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I just joined a membership for internet marketers.
And I just cancelled that membership THE SAME DAY.
Was it because I simply wanted to download the info and run?
Nope.
Was it because the information in the members area was bad?
Not exactly.
Here’s what happened:
I received an offer from a well-known marketer in the online marketing niche to join his membership at a discount.
The offer sounded good, so I joined.
But when I entered the member’s area, I found a mass jumble of disorganized information in absolutely no particular order with no directory or any means of navigating the mess. It looked like a website crabbed together by a marketer in the late 1990’s. Navigation was difficult, disjointed, and confusing. There was no search option – none! I found myself wading through a sea of irrelevant stuff just to try to find what I was looking for.
But even that is not why I cancelled.
I noticed that he was using information products created by other marketers that he purchased the rights to. (Or, at least I hope he did.) Those products didn’t fit with his own original products, but that’s still not why I canceled.
The straw that broke this camel’s back was when I opened a handful of PDF’s, did some reading and realized the material was TEN YEARS OLD.
In fact some of these PDF’s even boasted copyright dates of 2012 and 2013.
That’s right – he was offering online marketing advice from a time when internet dinosaurs still roamed the earth and marketing only barely resembled what it looks like today.
80% or more of what worked then is ineffectual today or a complete waste of time or in a few cases downright illegal.
And yet this guy is advertising his site as the latest, greatest marketing information found anywhere.
Yeah.
Right.
If you are lucky enough to be in a completely evergreen niche (18th century artworks, for example, since they’re not making any more of those) then you probably don’t need to continually update your older content.
But the other 99.9% of us need to stay on top of what’s working and what’s not if we want to retain our hard-won paying members.
Now then, where is the opportunity in all of this for you?
This membership site has been around for a decade and making money for its owner for a DECADE, despite the fact that it’s not very good, the information is difficult to access and too old to use.
Which means that YOU can start your own membership, do a better job than this person is doing, and make a killing.
The key of course is to get a continuous influx of new members. The content part is easy – every week record or write new content and keep it coming. Make your site easy to navigate. Fill it with everything a new marketer needs to know, along with the latest techniques, tools and so forth.
Bring in new members on the cheap by advertising your latest, greatest money-making blueprint for a measly $1 or $7, with a month of free access to the membership site and thereafter billed at $19 a month, $39 a month, $99 a month or whatever you choose. The less you charge, the easier it is to retain members, but the more you charge, the more perceived value your membership has. Sometimes you will make far more by charging $99 a month despite the fact that you have far fewer members. After all, you need more than 5 members a month at $19 to equal just one member at $99.
And above all else, continually UPDATE your content so that nothing is more than a couple of years old. In some cases this will mean making a few minor changes, and in other cases it will mean completely reworking the content. But as long as your content is useful, relevant, up-to-date and helpful, you will have no problem retaining your members for months and possibly years to come.