in their businesses? What did they need? What did they want
to learn? How much money they make? How much money they want to make? What
caused them the biggest problems? All those sorts of questions.
The first part of the
survey was multiple choice, the second part was open ended questions like
tell us what you want, if you could have anything, what would it be. And
literally we sat down for nearly a month and read through all of the answers
and picked up ideas. At that point, I don’t think anyone had done a survey
that got such a great response. That was gold for us. We listened to the
customers, listened to the market place, and listened to what people were
complaining about.
The easiest formula for
creating a product is, find problems that a lot of people are complaining
about and provide the solutions to the problem. That’s a great way to start
a brainstorming session.
Going back to working with
a partner, Jeremy and I bounce ideas off each other all the time. If I get a
great idea, I tell Jeremy and he either says, wow that’s a great idea or you
know Simon that’s crap. And I go away sulking and the day after I realize he
was right.
What Jeremy does though is,
he says if you do this, this and this it might work. So we said we knock
ideas between each other backwards and forwards. And ultimately it’s a great
way of brainstorming, rather than sitting there with your pencil and a
notepad and just thinking of ideas on your own.
It’s also important to
bounce ideas off people in your marketplace, people that know what you’re
talking about. Sometimes I say things to my wife and I just get a blank
look. You’ve got to talk to people in your market place. Talk to your
customers and if you have a business partner bounce ideas around with them.
That’s how we came up with
the software that made up the main part of MME3. We gave our customers the
software we were using to run our membership sites.
I know a lot of marketers who wouldn’t have dreamed of giving away their
prize technology or the secret software, but it’s the best thing we could
offer. And it brought in $1.7 million.
So the big pay off was by
sharing and giving a great value. The problem we had initially was the
software was custom built for the application we use it for. But we realized
not everybody would want to do what we did. People need more flexibility and
more control. I bought software and membership style management systems in
the past and it was not flexible enough. So we had to reconfigure the
software so people could use it for different things.
While we were redesigning
things, Jeremy and I were like two kids opening the front door of the sweet
shop, because we had a very good program behind us so that was a bonus. We
sat down and we brainstormed how we could make it fantastic.
Now six months down the
road, it’s a whole lot better than it was in June. In six months time, it
will be better still and six months on, it will be better still and that’s
because we listen to what people want. We have a forum for members and we
recently polled members to find out what plug-ins they wanted for future
releases. We have a suggestion box built right into the software. If you
would like to submit an idea it comes to a control panel on our site and we
get to read through all those and see what things people want. Then Jeremy
and I discuss things with the programming team and that’s how it works. It’s
a joint effort. I think that’s the big thing, two big things I would say is
listen and brainstorm with business partners and groups of marketers that
you have put together. Ask your customers what they want. If you ask people
what they want, they will tell you willingly and you learn from that.
Pre-launch Secrets
Jeremy:
If you have a really good pre-launch, you can basically just put up an order
button and people will buy it and you don’t need good sales copy. But during
the planning stages, plan how you can somehow provide value to everybody out
there in your target market. Some kind of value or content to get attention.
You can give away free reports, free books, movies, audios, all kinds of
stuff. But it has to be good stuff. You can’t just give away a free report
that’s 5 pages long and is a sales page for your product, that’s no good.
You’ve got to give actual content.
That was one thing we did
during the planning. We thought, how can we give away free content, we made
a free report that we released, we made preview movies. Simon made some
really cool videos about what you could do with the software. I think that
was the big factor in a lot of people’s decisions, because they saw these
videos and it had the wow factor. And the goal of that was to show people
what it could do.
The goal of the mastermind
series audios releasing them as a tips series was not so much to get the
image of buying an audio series, but more the mindset. We didn’t want people
who were not entrepreneurs to buy MME 3. We wanted serious people who were
going to buy it and use it for their businesses. Use the product for their
businesses and actually be serious about it.
We wanted to help people
with their mindset. All the customers got the entire 10 volume set. Each
audio was 1-2 hours long. And it’s just solid content. There’s no selling at
all in those audios, it’s solid content for people to listen to. And on top
of that, we even had videos made to show people, step by step how to resell
them. We basically put together different parts of the package, because you
can give somebody the so called keys to the "Ferrari" but if they don’t have
their license they’re going to crash. So we gave people the software to
build the business and the mindset to make things work. That was the goal of
the mastermind series.
We also gave them some
other products like jv zone, member to member offer zone, and other
services. Everything had a purpose. A lot of people didn’t see it all come
together like we did, but everything did actually have a purpose.
So when you’re planning,
make sure everything has a purpose, make sure there’s a reason why you’re
doing things. Make sure you understand your market and try to provide as
much free content as you can during your pre-launch to get attention.
Basically, make products that you can sell for 10 dollars, 50 dollars, 100
dollars or more and give them away. People are going to be thinking wow this
is cool, this guy is giving me this for free. Wow I can’t wait to see what
he’s selling. I think that’s really important.
Also, while you’re
planning, you have to be in constant communication with people like your
affiliates and your jv partners. You could hire an affiliate manager if you
want, but when working with jv partners, I like to do that personally. It’s
important to build that relationship.
I sit down and write
personal emails and email them individually. I don’t want to have somebody
else mail or email jv partners, I think its kind of cold. So keep in contact
with your warm contacts, with all your partners involved.
I did that for several
months during the MME 3 pre-launch. All of our top producers on the launch
were people we have good working relationships with. And we’re in constant
contact with them. We talk on Skype, MSN, email back and forth, things like
that. So it’s really important to plan your launch strategy. Is it going to
be just you, or are you going to have partners help you launch it? If you
have a list of a million people, I guess you can launch your product alone.
Even if you have ten thousand people on your list, you can just launch your
product yourself, if you want to, as long as your list is responsive.
But if you involve
partners, you can do much more and cover more ground. There’s so many more
areas you can reach. Start getting word of mouth, people talking about you,
and that's another key. You’ve got to manage all that and make sure you’re
very open with your partners. Show them your products, give them full
access, tell them what you’re doing, tell them exactly what’s going on.
Don’t blow smoke or hype things up. Be very straight with your partners,
because they understand business. They’re not just part of the herd. Work
with them one on one.
You also have to decide on
the software your going to use to run your business. Who's going to write
your copy? Where are you going to market? There’s a lot of things you have
to decide, depending on your product. Basically like Simon said, it’s good
if you have someone to talk to about it in the planning stages, because if
you’re by yourself, its really hard. You can do it, but its a lot easier if
you’re talking with other people. So I suggest trying to find somebody to
work with on it or if you do it by yourself, try asking other people for
their opinion as you’re going along. And when you’re finished, ask their
opinion again.
There are a lot of things
involved in the planning stages. You’ve got to plan the building of your
product, the development, the marketing, the pre-launch, everything. You've
got to plan.
Every product is different,
so I’m just telling you what we did for ours. But you can apply this same
strategy in any market. Plan how to build it, plan how to launch it, plan on
giving away free content during the pre-launch, that kind of thing.
Hopefully anybody can have a successful launch doing that.
Super Successful Launch
Simon:
It was absolutely crazy. Seriously, I think the week we launched MME 2, we
were probably working 18 hours a day just replying to emails. We literally
got to the end of MME 2, we’d done the best part $700,000 and we were like
that was great, see you tomorrow. That’s not how you want to be, but we were
literally exhausted. The build up of the things is tiring enough, but then
to just get hit with email after email after email after email and you have
to reply, because it could be sales vs. losing sales by not replying. You
can have people that can’t find something in the site and they need help or
whatever.
So have a support desk with
support tickets to respond to people. Make sure that the login on the site
is working. Anything that goes wrong in those early stages during the launch
can be a disaster and cost you major, major stress.
Planning is boring, we know
its boring. Everybody hates planning, but its very, very important. I think
in the first hour of MME3, when that went live, we generated somewhere in
excess of $100,000 in sales. Now can you imagine what would have happened if
that site crashed? I don’t like the idea of loosing $100,000.
Not only that, if your jv
partners and your affiliates are promoting your launch at 9 o'clock in the
morning and at 10:30 something breaks, there’s nothing worse.
Something else you have to
keep in mind when you’re doing a launch is you’ve got to create a reason to
get people to order now. A million and one things can happen in the sales
process and if you don’t get the sale, you’ve blown all the time and effort
and in some cases the money you’ve invested in the pre-launch process. One
of the ways to get sales is to add bonuses for the first number of people
who order. One of the MME3 bonuses was this call.
Now here’s the thing, you
could use another tactic like increasing the price after the first 100
orders or the first people who order the product get hundreds of bonuses.
The orders in that first hour or the first few days can be huge because
everyone is scrambling to get in on the lowest price or claim the bonuses,
but once the bonuses have gone or once the price goes up, the orders drop
massively.
I spoke to people that run
firesales where the price starts at $97 and then goes to $197 in day 5. In
day 5 they might as well go home because there’s nothing coming in.
We wanted to create an
incentive for MME 3 to get people to order now. We used bonuses to do that.
We had a whole series of bonuses that were on the site, but we didn’t want
to have a lack of bonuses affect sales for the rest of the seven days. If we
decided the first 100 people were going to get this, the next 100 people are
going to get that, by day 2 the bonuses would have been long gone. There
wouldn’t be a thing left on the page.
Because we didn’t want the
bonuses disappearing off the page to affect sales, we actually built the
Stampede Manager plug-in, and basically what happened was all the bonuses
stayed on the page. I think we have 10-12 bonuses on the page. If people
were one of the first 100, they got to pick 4 bonuses, the next 100 got to
pick 3 bonuses and it kept decreasing. So even somebody coming in 23 hours
and 59 minutes of day 7 still had the chance to get the top bonus.
Jeremy and I have discussed
this and our educated guess is we increased sales somewhere between 10 and
15% because people were always able to access the bonuses. 10 or 15% is
nearly $200,000. So make sure you use the stampede manager in your launch,
because it will make a lot of difference in your sales.
But again, make sure you
get everything working prior to your launch. It’s really critical. Jeremy
and I promoted for someone in the past and 3 minutes into the launch we
blasted out an email to 150,000 people and the site went down. So the next
time that person asked us to promote their offer, my mind wandered back to
the day that I had to spend 24 hours replying to my own subscribers
apologizing for sending them to a page that didn’t work. So make sure that
everything works. It’s really critical.
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Report ---
If you found this short
report helpful, you can download the entire package,
Million Dollar
Memberships -
The Secrets Behind Building A Multi Million Dollar
Empire With Membership Websites
here
The full package,
Million Dollar
Memberships - The Secrets Behind Building A Multi Million Dollar Empire With
Membership Websites includes:
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Master Resale
Rights – You keep 100% of the profit from every copy you sell |
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Downloadable CD – Download and
listen at your convenience in your car or on your MP3 player |
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Transcript in PDF format
– Print it out for easy reading and note taking |
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Sales page – Simply upload it and
let it sell the package for you |
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Thank you page for your customers
to download the package – Hassle free. Customize a couple links and
upload the page to your server |
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Legal Disclaimer and Terms of Service
pages – Gives your customers a feeling of security and peace of mind
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Graphics package for the HTML sales
page – Professionally designed graphics helps convert more visitors into
customers |
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Marketing kit to promote the
package – Saves you time and headaches trying to come up with your own
promotional material |
Order your copy of
Million Dollar
Memberships -
The Secrets Behind Building A Multi Million Dollar
Empire With Membership Websites
with Master Resale Rights for
Only
$7.50
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