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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.
Prelaunch 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.
--- End Report
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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
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Order your copy of
Million Dollar
Memberships -
The Secrets Behind
Building A Multi Million Dollar Empire With
Membership Websites with
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