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Autopilot ProfitsThe hard work is done. After a successful prelaunch and launch process your membership site is operating at full steam ahead. You watch your attrition rate, test and tweak your marketing, and continue to monitor feedback from your members so you can determine how best to meet their needs.

Depending on what you offer, whether it is education, physical product, software, news content, audios, videos, private label rights articles – anything, and whether you prepared in advance or you are creating what you provide “on the fly“, will dictate how much ongoing maintenance you have to do. Obviously no one wants to work forever, so you need to consider an exit strategy or set up an automation process so you can separate yourself from your membership site.

If your exit strategy is to sell your membership site, you will attract a larger price if your membership site is automated, so really, unless you need to sell urgently, you should be thinking about how to automate.

Systematization

Every membership site, no matter the offer, can be systematized to a degree. In some cases you can make use of automated computer processes to handle aspects of your membership site, for example setting up email autoresponders to distribute content in a sequence at predefined times. Other aspects of your membership site may require humans to take over certain roles in order for you to remove yourself from operations.

I make use of both automation through technology and outsourcing (or really out-tasking) to people. My membership site, Blog Mastermind, provides training and at the heart of the program are a series of e-lessons that come out weekly. When I initially released the program I only had the first e-lesson ready to go. Each week I produce a new e-lesson and add it to the sequence using an email autoresponder. As people join the program they begin at e-lesson one and continue through lessons consecutively. Once I complete the entire series of lessons I can set most of the program on autopilot.

I plan to release somewhere between six and twelve months worth of e-lessons, however there is no reason why you have to necessarily stop your membership site at any point in time. Some programs keep going with no end date, in which case you may need to find a way to keep fresh content coming without you providing the content, unless you want the job to last forever. Bear in mind too, that if new materials stop coming then your members will quit when they reach the end, so you need to continue to find new members to keep cashflow stable or find a way to keep fresh content coming indefinitely.

Depending on what you provide to members, you could bring on other people to produce content or product for you, but if your content is based on some form of intellectual property – skills and knowledge that can only be acquired through study and experience – you may need to search for a while to find someone qualified. You don’t want the quality of your membership site content to drop, thus increasing attrition, because you hire people who can’t deliver a high enough standard to satisfy your members.

Work Short Term

My plan is to work short term, produce great content and then restructure my membership site so there is no ongoing commitment that can only be provided by me. This strategy means I have to work hard for a period of time, produce my best work, and then once enough content is in place, remove myself knowing that I have a complete membership site that can continue to take on new members.

Using this system I could work in six to twelve month bursts, set up new membership sites, fill them with content and then move on, leaving them to operate automatically, or sell them for a nice profit. However this method is very labor intensive and should only be considered as a short term option. The good thing is, once content is created it doesn’t stop providing value, even as you work on new projects. You can slowly build on your previous efforts to the point where you are financially secure.

This is the model that a lot of information marketers use online, and not just with memberships sites. They work progressively from one product to the next, creating something new, doing a product launch resulting a big rush of money and then setting the product to sell on auto-pilot and keep the income trickling in. Eventually with enough products out there and constant tweaking of marketing, this process can make you very rich, but you have to enjoy creating new sites/product/content and the marketing process, if this is the path you choose.

Outsource

I have a friend, Marc Lindsay, who runs the PLRPro.com membership site. PLRPro provides people with niche website packages, complete with 440 fresh private label rights articles each month, website templates and keyword research. You take what they provide, set up websites each month and hopefully make a profit. In this case the offer never ends and the niche website packages keep coming to the exclusive membership (they cap how many members they accept to keep the value preposition high).

In order to make this offer work, Marc and his partner had to set up a content creation system to produce the articles, templates and additional resources they provide to members each month. It would not have been feasible for them to create this content by themselves month after month.

The solution in this case was a team of overseas virtual contractors who write the content. Marc and his staff compile the content into the niche website packages and provide them to their membership. They leverage outsourcing to deliver ongoing value. As a result, once the system was established, they could focus on marketing knowing that they could provide near limitless content and value to their membership.

Outsourcing is always an option and depending on your cashflow situation and profit margin, may be the ideal solution to automate your membership site, especially if what you provide as value to your membership is something that can be produced easily by other people.

In my case I brought on several key contractors to meet technology and content management needs. I also asked other bloggers like Daniel Scocco from DailyBlogTips and Alborz Fallah from CarAdvice.com.au, people with similar skills to my own who could help train my members, to come on board as mentors to provide content and support in the private member forums.

Bringing people on to help didn’t completely sever me from the program – I still have to provide the “meat” of the training materials, but it did significantly reduce the amount of time I have to commit to keeping the site going. Of course hiring help also took a big chunk of my profit margin too, so you have to balance outsourcing costs against income.

How To Find People To Help You

Most membership sites cannot be automated without the assistance of other humans and as with all businesses, the quality of the people you work with will dictate your success.

I sourced people from within my circle of contacts and I recommend as a first step that you also look within your sphere of influence. Many people locate staff and outsourcers by simply sending an email to their own list or making a post to their blog. The people who know you know your products too and it’s often easier to find the right people from within your existing circle because they already have a relationship with you.

If searching your contacts doesn’t work, take a look at freelancing hubs like Guru.com, Upwork.com, Envato Studio, or by posting in forums like Sitepoint and Digital Point.

Outsourcing and hiring is no small task and an in-depth discussion of the topic is beyond the scope of this article. If you are looking for further assistance please read through the archives of this blog.

Automating Marketing

Once you systematize the creation and maintenance of your membership site, you can spend time automating the marketing channels. 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 what your free value into the funnel of another related business (incentivised with referral commissions, by doing contra deals or by leveraging relationships).

Here are some examples:

  • Find complimentary businesses with email newsletters and provide them with email copy to insert into their sequence that promotes your membership site or a free lead-generation product that can be given away. This allows other list owners to offer free value to their subscribers and also make an affiliate commission on any sales they make into your membership site. Once the emails are in the sequence, and provided the marketer continues to capture new leads into their list, you might just have a steady source of new members. Then repeat the process with more email list owners.
  • Set up pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns to drive traffic to a namesqueeze page that offers free value and then slowly soft sell your membership site. This process, once established, can work on autopilot as long as you have someone monitoring your PPC campaign and tweaking keywords to keep the traffic coming.
  • Purchase co-registration leads to bring people into your marketing process. This is another way to drive traffic, but obviously you have to know your numbers to make this work (the same goes for PPC). If you know what the value is of one person coming into your marketing process, then you know how much you can spend on co-registration leads. Once you tweak the process, switch the traffic on and watch the members come.
  • Find other information marketers and ask them to distribute your free resource as a bonus in their package, with their affiliate link embedded so they earn commissions for any down the line sales. You can apply the same technique on the thank you pages and confirmation pages of other marketers, offering your resource to their customers, again incentivised with affiliate commissions.
  • Plus you always have the option of standard online advertising methods, like purchasing banners on websites, paid reviews from blogs, RSS feed advertising and ezine advertising, just to name a few. These methods require testing before you find a good return on investment, but if you find the right target market that converts well, then just keep your campaign running for as long as it is profitable.

Completing just the five suggestions above should keep you very busy. Most likely you will focus on one or two marketing channels initially because it can take some time to get the numbers to work in your favor. Once you have dependable sources of new leads and your membership is growing faster than your attrition rate your job is done…if you want it to be.

In truth there is always more marketing that can be done, there are always new markets to tap, you can continue to work on providing value to your members to reduce attrition, find new JV partners, do a relaunch – the options are limitless.

For many of you, your goals will work in order of priority – first focus on a successful launch, then minimize attrition, then automate your system and marketing, perhaps finally ending with a big sell out or moving on to work on more products (perhaps a few higher priced back-end options for your members to buy).

In the next episode in the how to launch a membership site series we look at the final step in the journey – building a back-end and selling your membership site.

Yaro
Writing the longest blog series ever….