Expert List Building Blog

After an Internet Marketer has earned a few bucks they start looking around to see how they can get more bang for the buck.

Or rather it’s the other way round – more bucks for the bang of your effort.

This is when they start to realise that list-building is “the secret” to a more sustained and steady income.

And then there’s a secret inside that secret…

And that is Membership Programs or Membership Sites.

Just having a hundred people in your membership can give you a full time income…and then think of continuing the traffic to your optin page and increase the membership to several hundred…or several thousand.

This is a more advanced strategy and not for the beginner what ever the sales pages say!

But is a stage that you come to – it is a stage where you have created your “business system” and you can virtually walk away and it runs itself.

This is a powerful method of providing yourself with “Continuity Income”. All the beginners on the Internet are looking for “passive income”. Well here it is but the price to pay is the learning curve of marketing knowledge to get there.

Next is an article by an expert marketer with his…

Continuity Income Secrets …

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Back in the Pleistocene era … when I was selling subscription-based data networks — where my customers were spending up to $100,000 a month (sometimes more) with the companies I represented — losing a customer was a HUGE deal.

I had the most profitable portfolio of business, largely because I kept customers longer than anyone else. My employers found me annoying and troublesome … but they tolerated me for this reason.

I was also adept at acquiring new customers …

The average tenure of an Information Technology decision maker at any one company was about 18 months. When my contacts packed up and left for a new assignment, they often took me with them.

What few people in my industry realized was that these “changing of the guards” were when accounts became vulnerable. I seemed to be the only one who had made a point of becoming exceptionally skilled at managing these critical transitions.

And the increased retention, profitability, and net revenue growth I was able to achieve, by doing so, was impressive.

Another key element of my retention strategy was a customer newsletter that I personally wrote each month and had sent by mail to each and every one of my contacts.

To my knowledge, no one else in my industry did this.

Some companies had fancy tools that allowed their customers to hop online and check usage and trouble tickets and stuff like that. But none of them kept their customers jazzed with new ideas and opportunities the way I did.

And none of them built the same kind of personal bond as a result.

Why am I telling you this in
an article about continuity income?

The reason is simple …

If you want to build longevity into your continuity programs, the personal connection fostered through your newsletter should be your central focus. Sure you can create all kinds of cool content and throw it up in an impressive looking membership site.

But it’s the personal relationship you cultivate through that newsletter that bonds your members to you like super glue. If you’re looking to create quick, easy continuity income, my advice is to skip the techno mumbo jumbo, and focus on that newsletter.

Sure there are people making a killing with whiz-bang membership sites. But there are many more wasting a lot of time, money and effort creating them.

When I explained how I was doing my latest continuity program at a recent Mastermind, Ben Settle (amazing copywriter and all around great guy) said it reminded him of the story of how American astronauts used a million-dollar space pen to write upside down while the Soviets used a pencil.

You see, I was all geared up to spend a whole lot of time, effort and money piecing together a membership site (the million-dollar pen) when I realized I could get coins from my project much faster and easier with a proverbial pencil.

Instead of wasting a lot of cycles on something I scarcely understand, I decided to use a lowly autoresponder to deliver my new Persuasion Mastery Club continuity content.

And a couple of days later I welcomed my first members …

48 hours from concept to cash!

Here are the steps I took to do it:

1. I wrote a quick Day 0 autoresponder message that confirmed the details of my continuity program with a link to a single pre-recorded MP3 interview and PDF transcript, and some teaser copy promising my newsletter would be arriving in a couple of weeks.
2. I drew up a short blurb (just 286 words) that pitched a 30-day free trial of my program as a free bonus, and slapped it up on the sales page of one of my existing products.
3. I set up my shopping cart (added another 73 words of copy here as well) to send out the welcome message and auto-bill customers for the continuity — 30 days delayed.

That’s all it took.

After the sales started coming in I wrote an 8-page newsletter. And then I created a Day 15 autoresponder message with a link to a PDF file of my newsletter.

And each month since, I just rinse and repeat. That’s the extent of it.

They get an audio interview and transcript at the beginning of the month. Then mid-month, they get my newsletter.

Actually, everyone who signs up is on a different cycle and the autoresponder handles all of the scheduling.

Can you say easy to manage?

When somebody wants to quit, they e-mail us and my assistant just goes into our shopping cart and cancels the auto-bill and removes the customer from the autoresponder.

… No cumbersome content management.

… No forum brats to baby sit.

… No worries about trying to impress people with a lot of glitzy looking content — like you seem to have to do with a membership site.

I know people who have been pulling their hair out for months trying to get one up and running.

And you avoid the all-too-often situation where people sign up, download everything, and then cancel. Don’t you just hate the thought of it?

I wish I could take credit for this blinding flash of the obvious (using an autoresponder to run a continuity program), but I can’t. It came to me in an e-mail from Jimmy D. Brown. Thanks Jimmy.

Now that you’ve taken the hassle out of
creating your continuity program, here are
a couple of tried and true ideas for marketing it …

While not written in stone, it’s generally not a good idea to pitch a continuity program directly. Why?

Because by definition, you don’t know exactly what’s going to be in there from month-to-month. Remember, this is an ongoing saga, where you and your prospects are taking a journey together through time.

If you’re selling a course with a beginning and an end, that’s not a continuity program. It’s a correspondence course … different story.

A true continuity program is best sold indirectly, as a bonus, or with a bribe of some other highly-prized problem-solving information.

You saw a quick synopsis of the first method above.

Simply integrate your continuity program pitch into your existing products wherever possible. Create new niche front end products with this in mind.

Your continuity program tagged onto these new products supercharges their profitability, giving you more dollars for promotion. You can now pay much more for a new customer. And that’s HUGE!

You can also create new, low-cost front-end products with content from inside your continuity program. Each month I address something specific in my interview and newsletter. The best of that content I’ll be dressing up as new products. When people buy those new products they’ll also be signing on to my continuity program.

The other tried and true method is to bribe your prospects to sign on to your continuity program by offering them a high-value info-product for free.

Create a highly targeted, in-demand product. Pitch the hell out of it. And offer it for free if your prospect will just sign on to your continuity program.

Or go one step further and give them the product if they sign on for a $1 dollar, 30-day trial of your continuity program. Instead of the regular monthly rate, the first month’s a measly buck. How can they resist? Be sure to test to see what your stick rate and stick duration is before rolling out.

Are there other great ways
to market continuity programs?

I bet there are. Tell us about what works for you in the comment box below.

Come to think of it, tell us about your experience as a consumer too. Do you subscribe to continuity programs? How many? What kinds of programs do you like?

Go ahead. Give us your thoughts.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor

THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.

Related Posts:

• Internet Business Models – Which One Is Best For You?
• Learning and Earning – What Drives you?
• 5 Ways to Easily Grow Your List