4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

Tim – MemberCon.com: Now, you have a forum, which is really busy. I’m looking at it now. Are only members allowed to comment on the forum?

Don McAllister: No. No. Anyone can join. You have to become a member of the forum, but you don’t have to be a ScreenCastsOnline member to access the forum. I did initially set up a members’ only sort of area on the forum, but to be honest I’ve not really leveraged that very much. I don’t use it very much. I did in the early days. I sort of had conversations with the members in that particular forum, but I tend not to do much in there now. And to be honest, the forum itself is pretty much self-managing, which is a good thing. I did find a couple of people in the early days who were really, keen and frequently on the forum and they’ve done moderators. So in effect it self-runs, although it’s set up.

I mean I’ll drop in. I always go in every week and start a new thread to do with the show so that people can actually talk around, what I’ve discussed on that week’s show. I’m making extra information and, they can give comments about the show. So, that’s something that I regularly update as part of my workflow publishing the show. But everything else, the chit chat forums and their requests for help – it will be too difficult for me to actually manage that on a day-to-day basis. So, the moderators. And really the community of people on there is super. most of them are very knowledgeable. Everyone’s very helpful and it’s very friendly. There’s no spamming. There’s no aggression in the forums. it’s really what I feel to be a really safe place for a new Mac user to go to because they will be helped out. It’s a really valuable resource.

Tim – MemberCon.com: I like the idea. That’s interesting. Most people that start a membership site, they put the forum behind the wall as well. You’ve decided not to do that and in a way I can see that being a really nice marketing tool. You’ve got the members talking about how great the last video was. Maybe it’s enticed people to join up and at the same time, you haven’t had to worry about trying to get that momentum going on the forum?

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I mean the only thing I might – in retrospect what might be better would be to actually put the discussion on the show page itself. on the main site rather than over on the forum. And I think I need to use testimonials a bit more. Because, I get tons of really good feedback on the forum for every show and that sort of – it’s definitely not behind the wall, you know? Anyone can see that, but they have to go to the forum to see it. When I get time to redesign the site, I might actually bring that across and actually put that on the main page for each show.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Now, you’ve been creating content for awhile. You’ve got a ton of HD video already up there. Do you find yourself struggling at times to find out what the next show’s going to be or has it always been easy?

Don McAllister: It’s fairly easy because the Mac market, it’s a rapidly evolving market. There’s tons of software available. Apple themselves, bring updates out. What I’ve tried to do, it always has to be something that I’m interested in. I never do a tutorial on a bad product. If it’s a bad product, I just won’t cover it. So, again that goes into the recommendation engine type of concept as well. So, it always has to be something that I’m interested in or more importantly something I think that, the viewers would be interested in. And if I can sort of expose something that people don’t realize or is, hidden away the more the better. So, I like to sort of bring the best out in a particular application set in its context and that gives people value. They’re not just, learning the nuts and bolts. They can see how it works and where it would work and where it might fit in with what they do.

Yeah, I mean there are weeks when I sort of scratch my head when I’ve got, a choice of things that I want to do and I’m not quite sure which one to do next. But there’s a ton of stuff. And also, I get loads of suggestions from people asking me to do stuff. So I’ve got a list, as long as my arm of applications that people want me to cover. So, if ever I do run out, I’ve always got that to fall back on.

Tim – MemberCon.com: And video is really time intensive. Have you been able to systematize it a little bit to make it easier?

Don McAllister: Not really. It’s still probably, the most intensive part of the workflow. I mean that each show now is never normally less than 30 minutes. Sometimes it goes up to 45 minutes. And, it’s sort of compressed into the latter half of the week. So I’ll try and sort of do the recording on a Wednesday and try and do the editing on a Thursday and then do all the postproduction stuff on Friday to get it published.

I mean obviously, I’m becoming faster as I get more experience and I’m now faster at editing. And there are templates I use and there are a set of tools within the editing suite that I use now that I’m quite familiar with. So, the process is speeding up just because of the experience I’m gaining.

And there’s a lot of automation as it regards to the encoding side of it, which is another big part of video. once you’ve corrected your video, you’ve then got to do the encoding and the transcoding and then the uploading. So, again there is some automation there whereby I’ll take a master file and drop it on an icon and that will generate the four different versions of the show that I need and I can just, let that go ahead. So, yes and no. It’s certainly not fully automated but there are levels of automation in there that speed the process up.

And investments in the kits as well. I took the decision early on. And again, one of the reasons for going full time is that, the show pays for my Mac addition. So it’s easy for me to justify buying the latest and greatest Mac gear and, certain specialized stuff that I need. special video, encoding cards and stuff and that is all tax deductible and it’s part of a legitimate business expense. So, that’s good as well.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Do you use iMovie still to do the video editing?

Don McAllister: No. No. No. I’ve moved on to – well I actually use a couple of applications. Now, I use one called ScreenFlow, which is the thing I use to capture. Now ScreenFlow itself does have an editability and that’s sort of optimized for a screen capture. You know that’s a total reason for being glued. It’s a screen capture and an editing tool. But because I’ve been doing this for awhile I actually use Final Cut Pro and, I’m familiar Final Cut Pro and there are some aspects of ScreenFlow which are limiting for what I normally do. So, I capture in ScreenFlow and then actually I do most of the well all of the editing in Final Cut Pro and use Motion as well for graphics and titles and stuff. So, yeah they’re the current main tools that I use.

Tim – MemberCon.com: How about affiliates? I know you’ve got a tab up there for them? Are they a big proportion, a big portion of your memberships or have you not kind of gone down that road?

Don McAllister: Not really. Well, it was something that I thought I’d sort of put forward. But it’s certainly not a big deal as far as I’m concerned, you know? I get the occasional sale come in from the affiliates. I see the clicks coming through, etc. But no it hasn’t been a significant part of the business to be honest, although it’s nice to have it. It’s good that people, enjoy the show and support the show that they would want to become affiliates. So in that respect it’s good. But it certainly doesn’t generate a ton of revenue to be honest.

Tim – MemberCon.com: You’ve mentioned maybe even off recording that you do a lot of marketing just by word mouth? People hear about it and they hear about how good the content is. Are there outside of word of mouth or do you upload portions of the premium videos to YouTube? What kinds of things are you doing to try and get some exposure?

Don McAllister: Well, to be honest I sort of haven’t pushed very hard in sort of traditional advertising. I’ve obtained the occasional sale on the site now and again from an affiliate. But most of it is word of mouth. And the good thing with it being a Mac podcast is there is a large Mac podcast community and, that’s sort of cross promotion. Well, not so much cross promotion to be honest because I don’t really promote other Mac podcasts on ScreenCastsOnline, although I do participate in a few Mac podcasts other than ScreenCastsOnline. So, the Mac Jewelry, I do the Mac Roundtable as well and these are also like pundit type, panelist type shows whereby we discuss what’s going on in the Mac world. And, that’s been a really great way of getting, the brand out, the ScreenCastsOnline and myself as well.

Now, it’s only really in the past six months when I’ve started to take it more seriously sort of promoting sort of myself. Because it was always that, I hid behind the camera and I didn’t really appear on screen. The screen casts were just the desk top. But it’s only really been the last six months when I’ve come from behind the camera. So, now I’ve set up a YouTube channel and I do sort of like video comments pieces to camera. So you can actually see me in the studio and I’ll do one or two sort of video comments every week where I just either talk about the case, or I talk about the show or I talk about what’s going on within the Mac world.

And on there as well, I’ve set up playlists for hints and tips for the Mac so these small two or three-minute clips. You know just a little small hidden thought tip on what’s going on to the Mac. I’ve put the tray list for the member shows as well and I do like a 90-second to 2-minute trailer just describing what that particular member show is all about. I put them up there as well so people can see them. So, a little of that, but it hasn’t been within the past six months that I’ve actually started to look at that seriously.

Tim – MemberCon.com: One of the things you touched on was doing comments about other things outside of just the business. And I noticed in your Twitter account, you do a ton of tweets and you’ve kind of combined your individual persona with the business and do talk about both. That’s been a struggle for me. I’m not sure whether or not my website should have its own Twitter account and I personally should have a Twitter account but you seem to have blended it pretty well.

Don McAllister: Yeah. I mean I have got a separate Twitter account, I’ve got a ScreenCastsOnline Facebook fan page, but I still can’t get scripts with Facebook. It still does nothing for me. I hate going on to the site and I really don’t. I don’t know Facebook really is more for personal use than business use to be honest. But I sort of followed the trend that, you should have a Facebook presence so I have a Facebook fan page.

What I tend to do is I have a Twitter business account. Sort of an actually online Twitter account and I’ve linked that to the Facebook page. So whenever a new show comes out I’ll go to Facebook and post the details of the show and that will then post across to Twitter on the ScreenCastsOnline account, which has relatively few followers. I think 500 or 600 followers something like that.

But my main account, my Don McAllister account on Twitter, yeah, you know? I mean most days it just sits on the corner on my screen. I monitor it. I will tweet away about sort of what I’m doing that day about nothing too personal to be honest. It’s maybe all to do with Mac. there’s a great bunch of people on there that are all Mac heads and we converse on Twitter. And then I will, throw in the occasional business related one, but never blatantly. I’ll post about my daily blog posts ’cause again I have a blog, TheMacScreeCastGuy.com and I try and do at least one blog post a day. I can’t always keep to that to be honest. But if I do produce a blog post I’ll post that in the Twitter stream. So, I would think the ratio is probably, even up to like 30, useful normal conversational tweets to like one sort of business related tweet really. The ratio is very low for, trying to promote myself or the business. It’s maybe all – I’m just a normal Twitter user that tweets away about the daily activities.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Nice. I notice you have some free tutorials on your site as well. Have you come up with a good ratio of free stuff I’m going to put out to promote the premium stuff versus…?

Don McAllister: Yeah.

Tim – MemberCon.com: too much and having too much free?

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s again and that’s something that sort of evolved over time. I mean initially it was completely free. I felt bad taking away free content and replacing it with paid content. So, in the early days, the very first take was – it probably goes back to the $25 for six months. That was only for one member show every month. So it was one member show and three free shows. The member show that was restricted to members plus it was in HD so I sort of removed the HD side from the free shows. And I also introduced sort of chapter markings as well to make the shows easier to navigate for members.

And then I went from, the one member show to three free shows a month to alternate weeks. So, one week would be a member show the next week will be a free show. And that lasted probably for the past two or three years. Up until when I sort of took the decision, not longer after blog world actually was sort, blog world I was sort of thinking about it then and I decided that as from January I was going to completely flip it and do one free show a month to three member shows and also increase the price. That’s when I put the price up to the $57 for three months. So, at the moment it’s one member show to three free shows.

Again no negative feedback at all from the people who subscribe to the free shows. What I did do though is before I flipped it was to do a crazy 50% off offer for November. So that anybody who’d been with me for awhile yet was still sitting on the fence, you know I sort of said, “January we’re moving. We’re going to three member shows and one free show plus the price is going up. But, if you’re on the free feed and you want to join know now, you can get in and we’ll do a 50% offer.” And, that did get a significant number of people in that month. all the people who probably would never have paid the full price even before I put the price up and changed it jumped on board at that point. So I had quite a big spike in the membership numbers for November to get those sort of stragglers on board before I put the price up.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So, used it as a sales tool. I like that idea. Now, I know if it was me because, I have this attention disorder I’m sure that after about two or three years I’m itching to try and replicate this somewhere else. You’ve stayed really focused on this, which has always been a challenge for me and just to grow these numbers. Have you considered trying to duplicate this success on maybe a different membership site?

Don McAllister: Not really because it’s so time consuming. it really does take well all of the working weekend and longer. I mean I always say that when I left my IT job really it was sort of like retiring because I was stopping that to do what I enjoyed. But I’ve actually worked hardest since I left my full-time job than I ever had. Because it’s not just the ScreenCastsOnline, there are other podcasts that I take part in. There’s the whole running the membership site, doing the websites, all the ancillary stuff. I mean my wife has come on board now and she does a lot of the admin stuff now to help out in that respect. But there are always things to do. my time is pretty much occupied. There’s no real free space for me to branch out, which in some respect is a bad thing. But I want to focus on the show and deliver value in it.

I think when you are delivering a service like this on the net, you have to be consistent. attention to detail is paramount. You have to deliver a good product and, that’s the way people remain loyal to you. So, I can’t really see me freeing myself to do too much outside of what I’m doing now.

Again the other think process which is a time consumer that I still do myself, I suppose I could look at, getting an intern in to take some of that off my hands. But again, I see the editing process possibly, the creative process. Because, it’s never one take. There are always things that I either fluff or I need to retake. And, there’s a judgment joining the editing process when, of the best way, which take to keep and how to tie it together. So that people don’t notice there’s been a fluff. And, I enjoy that bit quite a lot. So, I might sort of try and free myself off for other projects, but certainly not at the minute.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Alright well listeners and viewers of this, check out Don’s website. It’s ScreenCastsOneline.com. We’ll put the link right here in the transcripts as well on the top above the video. Don thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us today and more success for you going forward here.

Don McAllister: Thanks a lot a Tim. It’s been good to talk to you.

Don McAllister owns a successful membership site that started as a humble podcast back in 2005. He built his membership entirely from scratch and eventually quit his full-time job to focus on the membership site as a business, ScreenCastsOnline.com.

Don has a tremendous reputation within the Mac community and in this 2-part interview he talks about how he built his membership site and continues to attract a loyal audience for his weekly Mac tutorial videos. Don breaks all the “rules” when it comes to membership sites, including not auto-renewing his memberships. But he has a specific reason for not doing so and it works for him.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

Tim – Membercon.com: Hello everybody. Thanks for joining me at MemberCon.com for another interview with a membership site owner. We’re going to be speaking with Don McAllister. His website is ScreenCastsOnline.com. I’ve known Don for a few years now ever since back when I owned the podcast in New Media Expo and Don was one of the early adaptor podcasters that I learned about early on probably back in 2005 or so. So, we’re going to talk to Don about how he turned his site into a membership site and some recent tips and tricks that he’s learned about attracting new members. So, Don thanks very much for joining me on the show today.

Don McAllister: No problem Tim. Nice to speak to you as always.

Tim – Membercon.com: Well, when did you first start your podcast?

Don McAllister: Well, the podcast actually started back in the summer of 2005 so it was quite an early podcast. It’s one of the first podcasts really that came out. And when I started it, it was, a hobby podcast basically. I was generating content and I’m just throwing it out there for free probably for three or four months. So, it was very much a passion of mine, you know? It’s all to do with the Mac. ScreenCastsOnline is a video tutorial site and each week I would create a video tutorial using a screen capture technology. So these will be screen casts, hence the word ScreenCastsOnline. And I basically take people through, using the Mac, using the latest Mac software, and using the operating system. Really just sort of helping people through, how to get the most out of the Mac. And, it was something I really enjoyed doing.

Tim – Membercon.com: And so your target audience is basically anybody with an Apple product or basically a Mac computer?

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Really, speaking, although it’s quite interesting in that I do get, Windows users as well who are interested to find out what all the fuss is about the Mac. I mean, I was sort of caught away as well at the time because, the Mac sort of gained in popularity significantly over the last three or four years especially over here in the UK and in Europe. So, I still get lots of people who aren’t Mac users, but still are interested in possibly switching across to the Mac and really just want to see what it’s all about. And they just can catch some of the free content and start to understand what it is that makes the Mac so attractive and why it draws so many people in and people enjoy using the Mac so much.

Tim – Membercon.com: So, a lot of our listeners are probably in the position you were in back in 2005. You’ve got free content you’re creating. You realized there’s an audience for this. At what point did you decide, “I can monetize this. I can actually turn this into a business?”

Don McAllister: Yeah. Well, it was a gradual process. I did sort of have one eureka moment. But really the thing that seeded the idea was the fact that people started to make suggestions about sending donations in because obviously, I was working full time. I was working quite a few hours during the weekends putting the show together because it did take quite a bit of assets to put content together. a video isn’t easy at the best of times and sort of creating sort of like – well, at the time they run about 20 minutes, 25-minute tutorials. It was taking a lot of my time. So, people sort of did start to get a lot of benefit from the content and they sort of realized that I was putting much effort in. And I did start to get queries, some people saying, “Look, can we send you a donation to help out with your costs, etc?”

And I was sort of encouraged by that. It wasn’t something that I initiated. It was very much initiated by the audience. And so I did set up some, donations that people could donate some cash. And that sort of started me off thinking along the lines of well, if people are willing to pay donations, perhaps if I start to either create more content or deliver extra value in some way that there might be a way of formalizing the arrangement and actually starting up sort of like a membership system.

I didn’t really want to go down the advertising route. I sort of approached people to do advertising and at the time, podcasts were very much an unknown thing. And I didn’t feel at that time that advertising was going to – it wouldn’t really generate anything significant. But, the membership sign up thing I thought well, if I can produce quality content and produce it regularly, getting that revenue would help me buy new equipment, etc. So, after probably ’cause I did it free for about four months and I’d started to take donations and then it was probably another three months or so before I sort of realized, well perhaps premium content was the way to go. And I sort of set up the membership system at that point.

Tim – Membercon.com: Did you have a full-time job while you had started this?

Don McAllister: Pretty much so. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a bit vague now ’cause it’s like four or five years ago now. But basically I was still working full time. But when I decided to go full time with the membership, I decided to drop the full-time job. Because there was no way I could do everything I wanted to do and keep a full-time job at the same time. So, it was a bit of a leap of faith. There was some questioning there, there was a block of a month or two, but I sort of made the decision I wanted to go with the membership scheme to go full time really and make a proper go of it.

Tim – Membercon.com: Uh-hum. Which is great. It was obviously a good decision and you’re full time at this now correct?

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it worked really well. I mean it took awhile to ramp up. You know the first month or two was pretty scary because, these sorts of things they don’t take off overnight. It’s a very gradual process to build the numbers up. But I sort of tried to look at multiple revenue streams rather than just relying on the membership in case the membership figures didn’t go that well.

One of the eureka moments I had was to actually look at not just advertising, but sponsorship. So, to get a couple of vendors interested in me producing tutorials for them to put out on the show. See initially I couldn’t really get sponsorship because I was an unknown force. people really didn’t know me in the Mac community and they didn’t know my work. So, I went with affiliate arrangements initially. So, I’d do a show about a particular product and then I get a discount code for the viewers so that they could see the tutorial. they could understand the product. And at the end of that if they were still interested, they could then go ahead and purchase it at a discount plus I get some commission.

So by having both the membership and that sort of affiliate deals in the early days that, sort of cushioned me through the period whereby I could start ramping up. I also did sort of not so much consultancy, but production work for the companies as a paid job. So, there were two or three different ways I could earn some revenue. And that sort of eased me into the process of going down the membership route.

Tim – Membercon.com: And I like that because when we think of membership sites, we often think that that’s it. You’ve actually combined sponsorship and membership to create a bigger piece of the pie.

Don McAllister: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. And it was very much, a safety net really at the early days. I meant it’s at the point now where the membership numbers are significant and if I wanted to well, I can now decide whether or not I want to do sponsorship or if I want to do. I sort of stopped doing commissioned work to be honest. Because it was so labor intensive. It helped me through the early days, but now the membership has grown so that I haven’t really got the need. It’s great to get extra revenue in obviously if I want to, but I tend to push the work away now and just focus on sort of delivering the cold product, which is, the ScreenCastsOnline, which is the thing that I have memberships site built around.

Tim – Membercon.com: We’re you concerned at all when you went from the free to the paid model? Did you get some pushback? I think that’s a big concern for people who are considering that jump.

Don McAllister: Well, I was really concerned about it. I mean it was a leap of faith and a leap into the unknown because I really didn’t know how people would actually respond to that. To be honest with you though I think the fact that I sort of was giving up the day job as well sort of validated the decision in some people’s eyes. Because they realized that I was taking the risk in going full time. So, I got tons of support from people saying that, “We’re behind you. Great. you go for it.” I think literally I’ve had two e-mails from people who said, “Oh, you sold and podcast should be free,” which surprised me really. I didn’t get any more of a pushback than that, you know?

Obviously, there probably were people who just sort of didn’t, subscribe and didn’t make it known that they were displeased, but the actually pushback? No it’s very limited. Let’s say two e-mails at the most of people just expressing, their feelings that they thought all content should be free which obviously is bonkers, you know?

Tim – Membercon.com: Yeah. Absolute rubbish. Sure. To use an English term.

Don McAllister: Yeah.

Tim – Membercon.com: Well, how did you decide on pricing early on and is it the same as it is now? Because back then, you don’t have anything to really compare it to, to decide.

Don McAllister: Yeah. That’s right. Well, I sort of took the approach. I mean it’s something that I struggled with for ages, you know? It’s so hard to know how to price something, as you say, especially if there’s nothing to base it on. So, I sort of took the decision early on to try and price it low, probably too low in retrospect. To price it low with the idea of, well the lower the price was the more people would take up the membership and then, I’d make the money upon numbers. So, I wanted a ridiculously low level of I think the original one was $25 for six months. Which, when I think about it now that’s like six months’ worth of half hour video tutorials at $25 dollars. It’s really low.

Tim – Membercon.com: Yeah.

Don McAllister: So over time I’ve sort of pushed that, but it’s low now. I mean what’s happened over time is obviously as I built up this back catalogue tutorials one of the propositions now when someone joins as a member is they get immediate access to the back catalogue. Well, that’s over 200 shows now. So, that in itself has a value. So, the initial joining fee is still only $57, but that’s for three months membership. But that includes access to the back catalogue.

And going forward, I’ve sort of kept the renewal late low because once people have become members again I didn’t want to start sort of messing things around by sort of increasing the charges. People are already joined. So, that’s still relatively cheap. That still is $25 for six months. But that’s only for existing members. There’s this premium of $57 you have to pay to join up. But again, people still says that’s too cheap. Yeah. I’ll probably push that up gradually over time. But it’s very difficult to strike a balance to know, where the sweet spot is really for people.

Tim – Membercon.com: That’s something I didn’t know that you get access to everything. I mean we, and just from my own experience, had a little trouble with that finding that people may either (a) get overwhelmed with all that content or just join for the initial period and then grab everything and then leave. Have you found any of that?

Don McAllister: Yeah. It’s difficult to track to be honest. I’m sure that does happen. Yeah I’m sure it happens, but, the rate of people dropping off is relatively low. So, once people tend to join – there are people who just want to, get the back catalogue and that’s it and then they will probably leave.

Because it’s quite a contemporary show and I never really record it more than a week or two weeks in advance, it’s always new stuff and it sort of transformed as well as it went into a bit of a recommendation engine as well. So the call membership sort of follow the show both for up-to-date information on the latest software as it comes out, and they can keep abreast with what’s happening and get up to speed with things quickly. But it’s also I get lots of feedbacks from people saying well, “I haven’t got time really to sit down and check it out all the new software as it comes out. So, what I tend to do now is wait for you to cover it and then I can assess it from watching a half hour video and then decide if it’s for me or not.”

Tim – Membercon.com: Interesting.

Don McAllister: So, it’s various things. It’s training but it’s also a recommendation engine. And it also, helps people with their busy lives so they don’t have to worry about checking everything out. They can just wait for me to do it and sort of come in on the back of that.

Tim – Membercon.com: And then after that three months of their initial membership it looks like it doesn’t automatically renew. They probably get an e-mail to renew?

Don McAllister: Yeah. I terribly went with the option of not allowing recurring. I did start initially with, when people join they could sign up as either a nonrecurring membership or a recurring membership. But I found that, even though it was plain as day that, this is what they were signing up for, I’d still get feedback from people saying, “You’ve just taken money out of my PayPal account. What for?” Because they haven’t realized that they’d signed up for a recurring membership the very first time. So, I decided really to stop doing that and again sort of turn it around into a bit of a sales point in the, when you join as member it’s not an opt-in, you have to opt-in after the initial membership period to start renewing. I think that sort of gives people if you buy something at $57 you sort of always like to think, “Well that’s going to be $57 for every six months or whatever, and do I really want to do that?” But if you know that you’re just paying for the initial payment period and then you have to opt in after that to remain a member, I just saw that as the easiest way to manage for me. And I think it probably is probably more attractive to people as well.

Tim – Membercon.com: Yeah. And you offer a seven-day money back guarantee? Do you find that that puts people over the edge?

Don McAllister: Difficult to say. It has been taken up a couple of times, but again that’s based on people’s misconception. They might have thought there were more shows about a certain product that were available and when they looked at the catalogue they realized that it’s much more of a mixture of tutorials. That tends to be, the main reason why people might call them. But again, I’ll be surprised if over the four years, I’ve had more than a dozen, refunds I’ve had to do, within the seven-day guarantee no risk thing. So the take up on that is very, very low.

More in Part 2…

After I wrote that sentence I thought, “ContinuityKing.com is a great domain name – wonder who owns it?” Ryan Lee does.

I called Ryan to do a quick interview about his thoughts on membership sites, growing an online business with integrity, and dealing with the time pressures of being an online entrepreneur.

As usual, four different ways to listen, watch or read:

1. Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2. Download the full mp3 file here
3. Read the transcript (below the video)
4. Watch the video:

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hi, everybody Tim Bourquin here from MemberCon. I’m going to talk with Ryan Lee today and a lot of you probably know of ryanlee.com. He’s a pretty much a leader in terms of membership sites and giving advice and education and coaching for membership sites, but I met Ryan at Blog World Expo really briefly. Ryan thanks very much for joining me on the phone today?

Ryan Lee: I’m excited to be here.

MemberCon.com: I watch your videos and of course you notice right away that the domain is your name, you’re branding yourself as the product, was that a conscious decision because I always think down the road of selling it and branding yourself as a person is tougher to sell while, but you make more money while you own the site. Was it a conscious decision to kind of make it your brand?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. And you know what it’s a great question because for years I fought it. I fought branding myself because of your exact reasons like it’s really hard to exit, but for me this is one component of my business is something I’m going to do forever. Like I’m Ryan Lee, just like Donald Trump, he’s Donald Trump, Martha Stewart is Martha Stewart. She’s not going to sell Martha’s. She’s always going to be doing whatever she’s doing, but what I’ve also done is build a lot of other business that aren’t depended on my name. I own a lot of membership sites. I own one called strengthcoach.com. My own software called Fitness Generator, a Nutrition Generator, and I own a lot of different properties that are not necessarily tied into my name. So Ryan Lee is kind of the umbrella for a lot of my Internet marketing stuff, but there’s still a ton of things that I own that are not my name. Like I have a new magazine coming out, it’s going to be called Dot Com Lifestyle and I could have called it like I could have been kind of an egomaniac and called it Ryan Lee Magazine or something like that, but I wanted to build a separate kind of brand, and I set up some separate corporations for some of these and separate merchant accounts. So if I were to sell those, it’s easy to just slice off little pieces of it.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up about the magazine again too because I want to talk to you about that. You’ve got the recurring revenue report, which is a printed newsletter and a CD.

Ryan Lee: Correct.

MemberCon.com: And then you talk about doing an actual print magazine now?

Ryan Lee: Right. In case, I don’t have enough on my plate.

MemberCon.com: OK, you’re right, exactly, exactly. But I’m curious about that decision because of course prints are having a tough time right now and Internet is all about making it easy for digital downloads and things like that, did you find that people are signing up more for membership stuff these days if they get something physical on mail?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. Well, think about what I just said before, right? What did I just say?

MemberCon.com: Everybody’s doing it, yeah.

Ryan Lee: When everyone’s doing one thing, I like to do the other.

MemberCon.com: OK.

Ryan Lee: Because there are always opportunities. So you’re right, a lot of people are going digital, but right now my business 95% of it is digital and online, but there’s still something about getting that physical thing in the mail. It’s still hard to sit on the toilet with your laptop. As disgusting as it sounds, but it’s still hard to go to the beach with a laptop and read it in the airport, like there’s still something about that magazine and what a magazine does and in physical products, it still gives you a lot of credibility. If you think about it, emails, membership sites, all these, there’s still not a 100% deliverability, but something physical coming in the mail, a CD, DVD, a newsletter or magazine, whatever, assuming their address is right, if it’s wrong it’s going come back, but that’s a 100% deliverability. So, there’s a lot better ways to reach people in terms of marketing. So again everyone is online and everyone is trying to go online, so I’m going the opposite and plus the magazine publishers, the traditional publishing, they’re just, I’m not going to generalize and say they’re all morons, but what happens is no one thinks differently. It drives me crazy with business, everyone copies everyone else and they think, “Well, we’ve been publishing magazines like just for 120 years, this is the way it’s done.” No. It’s not the way it’s done. It’s not the way it has to be done. Like I’m looking for direct to consumer types stuff where they can cut up the middleman and so few people buy stuff in newsstands anyway and bookstores can return everything for a 100% of the money back, and just no wonder why all these magazines go out of business and they rely a hundred percent on advertising. I’m relying zero on advertising. I also know how to monetize the back end. So there are a lot of advantages that I know I’m going to have in getting into the magazine publishing business.

MemberCon.com: Sure, absolutely.

Ryan Lee: And I’m excited about it. I just love challenges.

MemberCon.com: That’s good.

Ryan Lee: But I think if you can add physical components, it’s definitely a great way to add a lot of value to your membership sites and also create different levels of memberships as well.

MemberCon.com: Right. We’re jumping around a little bit here.

Ryan Lee: I love to jump.

MemberCon.com: When I signed up for your inner circle, you gave away a ton of stuff. You gave away all the videos away from your Continuity Summit, and there were all kinds of bonus material available. I mean it was really a ton of stuff and for a lot of people that probably put them over the edge, but how did you kind of decide how much you are going to give away to get people on to that continuity program?

Ryan Lee: Well, another great question. I knew I wanted to do a big launch for this coaching because right now I had a mastermind group and people paying ten grand a year, and then I had my $40 a month newsletter, but people still email me everyday all day and they want me to coach them and I don’t want to take on individual clients anymore, it’s just not worth my time and I wanted to find the program that can kind of be a middle ground where I can answer a lot of questions and it’s not too expensive, which its cost prohibitive for everyone, but it also makes financial sense to me. So I said, “OK, I need to have some kind of continuity coaching and what I’m going to do to get attention and one of my main marketing guys said, “Well, why don’t we just give away this, I did this one DVD,” which is basically I took one session from my Continuity Summit and just took that out and made it its own DVD. Which by the way is good tip like even if you’re going like a multi day event or a multi hour, try to create them a separate sessions and I purposely created that, so it could be it’s own DVD. So anyway, he said, “Why don’t we just give away the DVD,” I’m like, “Yeah, but that’s not buzz worthy.” That’s not the kind thing where everyone is going to be talking about it and telling their friends about it. So I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Let’s give away everything from the Continuity Summit.” And then I saw people with, it was already being downloaded anyway online. I’m like, “Screw it,” because I already pre-selling for hundreds of dollars and sold the bunch from, but I’m like, “Screw it, I’m taking a chance, I’m rolling the dice, let’s do it and it was just a big hit. Sometimes you got to have some of the cajones to just put it out there.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: There are a lot of people just did the dollar and cancel right away and, yeah, absolutely, but that’s OK because now they saw the stuff, they saw that I can deliver the goods, they saw I do this with a lot of integrity and honesty and hopefully they’re going to follow me for a long time and perhaps purchase other products or maybe get a membership to the magazine or whatever. But I know I’m going to change a lot of lives and touch a lot of people and reach a lot of people by really over delivering and making it. I want the people to see this site and say, “I’d be insane to not join.” And with giving away one DVD is just not going to do it.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: But this level of insanity like Mark Joyner wrote a great book, The Irresistible Offer, like creating a super irresistible offer. So that’s what I try to do.

MemberCon.com: Then in terms of the stick rate in terms of what people are doing to continue on with that. It’s an open question, but what is a good retention right to go from that dollar these days to the first and getting them charged for that first month?

Ryan Lee: It’s going to depend on obviously your product, your market and the price of membership, but in general, this is a real kind of blanket statement, if it’s a forced continuity meaning, OK, you pay a dollar and then you already put it, you automatically put into like hundred dollar month program. You probably are going to get about half of the people stick through the first billing and then depending how good of a job you do keeping them and providing good content, it could fall by 5% a month, it could fall up to 20% a month, and you just have to keep refilling the bucket. So that’s kind of a real round, a real base number, but if you think that you’re going to do a dollar trial with even optional continuity or force continuity and think that people are going to stick in and you’re going to get 80 to 90% of the people sticking up on the first billing, you’re a 100% mistaken.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. It’s just not going to happen.

Ryan Lee: Because what happens is when you lower the barrier of entry to a dollar or free, you get so many more people in the door. Like literally five to ten times as many people, but you also get a lot more tie up kickers and what you’ll notice is it’s really an interesting phenomenon, but the more money people pay, the more laid back and understanding they are with things. So there were a couple of technical issues that happens and some people couldn’t get in and we get a lot of email supports and those questions and people who paid, who said, OK, they definitely want to stay with the 97 a month like, “Oh, Ryan I know you’re busy. I know about the technical issues, so just set me up whenever you can. I just want to check in.” It was probable 90 to 95% of people who were pissed or the people who only spend a buck. What is this crap? What’s this scam? I just spent a dollar, I can’t get in, I’m going to call my credit card company and charge back right away.” But it was the people who paid a dollar, who didn’t even want the continuity? So it’s like you attract the crowd that is just there, just the bargain hunters, and you don’t want to do that either. I mean you’re going to get more people in the door, but just be prepared for that as well and be prepared for up to 50% canceling before they even get to the first billing.

MemberCon.com: That’s true, whatever reason we’ve seen that two the higher the product price, the less support it actually takes to support those people which is interesting.

Ryan Lee: It’s just so counterintuitive, but it’s amazing. Like it’s just the way it is. I don’t get it. I mean I do get it, I do because there’s different mindset and the reason the people could afford the hundred a month are because they have the good mindset and they understand I’m investing in my education. With the dollar people like, “Yeah, let me just see this crap. Oh, let me see it’s only a dollar and I should do it, let me try it.”

MemberCon.com: And I know you’ve closed it now too. And I know that’s very popular these days, is to actually close the program because otherwise people don’t take action. I mean do you see that as pretty much the trend these days? You have to open it, close it and to get that urgency?

Ryan Lee: Well, yeah. You have to give some kind of reason and when all of my marketing is a 100% transparent and open. So everything I’m doing I tell people because I can’t stand, like you used to be able to get away with the crap, you can’t do it anymore. And when you say, we’re only selling 1,000 memberships this week, like people aren’t dumb, like it’s digital. You can sell 50,000 of them and why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you want more members? It doesn’t make any sense. So at least if you close it down and give a reason why and to be honest it sounds like BS, but we were really having the technical issues, so we couldn’t handle anymore. So we have it closed now to the public and I still open it once in a while, and I have a secret page where my members can get it or people on my waitlist. So we still let people in, but it’s not open to the general public. We don’t want the big influx, and you know what, my members appreciate that because I’m handling more of them. I can give them better service; I can answer more of their questions, so they’re enjoying it too. But you have to be open and honest and I can’t stay when people are just dishonest and it’s so obvious too. “We only have ten more of them, our server crashed, we only have five more,” come on.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: But give us a freaking break.

MemberCon.com: The emails.

Ryan Lee: Once they start sending that crap, I just unsubscribe. I’m like, “I am never going to trust you.” And once you break that trust you just can’t get it back. And a lot of marketers, they do the churn and burn mess. They get people in, they email them to death with no content until they unsubscribe and they just keep getting more people in the funnel, but that’s not how you build relationships? I mean I have client’s who have been with me for like 11 years online.

MemberCon.com: Wow.

Ryan Lee: That come to my events, that know my dad when he comes to the events. They give me hugs. One of my kids’ birthdays, they send presents, that’s the kind of stuff, that’s how you have an impact. It’s not just about lining your pockets with more money. It’s making an impact, making connections. Like my first job for six years, I worked in the children’s hospital, that’s all I knew and it was about making connections with the kids. It wasn’t just kind of suck money out of the kids and their families, I mean, I still don’t get that world where it’s just money, money, money, and that’s all it is. It’s more than that.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. And kind of going back to that whole branding your self too, online there are so many anonymous commenters, people that don’t want to give any information about themselves to go out there and say, “This is my name and this is who I really am,” I mean that could be a little scary at times, but it’s really what works. People think that if you just put good content out there, people want to know who’s behind it, right? I mean they want to know.

Ryan Lee: Yeah, absolutely. They want to know a story. They want to know who you are, again that’s the difference you see in a real business and selling a couple of eBooks, that’s the difference. That’s the difference between five and six figures and seven and eight figures.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: And the ones who do really well. And I’m not talking about the scumbags who do the CPA offers and fake blogs and the Acai-Berry, and all that crap. I’m talking about like real, legitimate businesses that are making seven and eight figures. They’re developing relationships. They’re delivering really good content there, you know who they are. It’s not some faceless corporation with some cold message. Like if you’re a solo entrepreneur and you’re running a membership site, use that as your strength. Let people know you. Let’s say, “My name John Smith and I’m the one who runs this site and here’s me on the farm and this is what we do.” Like let people into your world.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: It’s such a natural and easy way to market because you’re just being you, and when it comes across people can appreciate that. Not everyone’s going to like you and that’s fine. As you said, you’re putting yourself out there, but you have to have tough skin when you’re doing this. There is no doubt about it because even this as likable as nice as you are, as much as you are trying to help, there are still going to be people who don’t like you or think you’re an ass.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. Well, the things we’re battling right now too, is we put out a ton of free content to our email and newsletter and yet we’re still getting people that say, “You’re trying to sell me something all the time.” And I think to myself, “Well, you’re just realizing this now? I mean, of course, we’re trying to sell you something, but do you remember those four-hour long interviews we just sent you the last four days and yet that doesn’t stick in their head, it’s the one pitch that you sent them.” And yet it’s a small vocal group. You have to realize that that’s not the feeling of your entire list. It’s a small group.

Ryan Lee: Right. Yeah. And I used to read all my emails and believe it or not I really am very sensitive. Like every movie, I’m always freaking crying like I’m a big baby, softie. So even for making millions of dollars, like if someone sends me an email saying, “Oh, I didn’t like this or I want a refund or I want send back this product,” it still bothers me. So my assistant’s job is basically to protect me. Don’t let me see that crap. I don’t want to see it. I don’t need to see it.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: Because it puts me in a little bit of a funk. So try to shield yourself from all that crap and just say, “Hey, look it’s one person who doesn’t like it and there will always be,” especially if you’re selling any business or marketing thing, there are some people who have such a lack mentality and anyone who tries to make any money, God forbid, you’re like the devil. “This should all be free. How could you charge for this? I could just find this stuff online.”

MemberCon.com: Yeah.

Ryan Lee: First of all, I know you can, and even if you could, it would probably take you four years and $50,000 investing in education to figure this stuff out when you could pay 99 bucks and let me shortcut it for you. So go knock yourself out. They’re bitter. They’re bitter people. They’re jealous people, and let me tell you, when you still make a lot of money it definitely changes some relationships. When you put yourself out there and people know your name, your friends are going to hear about it, and that definitely changes some relationship and some friends are going to, I can’t stand this phrase and say, “Can I just pick your brain?” Like, “Can I take you to lunch for an hour to just pick your brain?” It’s like, “No. You can’t.” I just picture some of the little pick, clicking away my brain like, “No. Just here, take my book, just read.

MemberCon.com: Well, especially when it’s stuff that that’s what you sell, right? I mean this is how I make my living and so you’re asking me to do something I do for a living.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. I mean if your friends, a personal trainer you say, “Hey, you know I gain ten pounds this past three months, can you just train me for free everyday?”

MemberCon.com: Right.

Ryan Lee: Like, “No. I can’t.”

MemberCon.com: It doesn’t work that way. All right. Two more questions.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. And especially if you’re, this drives me crazy. Like I spoke at a seminar a couple of weeks ago and I went up, I did my presentation. I had a product to sell, which included everything. And I always try to help people at the event, I answer all the questions. And one guy was sucking the life out of me, twenty minutes, he wouldn’t let me even help anyone else. He just kept asking and asking, then at the end he’s like, “Oh, can I ask your cell phone I want to call you and ask you more questions.” I’m like, “Did you buy the product?” “No.” I’m like, “All right, I got to go.”

MemberCon.com: Yeah, I mean.

Ryan Lee: That to me is just rude. Like don’t bother anyone and there was no, “Hey, thanks so much for the information; how can I help you Ryan?” Nothing. “But help me. Help me. Help me. Help me more. “No. I’m not going to buy your products. Help me. Help me.” Like why would I ever do anything for someone like that?

MemberCon.com: Yeah. And you got to just realize that some people are just going to keep taking and as long as you give it to them and in some place just be nice and say, “No. I can’t do this anymore.” It’s just that line you have to do. All right I’ve kept you on the phone longer than I promised, so I appreciate your patience. Two more questions. You mentioned the virtual assistance. One of the things that I’ve even done battle with myself lately is that I realized, “God, if I train a virtual assistant, I could almost do it in as long as it will take me to train them, but that’s really short term thinking.” How did you get over that hope of saying I’m just going to bite the bullet, training this person so that at long term I can get away from doing these things?

Ryan Lee: I’ll tell you what, that was a big bullet to bite. It took me months and months to finally say, “You know what, I’m just going to do it,” because I didn’t want to hire anyone. I want to do it all myself, but I had at the time Debbie Collin who’s great. She was coaching one my friends and I said, “Let me hire this business coach to help me kind of organize things.” And we’re talking and she’s like, “You’re at the point of your business, you need to hire someone, you have to have someone doing this.” I had someone who is basically just doing some transcription for me and I trusted her, she’s really responsible and I hired her. At that time, it was like 12 bucks an hour, which felt like a ton of money, but ever since then my life changed, like my businesses grown exponentially, and I couldn’t have done it without hiring someone. So there’s going to come a time we just hire someone. It doesn’t take long. I mean, it could be as easy as just do the screen capture videos of the process, like here’s how to go into the shopping cart, here’s how to change an order, here’s how to answer the email, here’s what to say, here’s what to do, here’s how to ship this, whatever it is. And you take a day or two out of your schedule, but once you do, within a week you make it back many times over. And there are even companies now you can just outsource customers support too. There’s so many resources, so many virtual assistants, but if you’re going to run a real business, you need someone, you can’t do it all yourself. There’s going to be a definite feeling on what can accomplish with just you.

MemberCon.com: You said you hired a couple of people for the magazine side. Did you decide that they work and be virtual people that you wanted them in the office, what made that decision for you?

Ryan Lee: With the magazine, it’s interesting because I had a guy, and he was my first intern. He is twenty years old, he’s like, “Hey, I live in the area.” He’s like, “I’d love to come help you out, do whatever you want.” He paid his own ticket. He came from live event last year. I really liked the kid. He would come in a couple of times a week and just help me out and do things and really motivated and he used to run magazines and newspapers for a school, for a college, and so I hired him to run it. So he’s in my office. That’s why I got a bigger office, so he’s going to get his own office, and then I hired another basically another customer support and someone to help out with the magazine as well. So that’s a local person. I actually put an ad in craigslist. I had like 200 responses. I was going through them all, and this guy is an intern, he said, “I have a friend who I used to work with in college and she ran the school paper there and she’s really motivated,” and I came and I interviewed her and she was just great. So I hired her on the spot. So that’s how I have those two people.

MemberCon.com: All right. We’re looking forward to seeing the magazine.

Ryan Lee: It’s so cool.

MemberCon.com: Good. That’s sounds great. So let me ask you, is lifestyle, when you say about kind of the online entrepreneur lifestyle thing, so it wouldn’t be business-oriented, but more kind of outside of that or what will it be?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. It’s definitely broader, like it’s going to be the making money online stuff, but it’s not this cheesy, “Here’s how to make money with AdSense in Google.” Like, it’s not an ad stuff. It’s real life case studies. It’s real people who have gone from zero to five, six, seven figures. It’s not just the “gurus.” It’s not just gurus trying to pedal their wares. It’s literally like step by step case studies. There are successful bloggers, there are successful guys who make it on the Internet like Yanik Silver, Russell Brunson in the first issue. There’s Kristi Frank who was on the Apprentice. There’s this woman, Isabel, who was a personal trainer who created first product. And it’s literally just start to finish how they created it, plus we get some really cool columnist. In social media, there’s a really popular guy now, have you heard of Gary Vaynerchuk?

MemberCon.com: Of course, yeah.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. He’s on board. He’s a columnist and then we got some guys who are just legends like Brian Tracy. He’s a columnist talking about productivity. Another columnis, he’s going to be talking about traffic and social media marketing. I said if I’m going to do this, we’re going to get the best of the best, and we’re going to talk business, but we’re also going to talk lifestyle. We’re going to talk a lot about productivity, getting more things done in less time. We’re going to showcase getting organized the different offices and resources and calendar of events and the top links and resources like really practical stuff, but in a fun way as well.

MemberCon.com: That sounds awesome. I already subscribed like 15 magazines. This will be another great one, I can’t wait. I love magazines. I love the format, so I’ll definitely be subscribing. So I was looking on your site today just as I was preparing for the interview a little bit, and I saw your case studies and saw some of things on that site. Have you changed anything you’re doing in terms of this new FTC thing that went in the December 1st?

Ryan Lee: It’s stuff we’re looking at to now because some of the things I’m going to have start changing some of those, which stinks because my stuff as a whole is legit, like all these testimonies are all real, there’s people who are getting just incredible results, but yeah I mean it’s stuff now we have an attorney that we’re talking to and trying to go through everything because I just want to make sure that I’m protected.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. It’s a shame that the law, of course, is to protect people that just flat out lie I think about testimonials. I don’t understand why it has to totally say if it’s a real testimonial that you could not be.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. I don’t get it. Look, if I have a client that I taught from scratch and now he’s making $3 million dollars a year, why can’t I say that? If it’s true. Look, I agree I think there are a lot of sleaze balls out there, and a lot of people make up testimonials, this is a lot of crap. There definitely should be something in place, but I don’t know, we’ll see what happen but we’re still working on. If anything, I think it’s going to help me in a way that a lot of competitors who don’t really have much for platform, it’s really thin. And they rely on a lot of lies and deception. They rely on how to make six figures a month in three days that kind of crap. The FTC isn’t going after small price now, but they’re going to be gone. I mean they have no leg to stand on. It’s all a bunch of garbage so what’s going happen is the people who over the years have developed relationships, like what I’m doing. It’s going to be much better for us because all this fly-by-night people are just going to be gone.

MemberCon.com: It’s a good point.

Ryan Lee: They’re just going to disappear.

MemberCon.com: Lot less noise.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. Absolutely. And that’s what I’m positioning myself for to be the trusted voice of all this stuff. And a lot of people don’t want to do it because they don’t want to take the time, they’re too lazy. “Oh, my God, I have to blog. I have to create a new video each day for three minutes. Oh, my God, how am I going to have time?” It’s like, “That’s not, hey, bring it on.”

MemberCon.com: All right. Well, Ryan I appreciate that. I kept you on the phone a lot longer than I said. Again, I appreciate your time. Of course, listeners, very easy website ryanlee.com.

Ryan Lee: R-Y-A-N-L-E-E.

MemberCon.com: There you go. And I’m sure you’ll announce the magazine right there?

Ryan Lee: Yes. We had it announced it there and it’s going to be. The site is not up yet, but it’s going to be dotcomlifestyle. D-O-T-C-O-M L-I-F-E-S-T-Y-L-E.com.

MemberCon.com: Excellent. All right, Ryan. Well, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Ryan Lee: It is my pleasure Tim. Thanks so much everyone listening. I wish you the best and thank you.

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Transcript:

All right, so, that’s the next common question. What do I charge for this? I have no idea what to charge. So, Emile and I have come up with a super secret formula for determining exactly what you will charge for this and it works extremely well. So what I want everybody to do right now is either to write down or think in their head a price. There’s a price, I know, that you’ve probably considered charging on a monthly basis or an annual basis or six months of your content. I want you to picture that in your mind. Ok? Here’s the secret formula for determining what the pricing will be, this is very easy. Triple it. If somebody is willing to pay $9 a month for something I promise you they will not flinch at paying $27. Now that doesn’t mean that you can charge $400 for a hobby site or a site on gardening where it’s, , something they do in their leisure time. But what I’m saying is that I see time and time again that content creators always undervalue your content. For whatever reason, it’s just human nature I guess, we feel like the content that we create isn’t as valuable as something somebody else creates.

So immediately I want you to think of tripling whatever you were thinking about charging. Obviously the sites that sell memberships to a business where you can make money from it, for instance, a small business or, in my case, trading where you can actually make money from making trades on stocks and options and the futures that the traders that I’m talking to are talking about, you can charge more. But, your tendency is going to be to undervalue it, under price it so make sure you really get what’s truly valuable for you. And the honest truth of this is, is it’s going to be worth whatever you say it’s going to be worth. People are going to, unless you are totally outlandish, whatever you say it’s worth that’s what people are going to have in their mind as being worth. So, and it’s always easier to do a sale later and bring the price down but, rather than raising it, unless you’re doing some kind of promotion. But, you obviously can’t raise it for member’s that are already in, in the program. You can, but you’ll probably lose a lot of them so, always err on the high side. You can always bring it down or run a sale or do something later if it’s not drawing the audience that you wanted.

So with that pricing, there’s a couple ways you could start. I always recommend doing a charter membership. In other words, if you haven’t started a membership site and you’ve got the site up for a while, give those early adopters an incentive to come on and join you. Maybe it’s because you don’t have a ton of content behind your membership wall, maybe it’s because you’re still working out the bugs of the software and sometimes, , a piece of content isn’t there or there’s a 404 page or something. So, say look, we’re going to do this, I’m just getting it started, there’s some great information in here but because you’re a charter member, because you’re the first on board, I’m going to give you a great discount. And if you’re charging 99 bucks a month, give it to them for $29 a month. And they get to keep that monthly membership price as long as they stay a member. So it’s great to help you with retention and it’s also great to make sure that you reward those people for coming on board first.

Free trial with auto start. So, you’ll probably find some people that will do a free trial without collecting the credit card first. And while you’ll get a ton more people in your free trial if you don’t collect the credit card I’m going to tell you that if you do collect the credit card first, even though it’s free and you don’t charge the card for 2 weeks or 30 days, that’s the way to do it. You’ll convert a lot more of those people than you will with a free trial.

You could try the free trial without getting the credit card but I’m telling you a lot of people will not do it, they’re just going to come in over and over again for that free trial.

Getting the credit card up front ensures that you can start charging it if they decide not to cancel and it keeps you from somebody creating 15,000 Yahoo addresses and using a different one on a different dial-up IP address every time to get the free trial stuff and never having to become a member.

So, you’re not going to get as many members doing the free trial if you request a credit card but it’s the way to go. I’m telling you, you’re going to convert a lot better and you’re going to get people that are more serious about it especially if you have a forum or message board, you don’t want a lot of people in there who are just in it to check it out and they’re going to put a lot of junk posts up there. You want people who are serious about it, giving them your credit card, them giving you their credit card tells them, tells you, sorry, that they’re serious about it.

You can go low dollar free trial. You can go dollar for the first two weeks or $7 for the first seven days and then $99 thereafter, that’s another way to do it too. At least you’re getting something, they’re paying something, they’re going to put value on that thing, they’re going to probably become more involved in the site even on the free trial because they paid something for it. If it’s a buck, they’re going to put a value on it and participate because they’ve paid a dollar. It’s just the way human nature is.

Higher dollar trial and lower thereafter, so, in our case, one of the things we’ve talked about doing since we’ve got 180 interviews in our library already is charging $99 for the first month and $29 for every month thereafter.

So, it does a couple of things. It, if you have a site where you’re going to get a lot of attrition, meaning people can get everything they need, download it all and then leave after one month at least you’re getting that high upfront fee and then if they continue on they’re rewarded for that with a lower fee. And also it allows you to have a huge library of things as you build it and still not have everybody come in for one month and then leave. So, it’s definitely an option if you’ve got a big library of content already built. The higher dollar free trial and then lower after is the way to go.

Lifetime membership. We’ve had some success with this. People sometimes like to know that they can spend money with you one time and then be done and not have to worry about being charged every month, not being, not worrying about being charged every year, that they pay one time and they have access for the rest of their lives.

Now, the truth of the matter of this is really it’s lifetime, your lifetime, their lifetime, that could be a long time, the fact of the matter is really, who forgets about the subscription first and it’s probably going to be them. That’s the truth. Two years from now will we have our lifetime members still logging in? I don’t know, we haven’t seen that yet. We haven’t done a membership site that long yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how many lifetime members we have that come in and grab the content still week after week.

But no matter what pricing model you take, this is the truth, is that without urgency nothing will happen. And I thought this, I thought we’re going to put great content out there, we’re going to put some of the best trading and online investing content known to the free world out there behind our membership wall. This thing’s going to sell itself. I wish that were the case. You will get one or two members a month that way. But if you don’t make something to generate that urgency whether it be a discount to a certain time or you’re going to offer a bonus that you’re going to take away after a certain time, you’ve got to do something to get them to do urgency. Because even if it’s the greatest content in the world there’s something about human nature, if it’s available today and available tomorrow, I’ll just wait ‘til tomorrow. And that’s just the way we all operate. So, make sure you do something to create urgency.

Here’s what we did to create urgency. And both of these ideas made $7,000 each in membership fees. So, back in April we decided that we were going to do something to create some urgency because we were getting some members but it wasn’t a lot. And this is an actual screen shot from very early on when we started our membership site back in April. And as you can see here there’s 35 subscribers between April 26th and May 2nd and we got about 4 more between May 3rd and May 9th and here’s what we did. We closed the site to new members. Some of the traders that we interview have nothing to sell themselves and they’re just guys that make millions of dollars trading from home because they’ve figured out a way to do that. And they don’t want the world always knowing about that, so what we said is look, we’ve got a lot of members here we’re trying to service and we’re trying to do good content for, we’re going to close the site. And we closed it for about 40 days and that sense of urgency, even though they could wait a month if they wanted to, that urgency got 35, almost 40 people to sign up, we made about $7,000.

Then we did something to draw urgency again in June, June 21st through June 27th and the 28th through July 4th, made about another $7,000 and this is what we did that time. We offered a lifetime membership and we haven’t offered it since. But we got about $7,000 worth of income because we offered a onetime offer for a lifetime member they paid one time and they never had to pay again.

So, we did one other thing that didn’t work quite as well but still generated $4,000 worth of memberships and that was right in here, between these two periods, May 31st to June 6th, June 7th to June 13th, we got about 20 members, a little over $4,000 and what we did was we had bonus PDF’s and we took them away. We said these five great reports, and they were really good PDF, solid information reports, we took them away and said they’re not available and they haven’t been available since until the lifetime members. If we offer a lifetime membership, we’ll be giving those away again.

But just taking something away, you’ve got to do that to generate sales. There’s people so bombarded with information out there and so many offers these days that if you don’t give them a reason to do it by a certain time they won’t do it. Now you’ve got to stick to that because if people find out that you just keep extending the deadline, extending the deadline it’s going to lose its effect. You’re going to cry wolf and then nobody’s going to believe you anymore when you say you’re going to take it away. So, you got to just take the risk and if it’s closing the site or taking PDF’s away and make it happen and really stick to it so that people believe you and when you run promotions they work, they’ll continue to work.

Ok, the best way that I know of to sell a membership site, to sell memberships is to tell a story. And here’s what we do, I put a video on the homepage that says how I learned how to trade and it’s me basically talking about why I started traderinterviews.com and the importance behind starting the website in the first place. And it’s very easy to do. I record audio, I make slides and PowerPoint, I save them as JPEG’s, there’s an option to do save as JPEG’s, and I sync the audio and slides in Windows Movie Maker which is free, available in Windows. If you’ve got a Mac you’ve got all those tools plus and even better tools. So, tell your story, use a video to do it ‘cause you’ll find that some people don’t want to read your information about how great your site is, they just want to click play, sit back and watch the material. So, make a video, I highly suggest you do that, it will work really well.

And you sell your membership but of course by giving away things. And the way that we do that is when somebody first comes on to the list we, the very first email they get from us is just pure free stuff. Here’s a free audio interview, I make no mention of our membership site, what it costs, deadlines coming up, nothing. The second email is more free, I might, at the very end mention hey, , we’ve also got this membership site, I’ll be telling you more about that later. And then the third email free, again, it’s a free piece of content, all of these have free pieces of content in there but slowly, but surely I’m bringing up the volume on the sales piece. Ok? I’m, on the third email maybe I say hey, we’ve got a sale that’s starting on Wednesday, in the meantime, don’t worry about that now but just keep in the back of your mind that Wednesday the site goes on sale, here’s your free piece of content. And then by the fourth or fifth email it’s a full on sales pitch. Now here is our AWeber account, we’ve got 17 emails in our follow-up or our auto responder chain. In other words, when somebody joins our list they get, automatically from day one, 17 emails that we’ve loaded up in here before we even send them anything new.

And I highly recommend that you use a service like AWeber or IContact or CustomContact, one of those, because it allows you to load up emails that go out automatically without having you do anything.

So, these first five emails are pure content emails. They do have an increasing sales pitch. By the sixth email I’m really pitching. The eighth email, right here, is a full pitch, there’s no content, there’s not a thing, it’s just here’s why you should join our site.

Now, our highest unsubscribed rate is surprisingly is not after the eighth email. I thought at first, well, if I don’t at least give them something, some kind of piece of content they’re going to totally unsubscribe. Actually, that’s, it’s about even, eight’s about even with the rest of these, the highest one is message one. And that’s just like people that come to your website homepage and then leave right away and don’t look at anything else.

For whatever reason after message one they don’t think it’s for them. Which is fine, you want as many people off your list that aren’t prospects as quickly as possible. So if after message one, which is only pure content, I haven’t pitched them a thing, and that’s the highest unsubscribed message, let them go. I pay for every subscriber that’s on our AWeber newsletter list so I want people who are not prospects off my list as quickly as possible. And if they unsubscribe after one email where I am not selling a thing, they’re definitely not prospects.

So, don’t worry about selling at the very beginning but at least five or six emails into it, it should be a full on pitch and if they do unsubscribe because you’ve given them a full on pitch, again, they weren’t a prospect for you at all anyway. So let them go.

It’s basically what we call the long sales page. , we’ve all seen those internet sales pages that go on forever that make you scroll 50,000 times in the sidebar, it’s like that only what you’re doing is you’re turning it on its side. And a guy named Jeff Walker kind of coined this, you turn the sales page on its side and you slowly drip them content through email to get them to become members.

Now, I already said we use AWeber.com, here’s a book, the Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing. I’ll send you these slides later if you want to email me. But, in fact, I know everybody of course who’s registered for this so I’ll send them out to you. But, that’s a good book and I’ve read it and it’s got some good ideas for email marketing. You might want to check it out.

Places to learn about list building; listbuilding.com, sneakyemailtricks.com and of course membercon.com, we talk about that stuff as well.

Again, if you can’t write this all down no problem, I’ll send you the slides.

So, here’s how our sales funnel works, and we’re still working on this, we are still tweaking, we are by no measure have reached the pinnacle of membership site start up yet with this thing. But, it’s starting to work really well for us and here’s what we do. Everybody that comes to our site we are trying to get them to do one thing and that is join our email newsletter. So, we’ve got the light box, we’ve got the subscription on side here that does get used here occasionally though not very much. We direct them to this page and at the top of every page it says are you looking for the 5 free interviews? And it sends them to this page, enter your email and we’ll send you highlights from 5 strategy packed interviews with great traders. Ok, they enter that in there, that’s the first step and we’ve got them into our email system.

When they click on the confirmation page we give them this, it says your time of your joining the mailing list is perfect. We’ve got some terrific traders lined up the next few weeks. Enjoy the five free interviews, the first of which is headed to your inbox right now.

And then Emile’s designed something that’s very clever, it’s a cookie that gets set on their machine that says in 72 hours, basically 3 days, almost 4 days, your one year pass is going on sale for $399 and it starts a countdown clock. That countdown clock does more to generate urgency for us than anything we’ve ever used is a countdown clock. It actually makes it hit home for people that in a certain amount of time something is going to happen. So that’s their first indication that something is going to go on sale for them.

And then we slowly take them through these messages, 1 through 5 and then 6, 7 and 8 and by the fifth email, ‘cause we send one a day, the next time they go into get that last free piece of content, it says one year pass now on sale for $399. So, we charge normally $1,147, we’ve actually raised the price of the one year pass, it’s now $497 on sale. But they’ve gotten five pieces of content, one a day, they’ve gotten an interview every single day, by the fifth day we think they’ve had a good enough idea getting all this free content to know if the site is for them or not. So then we give them 72 hours to become a member at the discounted price and then that discounted price goes away. If that countdown clock clicks, kicks down to zero, the price goes up to $1,147. Now if somebody has called me, which has happened, and said hey, I was out of town, can I get that discounted price? I’ll give it to them. Ok? But, I don’t go on and continue to continue extending this over and over again because again you want that promotion you do in the future to have impact. And if you don’t, if you just continue to extend it and do these fake countdown clocks, it’s not going to work for you. So, we give them 72 hours to become a member at a highly discounted rate and then that’s it.

So the point of all this is that you can promote your, obviously, your content via your website but what really works, what sells the membership for us is not our website, it’s the email drip that goes out every single day. It’s that constant contact, here’s another piece of content, here’s another example of what we are, that’s the stuff that sells our website, not, or excuse me, that’s the stuff that sells our membership site, not the website itself.

So how do you keep members? That’s a big deal. Attrition is a big deal, especially in the financial industry where we are here, if you keep somebody for five or six months you’re doing really well. People come in and out of this industry very quickly and they try different things. So, but then we found a few things that we can keep them on board.

So why do they cancel? We think we give great content out there, why are they cancelling? Well there’s a couple of reasons that we found out. They don’t understand how to use it.

We think our site is pretty simple. We have a library of audio interviews with traders about how they trade. Pretty simple, you buy, you pay for access, you go in and download what you want, we upload a new one every week. But the truth of the matter is if you don’t show them how to use that, how to play the interviews, what you should be thinking when you’re listening to the interviews, what kinds of things should I be picking up while I’m listening to these interviews or reading this article? If you don’t really explain in simple, stupid terms about how they’re supposed to use this content they will unsubscribe, we found that.

I don’t know if that means you create a FAQ video, I think that’s a great idea to show people who it works but you’ve got to do something.

We had this problem; before we started our membership site we had been doing interviews for almost two years. So we have 180 interviews that are anywhere between 30 and 40 minutes. I mean literally, 80 hours of content already in there when they become members. People can become overwhelmed, they don’t know where to start and you could have the greatest content in the world and tons of it. And it’s counterintuitive because you think the more great stuff I have in there the more likely they are to stick around and get through it all. But the truth is, is that if they get overwhelmed, that there’s too much in there, if you don’t guide them from where to start. Here’s where you start, after you’re done here then go here, they’ll get overwhelmed and they’ll cancel.

You haven’t communicated regularly with them. Now this is probably the most controversial thing I’ve said in the last couple of weeks when I’ve done this webinar and when I did it at the show was that I think you should be emailing your list daily, every day. Now, that’s a lot of work for you because you don’t want to send them garbage. And because if you send them garbage just to get an email out on a daily basis they’re going to unsubscribe and they’ll probably report you as SPAM.

You need to have daily contact with them because there’s something about that familiarity, something about reaching out to them every single day that increases conversion to become members. They feel like they start to get to know you. That’s a lot of work for you though, all the onus is put on you because to put out a daily email with good stuff is hard, it’s a lot of work. You got to work really hard to make sure that every email you’re sending out is valuable, has good information and is pointing them in a direction that you want them to go. So it’s hard to email every day ‘cause we know we have to get that schedule out but we have to make sure the content is good. So, every day, at the very least every other day, but I highly recommend you try it daily.

Not enough content; this is rarely a problem because of the second one, overwhelmed is more common. But if you don’t have enough, if you’ve got one article in there and they’ve paid $97 for the first month obviously they’re going to unsubscribe ‘cause there’s not enough in there. So you got to have at least enough to keep them going for that month.

There’s no time to consume the content. This becomes more on the excuse side I think, although you hear it a lot. I don’t have, I just don’t have time to watch your site. Well, my sense is that if the content was good enough, if we’d done our job they’ll make time for it. Ok?

So you’ll get that excuse, you’ll get that reason and perhaps it’s true for a lot of people, but my sense is is that I’ve not done one of the other things well and because of that they’re giving me the no time excuse.

And they don’t value what they’re paying. If for some reason you’re grossly overcharging for what you’re doing, we’ve experimented with some different prices on a monthly basis. Or if your choices aren’t clear enough, in other words, if I can come in for a month and grab everything and then leave the same way a guy who pays four times as much for an annual membership is getting then your choices are a little bit out of whack and we’ve had to deal with that.

We actually took away our monthly membership, we only offer a one year now. We’ve done that just recently but I think it’ll work a lot better.

So, you got to make sure the value is in line with what you’re charging.

Some common mistakes of membership site owners and then we’re going to get to some questions. I see a bunch of them here popping up so, we’ll get to those, I promise.

Common mistakes that people will make, we’ll go through this quickly. There’s too much in the free trial. When we first started doing the free trial we gave them six full interviews that were 40 minutes each, one a day. Most of the time they got to the end of the five days, they hadn’t listened to all of them because they had to listen to 40 minute podcasts each day to get through all of them. And by the time the fifth day came around, they said well, I haven’t even gotten to these five that I got as free trials, why should I join? We boiled it down to six minutes each day and it’s been a lot better.

Under pricing and undervaluing goes back to that triple it guys. Whatever you’re thinking about charging you got to charge more.

Not emailing frequently enough. If you’re only emailing once a week, not nearly enough; they’re not going to develop that relationship, they’re not going to be trained that when you send them an email you want them to take action. Weekly’s not enough to get them to train your, not enough to train your list.

Waiting until all your content is built. If you wait until you’ve got months and months of content, you’ll never get there, you’ll never do it. And my mantra to you today is get up there and just start it.

Giving up too soon. It does take time to do this, guys. It takes time to get members. We’ve had days we have no members, we’ve had days when we’ve had 12 members. You don’t give up too soon, it does take some time.

Not selling other people’s products if they don’t buy yours. So, we tried initially, first push our list, of course to buy our products. But, it’s just not going to be for some people. And if we’ve got people that are in the industry that may be competitors to ours, they may find values in theirs that they don’t find in ours for whatever reason. I try to let my ego step aside and not, , I think we’ve got the greatest stuff out there, but for whatever reason if somebody doesn’t find our stuff valuable, they might find somebody else’s valuable. So, email out to your list, after you’ve tried to get them to convert to you and they don’t, about your other competitors out there. You can make some affiliate money that way, it’s worth doing. At least you’ll make some money doing that.

And finally, a guarantee with teeth. Instead of just saying money back guarantee, which everybody loves of course, try this, try doing it where you say give it some teeth, give it some specific criteria. In other words, for ours we say if you don’t make a trade on a stock or an option or a future or a 4X, if you don’t make a trade that is at least 500 bucks in the time that you’re a member, we’ll give you your money back. Well my members hear, our membership is $500 for the year. So we’re saying if you don’t make a trade because of something you heard on our show that makes you 500 bucks that this thing pays for itself, we’ll give you your money back. So instead of just doing a money back guarantee, put some teeth behind it, put some criteria behind it, give it some criteria that says if you meet this and you still haven’t gotten to your objective we’ll give you your money back. It makes the guarantee just have more teeth and more believable.

So, thank you very much for joining me in this experiment. Thanks for your patience as we got used to the software, we’re going to be doing more of these with entrepreneurs. So some of them might be paid but some of them will probably be free to attract attention. We’ll try to give great information in the free ones as well. But, thanks very much for being here. I appreciate it and we’ll see you next time.

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Transcript:

So let’s talk about the tips and tricks that we’ve learned in organizing a membership site. And the membership site that Emile and I have is called traderinterviews.com and it’s a membership site for online traders and online investors.

And one of the things we started to see about a year ago was that advertising just wasn’t cutting it. We were basically spending all of our time on the phone, selling to advertisers and it really wasn’t making us that much money. We were putting a ton of work into the site and we realized, eventually, that that was not going to be the way that we were going to make a company out of doing advertising. Because our site was niche enough that when I went out and talked to the eTrades and the Ameritrades and Schwab’s of the world, we realized that our traffic just wasn’t big enough, we were getting maybe 60,000 unique visitors a month but for those guys they want millions of visitors, they want Yahoo type audience. And so, we spent all of our time on advertising sales.

And so we decided back then, I think it was in April, to go full on with a membership site because we knew we could make a go of that.

So, if you have any questions while we are going along, I’ll try to monitor the windows here and I’ll probably do most of the question and answer toward the end.

So, we’ll get through the PowerPoint presentation here and some slides we’re going to talk about basically the things that we’ve learned in this 9 months. Things we’ve done really well, things that we’ve crashed and burned on just to give you an idea so that when you go to start your own membership site you can hopefully avoid some of our pain and take advantage of the things we did well that you can go right away to and know that they work.

So, let’s get started with that. The truth of the matter is, is that for 99% of the websites out there, the blogs out there advertising is not going to cut it. In fact, it’s probably going to be member supported sites that actually make you money for the most part. And we’re not talking about $50.00 a month or $100.00 a month on affiliate ads, we’re talking about trying to do quit your job kind of money. Because I think that’s the kind of business’s that I’d like to see happen with the membership site.

Certainly with our site, we’re making, finally, quit your job kind of money with this site although we’ve got a long way to go with traderinterviews.com. But there’s some things that we’ve tried that worked out very well and I really think that subscription content is the new trend. I think most people are going to realize, pretty soon if they haven’t already, that some Amazon affiliate links on their site, some Google ads on their site just really, for the most part, isn’t cutting it. It is not making the kind of money that you want to make to turn this into a business. And the more time you can spend on this the better content you’re going to have and the more time you spend on it the more money you want to make from it.

So hopefully, eventually, you’ll be able to quit the job entirely and do a membership site as a standalone business.

So let’s just, really quickly, talk about the tools that are involved in doing this. So, very easy to set up a membership site these days; most bloggers are working on WordPress or if you’re a pod caster you’re working on WordPress, but it is a really simple way to get in there and start doing a website very easily with everything built in, SEO, search engine optimization and all of the tools.

So many people are using WordPress now that there are thousands of plug-ins. Pretty much, I can tell Emile now that I’d like to have our site do this and he can go out and find a plug-in for WordPress to make it happen. So, if you’re not, if you don’t have a website yet or you’re starting one, I highly recommend WordPress as a foundation. I don’t think we would start a site these days without using WordPress just because it makes it so easy to get started.

You need a membership gateway like amember.com which is what we use or premiumcast.com if you’re doing a podcast, but you need the website which is WordPress, the membership gateway which puts a wall up between visitors to the site which just come off of the street and your member’s who are paying for content. There’s a, amember does a pretty good job of doing all the functionality that you need pretty easily. There is some coding involved in getting it set up, I’m fortunate enough to have Emile, a software engineer as a business partner and my brother and so we have done that pretty easily. But one of the things we’re probably going to do a webinar in in the future is how to install a member, just kind of a tour of the features and so, it’s an important, obviously, step in starting your site.

There are also WordPress plug-ins like wpwishlist.com, wp-member.com, these are the plug-ins that you can use with WordPress directly if you want to to start up a membership site pretty easily. Some of those, like I think wpwishlist is a 180 bucks if I’m not mistaken, so, they’re, , go out there, we’re actually going to be putting out a post of kind of like a comparison of all these different WordPress plug-ins to show people what’s working, what kinds of features they have, how much they cost and kind of our evaluation of those things.

So, really, you could start a membership website or a subscription website, WordPress is free, membership gateway or a plug-in, you’re looking at about 180 bucks, 250 bucks tops to just get it started, get it off the ground, so it’s really inexpensive to start one of these sites.

And then you need a PayPal account or an authorized.net type of account where you can accept credit cards. We accept both PayPal and authorized.net to accept credit cards. PayPal’s not my favorite thing to accept but I know a lot of people like to use it so we make sure that’s an option because I think we’d probably lose sales is we didn’t offer PayPal and or a credit card system so we use authorized.net to do that.

So one of the first questions I get is what do I do if I have a podcast and I’ve got an iTunes feed? Now, if you don’t have a podcast this may not make a big, a lot of difference for you, but if you do and you’ve got people subscribed to a feed already or even a regular blog feed, what we do with iTunes is we now put all of our free teaser content into that iTunes feed and we’ve created a new feed for our members. And iTunes is great in that you can, people can subscribe to a premium feed that has their username and password built in to the RSS feed and so they can get all of their member content, if it’s audio, if it’s a podcast in iTunes. It makes it very easy, they can use all of the tools they’re already used to using which you want to make sure you can make it as easy as possible to consume your content.

So let’s talk about the models of subscription sites and these are just a couple. There’s lot’s out there but I’m just going to give you a couple that you can be thinking about right away in terms of your own content and starting a subscription site.

So, ongoing monthly members, in other words, you just charge $28, $128, $928 a month and you try to keep members as long as you can, you provide that content to them. So it’s just a monthly membership, what you put behind that wall is entirely up to you. Some people put audio, videos, a message board, articles, but just, it would be an ongoing monthly payment that members make, just say members, pretty simple.

So a clear course with a start and an end. So, this is one of the things that Emile and I have really been thinking about lately is instead of just offering a huge library of material like we have with Trader Interviews, sometimes that can be overwhelming and there’s something about the fact that if it’s available today and it’s still available tomorrow then I’ll just wait ‘til tomorrow to become a member. And so that’s a constant challenge that Emile and I have had to kind of overcome and think about when we’re doing our site. There’s a lot of content in there so we’ve thought about packaging up all of our content, our articles, our transcripts, our podcasts and making it a start date and an end date and then open up to new students or new members once a month and they’ll all be on this same track together. So maybe we can start a message board and then it can all kind of commiserate together, talk, discuss what’s being taught in the, in the sessions that you’re having each month. And so, they go through this as a group. And in some sense there’s a, an ongoing membership site that goes on and on forever is a little bit hard for people to grasp. They think, oh, I’m going to get charged every month and I got to remember to cancel if I don’t like it, so having a course with a start and an end I consider to be a membership site as well.

All right, free giveaway and then forced continuity. So, this is kind of the hot model in internet marketing right now where you give away a CD, you give away a package of articles or a package of videos or interviews or something along those lines. If it’s a physical product some people charge shipping and handling and then they’re automatically in your membership program so it’s free or 6 bucks for the shipping and handling to join and then they start up with the monthly membership 30 days after that start which can be whatever you’re charging on a monthly basis, 47 bucks, 97 bucks, whatever that may be. So, that’s kind of the hot one right now that people say is working but it’s just one more option for you.

Courses with a higher level of detail; in other words, you’re going to create a beginner course, an intermediate course and an advanced course. You can buy one at a time, if you buy, , the beginner course for 199 bucks and they’re each a 199, maybe you sell all three for $450, give them a discount for buying them all at once. I still consider, even though it’s not a membership site per se, is anything you put behind a wall, any piece of content behind a wall, I kind of consider a membership site. And you can do this in the same way you could do with the course with a start and an end or you can just sell it outright and they learn at their own pace.

And then you can break it into pieces. I’ve seen this work very well where people have said ok, the audio is free but I’m going to charge for the transcripts or the, if you’re there at these webinar like you are tonight here with me, it’s free, but if you want the recording of it because you can’t make it we’re charging for that. I’ve seen people charge a buck for the live stuff and then a hundred bucks for the recorded stuff. And it works because people are buying convenience. They’re buying access to that product, they’re also buying it so they can watch 15 minutes at a time or go back and watch it 3 or 4 times at a time or 3 or 4 times.

So, be creative in what you’re thinking about how you can charging. And even if you’ve only got one product, there’s probably some way you can kind of split it apart or break it apart and sell it in pieces or give some of it away for free and sell the rest.

So, we’re going to talk about how to determine your niche. And I have a pretty strong feeling about how you start this. You may already have your niche in mind and your product in mind which is great, but if you don’t here’s what I’ve always said to people, “Well, how do I know how narrow to get with my audience?” And I have a general rule for that, my secret formula is basically I want you to take the niche you have in mind and then slice it in half. Literally take that audience and try to lop half of them off and get even more narrow, and then, one more time slice it in half again.

So the example I use is my wife is a marriage and family therapist and we’ve talked about doing a membership site for her but she’s, her specialty is young, adolescent girls who have eating disorders who are athletes. So we said ok, doing a membership site for other therapists, that’s the big, broad picture, let’s slice that in half. Ok, let’s target therapists who treat eating disorder patients. That’s still pretty narrow but let’s go narrower, let’s go one more time narrower and let’s go therapist who treat eating disorder patients who are specializing in young student athletes. Now we got right in that sweet spot where a membership site can really be valuable to the members; you’re giving them very specific information that people are passionate about getting that information, it’s not easy to find because the more niche you are the harder it is to find that detailed information. So that’s really right where you want to be.

So take the niche you’re thinking of, slice it in half and basically slice it in half again and try and get really narrow. If you think you might be too narrow you’re probably in the right spot because this is a big world we’re talking about and we’re talking about the internet, we’re talking about the entire universe of people on planet Earth who can subscribe to your stuff is probably a bigger audience than you may think or you may first think. So, try and narrow your audience down as much as you can so that the information is hard to find, which means they’re going to want to pay for it and you can give them really solid detailed information which keeps them on as members month after month.

So how many subscribers do you need to start? Everybody asks that question. And what do I need? Do I need a thousand members? Do I need a thousand people listening to my RSS feed or my podcast? And my answer is always you need one. You need one because you’re going to create this content and put it behind a wall and yeah, you may need several articles or several podcasts to get started but especially if you’re saying I’m just going to get this started and for those who join me early on or become charter members I’m going to charge a really low price and as long as you stay a member you get to keep that price. There’s ways you can do this with just starting a little bit of content and have just one listener, one. If you wait until you have some critical mass of members you’ll probably never do it. So, do it right away, pretend like you have a thousand member even if you’ve got one great content for that one member, create great stuff and you’ll grow it organically from there. Plus it gets you off of, kind of get’s you out of your chair and gets it done. , there’s so many people that wait and wait and wait until the right time and it just will never happen, you got to do it now.

And how much content do I need to start? It helps if you’ve got a lot but we’ll also talk about how membership sites can have too much and overwhelm their members. So I would say have a month’s worth. Whatever your service is or whatever your product is, have a month worth of content if you can create that in advance, get your membership site launched and then create more and put more and more and more content behind the wall as more and more members join. So don’t wait too long. You’d be surprised, people get overwhelmed very easily. If you have just a little bit and you can say here’s where you start. And you can guide them through the content you’re going to do pretty well. So don’t wait, if you have a month’s worth of content that’s kind of the ballpark that I say it’s time to start.

So, my message to you is really I would like you to treat your membership site, or treat your site as a membership site right now even if you have no intention or you’re going to wait, you’ve got some things to, , get through the holiday’s or whatever. There’s always excuses so I would say start, it’s never a bad time to start, so, but treat your site as if it were a membership site right now ‘cause there are certain things you need to do to get your site ready to have paying members.

All right, so what is our number one, our number one secret success tool in getting new members? And you’re probably going to be surprised, it’s not RSS, it’s not pay per click, where are you? There it is, email marketing.

Email marketing is our number one draw for our members. So, first things first, if you do not have an email newsletter list, if you’re not building an email newsletter list, start tonight. Start today to build that email newsletter list, come up with a product you can give away to bribe them to get your, their email address. And one of the fastest ways that we know how to do that, how to build that list fast is a light box.

Now a light box is one of those things that you install on your site that comes up and I’m going to show you an example of it in just a minute. But here’s how we first started with our email address. On the top left-hand corner of every page of traderinterviews.com we had an email subscription box. That red arrow is pointing to it right there. And we got, probably, 3 or 4 members a day subscribing to our newsletter. It’s just, everybody’s kind of used to seeing a subscription box on the left-hand side, it’s not out there enough, it’s not calling attention to itself enough. So if you’ve got one of these and you’re not having great luck this is why we suggest you go to a light box. And a light box is this, it darkens the outside of your website and pops this up and we say 5 free interview highlights sent to your inbox. Top traders discuss their strategies. Enter email, send the free interviews. Now there’s a whole variety, we could do an entire webinar on just how to design this light box and Emile and I have tried a bunch of different things. But I would just suffice it to say that people sometimes say, “Well, , those light boxes, they’re kind of annoying, they’re in the way.” They work. That’s all I can tell you is they work. We went from doing 3 or 4 subscribers on our newsletter to about 40 a day right after we launched this. And now we have days when we have 25, we’ve got 31 today, we’re still trying to figure out how to do this. We’ve had says we’ve had almost 200 if somebody’s done an email for us and promoted for us.

So, they can click the close box, I know, some people have just a version to light box or pop-ups but it works folks. I’m telling you it works. This is the fastest way to get people’s attention that you have a newsletter and that you’re offering something.

Now, you’ve got to offer them something good. In this case we offer them 5 free highlights of interviews. But, you’ve got to offer them something to get them, bribe them basically, to join your list.

The one we used it’s called actionpopup.com. That’s where you go get this action pop-up and they kind of have some support there on how to install it and that sort of thing. Emile and I always think the founder of this site looks like Anthony Michael Hall from Sixteen Candles.

All right, now, if you have an aversion to the light box and you don’t like that, although I’m telling you it works, I highly suggest you do it. But, if you don’t like it there’s another thing that people have said it works almost as well and that’s the slide up. And you may have seen this on some websites where at the bottom part of the screen, after you visit the site for about 15 minutes, it pops up from the bottom and doesn’t block the screen, but just comes up from the bottom, it kind of catches your eye. That works as well and you can get that at instantslideup.com.

But one of the things I want to say about the instant pop-up, let’s go back to that screen for just a second. For this light box, what Emile and I did is we designed it so that after they’re at the site for 15 seconds, which believe it or not, in internet time is a long time, if they’re here for 15 seconds or they go to leave the site the light box pops up. Now they can click close and close a tab or just leave the browser, they don’t have to do anything obviously, but that’s where we’ve kind of found the sweet spot where we leave them on the site long enough that it doesn’t pop up immediately. In other words, they’ve got a chance to see what our site is and get some picture in their mind of what we’re offering and then the light box comes up. I think if it comes up instantly it’s probably a little bit too quick. I haven’t even decided whether I like your site or even whether I like the way it looks and you’re popping something up to me. 15 seconds, while it doesn’t sound like a long time, believe me, if people come into your site and leave they do it within about 10 seconds normally. You probably, if you looked at Google analytics and seen people come to your home page and leave, they do it very, very quickly, so 15 seconds is a long time.

All right, so instantslideup.com if you don’t like the pop-up version.

Now, one of the things that I said earlier was that I think you should try, start treating your site as membership site right away is because subscribers on your list, to this email list, you have to start thinking about them, that they are on your list for one reason only. Does anybody think about what that reason is? They’re there to buy from you. That is it. That is why they’re on your list. We stopped thinking about trying to build our list from trying to get as many people as possible to going to we want people on our list that buy from us. That’s why we’re doing it. We like giving information out there but ultimately we’ve got to pay the bills, we want to make money on this, this is a business.

So, will some people say I’m not going to come to your site if you have the light box or if you start emailing me too often I’m going to unsubscribe? Yes, that may happen but the people who are passionate about the subject and as long as you’re putting good information out there, they will stay subscribed. You’re going to get people who unsubscribe.

, Emile and I have agonized when I see people unsubscribed from my list after an email. I put out, probably what I think is the greatest email ever and I get unsubscribes. You could tell people that the next email you’re sending out is going to tell you who killed JFK and they will unsubscribe, that’s just the way it is. So, we try not to take it personally anymore, we try to do the best we can to put great content out there, but ultimately, you have to realize that people are on your list to buy from you and you want to train your list to do that.

Now, woops, back it up there.

What I mean when I say train your list to understand that? I can always tell when we do joint promotional ventures, I’ll send out an email for somebody who’s got a similar product in the trading space and they’ll send out one for me and we always direct them to a page on our site for the 5 free interviews. That’s our hook, that’s our hook to get them in. And I can always tell when somebody has trained their list to act because they will get a very high pick up rate, a very high conversion rate. They’ll send out to 20,000 people and 2 or 3 thousand people will click on the link in that email, that’s huge. But I can also tell when people haven’t trained their list because somebody will say I just emailed out to 40,000 people for you. Awesome! And we’re thinking fantastic, we’re going to get tons of email subscriber sign ups. And we get 20.

So, you have to train your list from the very beginning to know that when I send you an email it is for you to take action on something. Make your emails short and my advice would be to never have more than a link to one thing in your email. I know it’s very hard, in newsletters, we think, we send out newsletters and I’ve got this article and this little box and I want them to go to 5 different places. The fact of the matter is that they’re probably going to click on one thing in your email, one link. Chances are they’re not going to come back to click anything else. So, in every message you send out it should be one link and I don’t mean one link in the email linked to it 4 or 5 times, well maybe that’s, 3 or 4 times at least, but only have one message in your email and you want them to go to one place. In other words, you are training them that when you send an email there’s one place for them to go, not six different places, not read this article over here, read that article over here; you’re going to send them to one place. And that’s really how you’re going to see your conversion on your email list really bounce up.

Even if it’s just to a free thing; we send out stuff to our email newsletter list to an article that we’ve posted or an article that we like online, we link to that one thing. We don’t try to get them to go to five different places because the honest part is they’re not going to, they’re going to go to one place so make it count.

So what should you give away as a teaser to draw your email list? And we made this mistake, we are a podcast, a paid podcast and we used to do interviews with traders, audio interviews, that’s what we’re selling you. When you become a member you are buying a membership to a paid audio site. Well, what we were giving away at first was five PDF reports on trading. And then one day I was just sitting there and something, I saw a video online or somebody said something to me and it clicked. I’m thinking why are we giving away PDF reports to get people to sign up for a list of a site that you’re paying for audio interviews? So, we changed it and we’re giving away 5 teasers of interviews, they’re basically getting 5 highlights or teasers of what they would be getting as members and we saw our conversions go up quite a bit when we started doing that. ‘Cause it just made sense to people, we drove it home that this is what you’re going to get as a member. So what you should give away is just whatever you’re going to be selling or whatever you’re selling access to, that’s what you should give away. Ok?

And there was a tendency, even for me and my brother, to hold back the best stuff. Let’s leave the best stuff for the members and, , our second best stuff we’ll give away to the newsletter list. It’s the opposite. Give your best stuff away, you’re going to have to put good stuff behind the membership wall for sure, but you want to make the best impression possible. So we took 5 of the interviews that I thought out of the 180 we’ve done, these are the 5 best we’ve got. And I boiled them down, they’re 40 minute interviews, they only get 6 or 7 minutes of them but it’s great stuff. And so make sure you give them, if you have, if you have articles behind your membership wall or you want to or it’s a podcast or whatever it is, give your best stuff away for free. Even if it’s in a condensed version, it doesn’t have to be the first thing, maybe just a teaser, make sure it’s your best stuff, keep that in mind.

It also takes a lot more than just paying great commissions to entice high traffic bloggers and sites to sign up. You have to be willing to do more to help your affiliates become successful – in their own sites and in your affiliate program.

One of the best affiliate programs around for content is INO.com. Brad Stafford was hired just over four years ago to jump-start their affiliate program and it has been a huge success. I wanted to get Brad on the phone and talk to him about what he did to make their affiliate program such a powerful force in their overall marketing program.

If you are a large content company or a single site owner, you’ll find tips in this interview to help you increase sales through a well-run affiliate program.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

Tim – MemberCon.com: Hi this is Tim Bourquin. Thanks for joining me for another interview from membercon.com. The whole idea of these interviews of course is to give you something to think about in doing your own membership site and selling your own subscriptions and so I wanted to talk to somebody who really knew the affiliate side of the game and somebody who could also just talk about marketing a membership site. So today I’m talking with Brad Stafford, he’s the marketing manager for ino.com, i-n-o.com. It’s a financial website so I knew him from my other website that I do, Trader Interviews, my membership site but Brad does a terrific job of basically getting affiliates recruited, motivated and just marketing the site overall so I wanted to get him on the phone and have him talk to us about how he does that. He has generously offered to do that with me, so Brad thanks very much for joining me on the phone.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Hey no problem. With an intro like that I think I’ve a lot to live up to so hopefully I won’t let anybody down.

Tim – MemberCon.com: It’s good because I get your emails all the time and you really do a fantastic job of using affiliates to promote this site so I wanted to talk to a little bit about how you got started and did that. First of all, how long has INO been a membership site?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well ino.com was originally launched in 1995 almost as an Amazon for the financial world selling books and as time went on I think at around 1999 is when we originally launched Market Club which is our premier membership site and we’ve pretty much been membership since then. We do operate another arm of the business which is just advertising and lead generation for when membership slows down, advertising is there to pick it up and vice versa.

Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s good. I want to definitely get into that lead generation part of that because I think that’s important for our membership site owners as well.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah absolutely.

Tim – MemberCon.com: At what point did they decide to start doing affiliate marketing as a way to generate more memberships?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well I’ve been here for almost 4 years now, 3 years I’m not sure but they started basically I would say 6 to 8 months before I came along and it was just I don’t want to say in shambles but there wasn’t much attention paid to affiliate marketing and to be honest with you I had zero experience with internet marketing and anything along those lines, I had a sales background. I’ve known Adam Hewison, the president, for years. I mean I went to elementary school with his daughter and he brought me on and basically said here’s what an affiliate program is, make it work make it happen and what I wanted to do is just change the way the internet and internet marketing worked from a business side where a lot of the affiliate programs that you deal with and whether it’s Commission Junction or whoever. There’s a huge blinding wall between the company and the affiliate themselves and so again what I wanted to do was to break that down and to make each affiliate a personal relationship. I did sales on a large scale and dealing with those interpersonal relationships hey how’s your dad doing? Hey, how’s your mom whatever the comment is, whatever the personal interaction is but that’s what I would say has made us so successful as we’ve grown to be.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so initially there were hardly any affiliates or if there were they weren’t creating any memberships. What percentage of the memberships these days come in through your affiliates?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: It’s a good question. Right now I think we’re probably close to about 65 to 70% of our memberships, of our paying memberships are coming through the affiliate program, the affiliate network.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Wow.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: The free offers, the leads that we’re driving into our database I would say 80% are coming through the affiliates.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Wow that’s huge so it’s obviously a big part now of the overall revenue for the whole site. So how did you get started with this? How did you go out and find affiliates initially to approach and say hey how about promoting ino.com?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well I mean the thing that I have in favor of me is we have a huge reach at INO. We have over 500,000 on our email list, we have millions of visitors every month and what I wanted to do was to go to each person, essentially you’re asking people to give up an advertising revenue, you’re asking them to bet on the com. You’re putting up our banners or posting our videos or whatever it is, is going to make you more money than your advertising a bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush. Well I’m trying to convince people that 2 in the bush is better than 1 in the hand and one of my ways that I’m able to do that is to say in all reality how can I help you? Whether it’s using my knowledge, using the tens of thousands of dollars that I know is spent educating me to pass that on to you or whether it’s how to harness some of our traffic and get it to your way. If people realize and people know that it’s a 2-way relationship it works much better and again I’d rather work on that kind of a level than just hey sell for me, sell for me, sell for me. What can I do for you and again it really takes their mindset off okay here comes another salesman as opposed to hey here comes somebody that wants to help me out and I legitimately do.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Yeah one of the things that I know a lot of people do with their affiliate programs is they just put it out there and they hope the affiliates will click on the link on their site …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Right.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … and just get signed up and start promoting but obviously it’s not that easy and one of the things you do that I liked was you pay for a lead so even though somebody is getting something for free that I direct them too you pay me money for everybody that signs up every legitimate lead so they don’t have to buy something to earn money …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Right.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … which is great for me as the affiliate. I’m wondering for a smaller company is that a possibility? When did you decide to actually to pay for a lead rather than pay only when they bought something?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well the lead revenue and I sort of have to take a step back and address another side of our business where we have ino.com is a free site. It’s charts, quotes, news and more and it’s an advertiser supported site. We’re able to take advertisers’ offers and specifically target them to our users which are leads in our database. So we’re selling leads but we’re obviously using the advertiser’s free offer to drive that lead and we know what that value is, we know when X person comes in we’re able to, because of Dave Maher our tech director and his I would say just wizardry with the formatting of our database, we’re able to see specifically how much each user is worth. Where that source came from and then how much that person’s worth to us in the long term and it was about 2 years ago that I came up with the idea to launch Trend Analysis which is one of our free offers. Trend Analysis, right now we pay $3 per first name and email address that comes into our database through an affiliate. Over I guess the course of a year and a half the Trend Analysis email list is about 125,000 and 85 to 90% came through the affiliate network. Now what we did with that is we took those leads and obviously tried to up sell them into one of our paid services but if we weren’t able to do that that person went into the general sort of bulk INO database where then we could make up that $3 hopefully within a 6 to 8 month period. Thankfully because of the quality leads that affiliates are driving because we are paying so much for those leads, we’re able to turn that revenue around within a month. An old term in car sales is you rolled over in your car well we never rolled over in our leads which is a good thing because every asset that comes into our database is a valuable asset to us whether it’s $5000 over the course of a year or $5 we don’t care as long as we’re in the black.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: So that’s sort of where we’re going.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so you through a formula decided how much each lead is worth and then decided to pay affiliates based on that. I think a lot of people who have been listening to this might worry that, well how do I keep somebody from just throwing emails and mails at me that they just make up and create Yahoo accounts for.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Sure.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Do you kind of monitor how good the quality of the leads are from each affiliate?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Absolutely and the first thing is not only with the leads that affiliates drive us are they getting paid for that lead but we’re able to, again with Dave Maher’s help, we’re able to tattoo that affiliate code onto that person’s registration so when they order Market Club or when they subscribe to Market Club or INO TV Premium that affiliate’s getting credit. Now with regards to the quality it is a I don’t want to say never-ending battle but it’s always a back and forth. We don’t and I know and a lot of other affiliate programs are different but we don’t allow affiliates to run pay per click or any external marketing. Reason being is we had an affiliate who basically is just using our search words to drive in leads. Their commission check went from I would say a healthy $5000 to $8000 every month to $25000 where we took a step back I called him and I said hey what are you doing? Oh I’m using this, I’m using that. Well we don’t allow that and in digging more into that person’s leads we were able to figure out that he was either spamming or he was the owner of the most prolific Nigerian trading database in the world. So we had to put a couple of internal monitors in place where we’re able to track which affiliate and what their revenue per lead is so if it’s $8 per lead that’s coming in that’s good we’re making money on that person. But we also implemented a 30-day lag on the payments so an affiliate comes in and any affiliate sales for example in September that were made by that affiliate, those leads aren’t paid in October, it’s paid in November because what we’re able to do on top of just the basic tracking of revenue we’re also able to track how active that lead is. And again, a lot of companies are able to do this but a lot of them aren’t. I would encourage really anybody that database management is crucial and so what we’re able to do is say okay X affiliate sent in 50 leads and of those 50 leads 2 have actually opened an email, 2 have actually visited the website so we’re able to go into I contact that affiliate and say listen how did these leads come in? Oh they came this way and 9 times out of 10 they’re using something else either they’re going on forums to drive leads or whatever it is and so we are not liable for those leads. We’re basically able to say these 50 leads or 48 leads are now dumped from the database. It’s again an ongoing battle because we do we really are one of the only affiliate programs that pay for leads and pay for them in volume …

Tim – MemberCon.com: Right.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: … so it just sort of comes with the territory.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Now do you track an affiliate cookie or that tattoo forever? It seems like sometimes it’s 90 days anything they buy within 90 days. Sounds like you’re a little further out than that.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: We do and again the biggest thing when I came in and I guess I was in a good situation because I didn’t know business as usual so my mindset was, why don’t we pay these guys for much longer I mean their value to us is so high why not pass that along to the affiliate. I mean if we can pay affiliates $5000 every month versus $5000 and then $500 I’d rather pay them more over the long term and so our cookies are 365 days and again with the tattooing we’re able to, on our backend keep even more intricate track of that because the cookie system, it’s hard because it’s flawed but it’s not I mean you know.

Tim – MemberCon.com: It’s imperfect for sure.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: And so again one of my things was I would have affiliates contacting me and going hey I’m getting thousands of clicks and only so much recurring or so many conversions and through digging into that and this was about I guess about 2, 2½ years ago I sat down with my tech director and I said listen we need to get this solved and he’s like it’s going to end up costing us a lot more money and sort of saved sales or saved affiliate payments but I said listen it’s the right thing to do and he agreed and we put a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort into making sure that a lead that’s driven to us is attached to that affiliate and that affiliate’s going to get paid whether it’s $3 or whether it’s $180. We want to make sure that they’re getting paid because if you’re making money then you’re obviously going to continue work us. It just makes good sense in the long term.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Right. It’s like any business relationship, it’s built on trust. If they don’t trust that they’re going to get credit for that they’re going to stop promoting.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Exactly and there’s no reason. I’m relatively young when I came in and I want to develop long term relationships. I want to be in this industry because I love it for 50 more years hopefully doing more than what I’m doing now and with more success but I want to know you Tim in 50 years. I want to know everybody else that I know in 50 years and be able to look them in the face every day and say I did everything I could to make you as much money as I could.

Tim – MemberCon.com: How about the software that you’re using? Is it something you built in-house?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: No, actually we currently are using a third-party service called Direct Track and Direct Track it’s been good I mean I think with anything that you use whether it’s Microsoft or whatever whatever affiliate program management system you use they’re going to have things where you’re like hey I wish I could change that, I wish this could work a little better. But overall I’ve been happy with Direct Track. They give us the ability again to if we’ve got problems I can sort of burn the phones up enough to get it solved relatively quickly.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So one of the things you do is you go out and you contact these affiliates and you say, look we can make you money but one of the things you also do different is you say if you promote us, we’ll promote you. You’ve got a very popular blog that you allow people to do guest posts on if they promote for you so it’s more than just you’ll make money if you promote us, we’ll help promote you too. Has that been a big factor in getting affiliates?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Absolutely. with INO our services are not $5000 courses you know. They’re low-priced courses because we want to hit every trader. We want to provide the highest quality service possible but we don’t and especially now in this economy we don’t want to break people’s trust by saying okay it’s $10,000 when we know what it’s really worth and that’s sort of a disadvantage to me because there’s other affiliate programs out there that can go out to new affiliates and say hey if you promote our affiliate program you make 10 sales you make $1,000 a sale, that’s a pretty good chunk of change. With our service it takes a lot more to get to that point so and again with me what I want to do is build that relationship of I can help you in more than just sending you a $1,000 commission check every month. I can help you learn more about marketing. I can work with you to help improve your email marketing or whatever it is and absolutely, the guest blogs have been very popular with affiliates it’s a great place to get exposure for them and it also benefits us because hey it’s great content for our site so it’s really a win-win.

Tim – MemberCon.com: a lot of companies out there kind of put affiliate marketing into the same vein as just general marketing. A lot of times it gets thrown into the lap of just somebody else who’s probably got a ton of other things on their plate already. Do you recommend hiring somebody just to dedicate only to affiliates and that’s all?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: From personal experience if you want to have an affiliate program that makes more than 50 bucks a month you’ve got to have somebody that’s working more than 50 hours a week. I’ve worked with too many people that go, oh yeah help me learn about affiliate marketing and then they’ve got 18 different things on their plate and can’t focus on it. I mean if you want to continue to get more affiliates every week, if you want to continue to build those relationships, add more sales, add more revenue it is a full-time job. I work, no lie, between 60 to 70 hours a week just making sure everybody’s happy, making sure I’m staying in touch with people. So you really can’t realistically expect oh get an affiliate program put it on Commission Junction or Clickbank and we’ll roll along. That might happen but it won’t happen for long and you won’t have much success.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So you’ve probably tried a lot of different things in your approach to a brand new affiliate? What works what clicks when you say when I pick up the phone and I call or I email here’s what typically works for me to get them interested?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well I mean the big this is with me again integrity and honesty is first and foremost and when I go to a new affiliate, before I pitch them on the affiliate program I basically say, listen I’ve got some services, I’ve checked out your site, which I do, I’ve followed you on Twitter, I’ve checked out your Facebook whatever it is, I come to you for a reason it’s not only because you probably have decent traffic but you are good at what you do and what I want to do is have them look at our services because it’s just like the car salesman who sells Volvos but drives a Honda. You really can’t believe somebody is going to put their name behind something that they don’t like so before and affiliates say well I don’t like Market Club but I like INO TV for example and I want that honesty. I want affiliates that tell me like it is. I don’t want just marketers who are like; oh I can sell 50,000 of these. Great but where is the integrity behind it? So what I do is say, listen let me give you a staff membership to our services to check them out because if you’re not willing to check them out, look at them as quality services then you’re not going to be a good affiliate long term for me because you’re not being honest. You might say oh this is a great service but you’ve never actually looked at it, you’ve never actually checked out our charting package or anything along those lines.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: So with me I like to take that to him and say look at it first then we’ll figure out what we can do from there.

Tim – MemberCon.com: And how about who you accept into the affiliate program. It’s easy to put a link up there again and just let any blogger pick up an affiliate banner and post it but do you kind of concentrate on that long tail of a lot of bloggers with a little bit of traffic that add up to a lot I mean or is it the 80/20 rule that 20% of your affiliates give you 80% of the revenue.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: We market different. There are services that market on a large scale where they basically gather up all their affiliate reach and then over the course of 2 weeks send out emails, do blog posts, just selling the product and what we do is market more on an informational basis. We have the Market Club educational videos where we’ll teach about Apple and diversions so something along those lines and so we require a huge reach and bloggers are by far the biggest for us. There’s 2 things; one, I’ll take a blogger that makes 1 sale a month because they’re excited, they’re easy to work with you get back and forth emails real fast and more often than not they’re good genuine people. I’ll take that versus a huge Bloomberg deal because you spend so much time wasting trying to get to the right person, trying to do this oh we got to get this approved or we got to get that approved. It’s a matter of valuable time and sure Bloomberg could make 10,000 sales but in the time that it would take them to get those sales for me I can get 100 affiliates who would make a sale a month for me and I’m fine with that and I don’t have the headache so I love the bloggers because they’re just so cool they’re interesting people and again they’re the majority of our business, they’re the reason our videos are getting 50,000 views at a pop.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Yes, speaking of those videos one of the things you guys also do really well is you create a lot of free content to give to your affiliates to give to their list which drives traffic. So how would you decide how much content to give out for free to kind of spur those affiliates to keep talking about you?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well again with Market Club the videos are really the connector point that we have with our audience and the affiliate network is a big part of that. Again, most of our affiliates are bloggers or educators in some realm and they don’t want to continue to sell a service but they’ll post free content it saves them a blog post, it saves them a tweet whatever it is and they’re able to say, hey here’s some free content, I looked at the video, I thought it was interesting they give their 2 cents about it whether they trash it or whether they praise it doesn’t matter to us I mean you’re giving your honest opinion and that’s what people want that’s what your visitors want as a blogger, as an email list owner is people want your honest opinion about something.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So do you push to have them put an actual post out about a piece of content or is a banner ad on the blog the most effective. What works best?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: banner ads, maybe I’m skewed but the only thing that banner ads are really good for is branding. I mean the way that you’re going to connect to an audience is through harnessing that blogger’s or that website owner’s credibility in your favor. when I go to a blogger and I say you can put up banners and that’s great but I really want you to use the service and watch the videos because your word is worth more than 100,000 impressions because 100,000 impressions might get 50 clicks but 1 blog post might get 1,000 might get 500 and that’s much more valuable not only to them but to us and so I would much rather have email blasts go out and tweets and Facebook updates and blog posts than everyone go well I’m just going to do the banners. I mean the banners are great. They’re going to make some money for you but they’re not going to be as effective as a personal interaction with your visitors.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So then, do you give every affiliate a free trial to all the services?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: I give them a lifetime staff membership.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So they can access everything they want forever?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Everything.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Even the smallest traffic blogger affiliate?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: I don’t care; it’s all going to work out for the better. Here’s a perfect example. When I first, I guess it was about 2 years ago I had really just stumbled across the blog and I’ll hold the name off for now but heck of a nice guy, emailing back and forth, had great ideas about markets and a very, very intelligent guy and had very little if any traffic. He is now one of my biggest affiliates because he had that staff membership and he’s grown where Market Club is almost intertwined with his website so the visitors that come to his site they go, hey I relate this with Market Club, I relate this guy with Market Club because he’s been there so long. So if I just said okay so and so, I’ll give you a 1 month trial, let me know what it is then where we are now where he’s making $8,000 to $10,000 a month without even trying that would be hurtful for both of us. So, I look at it as you’re going to benefit from our services in one way or the other and all the updates that we make we update to real time and add the UK markets and we go in to Australia with Market Club, that’s all going to be included. Again, the big thing is integrity from me and if somebody likes the service then they’re going to be a much better affiliate than somebody who says, oh yeah it looks like a good service, you’ve got some good marketing material but they’ve never actually opened the webpage.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Well that definitely sets you apart and I suppose it’s nothing you couldn’t take away if you’ve given somebody a membership for a year and they haven’t given you a single lead, there’s nothing that says that you can’t turn it off because they’re not active anymore …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Sure.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … but it’s just that I like the idea that, I think most people that want to start an affiliate program come from it as they’re not to be trusted, they’re going to try and screw us, they’re going to try and make money. You come from it as, let’s give them everything they need to sell and don’t burn a bridge because you never know what somebody’s going to turn into you know, I like that.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah it is and again I’ve had a couple battles with the partners here because of that reason. I said I want to give it away forever. Well we can’t just do that and a bunch of umming and ahing and they’re on board making sure that I give out 50+ memberships a month. So yeah it’s worked.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so if you had to go back from day 1 and talk to yourself and say here’s what’s worked best out of all these things we’ve tried some worked some didn’t work. What I’m getting at is tell our listeners what you think was kind of the most valuable thing that you have learned that you wish you had known that first day when you started.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Oh boy, the first thing that, to be honest, what I would do is tell myself, figure out how you can help them first because if you can help them with something they’re going to help you and that’s by far proven to be the most successful I guess sale pitch for me is saying listen, I want to figure out what I can help you with. If I can help you accomplish your goals then I can work my goals into your goals.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Excellent.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: That’s it, that’s it.

Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s great Brad. Well hey I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. I think our listeners will get a lot out of this.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Great.

Tim – MemberCon.com: And listeners, if you want to go check out how ino.com does their affiliate program, it’s i-n-o.com. Actually, is there a better place to send them Brad, to take a look?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yes actually, ino.com/insider and that’s our affiliate only blog so that’s a private blog. Also shoot me an email, brad@ino.com and tell me that you heard my interview from Tim and we’ll go forward from there. I’ll get you a staff membership, if anything I’ll get you a staff membership.

Tim – MemberCon.com: I appreciate that Brad and oh one other thing I forgot to mention that I thought that you do really well is you develop a separate list and separate marketing altogether for your affiliates versus your customers which a lot of people don’t do. They don’t see the affiliates as somebody they need to have a whole marketing plan around directly.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah again it comes back to the personal interaction. You’re not going to send the same email to your users that you would your affiliates because I go to my affiliates in a personal way and say, hey let me open myself up and ask you to help me and ask you to post this and ask you to do this you know. I don’t expect anybody to do it. I always give myself a thumbs up like hey great, so and so posted this or so and so tweeted that. I look at it as little wins and every person on that affiliate list needs to be managed differently than your main user-list so absolutely keep them separate keep in touch with and do everything you can to help them.

Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s right. One other question I forgot I …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … need to ask you in my notes here. Contests, do you run contests every so often for affiliates to see who can sell the most and are they effective?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: We do and the contests are effective it’s again I think with us and I mentioned it previously is we don’t pay out a lot. We pay out 40% per sale but the sale price is not $8000 so the contests are a good way not only to get the affiliates excited about something cash prizes whatever it is but it also gives me the ability to open up a little more of myself and tell it like it is. The last contest we had we did a drawing where my now 2-year old son pulled out the winners and everyone had a good time, laughing about him, joking and all that stuff but the contests are a good way you just have to I’m still learning the contest thing because we do things a little bit different. It’s not a performance contest, it’s a participation contest. So if everybody participates you get an entry and so then we do random drawings from there.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so it’s not about who can bring in the most leads in a month.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well it depends. We don’t do it like that just because that doesn’t fit with our model. Other affiliate programs do where they say okay here’s a lead contest, whoever does the most leads but what I found is again because I’ve got so many of those bloggers I would instantly blow them out and they would go, oh great here comes a contest where these 5 guys are the only top 5 who have a chance whereas I’d rather have somebody who made 1 entry win something because then he’s going to be like, hey look at this I won something I just got 1 entry. sometimes it pisses the people off at the top but if they’re at the top they’ve already made 15 grand or whatever in a commission check versus the 500 that the 1 guy with the the 1 entry made.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So a good idea yeah maybe mix the 2. Maybe a company may have a performance one then next time you get 1 lead and you’re entered into a random drawing. I like that too.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah and again you’re hedging yourself with we’re able to hedge because we have advertising to back up so if that person just drives in 1 lead for us we’ll make money off of that person. Will we make the $5000 or $2000 prize back? Maybe not for a couple of years but we’re able to back that up so the performance might work better for the smaller affiliate with really just that focus to go on to reward the high performers and to essentially keep them coming back.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Excellent Brad, hey thanks very much for your time, I really appreciate it.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: No problem. Hey thanks everybody for listening, appreciate it.

So Mike and a partner created a series of instructional DVDs and began selling them to the passionate community of wakeboarders. The success of those DVDs led to the launch of their current membership site, LearnWake.com. (Warning: don’t visit this site if you get jealous easily – it’s incredible and you’re sure to have a bad case of “website envy” all weekend.)

In this interview, you’ll learn how Mike made the transition from selling DVDs to selling memberships to his website. You’ll also hear him talk about how he tried to market the membership website the same way he marketed the DVDs and realized it was a totally different game. Finally, you’ll learn how he set pricing initially by getting into the minds of his prospective customers and how he gets through slow patches by marketing to a worldwide audience.

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hello everybody. Welcome back to MemberCon.com. Thanks very much for joining me for another interview with a membership site owner. Today, we’re going to be speaking with Mike Mclin. He has a web site called LearnWake.com. I was interested in talking to him about how he got into starting this site and what he thinks are some good ideas and tips for growing a membership site. So, let’s start with your site. First of all, it’s a gorgeous site. That’s kind of what attracted my eye in the first place. Do you design sites as well? I mean, did you do this thing all yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah, me and my team, we pretty much built the site from ground up including all of the visuals and everything from preproduction all the way to the completed project. And we’ve also populated all the content that’s on the site, all the videos, motion graphics, and stuff like that.

MemberCon.com: How did the site start? Were you a wakeboarder yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah. I used to wakeboard a lot. And I actually used to ride on the Pro Tour and stuff like that. I kind of was deep into the industry and knew a lot of the key people in the industry. And one of the largest wakeboarding camps where people go for instruction from all over the world is right here in my hometown of Clermont, Florida. So, we actually started at a DVD series, an instructional DVD series, and it took off and did really, really well. And we were thinking about making a sequel, pretty much, to the DVDs and we kind of started realizing the business model of delivering instructional content is actually much better suited for a web site than for DVDs because of all the interactivity you can do on a web site with forums and people talking to each other and asking questions. Plus, we started realizing that when we’re selling DVDs, you start off and DVDs sell really well. And then eventually, as they become older and mature, it stops selling in stores. Where a web site, a membership web site, is the complete opposite. The more you mature, the more money you make because the bigger your membership base became. So, that was a really exciting business model for us and we were just really interested in taking the next step in doing a membership web site and it’s worked out really, really well for us so far.

MemberCon.com: So, you kind of got proof positive that people would pay for this content by selling the DVD. Did you do any type of surveys or kind of focus groups to find out if there were other web sites out there that were selling content memberships or was this the first one that would be out there?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: For our industry, we’re the top-selling DVD in the industry, and we sold probably a little over 100,000 units. So, we moved quite a few units. So we knew there was a very big market out there comparably and it hadn’t been packed yet. So, we pretty much knew all the stats and stuffs because we’d already done it to the DVD models. So, we knew the industry was there and ready for something like this. So, we pretty much just, yeah, we kind of pioneered it, at least for our industry. No one was delivering instructional content yet. And we’ve had a lot of people come up to us now and say, “Man, we were thinking about doing that. I wished we had jumped on that before you guys did.” So, we definitely kind of took advantage of that situation.

MemberCon.com: When you first started the site, was it free content or was it, from day one, it was a membership site?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Immediately, we realized that the goal was to make money obviously just like any membership web site. So how we wanted to get people on the site initially was we offered beta period. We figured it was a great way to test out the membership software since we have never done this before. And at the same time, it was a great way to get people to join the web site. So, we offered just a one-month beta because everything was pretty easy to iron out all the little bugs and stuff. And from there on, we just basically started charging. We offered a free week trial for the first few months that we were doing the web site, and that’s pretty much gone now. We’ve been a pay web site ever since.

MemberCon.com: Did you propagate behind the member wall content from the original DVDs to get content, kind of front loaded in there or did you put new stuffs in?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Well, the goal was to have 100% new content. And that was also what we were trying to do. When we created the DVDs, we always prided ourselves on not recycling content. And we tried to do that, but under certain restrictions, since wakeboarding is, for people that don’t know, it’s kind of like snowboarding from behind a ski boat. So obviously, it’s very seasonal. Our memberships are much higher in the summer than they are in the winter. So, we definitely want to make it, to launch the web site heading into the spring/summer area. So we kind of had to rush a few little things here and there. So we didn’t have 100% original content when we first launched the site. I’d say probably 75% to 85% of our content at that time was complete original content. And now all of it is.

MemberCon.com: When you are offering memberships, when they start to drop off, do you do anything to try to keep them? And have you found the people rejoin come next summer?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We definitely, we’ve only been going at this for about one and half years. I think we’re right around 18 months. So we started in April of ‘08 and right now it’s September of 09. So, yeah we have found a lot of people have resigned back up that we had lost during the winter. Also, we basically just change our marketing strategy. Since we’re a summer sport, we try to start marketing towards Australia and places like that during our winter since that’s their summer. So, kind of like just like surfers try to follow the endless summer. We’re doing the same thing with our marketing. We’re always trying to market and get our web site out to wherever it’s summer. So when it’s winter here, it’s summer in Australia, and that’s pretty much the market we tried to tap into at that time.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, that’s a great idea because you’re right. It’s summer somewhere always. How about pricing? How did you decide that it would be, I think you’ve $9.99 a month and then $99 for the year.

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: You know lot’s of people basically have this recurring payments, checking out there bank accounts every month. Lots of times for services they don’t use or they forget about. And $9.99 is kind of a sneaky amount. It’s single digit. Seems like it’s not that much. So, I think a lot, maybe they don’t keep real good track and we’re thinking, “Hey, you know, that’s something that maybe someone just might not notice,” or maybe it’s something that they just might not care. They’re like, “$9.99 seems very cheap. I’ll go ahead and let it go through the winter because I know I’ll be using it next summer.” So, that was kind of our strategy for that. We want it to seem like it was cheap, and $9.99 being a single digit instead of, for example, $14.99 which will be two digits. It just seemed like, it seems like it made it that much cheaper and that much less, you know, significant on a credit card bill. And then as far as a $99.99, that was kind of from our DVD business model. We had a series of DVDs and almost all of our profits are made actually in our box set where people would pay larger amounts and save money on the series as a whole instead buying each one individually. And we basically just took that same business model and applied it to the membership. If you buy a whole bunch now, you get it at a cheaper price. And I’d say, right now, we’re probably at 20% to 25% of our members are on the annual plan instead of the monthly.

MemberCon.com: OK. That’s a pretty good percentage. And I would imagine that, for a site that’s not about a business opportunity or making money, $9.99 would seem to me too to be somewhere where it’s just something you would let it keep going because it’s not 100 bucks a month.

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Right. Yeah, it’s easy to fly under the radar at $9.99 a month or yeah, just to seem like it’s really significant and it’s also something that a mom wouldn’t mind buying for their teenage son and having that recurring payment. She looks at it as $9.99 and it’s not that big of a deal. “I’ll let him keep the subscription.”

MemberCon.com: Well, let’s talk about what’s worked for you best in terms of marketing, whether it be a search engine optimization or spending money on paper click advertising, or live events that you market to. What worked best for your particular industry?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Just jumping back a little bit. With our DVD model, we were very heavy into print advertising. The industry-leading magazine is Wakeboarding Magazine for our industry and we would purchase ad space in there, which is just approximately say two grand an ad for a full-page color ad. This is very pricey when you’re just trying to start a company with nothing, a web site company where you’re building on your own. You don’t have any revenue out of the gate. So, we kind of went back to that business model to start off with. I think we did two ads, and we realize that we were getting fast with that. And we realized that it’s a different type of industry, it’s a different type of product, and we needed a different type of marketing strategy. So basically, what we’ve done now is we found that getting our web site basically in the news of certain news web sites that deal with Wakeboarding, news web sites in our industry. We have wakeworld.com, Wakeboarding Magazine’s web site which is wakeboardingmag.com. Getting in their editorial content, first off, it’s completely free, we’ve gotten a huge amount traffic back from that. So I would say that’s been our biggest thing mainly because they already have the site. They’re already on the Internet in a web browser. All they have to do is click our link at the end of a story or something that, and they’re on our web site. Whereas if someone’s reading something in a magazine, they got to put the magazine down, go to their computer, browse on the web, remember your web address, and get to your site. So we found that on line marketing definitely works for on line web sites. We have a very good product. We’re definitely leading our industry in that whole situation. So, we’ve realized that we can go ahead and throw some of these web sites a free instructional video here and there. It adds concept to their web site. It adds value to their web site to have our content on there. And basically, we’ve kind of integrated that into affiliate program also to where we have our video player on their site, people click on the video player or what not to get to our site. It’s basically an affiliate click and it’s worked out really, really well. The main bulk of our affiliate clicks and stuff are coming from other media web sites and stuff like that. So, really we have several of our big affiliate accounts which are media accounts, other web sites, and they’re the ones that are really taking advantage of the system.

MemberCon.com: How popular or important is the community aspect to the message boards and having members talk to each other to the value of what you’re selling in the membership site?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We’re looking at wakeboarding camps and wakeboarding coaches, and how much has it cost for riders to, for example, going to a wakeboard camp will cost them over a grand a week. So we’re thinking how can we make it…how can we simulate the coaching online, and that’s what really the forums are for. They can ask questions and do all sorts of stuff. We’ve also got what we call a user clip section which is kind of like a little mini youtube built into our site where our members can upload videos of them doing maneuvers tricks or what not behind the boat and can put it on our bulletin board, and we can basically analyze the clip, tell them what they’re doing wrong. So it’s almost just like virtual coaching, and the people that had really taken advantage of the system are loving it. So it’s really, really kind of stepped up the game, and it’s really just taken kind of what we do in our industry to another level.

MemberCon.com: How often do you feel like you need to add new videos or new content that aren’t submitted by your members, the professionally produced like you have, to the site?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We have several different types of content that we put on the site. We try to create and publish at least one instructional video per week, and that’s a pretty polished looking, about three to four-minute instructional video, nicely edited, done with some graphics and stuff. So, we try to do something like that once a week. We have what’s called a quick clip which are just simple little five, 10-second clips performing a trick from a professional rider. We try to get two of those up a week. And then we have what’s called library pages which is basically just a page kind of like…think of it as an encyclopedia of all the tricks on wakeboarding. We basically try to create an instructional page that tells you how to do a trick. We try to add one of those per week as well. And then everyday, we answer questions in our bulletin board. So quite of bit of updating and currently, it’s just me and one other person. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s really starting to get to the point where it’s starting to pay off.

MemberCon.com: I was going to say is this your full time gig, or do you have a separate career and would you quit that if this got big enough?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: This is not our full time gig, but we’re looking at it to possibly be that probably within the next year or so. We’re over 100% growth every month this year compared to last, and if we do that again next year, then this will be sufficient as to be our only job. We’re also looking at branching out and basically using the business model we’ve done for a LearnWake, and we’ve already acquired the names for LearnSnow, LearnBMX, LearnMoto. So, we’re basically looking at taking this business model, this template that we’ve created and apply it to other sports, and just starting to expand and see where we can go with this thing.

MemberCon.com: Excellent. Well, having those skills to be able to put those together yourself is certainly a big benefit there. Well, let me ask you about those content pieces that you add each week. I’m assuming that you probably do a lot of your filming in a couple of days or a couple of weeks over the summer and then you slowly kind of dole it out over the weeks during the winter. Am I correct in that assumption?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: That is the goal but it’s kind of one of the things that doesn’t end out working out that way. We’re always like going to build a whole bunch of videos and stockpile them up then we then just start releasing them. But it ends up being one of the things where we’ve kind of built on as we go. And, unfortunately, that’s how it’s been. Hopefully, one day we’ll be able to start stockpiling them though and start doing that but we just haven’t gotten to that point yet.

MemberCon.com: What’s the end goal? You mentioned building other sites with the same model. Do you see yourself building a huge media company and then selling it off to a big player or have you thought about it?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We have thought about it. We’re not really sure what the goal is yet. We kind of just, I think, want to see where we’re going to take it, and we love having a membership web site because when the economy takes a slide and people start cutting advertising cost, we’re not getting hit at all because we don’t make our money off of advertising. So I love having a site where we’re actually selling a service. So there’s no cost to goods or anything like that. We’re actually just selling a virtual service. So I really like the business model, and I’d like to just keep going with it and see where we could take it. And, yeah, eventually, I guess, either sell it off or have other people running the concept for us, and we just keep it going.

MemberCon.com: All right. Well, listeners and viewers, you got to check out learnwake.com even if you have no interest in wakeboarding, it’s just a terrific, terrific example of a great membership site done right, and we’ll link to that in the notes for today’s interview as well. Mike, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate you talking to me.

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: OK. Sounds good, Tim. Thanks.

Listen in as we talk about how he got started, how he promotes his membership site and information products and how he decided what to charge.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hi. This is Tim Bourquin. Thanks very much for joining me for another interview on membercon.com. We’re going to be talking with Tim Sykes today and he’s got a membership site and an investment site that I’ve been following for quite sometime. He does a great job of promoting that site and getting members. We’re going to talk to him about he got started in doing that and maybe some tips and tricks that’s he has gotten along the way for getting exposure and growing the members. So, Tim, thanks very much for joining me on the show today.

Tim Sykes: Thanks for having me, Tim.

MemberCon.com: Well, so I followed you now for a couple of years, I think. How long have you had your membership site?

Tim Sykes: I started in June of 2008, so just over a year.

MemberCon.com: At some point, were you doing your newsletter for free or was it always the intention to have a membership site?

Tim Sykes: Yeah, now, I started my blog in November of 2007 and I was just posting the results of my stock trade after the fact and it’s all verified by Covestor which actually taps into my brokerage account but people wanted, you know, real time trade alerts. So, I eventually came up with the idea of TIMalerts, which is just real time trade alerts and then that created a whole membership site. So, I basically just listened to what my audience wanted and then created it.

MemberCon.com: You got a great story I think that probably helped boost you into that paid membership site about some money you got and turned it into a whole lot more money. Tell that story, if you could, real quick.

Tim Sykes: Yeah. Basically, my parents gave me control of my bar mitzvah gift money. I was a tennis player in high school and I was injured so I had nothing to do so my parents gave me control of $12,000. I thought that I would lose it all. Instead I turned that $12,000 into about two million dollars by the time I graduated college. I started a hedge fund. I realized I wasn’t that great at running a hedge fund but while I was running it, I was in this TV show called Wall Street Warriors. That was a big hit. It’s now in 14 countries. And thanks to that, I learned that a lot of people haven’t the faintest idea of what stock trading and short selling is about. So, I decided to create a blog and a newsletter and a book and just basically teach what I’ve been doing for the past decade.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, that’s good you got to build this audience actually and you had this kind of built in audience before. You started your membership site which I know helps a lot but could you basically start the membership site at zero and develop it from there or how important was that to have that built in audience first?

Tim Sykes: Yeah, I mean I did have a little bit of an audience thanks to the TV show but a lot of people were skeptical. I mean it was a reality TV show and it wasn’t my greatest minute. So, I basically had to prove myself and I think when you’re starting any membership site in any niche whether it’s the stock market or cooking or plumbing, you know, you have to prove that your content is valuable. And luckily, I had had six months before of just free content. So, I had a lot of people who were making a little money off of my picks but then they wanted something more. They wanted it real time. So, this added to what I was already teaching. So, you just take it to the next level and you have to prove why people should pay you.

MemberCon.com: A lot of membership site owners will say that their most valuable part of their membership site is a forum or some sort of community. Looking at your site, it looks like, yours is a little bit different in that it’s almost a membership to you and that’s the most valuable part. Was that different? Did you ever think about starting a forum or develop the community or was that not important?

Tim Sykes: Yeah, I mean I would love to. The problem is that most people don’t know what they’re talking when it comes to penny stocks and short selling. So, my view was kind of different from everybody else’s. I have this problem before. Back in ‘99, I was a just basic Yahoo free group. This was before I even made my millions. And I was just part of a group and everyone was sharing trading ideas and I realized that my ideas were better than everybody else’s. So, I kind of learned that if you have some kind of edge over everybody else, then you can use that edge and kind of charge for it because you know that it’s worthwhile. So, yeah, I mean again, I’m still looking for partners. But in the penny stock niche, it’s very tough to trust anybody and to find good information.

MemberCon.com: One of the things I’ve seen on your blogs that I followed pretty much from the beginning is you have kind of this outward persona that is sometimes controversial. You’ll call people out when you think they need calling out and some of your post have this kind of edge to you. And yet, I’ve met you, Tim and you’re very calm, very, “even-demeanored” guy. It didn’t seem like the persona matches. Do you kind of use…is it almost like an act in the sense to get publicity initially?

Tim Sykes: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because you do have to kind of act a little bit but then also, I use my blog as kind of therapy like I just let it all out. This is my personal diary online. I’m not that…you have the same reaction that a lot of people do because in the blog, I really rip into people. I really let it all out. It’s like my alter ego. And people like it and it’s good for me when I’m sitting in front of the computer all day. So, I get to feel excited. My audience seems to like it. So, it’s a win-win. You don’t have to do that. You can be yourself. The key is really just giving good information and most importantly, collecting testimonials. I mean the only way to really promote my product is due to the fact that I have literally hundreds of people making money almost every single day. And every single testimonial, I capture and I save for future use to show, “Look, these people are making money based on what I’m telling them.” So, the alter ego thing is nice entertainment. It’s a nice therapy for myself but it’s not the core of the business.

MemberCon.com: In an investment type or kind of a stock picking site, it seems like it would be very easy to sell the value. “Look it’s 40 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month, or whatever it is but the picks I’m giving out can make you thousands of dollars.” Is that the number one way you market it or are there other ways do you think to draw an audience?

Tim Sykes: That’s it. You just need to create some kind of value proposition and I hate to use that term because it’s so formal but that’s what it comes down to, you know. Very rarely do you find anything in this world full of like just scheming, manipulative people, especially in the finance world, where, you know, you can see everything happening in real time. You can partake in trades if you want to. I’m not trying to recommend anybody to buy or sell any stock. I’m just trying to teach what I would do and how I’d profit. But if you can make that pick, you know. Everyone is so used to spending money. You buy a sofa for like a thousand dollars. Sure it’s a good sofa but you don’t get any money back. This is kind of like a sofa that gives you money and it can teach you over time. It might not be as comfortable as a sofa but you can actually make your money back and that’s very important.

MemberCon.com: What’s been the biggest return on your investment in terms of marketing dollars to get new members, whether it be email or paper click or something else. What’s worked for you?

Tim Sykes: Despite my success, I’m really bad with marketing. I just started emailing a few people but most of it, I just like expressing myself through facebook and Covestor and Covestor, I guess, would have to be my number one thing because Covestor taps into my brokerage account. It verifies all my trades. I’m number one out of 30,000 traders so it gives me…it qualifies me as an “expert”. Really, all I do is just let it out. It’s kind of a nice business model because, again, if you’re an expert in any kind of industry, whether you have five or 10 or 20 years experience, and you just talked about what you know, it’s okay to be wrong, but the fact that you have so much experience means that there’s value in what you say. So, I would have to say the number one thing is just letting it all out, good or bad.

MemberCon.com: Now, what about retention levels? I know in this particular industry, it seems to be the norm is three to four months. If you get people to stay that long, you’re doing pretty well. Have you found something similar for your members?

Tim Sykes: Yeah. I mean it’s tough. Even when I make, like this past Friday, I had two really good stock trades. Both of them made 15% within two days. And I had like 30 members cancel. And I’m like, “How can you cancel? This are really good picks. And a lot of people are making money.” And a lot of them, they have excuses. They have lives. They can’t make the executions. Their brokerage isn’t right. So, it’s very tough. You need to teach people how to use what you’re giving them or else they get confused and they get angry and they want to cancel. So, yeah, retention is tough. Usually, my members have been, you know, Tim, again, there’s so many good trades, so many good penny stocks trade lately. Our average members stay about five months. So, it’s a little bit above average but I’d still want to get them to a year because once you get a year, then you’ve seen a lot of trade setups and you’re actually learning.

MemberCon.com: How about pricing? How did you initially decide on pricing and do you offer a free trial?

Tim Sykes: Yeah, I mean at first, I just started with the whole dollar a day that seems to be a popular selling point. But then I just recently updated. We went from $30 a month to $50 a month and membership, they keep signing up. And it’s just because good information is tough to come by. So, I’m sure $20 a month doesn’t really matter. I could probably raise it to $99 a month if I wanted to. I don’t because I do want to get people falling in love with it. I have other products. I have DVDs that were coming out with seven different subscription plans for the next few months that are going to upsell with all different kinds of new products. The research is so bad out there. You don’t really know your audience. I know there are Internet marketers out there that can calculate everything to a T. That’s not me. Maybe eventually, I will get that efficient. Right now, it’s just kind of my own little thing and I’m still pulling in 60, 70, sometimes $100,000 a month.

MemberCon.com: Well, when it’s working for you like that, you don’t have to worry too much about getting every nickel and dime counted for in terms of what’s working, I guess.

Tim Sykes: Yeah, exactly.

MemberCon.com: You can just give it a try.

Tim Sykes: I want to focus on the big story. The big story is working. Whether I make $700,000 and I just get all the information out there in my kind of sloppy manner versus, you know, $800,000 if I really everything efficient but it would be like double the work. I’m already working quite a bit. I want people to understand that. With a membership site, you really have to respond to every single person, ideally respond on the web site so that you answer a question and that question, you know, every one sees the answers. You don’t have to respond individually to emails. Responding individually to emails could be the single worst mistake of my life. And I did that for many months when I first started because I just wanted to respond to people quickly. Unfortunately, you get the same questions over and over again and it’s just you kind of have to watch out for time management.

MemberCon.com: So, how do you do that? That’s a good point that you bring up because if somebody is not a member, answering their question could be a way to get them in the door and yet, you’re not sure if that’s really converting for you. So, what do you do? You tell me just to comment on a post maybe or something if they want a response?

Tim Sykes: Well, there’s a great software. It’s called Zendesk. I basically pay like 50 bucks or $75 a month and it turns every single email question into a ticket. Then I later use those tickets online and I show them to certain members. And, more importantly, I use a lot of the questions, I mean half the questions. We’ve been using Zendesk for like four months. We’ve had, I think 2000 questions. So, the questions do add up and I’ve been using a lot of the questions in my latest DVDs. So, when people ask these same questions, I say, “Hey, I already answered these five questions in this DVD. Here’s the link to the DVD.” So, I’m actually, again, using my business to create my business and I think that’s a beautiful thing because I can see which questions are the most frequently asked, then I just turn those into products because I know people want to know them and if people want to know them, then they’ll probably buy them.

MemberCon.com: And I like that method because, yeah, you may have somebody once in a while who says, “Well, I didn’t ask you a question to buy a DVD,” yet that’s how you make your living. You’re a businessperson. You’re an entrepreneur. That’s how you make a living. You’re not here to give free advice.

Tim Sykes: That and the fact that a lot of it answers to the questions. Trading in the stock market is not a simple thing. This isn’t like buy low sell high type answers. My DVDs are six hours long. When I answer a question, I’m answering it for at least 10 or 15 minutes. If I was going to answer something for 10 or 15 minutes for every single email I get, I would have no time to do anything else. So, you know, they might not want the long answer but in order to fully grasp concepts, I want them to have the whole answer. And obviously, I do like making money off of my DVDs too.

MemberCon.com: What percentage of your revenue is the one off the sales of DVD products versus monthly membership stuff?

Tim Sykes: Right now, it’s about half and half. But again, right now, this is the fall of 2009. By the spring of 2010, we’ll have several subscription plans just with, again, more subscription plans that aren’t just based on real time trade alerts. Real time trade alerts are easy. You just say, “Okay, buy this stock here, sell it. My goal is to sell it here. Stop losses here.” The new stuff, the new subscription plans are going to be videos. There’s going to be all kinds of seminars. So, talk to me in a few months and the percentage will change. It’s just about giving your audience what they want.

MemberCon.com: I’ve always heard, of course, that existing members are the biggest place to sell worn off products. They’re the most responsive. Have you found that to be true?

Tim Sykes: Yes. Yes. I mean my dad who actually helps me out with everything, he doesn’t even like to reply to people who are not existing members because we see that, you know, the buy through rate is so low. If you’re going to be interested in some kind of product, you know, you really do need to prove that you’re going to be interested for like a $30 or a $50 a month subscription plan ahead of time. Then, once they’re in the door, then you can upsell. This is what all these great infomercials, even though I have problems with informercials because a lot of them, you see the FTC come down on but they get you in the door with these little offers for $29.95 and then they upsell you on a thousand or $5000 package later. And, you know, it’s worked. I just wish that people would come out with honest products.

MemberCon.com: Now, you just brought up a good point again there because you’re saying that as much as we’d like to respond to every email that comes in, your experience has been that if they’re not members already, it’s just not worth because they’re not buying and if we thought that you were converting 50% of those people that weren’t members into members after you answered their question, it might be worth it. But it’s nowhere near that I take it.

Tim Sykes: Correct! A lot of people want free advice. Everybody wants free stuff. I mean I could tell you some stories about how people won for free but I’m not in the business of providing free information. I have a free blog, that’s fine. It’s a nice, you know, you can get a cheese. You can a good nugget of information here. But all the good stuff is premium. So, unless you’re willing to show me that you actually want to learn and you really want to invest time. I’m not like trying to like sneak around and try and steal people’s $500, I’m trying to provide a service and I’m trying to show people who actually want to learn. And they need to prove that they want to learn and the proving that they want to learn is by buying the basic membership.

MemberCon.com: Have you used affiliates at all to grow the business?

Tim Sykes: You know, we’ve used a little affiliates. I need to do better. Thanks for reminding me. I actually have to send an affiliate email out today because I’m doing a seminar and I haven’t really used them that much. From what I found, you can get a few sales here and there. But it’s just tough. Unless you have a full time affiliate manager, I don’t know if you have talked with Brad Stafford of INO.com. He is the most amazing affiliate manager of all time. He bugs me like three times a day and I hate his guts. But I respect him because that’s his job.

MemberCon.com: You know, that’s a great idea. I just was on the phone with Brad last week. I need to do an interview with him about how he gets his affiliates to respond. That’s a great idea.

Tim Sykes: I mean I literally get so many emails from him. If I wasn’t an affiliate, like, again, I signed up to be an affiliate. I proved to him that I wanted to do that. So, I’m now on his mailing list and I’ve made a few thousand dollars off selling INO stuff. So, he’s doing a good job. It’s just a very tough thing to keep track of all your affiliates. I have like 600 affiliates, and I just need to do better. I need Brad.

MemberCon.com: Well, maybe you’ll be able to hire him away at some point.

Tim Sykes: Maybe, I don’t know. I need like Brad to clone himself. That would be cool. Ask him if he can do that.

MemberCon.com: All right. Coming back to the big personality portion of this for just a second. I see some of the comments that come in the blog and some of them can be pretty nasty and some of them you probably delete just because they’re incredibly offensive. But how do you kind of keep that from getting to you and just focus on the big picture of responding to the members who do subscribe and do appreciate what you do?

Tim Sykes: I have a problem where I spend too much time responding to nasty comments. I think that that goes back to me being on a reality show where I basically have like the thickest skin. Nothing really influences me but I love responding. I love like pissing people off. And most importantly, for a business sense, controversy sells. I mean my biggest press hit, I’ve been on every single thing from CNN to CBS, ABC, CNBC, New York Times, whatever. I was on CNN debating God, sex, and greed with a rabbi and a porn star. I didn’t sell one DVD. And yet, when the New York Post ripped on me, totally inaccurate article, horrible things, but ultimately and I sold about 40 DVDs that day. So, controversy sells and it’s a very tough lesson but the proof is in the pudding.

MemberCon.com: You would say, and this is something I’ve heard a lot too, is that as fun as it maybe to be on CNBC or CNN, the huge media that doesn’t have direct links to your web site, in other words, if it’s not Internet based or some way that people can click over, basically it doesn’t work. They may have trillions of listeners and viewers but it just doesn’t convert.

Tim Sykes: Correct. The [New York Post] Page Six article which didn’t have a direct link but it’s the gossip crowd, and the gossip crowd is huge. I did this interview with BlackCardSource.com which is basically like a gossip blog, again gossip for people with black Amex cards. And I don’t have a black Amex card but I know a lot of people who did. So, I told all these stories about people with the black Amex cards and to date, that is my single most successful incoming traffic link. And it’s just a little blog. But when you have something that’s different and, you know, I’m trying to get away from all these people who were just straight out Internet marketing. You may have this specific formula. Here’s the product. Here’s the video testimonial. Just be really, okay? This industry is still so new. Internet marketing, what, 1994? 1996 is when it was created but really haven’t become efficient even now which is a decade in. The real people are going to last. The people who kind of manipulate and try and basically cheat their customers, they’re going to fall by the wayside even if they do have better success in the short run. Just my thinking.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. What about some of those Internet marketing tactics? We’ll finish up with this. I know the big thing right now and I get the emails all day everyday is for product launches. You open the window and after a certain amount of time, you close the window. What do you do to create incentive or urgency to try to get people to sign up?

Tim Sykes: As much as I want to not use any Internet marketing tactics, they work. As you want to try and get away from this specific formulas but it come out a little, you need to call to action. So, like this seminar that I’m holding in a month, I say, “Look, you have one more week to sign up because I need the final head count because I need to book the place,” which is actually true but giving them a one-week deadline instead of a three-week deadline probably tripled or quadrupled my sale. So, if you kind of use marketing tactics, they do work. And I’ve used, what is his name, Brandon Fredrickson. I’ve used him a few times and he used to help me with a few product launches and he sends me some copy and I edited around and those two months that I used him for two specific product launches, we did $100,000 each of those two months. I have never been able to duplicate $100,000 a month without using those tactics. So, you can run a real business but you also do need to use a few tactics here and there.

MemberCon.com: All right. Well, one last question. Your software, just the logistics of setting this up. I think initially you just used plug ins for WordPress. Are you using any other sort of membership software right now?

Tim Sykes: When we unveiled the new site in a few months, it’s going to be PennyStocking.com. It’s going to be aMember based for multiple subscription platforms. I’ve heard a lot of good things about aMember. They’re really great for basically tracking customers like if a customer responds, you know, asks a question, I can see his entire history. I can see what products he subscribed to immediately. That would be very good. So, I can say, “Look, you’re a member of this subscription, but how about you join this other subscription plan and then you can get better acclimated to my strategy.” So we’re going to try out aMember but as of right now, I’m all WordPress and WordPress, I would tell you is a headache. Right now, my site, my web site is down because we have too many plugins on WordPress and one of the plugins went bad somewhere along the line. It’s a midday right after a holiday. So, it’s not that huge of a deal. I have no product launch right now, but it’s still frustrating. So, understand the risks if you do use WordPress.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, we use aMember for our site and I can tell you, it’s a great product. I think you’ll–

Tim Sykes: Cool! Cool!

MemberCon.com: –get a lot out of that. It’s good.

Tim Sykes: I look forward to being less annoyed.

MemberCon.com: All right. Well, listeners or viewers, if you’re watching the video version of the slides, check out Tim’s site, it’s Timothysykes.com, if you want to see membership site done right and how he runs the site. Tim, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate it.

Tim Sykes: Thanks again for having me. Good luck to everybody listening.

In my interview, I ask him a variety of questions about how he grows his membership base, what works in terms of free and discounted trials, his conversion rates from the $1 trial to a regular monthly membership, and how he sets pricing.

As usual, 4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here:

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hi, Tim Bourquin here from membercon.com and thanks for joining me for another interview today. Today, our guest is Perry Lawrence and you may have seen his website, it’s a very popular one called AskMrVideo.com that talks about using video for your website. We’re going to talk to him a little bit about that and how he uses video and suggests that membership site owners use video to promote their sites. He’s also got an eBook he’s written called Membership Site Bible, which I understand a new version is coming out shortly this year. So we’re going to talk to him about that too. So, Perry, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Perry Lawrence: Tim, thanks a lot for having me. It’s a pleasure.

MemberCon.com: Well, I always like start with a little bit of background to give our listeners some idea of the context to where you’re coming from. So, when did you first decide to get into the membership site business and create revenue that way?

Perry Lawrence: Well, I’ve been doing websites for other people for quite a while and really helping other folks make money online, but it never really occurred to me that I could use that for myself. So, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, Rich Farina, dragged me to a membership site conference hosted by actually the developer of the platform I’m using. His name is Bill Myers and his associate, who now owns the company, Tim Kerber. So, it was I guess a three-day conference and really what they spelled out was really intriguing to me and it really made a lot of sense because they talked about it being a true business, a true sellable asset, the continuity model. They didn’t use the word continuity at that time, I think we called them subscription or membership sites but it all appealed to me but even more of the point that the type and caliber of people specifically Bill and Tim, but the people that they gathered to them was just outstanding. The people who had successes in other businesses who are now porting their knowledge to a membership or continuity website and I just for like, “Wow, I’ve found my calling, I found my people.” So, I went home. I really just studied the model, studied the systems, really got very familiar with the platform, started building membership sites for other people using that platform and others and just shortly, in a short matter of time, just really put my thoughts down to paper and came out with a book called “Membership Site Bible” that did extremely well and we pulled it off the market at the beginning of this year, while we’re rewriting it, and we’re coming out with Membership Site Bible to the New Testament and things have radically changed as you know even in the past two years. So, that’s kind of the story. After I wrote the book, I was still trying to figure out my niche. I thought, well there are other people such as your self and at that time Tim Kerber and Bill are both deeply involved in teaching folks the membership model. So, I knew that’s not exactly where I wanted to end up, but finally it dawned on me, “Well what have you been doing for the past 20 years, Perry?” And so I came up with a site called AskMrVideo.com. I’ve been here for so long, I’ve forgotten all the questions and so I figured, well let’s just have people ask me and I can tell them because I either know the answer or you find out the answers very fast and that’s kind of how the AskMrVideo.com site was born.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. So do you have a background then in TV production and then you just translated that to the web video?

Perry Lawrence: I did. I spent 20 years in commercial production, producing commercials for an ad agency, a little ad agency called Ogilvy & Mather. They hold the IBM account, 900 billion dollars or something like that, and a hundred million dollar account. And they got a great, great education there in branding and just really short form video which I really, really, really like and from there went on, about 10 years ago I work for a nonprofit in Philadelphia where I’m currently residing and that nonprofit has sent me all over the world doing short documentaries for their work, and so I was developing documentaries for them and developing their web properties and I helped them go from a five-million dollar organization to a 15-million dollar organization. So, that’s kind of my background. I’ve been in video forever, brief stint in audio and in my head, it’s a video very fast, and I have never looked back. I just really love video and know ins and outs of it and I really have been applying what I’ve known to the web for quite a while. It used to be just merely impossible if I get video on the web. And nowadays, it’s just incredibly easy so that’s what I really teach people is that, “Don’t be afraid, it’s easy and you can use it in marketing to great success.” So, yeah, my background is video production. I’ve been doing that since, man 20, 20 almost 25 years.

MemberCon.com: So, OK, so you took some knowledge that you had…a lot of knowledge you had from video production then translated that to the web. Your timing was great because, of course, web video has exploded over the past five years. But how did you initially promote your website to try and get members and how did you decide, “Well, let’s start with that. We’ll get to pricing in a minute.” How did you first promote your site?

Perry Lawrence: Well, like I said, I was trying to find what my niche was. Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. Like well, duh! You’ve been putting videos, you do that. And really, I think part of the issue there is you really have to be passionate about your topic and while I’ve done video for so long, I had to really tap into that passion again because some folks out there have been a dentist or a lawyer or groundskeeper, you name it and it becomes “a job” to them and then, and somehow the passion gets lost when it becomes a J-O-B. So I really had to tap back into that passion and once I did, then the light bulb just started going off. Like well, “I could talk about this, I could talk about this, I could talk about this.” So what I did is I was involved in a number of membership sites because of the Membership Site Bible and I just put up a squeeze page that it just had a caricature of me and an opt-in box. I knew at least I needed to do that and kind of a “coming soon” type of thing. And I just started adding my signature, my URL to my SIG file in the forms I was posting on. I didn’t know them but that’s called the expert posting, so I just was very helpful on the forms, just started talking to people about what I was thinking about doing, what I wanted to do and what I was going to do. And I just started really building a list, very slowly, very methodically, went to Yahoo Answers, I went to a bunch of places and wherever I want just kind of left little breadcrumbs and crumb trails to AskMrVideo.com and generated a few names, few hundred names, and then when got ready to launch really encourage those people to join as charter members and that’s a great strategy that I really think worked well. And I just promised them, as long as you’re charter member, you’re low, low charter membership price is guaranteed for life and I do have some life as long as askmrvideo.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, what was that price initially for those charter members on a monthly basis?

Perry Lawrence: I believe the lowest has been 9.95.

MemberCon.com: Well, that’s great incentive to stay subscribed obviously because if they cancelled then they’re going to be coming at a higher price, so that has probably helped–

Perry Lawrence: Exactly.

MemberCon.com: –some unretention. What do you currently charge for new members now?

Perry Lawrence: New members now are 19.95 and we’re getting ready to rollout in August our new, I don’t know if we have a name for it, but our new membership level has got a couple of other platforms that were rolling into AskMrVideo.com and I guess I can talk about him now. They’re going to have a full blown editing platform built right into AskMrVideo.com. So, we’ll get editing, hosting, plus a lot of marketing content that they can incorporate into their website, so we’re extremely excited about that and now probably I rollout of the 47 a dollar price point.

MemberCon.com: Did you use some testing with the 19.95 and try different levels or is this something you just kind of picked out of your head and went with it?

Perry Lawrence: I kind of picked it out in my head and went with it. I mean I’m talking to people subsequently. A lot of folks say, “Well you know 17 would be easier, we’d better, blah, blah, blah…” You know what I think the pricing is a pricing…Granted they’re, if people are in the buying frames and they had to buy the pricing they may have something to do with that 19 versus 19.95, I don’t really know, I don’t do a whole lot of testing. We’re getting addition to do a lot, but I have never done a lot of testing. And again, going back to my point, I don’t think the price is going to, a couple of bucks here and there are going to make or break it. However, I do believe that you have a lot of value and you do offer things that people want. They really don’t care what the price is. So that’s what I try to focus on is like, “What do my constituents want, what does the audience demand, what are they looking for, what’s going to get them to say, yes, to sign me up quicker?” And so we had a dollar trial for over six months and that’s been extremely well received. So they do a dollar trial, try to set up for 21 days and 19.95 after that.

MemberCon.com: What percentage or if you’re willing to share that with us are people converting over to the regular membership after that trial?

Perry Lawrence: Seventy-five percent.

MemberCon.com: Really? OK that’s fantastic.

Perry Lawrence: Yeah. We try to manage the consumption. I think consumption is a huge topic. It could be a whole another call, but I think consumption is really important when you’re talking about new members. And the best way to think about consumption is when you are at a restaurant. If they brought you four appetizers, five entrees, 16 desserts and 57 drinks all at one time, you’re not going eat any of it. You’re going to get up frustrated, unsatisfied and leave. But if you can start with an appetizer, let them finish that, start with the drink, maybe an entree.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Perry Lawrence: Dessert perhaps…People then can consume what you’re offering and be satisfied, be happy with the rate. So we’re really looking at ways to re-engineer AskMrVideo.com and make it a little more navigatable–

MemberCon.com: Right.

Perry Lawrence: –and a little more consumable especially for the beginners. You know, we’ve got so much stuff there, and some broad topics that we really want to now, take that, consolidate it a little bit better and make it available for people as they need it and when they need it so it’s easy to find and so they don’t get frustrated.

MemberCon.com: I’ve heard about that, that in fact if you do offer too much, in our minds, as the side owners, you think it’s a good thing because the more you offer, the better value it is but that being, that overwhelming feeling for the user sometimes can work against you.

Perry Lawrence: Yeah. I think there’s a real balance there because you obviously want to show them some goodies that are going to entice them. I think a folk like Jim Laube of restaurantowner.com does it extremely well. I think Tim Schmidt over at the usconcealedcarry.org does it extremely well. What are you going to get and make that such a value that you’d be stupid not to sign up and that’s kind of what we tried to do over at AskMrVideo.com and here’s what you get and if you went out and did this yourself, it would cost you arm and leg money and time wise, in that three to five typically great, great products or content pieces, assets we call those, after that you wanted then to be able to trickle it in. It’s like the blue plate special. Here’s the special to get you in the door and then be able to offer people up-sells, french fries, whatever it is that they happen to be hungry for once they get in. So, it really is a balance on some real key assets that they’re going to come for then deliver them some great other assets while they’re there that they can make use of. In a dual phrase, it’s always been, people come for, they come for the content and they stay because of the community, is typically true. I mean if you can migrate your folks from the content, get them involved in the community, your stick rates are going to be a whole lot higher.

MemberCon.com: Do you find that you get more conversions from your email list than you do from the website itself?

Perry Lawrence: Yes and no. I think up to recently, it’s been more from the website itself. I think recently what we started to do is, in our newsletter, have a members-only section. And I was hesitant to do that for a while but recently just added it and it’s just at the bottom, it’s just a little blurb that says, “Here’s some content that only members can get to and we’ve really made that valuable.” We have industry expert interviews, called us the video pros and that’s been received really well and we’ve also done some website strategy sessions that we’ve recorded and are delivering those every week. So every week, there’s a new interview. Every week there’s a new website strategy session that both of us are video-driven and it’s great, great content and that can only get accessed by members. So, now we’re starting to see more folks come from the list on, as members and as you grow your list, you can grow membership. It used to be that you could get 20% to 25% of your list on as members. I think that members dwindled down a little bit to below 20 for most folks just because of the industry landscape of membership sites. So it’s a lot harder, everybody’s finding it’s a lot harder to just, what we call lead with your membership site. You can’t just say, “Hey, you got a membership site, join here now, you get all these good stuff.” It’s really difficult to do that. I think there’s a lot of other ways to drive members and those ways are a whole lot more effective than just hanging up a membership shingle and expecting a lot of people to join.

MemberCon.com: I like the idea of a members-only section in the newsletter because it’s a constant reminder to everybody who gets it, that there is a member’s area and the more stuff and more kind of teasers you can put in that area, it’s a great sales to all I think for the members.

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely. Yeah I wish I’d done it a little longer but it’s working out really well now.

MemberCon.com: I’ve been hearing a lot about it and I’m kind of researching how long members stay members on certain sites and it seems for the internet marketers, the people that talk about making money online, 45 months is about the lifespan of their membership, I mean, they’re constantly having to get new people into their sales funnel. What has it been for you? Do you know kind of your average stick time for members who stay members?

Perry Lawrence: It’s about eight months but obviously some are shorter, obviously like I said to any other call, there’s some that have been on for two years, our charter members. So, I think a lot of it has to do, like I mentioned before, is getting them involved and getting them involved in the community and I learned a lot of great things from Jerry Minchey over at artisticthreadworks.com. He’s a genius when it comes to member retention and really community building, and so we’re doing a lot of things like that getting ready to do another contest. One of our first contests doubles our list so we’re getting ready to that again. Just had a member-only promotion this past July 25th and we called that “Christmas in July” and so we said, “If you’re a member, you’ll get a free DVD, if you’re member on that day, on Christmas Day, July 25th.” So, I’ve had a ton of people request that free DVD and I covered shipping and everything is totally a free gift if you’re a member, and so we even opened that up to people who are trial members. So we say, “For a buck, you can get this great DVD that’s got a lot of great content.” And so, there’s all kinds of ways to promote the site and to incentivize people to stay and that last promotion, I’m very happy about because I think it did both. It was a great way to say thank you to the members who had had stay and who were members and it’s a great way to drive new members to it. So, we’ll definitely be doing the stuff like that again.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. I’ve noticed that even if your content is the best stuff out there, the best online, the best you could find anywhere, without some sort of time-sensitive incentive or some kind of offer that’s going to be taken away at a deadline, it’s really a lot harder to get people to sign up just for the content alone. It’s almost like they need that push no matter how great the content is for them to get on board. Have you felt that to be true as well?

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely, absolutely. It wasn’t until two years ago was a little different, but nowadays that is 100% true. And so what a lot of us are doing is leading with launches instead of leading with the site. And leading with launches, what I mean with that, have a new class or new product, have a time, a time-sensitivity to that, a deadline and have also a class size limit and then we bonus in the continuity. So we’ve done that three times now that’s worked very successfully over the past six months, six to eight months, and extremely successful every time it has built my list substantially and increase membership substantially, plus sold a ton of products, and another way is to do a promotion like we just did with Christmas in July. That was a one-day only event and really did well for me. I did not push it at all. It wasn’t a hard sell whatsoever but a lot of people really dug in and we’ll have up-sells on as a free DVD, but we’ll up-sells on the back of that, added a bunch of new members, and so we’ll see. But there’s…I’ve talked to one membership site owner who closes his membership site for three months and has an event every quarter, so that’s really scarce. I mean you can only get in once a quarter and so it’s all about scarcity. I’m a big fan of Cialdini and his book Persuasion, and there are a lot of great tips that I try to follow from that and I try to implement in everything I do?

MemberCon.com: Now, you mention one site just before that that I meant to ask you again to repeat the site, it was artistic something.

Perry Lawrence: Artisticthreadworks.com.

MemberCon.com: Threadworks.com?

Perry Lawrence: Uh-huh.

MemberCon.com: OK. All right, I’ll have to check that out, we’ll link to that as well.

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely. Yeah, he’s a great interview to be there, crashing it in their niche it’s a woman and her husband who she designs little patterns for mechanized embroidery machine, sewing embroidery machines. And they’re absolutely crashing it.

MemberCon.com: It’s definitely a niche.

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely a niche. Not one of the most beautiful sites on the planet, but they’re absolutely crashing it. So a lot of these membership sites where mom and pop run. She does the content site and he does the management site if you will in the community building site, it’s been really good.

MemberCon.com: Do you offer a money back guarantee on your site as a sales tactic?

Perry Lawrence: Yeah, we do. That plus a dollar trial is no real…There’s no real incentive that’s for your money back, we feel it’s a great content, a lot of ton of downloads, so we’ve not had anybody take us up on that.

MemberCon.com: All right. We’ll I’m going to get a little selfish here and ask about the video side of things because I try to use that a lot in my site. What one of the things I do is I take the audio, make it a podcast, but then I also make some PowerPoint slides and make a video by putting just the audio over the slides. I noticed some people superimposed the people talking through Skype or what not, am I missing something by not having the faces of the people while they’re talking almost in kind of a TV sense or am I OK doing these slides with the audio?

Perry Lawrence: I definitely you’re OK doing the slides with the audio. The things that I try to teach everybody is just do it. Just whatever is what you’re doing continue to do, if you’re not doing start, and where you’ve start there you start. So you’re way ahead of the game. Most people will just throw up their audio. I think you’re way out of the game by throwing up, adding some slides to it because now that becomes even a more valuable asset. People learned different ways, they consumed content different ways. We try to make our content available three different ways, video, audio and text. Especially our classes, so yeah I think you’re way ahead of the game. Now what I will say though and what I do teach a lot is that people definitely need to be adding videos of themselves to their membership site. Membership sites typically are personality-driven and if you’re not hanging your personality out there through video, I think your competition is going to be where already are. And you’ll attract people, whether you do video or not, just by the way you write, by your personality and by what you talked about, you’re going to attract people who are similar to you and, you know, that’s exactly what you want and you can leverage that even times 10 when you do that with a video. So becoming an authentic authority what I call in your niche by doing a series of videos, doing an about me video, doing a live video, all those things are going to be very powerful on your membership site. Don’t stop what you’re doing because that seems to be working for you, but I will also get you to do videos of yourself, introducing about me, video doing a why video. Why you’re doing this? What’s your passionate about either that’s in business or in charity or, et cetera, because your kid needs a new pair of shoes and just doing video blogs about some things that you’re having fun with or passionate about. I carry my Flip with me every where because I’m always looking for a quick interview with an industry expert and it’s just so much fun and so easy to do.

MemberCon.com: That’s a good point that you brought that up about the Flip. Decent quality, it’s getting better but not the greatest. It used to be that you could put up a pretty crummy video with so-so audio and as long as the content was good, people got something out of it, they tolerated that. But I sense that that’s starting to change as well. People are expecting a little bit better production these days, am I right on that?

Perry Lawrence: It really depends on your niche. I’ll just agree with you on one point. The quality of the Flip…I used to lug around 20 pounds Betamax, Beta cam high end news camera with the lens cost more than the camera type of feel. When I was working in Manhattan and the quality of the Flip Mino HD far and above surpasses that. If you’d know a few tricks, the built-in microphone is the best built-in microphone on any camera period I think and so you can really…Now, you can’t have a lot of the flicks and volume adjustments that you can with one of these bigger more powerful cameras. But people ask me, “What’s the best camera?” And the best camera is the camera you’re going to use. So it’s brain dead simple, one button turns it on, one button hits record, one button plays back. It’s just dead simple and it just works. So for me, a lot of times, I get to leave my big cameras at home and just bring a Flip in my back pocket and just have some amazing content. And that’s what I teach people too. Now, if you’re worried about you look on film or how you’re coming across, you’re thinking too much about me instead of thinking about the content you’re delivering. People come to you for your content, for who you bring them, for the insight that you bring them so as long as you’re focused on giving, people will forget a ton of “quality issues”. I think you too, there’s a way to step up your game and now you can broadcast and widescreen HD, pretty incredible quality there. So the game is changing so yeah I think even with simple tools like the Flip and you too you can still have some good quality video if you pay attention to a few things. Don’t shot with light behind you and make sure you’re brighter than the background and get the camera close enough that the microphone doesn’t have to strain to hear you. So checks like that, making sure there’s catchlight in your eye to increase the trust factor that we teach all of that in the classes over at AskMrVideo.com and just I have struggled over that point you make because I’ve been in the video industry for the 25 plus years, and here I’m doing Flip videos and wanting people to think that I’m a pro is like, well pro is a relative term. You know, professional is a relative term. Now, we have done for our higher end clients, we have done high end productions. You can go check those out at barefootexecutive.tv and buzzprofits.tv and nicheology.tv. Those are web TV shows that we’ve put together for our high end clients, and they’re having some great success with that. And we have stepped up the quality there thus it is more of a “show” We just want to position it differently. So, yeah, I think there’s room for both. But if you’re just starting out or if somebody is just interested in leveraging what they do and incorporating video in their marketing bag of tricks. Don’t worry about quality, I mean there are some tips to pay attention to, but worry about delivering great content.

MemberCon.com: So, I’ll finish up with this, you said just put in the content up there as long as it was quality and great work to get membership than you see that decline, now it’s more of launch, you got to create some incentive to get in by a deadline, maybe even close to site, will that stop to work eventually or start to taper off and then what do you think is next? I mean what’s after that?

Perry Lawrence: I don’t think that the subscription or continuity model is going away any time soon. I think we’ve seen a dip a matter of fact because of the economy. I think as the economy bounces back people’s discretionary income and their “educational income” and their forgettable money is going to bounce back and as that do I believe the continuity of starting things will continue to grow. So, as far as how people go into market on internet in the next five years, it’s hard to tell. I think everything that has worked offline has since now working online, so I try to follow the rule of thumb that success leaves clues. Look at what some of the bigger companies are doing with their promotions. Look at companies like Sports Illustrated and what they do to incentivize you into their continuity program. Look at what your cable company does. I know Ryan Lee watches a few interesting sites and checking out what some other industries are doing online. So just, success leaves clues, follow what other successful people are doing, what their bundling, what their offering and look at the content that they’re delivering and how they’re delivering it. And I’m finding is people’s attention span gets shorter and shorter, smaller bunch work even better. So the future of the web, I think the future of the web is video. I happen to biased, but I think web free data will be an immersive video experience. You can find things like that over at who really are already doing stuff like that. I use a player called Veeple which is kind of an immersive interactive player that we’re having some fun with and so as video gets just that easy it’s rarely changing the phase of, it has changed the phase of internet plus companies like Live Stream, Justin.tv, Ustream, they’re all going to a live streaming model and offering that up to users so we’re going see people streaming their life 24/7. Kind of a scary spot, I’m not particularly interested in doing that but and as kids come up they want to be…Have what one pundit is called arm’s length intimacy and that the Justin.tv and the streaming media, streaming live video definitely does that.

MemberCon.com: You said Veeple, spell that for me so people are going to know what site to go through their.

Perry Lawrence: Veeple.com.

MemberCon.com: Got it. And, of course, anyone listening make sure you check out AskMrVideo.com for great tips on adding video to your own site and then what will be the site name for Membership Site Bible when that’s ready?

Perry Lawrence: They can just go to membershipsitebible.com.

MemberCon.com: All right, easy enough. We’ll link to that as well. Perry, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate your sharing…

Yaro also does a site called MembershipMastermind.com, which offers a free eBook called Membership Site Masterplan. For the great price of your first name and email, it’s one of the best free resources online for membership site owners. Go there now and grab a copy!

When I saw that Yaro had interviewed Jeremy, I knew it would be great. Jeremy Schoemaker is my type of entrepreneur – scrappy, motivated and passionate about making money online. His frank and candid demeanor really shines in the interview. I listened to the whole thing on a long drive a few months ago and again a few days ago.

I wrote to Yaro and he was kind enough to give me permission to post the interview and the transcript on MemberCon. You can find his original post here.

By the way, Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com also did an interview with Shoemoney which is excellent.

Thanks Yaro for allowing me to re-post your interview!

Click the play button below to hear the interview:

Interview transcript:

Yaro Starak: Hi everyone. This is Yaro Starak here from the Entrepreneur’s Journey podcast. And today on the line with me, I have a very special guest which sort of I have been trying to get for a long time but I guess I haven’t been trying hard enough because we both know each other and it took Nate Whitehill from Unique Blog Designs.com who I believe has done both our blog designs now to connect us properly. And my guest name is Jeremy Schoemaker, who you may know as ShoeMoney from the Shoemoney.com blog. So, thank you for joining me Jeremy.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Hey, Yaro, thanks for having me.

Yaro Starak: So, there’s quite a bit of history behind what you do and obviously you’re a well known blogger but that’s really not I think what you do really. I mean that’s part of what you do but definitely not all of what you do. But before we get to today, can we go back to yesterday and a little bit further back in that and just get us to where you’re up. Like did you go to university or school or what’s your story?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I lived on campus at Western Illinois University and many other colleges over the course of about seven years but never really went to college that much. I just had a really good time partying with my friends and it was a real waste of my parents’ money and I feel really bad in saying that and was really happy when I was able to repay them a couple of years ago for all the money I’d wasted of theirs. But yeah, I really was never a college student. I was never…I was barely a high school student. I mean I barely graduated high school and to be honest, I mean my mom was a teacher there and if it wasn’t for her and her reputation, I don’t even know if I would have graduated high school. So, I just was never into school and I was always kind of doing my own thing.

Yaro Starak: Nice that you had an insider there to get you through school. That’s clever.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. It was kind of weird I mean I remember going up and getting like our test scores from our finals and seeing like 43% D minus and then a quote and it says like, “Your mom is a wonderful person.” So, I mean I’ve very, very fortunate that I made it.

Yaro Starak: It is pretty clear that the education system has very little to do with your success online and in business. Where did you get your skills like how did you study up in this area?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I’ve always just been a hands-on person. I mean I think one of the reason why I never did well in school is just I never had the attention span for it nor did I really care to listen to somebody talk for a long period of time about, you know. I mean if they had…I want like a lot of meat…I really like…I love debate and stuff like that. I mean I need hands on stuff. So, I was always into electronics like from a very, very young age and fire and all that cool stuff. My mom forbid me from ever using like household electricity. So, the deal was as long as I stuck to 12 volt automotive kind of electricity that I could kind of have free reign and do what I wanted. Well, she didn’t think that I could get a converter in our basement and basically transform our entire basement into 12-volt powered. So, I don’t know. I mean I’ve always just been a hands on person and that led me into computers where I learned how to program and which eventually we’ll get later in the story I’m sure. It’s marketing and just kind of just learned as I’ve gone, just all hands on. I tried to read as much as possible online but take it all kind of with a grain of salt, and just test everything and just get hands on, get down and dirty.

Yaro Starak: Let’s put this into chronological order. When did you get your first Internet account?

Jeremy Schoemaker: It would have been about 95ish. I was working at Sears selling washers and dryers and this lady walked in and said, “You know, I hear you’re good with the Macintosh computers here.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know about good. I mean I’m good with the games on them.” And she said, “Well I’m going to start this Internet company and we don’t have anyone who knows anything about Macintosh computers and we need someone to walk our customers through setting up their computers.” So, she said, “I don’t know what you make here but I’ll pay you a dollar more an hour and you start tomorrow.” So, I walked out of there and the next day, I was thrown right into it. I never had a clue what the Internet was. I mean it was so new and especially this was in pretty rural Illinois where I grew up. So, I was landed right into it and we didn’t really each have our own computer because it was a really, really low budget startup. And so, everybody had what’s called a terminal server which was connected to a Unix based server and that one server was not only like powered all of us but it also was like the dial in server for everyone and all the stuff. And everyone there had to do and I didn’t even know it at the time but I was developing all these like server administration skills with Unix and Linux which helped me a lot later in life. But that was basically my first exposure to the Internet. And I also didn’t know it at the time but she was running about a million emails a day through there which is now known as high volume email deployment or spam. So, it was kind of fascinating back then at the time. I mean it wasn’t like you thought it was a really bad thing. I mean AOL would sell you their entire users. I think back then, it was like eight million users for a couple hundred dollars.

Yaro Starak: No kidding.

Jeremy Schoemaker: And you could, yeah, and you could market to them. So, it was just so early in the game. And it was…it’s nice…it’s funny to look back and to see how I really had no clue about what I was doing but it’s kind of like the Karate Kid and all of a sudden you get thrown on your own and you realize, “Hey, I know how to do all this, and this, and this.” So, I left to go back to college. After doing that job for about a year and a half, I left to go back to college, wasted about two years there, worked for a small ISP there just doing support and some small programming stuff which was very, very basic. And then moved back home and then worked for another Internet provider but this time, I had a little bit more. I was doing web design which I was never very good at but didn’t really take much back then to be an expert web designer. So, it was pretty much just throwing together a bunch of tables in a web site with no real graphic ability which I didn’t have. So, and then I started making my own web site and just playing around with stuff and building a bunch of just silly sites and I kind of fell into one because I was always a gaming person about 90 probably late 90s, I owned a site called madgamer.com. I owned MacQuake. There was a game called Quake I was super into which I’m sure a lot of people out there are familiar with and there was a Mac version that came out which was kind of hack and it was unsupported by anyone and it actually got the developers who poured it over to use my site MacQuake.com as the official support site. So, in all the documentation, they actually used my site. Then I was approached by a company called Other World Computing, still around, and they wanted to advertise on the site and were going to pay me like $1800 a month that I just absolutely was blown away by that.

Yaro Starak: What year are, Jeremy?

Jeremy Schoemaker: This is back in the late 90s.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Like probably 97, 98. I’m sure it’s on the way back machine back there.

Yaro Starak: Yeah.

Jeremy Schoemaker: I mean the site, the site was all framed out. It was all crap. You know, all we did was we just had a forum and it barely worked I mean the site was…it was bombarded with traffic, you know. I had no clue just flying blind just…I just made something I was into and I knew other people wanted help with the game and needed files and what not and had questions. So I created that service and service them which kind of leads into other things. Very shortly after that, the dot com crash happened about 2000 or right around there and Other World Computing said, “We got to break our contract with you.” We’re broke.” They refused to pay anymore and I thought, “Man, that was good while it lasted.” And I didn’t make much money. I think maybe I made $10,000 or so and spend it as fast as possible. And I just thought while that was good while it lasted. Then a couple of years later, about 2000, well I kind of needed to focus on jobs because I was getting older, getting into my 20s, mid 20s actually and needed to really focus on a career. I never really made more than $25,000, $30,000 at that point.

Yaro Starak: Have you met your wife is that why you’re saying this?

Jeremy Schoemaker: No, not yet. A couple years down the road. So, then, I mean it was pretty bare for work around that time where I was from. It was a really run down area. It’s about 100 miles west of Chicago in an area called the Quad Cities Moline Illinois and stuff like that. Some people out there, I’m always amazed of how many people had heard of it. But, so, I had to move for work and I moved up and I was working for a bank at the time in that area and this was before I moved in. I moved into the security position and it was right when there was all this regulation coming out. So they sent me away to get all these training on data classification and basically it was a security position but it was kind of weird. So, I was like this regional guy for this chain of banks. Well, I never really did very good working for somebody else because I was kind of lazy and what not and they ended up firing me after a while and I had no…I didn’t have any way to pay my rent, blah, blah, mid 20s, not going anywhere with my life. So, a friend of mine in Des Moine said, “Why don’t you come stay with me.” So I stayed on his couch and I ended up landing this job like totally just couldn’t believe it. I landed this job for the lead security administrator for Wells Fargo Bank. And so, because I have this banking experience and also this experience with security and was already trained in all this stuff, they brought me right in and it basically doubled what I was making before. And so, I had that job for a couple of years and that is where I met my now wife. So, along that way, one day I was talking to her and I have this NextTel cellphone and I was telling her like how cool it be if I could put a picture of her on my phone and I wonder if there’s any way to do that. So, I started doing research online and I found that you could do it but it was really, really difficult. You had to basically have photoshop and be a whiz. You have to deinterlace the photo nontransparent GIF and there was a patent on GIF files then so there wasn’t a lot of programs that supported Gifs. Anyway, long story short, I figured out how to do it then I started like hanging around some mobile phone forums explaining to other people how to do it and I just started getting bombarded with people who wanted me to format it for them because they didn’t have photoshop or couldn’t figure it out. So, I thought maybe I could create server aside, a way that would automatically format pictures for people. So, that’s what I did and I created a site that basically you could submit any image and it would spit you back the correct format for your phone and it blew up. I mean it just completely blew up and it was called Nextpimp and it still is. It’s still really kicking butt and it was basically just a side work. People could upload any format of image and it would correctly format it for the phone. And then people would say, “Hey, I’ve got this phone. I need this format,” and I would alter it for their phone as well. Then somebody came along, now this is probably 2003-ish and there were like, “Why don’t you archive these?” So because maybe I want a picture of the same person if people want to share what they upload or something like that and there was no such thing as tags back then or sharing or You Tube.

Yaro Starak: But what about copyright on these images?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Well, that will come around a little bit later.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, we went ahead and I was just kind of learning as I went at the time. I mean I was concerned about that and we had Please do not upload copyrighted material with respect, blah blah blah. And so, I mean but there was no Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Well, I guess there was in the process at that time. But like you say, it was kind of just like people just kind of did what they wanted and waited to see what happens. So, I mean I was just in this position. So people just uploaded content and I just…I let them categorize and basically shared it. And I was processing about 5000 images a day after about six months of starting the site. And it was a pretty busy site and then it started…a lot of people started linking to it and all of a sudden, it’s like I started getting all these traffic from search engines and just…it’s kind of fascinating to me like how these search engines work and how to optimize your site so you can gain them better. So, I started playing around with search engine optimization a little bit. And then one day, at the office where I was working, a lady and I had actually lost my job at Wells Fargo and moved to Omaha Nebraska now. This is probably about a year and a half later and working for a company called Commercial Federal as their system administrator security guy. And this lady is asking me how Google makes money because being the computer guy, you know how everything computer related works. And so, I knew I heard about an AdWords product or Google AdSense since Adwords were…I didn’t understand the Adwords side of it but I knew that if you place these ads on your web site, Google would target them based on the content. And she said, “Well, why don’t you do that on your cellphone site?” And I said, “Well because I don’t think I’d make much money.” It’s all images and I don’t know how they would target or if they would even allow that. So, I said, “You know, I’m going to try it though.” So I launched it, first day, I made like I think like four bucks or something like that and I thought I was a big timer. I remember I told my wife I was like, “This is awesome! This is like the coolest thing ever. I can just throw up these ads and I’m getting paid.” So, that really lit a fire under me and it was just like just playing with it and playing with it more. Then, of course, ring tones came out and I had already had…I already had this traffic like huge, huge amounts of traffic. Well not huge amounts, maybe 10, 15,000 unique visitors a day. I mean it got to about $40 a day or so. And I think $30 a day was pretty high point I think right before ring tones came out. And that was it. And then people were like if you could just format ring tones for phones like you do these wallpapers, that would be cool!” So, I mean man, I got to tell you, it took me so many and so long to figure out because it’s a server site. Now, I got to figure out how to code to, I mean now, there is all these tools that are just ready to rock if you want to build this kind of thing. But man, back then, it was very hard and it took me a long time to figure it out. But I did and so now, I let people upload ring tones and do all these crazy stuff and within not too long after that you see what you see with the picture of men in the Adsense check which was 100 and something thousand in one month. That’s probably a year after…well it’s probably two and a half years after I started this site and about a year and a half after really getting down with the ring tone stuff. So, go ahead.

Yaro Starak: Did the addition of ring tones like make the traffic increase? Was that why it went from $30 a day up to about the big Adsense check or was there some other reason?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, absolutely because now, we were getting…because I had learned about SEO and knew how to rank for things. So, now instead of like dog wallpapers, I was ranking for all these ring tones like whatever people were uploading.

Yaro Starak: Right.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, I mean just huge amounts of traffic, let alone I was number for the word ring tones back then.

Yaro Starak: Right.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, when ring tones really came on, I mean at the very beginning, I was there and I had the traffic and it was, about a 150,000 unique visitors a day as its peak.

Yaro Starak: Nice. Very nice. So–

Jeremy Schoemaker: So–

Yaro Starak: Go ahead.

Jeremy Schoemaker: You go ahead.

Yaro Starak: I just want to clarify for people like obviously with the ring tone, I’m assuming they found a piece of music they liked from somewhere and they had in what, MP3 format or something and they went to your web site uploaded it and converted it into a ring tone they could then download to their phone. Is that how the process worked?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. We can send them to some phones directly and others we actually…they could actually download the audio file. Now I mean like you brought up copyrights before and it’s pretty important I think that we address that because obviously, when you allow users to upload stuff, it creates a huge liability for you and so, we had we basically just went to a really big law firm who handled a lot of copyright stuff and just asked them how to do it. And we make users agree that they created what they’re uploading. We also make it very, very easy for people to report copyrighted content to us and we comply very quickly when somebody makes a complaint that something has been uploaded.

Yaro Starak: So, it’s kind of like the You Tube model, sort of thing.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, I mean there’s a Digital Millennium Copyright Act and therefore, the whole DMCA thing is there for a reason and it’s great for all parties involved. I mean the artist can protect their stuff, you know. You just have to have a clear and concise record of complaints.

Yaro Starak: You keep saying we. When did you go from you and your wife to…is it more people or is it still just or was just you two?

Jeremy Schoemaker: It’s funny you say that because I’ve always said we even if it was me just because I thought it sounded and in my signature back in the day, in my signature in my email, it’s Midwest Regional manager for ShoeMoney Media Group. I mean it was just me but it sounded cooler when you’re with an entourage. So…

Yaro Starak: I wrote an article about “it’s not we it’s me” many years ago but yes, that a very common thing to do, isn’t it?

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, yeah, it was just me and right about the time I made the big Adsense check, a couple of things happened to me. One was I realized I couldn’t do it by myself anymore because when I made that check, I also went to my very first conference to learn more about search engine stuff and by that time, I was pretty well…I had a pretty good following in forums and what not but I didn’t really have a blog yet. Actually, I did have a blog but it was only about two months old. This was in 2004. And so, I actually have to verify that date. I’m kind of just guessing.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: I should actually…you know, sometime I need to write a correct bio because a lot of times when I give interviews and stuff, I just throw out dates as they come to my brain or whatever. But all right, so basically that time, I’m sitting at this conference and this kid comes along on the Internet and emails me and I’d known this kid since he was like 12 years old and I always thought he was a little bit cocky but he was like, “Hey I know you’re having trouble with your–” I mean I was getting 150,000 and upwards a day and there’s a lot of times my site, the server would actually reboot at least one time a day. And I mean I thought I was a pretty good Unix engineer. I’m much better now but I really didn’t know that much then. But this kid I think he was about 20 years at the time, was like, “You know, I’m pretty good. I’ll prove myself for like 10 bucks an hour. Just give a shot.” So, I was like, “How about it?” Now, this was when I was bringing in about 3 to 4000, 5000 a day on Goggle Adsense, right?

Yaro Starak: Yeah. Tight ass, huh?

Jeremy Schoemaker: But I was a tight ass and it was really because I had been fired from every job I’ve ever had in my life. It was torturous for me to ever work for anyone. I hated it and I was scared to death that this is it for me. And just because I I mean like, what’s this ring tone? Like what’s the long-term play on a ring tone site?” I just kept thinking like tomorrow this is all going to come crashing down just like what happened before.

Yaro Starak: Paranoia, huh?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, I was like, I was a tight ass and I mean that seems crazy but at the time, I mean I was going nuts because my wife was in medical school. We had like half a million dollars in debt and I was paying that off as fast as possible because I really thought that’s it for me. This is my big thing so let me do this for her and she’ll support me for the rest of my life because she’s going on to this great career and I was never supposed to do anything. So, all right. So, then continue with Nextpimp and I open up and I really kind of realized after I made that Adsense check that’s kind of famous, I found affiliate marketing.

Yaro Starak: You found it?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, I did because people will ask me and they were like, “You know, you’re making this kind of money but how are they making it and why are these people advertising on your site? Because obviously they’re paying for it then it must be worth it. So, why don’t you find out what they’re doing> So, the people that we’re advertising through Google Adsense on Nextpimp were advertising a couple different things. There were either advertising commercial ring tone offers, which was affiliate marketing or they were selling physical goods like cellphone accessories data cables. So, now I had David working for me as programming and keeping the servers go and we had expanded operations a little bit but I was still only paying him like 10 bucks an hour and he was only putting in like 20 hours a week. And but I was like I’m going to try to take this to the next level. And I have all this traffic. I was number two for like cellphone cables and I mean just like I had all these incredible SEO rankings. And I really…so I started and I was redirecting people to Ebay and collecting like 10 cents when they buy a data cable on Ebay. So, I basically did some inquiries and got hooked with a guy in HongKong who sold me data cables, USP data cables for Nextel phones and all these phones for like I mean literally like 20 cents a piece and I sold them all day for 20 bucks with $5 shipping. And that’s quite a margin. And we would sell 10 to 20 a day. So, I mean it was good little profitable thing and that’s just data cables. We sold all kinds of phone accessories. And so, but then also I also did the affiliate marketing stuff myself and instead of getting a couple of cents per click, I started to get great ROI per click like a couple bucks. And because you can…those affiliate offers were converting to like $16 a lead on the mobile stuff and then also I kind of played around with just every form of monetization because up until then I had only made money with Google Adsense. So, I played around with donations which I basically was just like, “Hey, want to give me some money?” Then I also played around with subscriptions which blew my mind because I was basically…we have free ring tones and so my lawyer was strongly an advocate of not charging for ring tones because then we’re profiting from if there was a copyright issue. So, what we did is we sold subscriptions to the forum. So, if you wanted a cool avatar or you wanted like unlimited messages or the standard stuff you see on forums that are kind of premium stuff then you could pay 20 bucks every…well I think I originally did the…it was $25 a year for a membership. And we had a lot of people signed up and basically all it said, “When you signed up was, this is a donation based membership. And you understand you’re getting nothing for it other than you can have a cool avatar,” and I was amazed at how many people signed up because we have like special forums where people would for support and all kinds of stuff like that. And then I started reading about instead of like playing with price points for subscriptions and stuff like that. And I came across something that said, “You know, to try a shorter time period and a cheaper amount.” So what we did is instead of $25 a year, we went with $19.95 by every six months. So actually, we made quite a bit more but it was a lower price point and then it really exploded. And in the height of it, we have about 75,000 paying users.

Yaro Starak: Whoa!

Jeremy Schoemaker: I know!

Yaro Starak: Incredible.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, so and we’re still doing phenomenal monthly revenue and I’m just like blown away.

Yaro Starak: Can I ask you?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Go ahead.

Yaro Starak: Have you bought the sports car and the mansion by now or you’re still being a tight ass?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I have a wife now so my–

Yaro Starak: Just going to shoes and hand bags and something?

Jeremy Schoemaker: You know, well, we bought a house, we bought a nice house and I’m thinking like my days are numbered, you know. I’m still not convinced that this is here to stay but along this process I had started my blog and I started to write about and I had really a free reign to go crazy because I did not give a crap what anyone thought. I had a cash cow and I’m talking from experience and like there’s all these guys out there talking about Adsense and all those stuff and I’m just like, “Yeah this is guy is…he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I got this site. I know what I’m talking about,” and it just kind of you see the light with a lot of it where these people talk but they don’t have any experience whatsoever. They just those people who make money because they tell people how to make money kind of thing. Not that I have a problem with any of those, but it’s tough to take advice from somebody on how to sell things when they don’t sell anything, you know.

Yaro Starak: Yeah.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, it’s just really interesting. So, I mean I was really cocky back then. I was really, I believe the word was unstable and I think there’s…volatile! Volatile was the word.

Yaro Starak: Someone implied that to you.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Microsoft actually implied that to me because they didn’t really invite me to because I was like Yahoo’s publisher of the month. I was Google’s thing of the month and I’m speaking at all these conferences and I got this big, fat check but I was like this cocky guy. I mean I really thought my days are numbered. I could go back to my life and the crazy thing is like the blog just started growing extremely rapidly because I would…I mean I could be completely transparent and show everyone exactly what I was doing and I was still good to go because I was ranked like number one and number two for ring tones like who’s going to compete with that? I mean I could actually show people exactly what I was doing to make money, exactly who I was marketing. You know, we raised…when Hurricane Katrina happened, on Nextpimp, we had this huge fundraiser that got us so many new users and I think we spent like I don’t remember how many thousand we gave for charity but it was like so worth the money and I wrote about all these things and then I said, one month I was like, “I’m going to get into this paper clicks stuff. I’m going to actually be an advertiser and see what happens.” And I’ve never done it before. So, I allocated $40,000 and I said, “This month, I’m going to spend $10,000 on Yahoo search marketing, on Microsoft dcCnter on Adbrite, on Google Adwords. So, I wrote this entire two-part guide of my adventures this month. And I started off losing money, kind of understood how things work and then started making money and then really got it out, amazingly got it out. Now, I totally, totally saturated the ring tone affiliate marketing industry with that but which probably cost me a lot of money but for that short amount of time but looking back on it, I mean it really boosted. My blog became like a really high authority for people looking to make money online. So–

Yaro Starak: Let me just clarify, Jeremy, it’s nextpimp.com for people listening if they want to check it out. I’m looking at it right now. Are you still the owner of that site or has that gone to someone else?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. And it’s really going downhill massively.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: And I think it was…it’s a valuable lesson out there because it was a hard lesson for me to learn. And I’ve talked about this on my blog before. I lost passion. I mean like I was into making ring tones. I mean I was into it. I was doing it myself. I was having so much fun doing it and when you have that, when you believe in what you’re doing and when you have that passion, it’s almost like angelic because nobody can mess with you. You win. Hands down. You win because you’re thinking about it all the time. You’re doing it all the time. Well, I lost that for the ring tone market. I was more into making money than anything else at that time. And so, I was killing the site. I mean it was growing so fast because of my organic stuff. but I mean like now, I really don’t care about the site at all. I mean it still makes a decent amount of money but I’m so past it. I mean it’s kind of crazy because it still does very well and I have no doubt I missed out on a huge opportunity with that site. It could have been so much more but I simply lost interest in it. I should have appointed someone in charge of that site to take it over and to really take it to the next level and I didn’t. And that was a really, really good learning experience for me and one that I will not repeat. So–

Yaro Starak: You can only say that you’re so paranoid about it being taken away from you that eventually, you let it go rather than have it taken away.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. You know, I don’t know. I mean as we talk about other things that I’ve done, I mean you kind of see a pattern with me where I’m super, super into something and I am like so obsessive compulsive. I mean it’s all I can think about. It’s all I can do and I mean ring tones were that for me. Like when I had to figure out how to format images for people’s phone, it’s all I’d talk about. My wife was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” you know, and I’d be like, “Oh, I just I got to go downstairs and work on this. I got to figure it out.” And then when it was the ring tone stuff, it was like, so…I was so into it. I had to figure it out because nobody else was doing it and then and then I just…there wasn’t nothing else, you know. Then it was all about the challenge really was how to make more money and it really kind of…I really was more intrigued by that in less about the actual product and the actual web site. So, but it was still a great service and I mean people still use it all the time, you know. I mean like the ability to upload ring tones I don’t even think has worked for like a year. Now, this site still does earn money but I mean I think it really could have been, really, really huge like I could have retired and never ever had t do anything again and bought a baseball team or something, you know. I really think that it could have done extremely well if I would have stayed passionate about the site. But you know what? You can’t control your passion, you know. I mean like so here’s what happened with that. So, I lost my passion for Nextpimp. I got Dave with me now and he’s making…he’s now a salaried employee. I’ve got my mother-in-law now doing my accounting. She’s now a full-time employee. So I’ve got some expenses, company revenues doing good. We’re killing it with affiliate marketing. But it’s like we don’t have anything stable. So, I really…I hate ring tones so much I mean because that’s all I have done for the last four or five years. And so, this is in 2007, 2006. I have to look back. So, in 2007, 2006 was an awesome year for us. Just incredible year. I mean we completely destroyed it in the ring tone industry and made a ton of money. And then the ring tone industry started having a reg…sorry regulation. I got it out. And they started attacking all these sites that had free ring tones. Well, they actually didn’t have free ring tones. They just said they did but they never did and then you get conned into paying this huge thing. When we showed up on the radar of course and so we were having to deal with all these compliance issues and it looks like making money off of ring tones was over. I mean the only reason that there was a lot of money in that was because there was all these affiliate programs. And when the went after all these affiliate programs, then the Adsense revenue dried up. All this revenue dried up. I mean I still had my subscriptions but they’re cancelling because nobody is there helping people. I mean like, it’s just really I let it go downhill. So, I said to Dave like, “We’ve got to come up with something. Let’s try to come up with something new,” and the blog I was not…I had a pretty good following on the blog but I had never implemented any sort of advertising whatsoever on the site.

Yaro Starak: What year are we at?

Jeremy Schoemaker: This is late 2006.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, I’m in Las Vegas for I believe it was…no…yes. It was Webmaster World and I’m there with the guy who owns Digital Point, Shawn Hogan, and he introduces me to some reps from Ebay and they say to me, they’re like, “Hey, you created the thing you’re playing around with called ShoeMoney ads.” And I said, “Yeah, you know.” It was basically, the thought behind ShoeMoney ads was you put ads on your site that are Adsense and they have this great look and feel to them but if you could write your own ad copy and do it to your own offers and just kind of cut out Google. So, you know your site converts well for ring tones, why don’t you just make your own ad copy for ring tones, make it look like they’re Adsense and you cut out Google.” So, we basically created this whole ad system around that but we were taking none of the profit and it was kind of consuming resources and we kind of killed after a while. And so–

Yaro Starak: Clarify that. You have people promote affiliate offers. That was how they do that service, right?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. So, they could promote anything they wanted to because it was their site and that was my whole…I was starting to kind of have a beef with AdWords or I mean with Google ads since that time. And I was because, I’m now like the poster child for Google Adsense, and so even then when I speaking in public, I would give all these reasons why you shouldn’t use Google Adsense because from my experience and how there were so much more money in building a subscription model or direct advertising and all this stuff. I mean we had done deals with Sprint and Nextel and all these companies. And I was really kind of preaching about how Adsense was kind of the devil. I mean it’s so easy do but it’s really taken a lot of revenue on your pocket if you want to pursue that. So, now, we’re at like this event with these folks from eBay and they say, “You know, well a lot of people were making really good money through eBay using your ShoeMoney ad system. And we were talking internally and we think you should develop an ad system based around the eBay affiliate program. And we would be really, really open to helping you with that.” Now, I was like, “Oh, that sounds great,” you know, and I mean having people from eBay say that they think you should build an ad network and they’re going to help you I mean that’s pretty awesome. So, we looked into it and there was a couple of big problems which is one, I had never ever paid out to a bunch of people like if we were going to be anywhere successful and so the concept behind it was that eBay has this great affiliate program and it’s really a great program and it’s so great because it’s so diversified. And there’s eBay in 14 different countries. So, between the vast inventory on eBay and all the countries it’s in, I mean it’s basically the ultimate kind of display advertising because you could throw it on pretty much any site anywhere in the world and you can make money off of it. So, we basically and then you match that up with the affiliate system is basically based on volume. So, the more you make, the more you get paid. And so, as a whole network the thought behind…we came up with a company called AuctionAds after eBay kind of give us the pep talk which basically it was the thought behind it was, let’s pay out a 100% and just focus on growth and see what happens. And either we’ll become so valuable to eBay that they’ll give us a higher percentage than it’s even listed or what the hell. Maybe somebody will buy us. Or, we’ll just get so big that eventually we can take a percentage. So we had a lot of…capital was not a problem. I mean we were…we had the Nextpimp subscriptions millions a year coming in. We had great monthly revenue coming in but it’s going down. So, we want to build this new thing. So, we launched in March of 2007. Also in January of 2007, I decided to take advertising for my blog because things were going downhill, I want to see what I could get. So, I just said to the companies who had inquired before, what would you give me and I started throwing some ads out there just direct ad placement. So, and that was the first time I’d ever done any sort of advertising on the blog.

Yaro Starak: And how much did you get straight off the bat from that?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I think the…on the high end, it was like two grand a month and on the low end, a couple hundred for text links and stuff like that before text links were evil. I didn’t text…I don’t think I sold text links ever, actually no. I think I just sold like 125 banner ads and stuff like that.

Yaro Starak: When did you get total wise, like…?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Oh total? Maybe because we had one huge placement. Something to say like 3 to $4000 a month, max, like when we first started.

Yaro Starak: What were your unique visitors? We’ll talk about blogging in a moment. What was your unique visitor count at that time?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I want to say about 7 or 8000 a day, something like that.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So then we I didn’t nothing with RSS or, you know. I was like, “That’s for the birds.” I don’t know anything about that. I’m in the building businesses. So then so we’re making AuctionAds. We launched on March 7 and it was really the best thing and worst thing that I’ve ever done in my life. And like I said we had…so there were some things we had to figure out. One is that we’d never pay out to a ton of people before. I had no clue how to do that. And the second thing is, customer service like, now, we’ve got all these people that…you need to account for and you’re playing with their money. So, we had to figure that out and we partnered with my friend Patrick Gavin who owns a company called Text Link Ads. And he had just and he had just sold Text Link Ads to a company called Media Whiz. So, he basically pitched it to them and got them to back it and we’re in business and we’re partners. And, there were actually a pretty minority partner but decent partner. So, they were going to…their role was basically to handle all the finances, pay out affiliates every month and to handle all the customer service and we would handle all the text stuff. So, we go from March 7th,we launched and I don’t know how in depth you want me to go but it was the longest four months of my life until–

Yaro Starak: Why?

Jeremy Schoemaker: We fast forward to…well, between March 7th of 2007 and July 27, we sold the company and we were doing millions a month in revenue and we had 25,000 users. We had 20 SIM servers and this had become my life 24/7.

Yaro Starak: Who’s working with you like to help control of it?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Just the same amount of people, me and David. That was it. And actually, and I got to be honest, like David did everything. So, we went from like–

Yaro Starak: Well he’s getting paid better by then.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. So, here’s the cool thing like by then, he was like, “hey I think we had worked out a salary deal plus rev share and so he was coming more and more into it and he’d been with me three to four years by then. And a very loyal guy, a very awesome kind and but he was still…I think he was actually 21 when we sold AuctionAds.

Yaro Starak: That’s incredible.

Jeremy Schoemaker: He was 22. So when we sold it, I told him and we never anything on paper. But I told him because he was like, “What am I going to get like my small percentage of the profits of the sales,” you know. I mean this kid is like doing this 27/7. He lives in Minnesota. I live in Nebraska. So, but we got a data center in Minnesota where all the servers are. He has to basically live at this data center because he’s managing all these servers for one person. So I said to him, “You know, whatever it sells for if it does sell or whatever we do, I’ll give you half the money.” And he was like, “Oh, OK.” And along the way I sent him some bonuses because he didn’t see the end goal there for a little bit. He had a little problem because he was like, “You know, hey, we spent like 200,000 on this thing and it’s made zero amount of dollars and we’re making less money every month off of ring tones. And I’m like, “Listen, it’s fine. We’re growing at a phenomenal pace.” And he’s like, “And I’m working my ass off and we can’t barely keep these servers up and I’m just there going, “Yeah, and that’s an awesome problem to have because we’re growing.” So I was like, “What do you want?” He’s like “Well, I really want this Ducati motorcycle.” And I’m like, “OK.” So I bought it for him, whatever. Along the way, I had to give him stuff to keep him sane. So, we sell the company to Media Whiz on July 27 and it’s like, “Wow! Awesome!” It was so awesome to be done with that. We learned our lesson. We now had a bunch of capital to play with. I build a big edition on my house. I put the rest in the bank which sucks because we lost a lot of it recently with the stock market. But, it was really, really cool to…I had sold my first company. And had a pretty good exit. So, now I’m on like venture capital, people’s list and all this stuff and I’m getting into all these circles and go the TechCrunch conference and people all these companies who were now trying to launch their ad network, we were like the blueprint of like we launched an ad network and went from zero to millions a month in four months with 25,000 active users. So, I mean all these guys want to talk to us, what exactly do we do and I told them all, like “Read my blog.” I was so transparent about everything we did. I mean like just amazingly transparent to where I mean almost stupidly transparent because everything that we did is so copied like exactly my blueprint.

Yaro Starak: And is it fair to say that your blog was significantly irresponsible for such a rapid growth of AuctionAds?

Jeremy Schoemaker: No. I would say, OK, like from the start, yes but it was a good launching point. It was also, but it was also featured we also were advertising and yes. At Nextpimp, I used to kind of leverage the blog and I think that it’s important to have this whole kind of chronological thing. I used Nextpimp, I made a lot of money, I started writing a blog and then I leverage that into an audience on the blog by like, “Hey, look, I got this company. I’m making tons of cash. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about just listen to what I’m saying.” And then the blog, basically because that was doing so well, I could launch an advertising company and have a big advantage over others because I already had people coming to me, looking to me on how to make money. So, I mean with AuctionAds, we made a lot of people a lot of money. So, yes, having the blog absolutely gave me a huge advantage. Now, you also have to remember though that with AuctionAds, there was eight other companies doing exactly what we were doing with eBay including eBay who had like millions of dollars invested in their product and five years in development. So, it was kind of aggressive for us to come out like we did swinging and grow as fast as we did. Now, I mean I’d like to credit my marketing but, who knows. I mean I think I did some pretty amazing things marketing wise. And I wrote about it in the blog but it was pretty slick.

Yaro Starak: What do you think is the one thing that made the difference at why you can do better than eBay with a two-man team?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Well we had experience. These big ass companies, they have too many people and nobody can ever do anything. Like in order for eBay to actually do something that counts, they have to get it approved by somebody. It’s got to go the flagpole. It’s got to be reviewed. They got to go on their development servers. They’ve got to do this. They’ve got to do this. And then finally like maybe they get the OK to try it and they get a meeting about it, you know. We just outline the codes and it’s done. It’s implemented. So, I think that a lot of these other companies that were trying were just way too slow and we just…not only did we like look at what they’re doing and say like, “OK, there is 10 different things we do right here but we have the agility to move very, very fast because we were a two-man team. Do we have a little down time because we screwed up sometimes? Yes! But we were able to implement massive changes really fast. I think the key to our growth really was really just looking at our statistics. You know, we were advertising and spending a fortune on advertising on TechCrunch and Mashable.com and all these web sites and when we started looking at the numbers like 80 or 90% of our clients came from seeing the ad. So I’ll just kind of go over some of the techniques just real quick but I mean so it was like, “Wow why are we advertising all these stuff? What we need to do is to get more people to use the ad.” So, to use the actual product because at the bottom it said, “Ads by AuctionAds.” And the one thing that we found that was really, really awesome was that once you penetrated the market, like there was the mixed martial arts community, once you get one site to use it, all their competitors try it because they’re like, “Hey, what’s this guy doing over here?” So, all we had to do was basically get market penetration. And so instead of paying TechCrunch to run a banner that was animated, it was like, “Hey, you make money with it eBay with AuctionAds,” we had them actually use the product. And the cool thing was he was making money with it and we’re told just keep it all. It’s fine. But we were getting a ton more signups from him actually using the product than we were from the banner. So, then it was all about how can we get more real estate on the Internet because that was how we were getting more people. And then it occurred to me like, “Why don’t we just give everyone five bucks?” Like what would be wrong with that? Like, now, so an interesting thing is that it was cool…now along the way, I decided that we had to do a lot of crazy things, right, which were it’s kind of my best feature and my worst feature because I’m willing to like try really crazy things which, I said, “ You know what? Let’s have net zero payouts,” which means if it’s the first of the month, you get paid for last month’s earnings. No wait time. Now, we didn’t get paid until like 40 days later. So, if there was any problem on the network, it came out of my pocket. And keep in mind too, I’m also taking no percentage of this. So, it was cool when it was like 100,000 for the first month, a couple 100,000 but when it got over a million close to 2 million, 2.5, I was like, “Holy crap! Where am I going to come up with 2–” because I mean like I don’t want to cash in like all my stock and all the stuff every month, you know. It’s like that’s crazy. So, we had to get a credit line of multiple million dollars which we paid incredible amount. And all these things you don’t have to think about like currency exchange. I mean when you got 2 million bucks and you’re paying out on all these countries, currency changes from the time you made it. So, we had to do these currency hedging and, “Oh, my gosh, it’s like all kinds of problems. I mean it was like, it’s a great problem to have but craziness.

Yaro Starak: Yeah.

Jeremy Schoemaker: You just never think of stuff like that.

Yaro Starak: I can see why David was a bit worried about the end game there because he didn’t see the end game is a lot of holes.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I’m always the topline guy like I just focus on making so much money that it doesn’t matter and he’s more of the bottomline guy which is like, “Show me how this is going to work again?” you know. So, I’m the dreamer. I have the vision, whatever. So, we really balanced each other extremely well because I’ll come up with this great idea and he’ll come up with a hundred reasons why it will fail and the somewhere along the line, we’d agree to do something. So, right we do AuctionAds that goes well. So, basically I come up with this idea of paying everyone five bucks and so the people that we’re getting the credit line from there were like, “That doesn’t really make sense,” because if you get 20,000 people and you got to pay them off five bucks that’s a lot of money. And I’m like, “no, no. Trust me because our minimum payout is $10. So, if we give them five bucks to start, they got to make $5. By the time they made…because I was like, “Listen, people are so adversed to change that if people start running the product, they’re going to run it forever like how many sites do you put something on or even if you…no matter what happens, you’re so adversed just to change. So, you just need that incentive to do it and then once you do it, you’re less likely to change it unless somebody else gives you a better incentive. So, we just gave people five bucks to sign up. It was in their account when they made 10 bucks. They got paid. So, they actually had to make five bucks, did the math on it, and it was like, “you know, if we were to take X amount…and this was like basically the last month. I was like, “If we were to take X amount of percentage, this is going to work.” And that’s when we got bought out shortly after that, but it’s just little things like that and that’s something that we always do is look at our numbers. The numbers will always tell you what you need to do. It’s always funny to me when people come up to me and they’re like, “What should I do with my site?” I’m like, “What does your log say, like what are people doing? Like, “Where are your users coming from that give you value? What’s you goal?” you know. People just don’t know. Like bloggers, they’re like, “How do I make more money?” or, “How do I do this?” And I’m like, “OK, what’s your absolute goal for this site?” And they don’t know. they don’t know the answer. And I’m like, “OK, well, it’s hard to track value if you don’t know what your goal is.” So that really amazes me because you have all the data you need. You don’t need to talk to a guru or whoever to interpret what you have but you have everything you need. So, after AuctionAds and all that stuff, the one thing I knew for sure is I never ever want to run an advertising network ever again. It was just insane. I mean we were doing like thousand of hits a second, you know. I mean it was just nuts. So, but it was cool because like I said now, it opened us up to a whole new audience because if that wouldn’t have worked out, we sucked, but it worked out so it was awesome. So, then in 2007, I had capital and I was itching to start a new company and really if you see something that pattern involved whether it’s my blog Nextpimp or AuctionAds or this next…the next things I’m going to get into, they’re always service oriented sites and they’re kind of like we look at the market, we see a service that’s needed and we cater to that service and that’s really all we ever done, you know. I saw that with the ring tone industry, with wallpapers, you know. I mean I kind of discovered it by accident like and then just kind of discovered all these other stuff and there’s so many needed services out there but if you’re not passionate about it, you’re going to lose. So each one of these things we were super passionate about it. we were so confident in our product. Like I said, it’s like an angelic thing. It’s like you have no competition when you’re like that. And I mean I am hustler. I mean I’m a go-getter. And so, it’s really you’re immortal when you just…you know you have a great product, you believe in it, you put so much blood, sweat, and tears in it and you just…and even if you don’t have the best product, you’re willing to put in the time to make it the best. So, every time, that’s what we do. So, now, we’re getting to the end of 2007 and I purchased…I’m really in the mixed martial arts, huge, huge, huge. And I’ve always been a fan of it and I decide it’s time to jump in. I buy a domain called fighters.com. I hire 13 writers across the world to staff it and I just started burning money. And didn’t take too long really to realize like this was a bad mistake. But I thought I was like, man the recipe for success is here because it’s like, something we’re super passionate about. We love it but the thing we were missing was that it was so far away. Oh, and also, I started a conference called Elite Retreat like three years before that. Sorry I missed that one. But it was another thing where it was like a really needed service and basically oh man, I got it talking too fast. So somewhere I think 2006, we were like, I was talking with a kid named Lee Dodd and we were talking what the value of the conference is, is really like nothing to do with like listening to people speak but it’s like when you see somebody at a bar or something and you get some like one-on-one time with them, they’ll tell you things that they wouldn’t tell you onstage. And they’ll really help you and really think about what you’re saying. And so, I was like, “How do we capture that and cater to that community,” because that’s a badly needed service. So, we started Elite Retreat 2006 and then had it for the next four years. Long story short, it’s evolved into me running the whole thing because other people didn’t want to have…because we lost money the first two years basically. And so, I was…I just never give up on anything unless it’s the fighters who would give up. But basically we just…we created that and so I’m happy that the Elite Retreat now this year and 2009 when we had our event, it sold out in 10 days. I mean it was in San Francisco. It’s a two-day event. We took everyone to Facebook and now, it’s really grown into an amazing and I’m really, really proud of that. So, now back to fighters.com, in 2007, or end of 2007, we bought a domain. We hired all these writers. We have awesome content, incredible database of every fight that’s ever happened anywhere in the world and I’m struggling because this is so far away from everything I’ve ever done. I mean if the Elite Retreat does good or blog as well, everything else that we’re doing in that space as well. So, I pretty much decided at that point that fighter.com was not going to be for me. And so last–

Yaro Starak: What was the model you were trying to run with for fighter.com like a media site? A news site and make money from advertising or where were you going?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to have like a fantasy league based around ultimate fighting where you could choose your fighters and do all this stuff and make like fighter bout that would predict fights between what if this person fought this person and just build a whole social community around it, social network where people can make their own profiles and say what their style is and people can put up their amateur records and just really blow it out. But writers are expensive and especially, when you’re not making any money, and that just builds up and builds up and builds up and I had even investors on this project which was my first time too. And, so, they had gotten killed. Our investor had pretty gotten killed in the stock market and we’re basically like, “Hey, we’re not in for any more money.” And I was like, “We’re just getting started.” So, I had to make a tough decision at that time, which was do I buy them out and go at it myself which I tried to do and thankfully, they talked me out of it and instead we ended up selling the site to a third party which they haven’t really done much with the site since and I pretty much just broke even on that deal which I look at it like, I mean like I’m always a half full guy. So, I think that it was a big success in that I learned like so much while doing it and didn’t lose a lot or lose hardly anything other than my time which I think, again, that’s just…I rack that up to education. But I mean…so what I did do is but then I’m back in the situation in the early part of 2009 where it’s like, “Hey what do you want to do?” We don’t have anything really going, you know. We still have this Nextpimp revenue. We’re sitting on a pile of cash from selling AuctionAds but like I don’t want…like I mean I’m not done yet, you know. I want to do other things. So, David said to me, we have these tools that we use internally. And we should actually make a service where we actually let people… because people have always asked. I’ve talk about tools that we built in-house for the last six years. And what they do and how they work and people were always wanting access to them. And they’re not made for people. They’re made for us. So we never could do that. I said, “Dave let’s try that.” So, we called it ShoeMoney tools and it’s our newest things. We launched…it’s actually not 2009. It was actually late, late, late of last year of 2008. And basically, and then re-launched in like March 1st of 2009 and ShoeMoney tools, it’s tools.shoemoney.com and basically we opened up our suite of tools because we kept coming across all these tools that sucked and charged like hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. And I was like, “You know, all of our in-house tools like are better than all these tools and we have them all. So, why don’t we just do that? So, I’m happy to say that, like as of I think yesterday, we had 1000 subscribers. We haven’t really made a big marketing push yet. And we’re just getting started and it’s working for us. So, it’s 100 bucks a month. It’s got a forum and all that, and again, it’s a service that I think is badly needed. So, that’s where we are right now. That was the long history of ShoeMoney.

Yaro Starak: I have to say, you’re an easy interview. I just have to just ask one question and we just go from there. So…

Jeremy Schoemaker: I told you.

Yaro Starak: That’s incredible. Whoo! I was going to ask right now, today, you’re obviously running ShoeMoney tools but the fact that you have your tools must mean you’re still doing a lot of paper click and affiliate marketing, is that true?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. We play around a lot, you know. The thing with affiliate marketing is you never really find something that last very long. So, we experiment all the time and yeah, I mean we do it every day, you know. It’s like my hobby more than anything else. You know, during the day, especially lately, I’m been able to do a lot of bis dev stuff with ShoeMoney tools working with affiliate networks, and you know, just a lot of networking and promoting and stuff like that. And then like of kind when I go home and after I get my kids and wife to bed and stuff like that, then I play with paper click and build…I mean because that…again, I mean I am so passionate about that. I love doing it. It’s my hobby and it’s what I do for fun. I mean I love being able to throw up a site using like, Unique Blog Designs affiliate, have a site up and running and less than 15 minutes, and generating revenue like off a Facebook turning 36 clicks into dollar leaps, you know. I mean I love that. I just love it when it works and even when it fails, it’s such a challenge to me to get it working and just tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. And again, you have all the data you need, you know. You just test and tweak and test and tweak and it’s just a blast for me to do it. And so, these tools that we build I mean are tools I use. They’re tools that and it’s just something that again it’s like an immortal angelic thing and I’m just confident about them because I just know that they are the best and if they’re not the best and somebody tells me why, we fix it and if somebody says, “Hey you don’t have this tool that does this.” Well, three days after that, we do because everyone who works for me is a programmer. And that’s what we do. So, I don’t know. I just think it’s just a continuing thing with us over and over just like we’re super into this and I mean the lessons we’ve learned with Nextpimp, we should have sold that a long time ago and now, it’s to the point where there’s so much issues in that field that nobody wants to take it on. I couldn’t even sell that site for probably half a year’s revenue if I wanted to which is amazing. But it’s a declining industry but I’m really glad that the things that we are passionate and we still just kind of pursue those and even in this economy, I mean people were telling me like your business was going down and you decided to launch a new company. And in this economy where everything is going crap,” and I was like, “You know, it doesn’t matter what economy it is. Something that gives a positive return on investment will always succeed and that’s what we’ve always done is try to make needed services that people need and I mean it’s just an absolute recipe for success every time. And it’s not rocket science, you know. It’s just you’re passionate about it. You see an angle that you don’t think people are doing it right, then build the service yourself.

Yaro Starak: Are you still pretty much a two-man show then? You guys working from your homes or…?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I have two more employees now. So, I have…my mother-in-law is no longer with me but I do have a full-time…I kind of joke around and call him the CEO because I’m a horrible CEO. I’m an absolute horrible at running a company. You’re supposed to be good at focusing on the bottom line and all this stuff. I’m not. I just try to make as much money as possible and everything will fall into place. But that’s not how you run a company. So, I hired a guy to basically run day-to-day operations. His name is Ty. He does an incredible job. Then I also hired a young lady to do all of our copywriting and customer service and her name is Breana. So, that’s the team. Now David is actually part owner of the company. He invested…I gave him an opportunity to because he basically went from and that was an actual a pretty cool process as well. He went from working for $10 an hour to more to becoming a salaried employee and then a salaried employee with a percentage of profits and then actually being able to, when we sold AuctionAds, I said, “OK, I want you to stay with me for the long haul and if you’re in it then I want to you invest and buy a decent portion of this company. So, he did, and so now, he’s co-owner of the entire empire that we built because he’s been in it with me since the beginning pretty much.

Yaro Starak: So, it’s like the silent partner you never hear about.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah yeah he’s not the loudmouth that I am and he’s such a smart kid. He speaks like four languages fluently yeah. He’s into program like nobody have ever seen. But it’s not…programmers are a dime a dozen just being honest. I mean programmers, graphics peoples dime a dozen. Marketers, dime a dozen but it’s the one that…the ones that really see the angles and are in it for the long haul that there’s such a huge value to. Most people, as soon as they hit the dip, they’re done, you know. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have passion or what but finding people for me has been a huge shore and I’ve got through probably 50 people to find the team I have.

Yaro Starak: All right, Jeremy let’s wrap it up. I do have one question that would probably be relevant for the listeners more than anything else. Thank you for telling your story. it’s really interesting. We haven’t even touched upon the other aspect of your life there which was the other interesting aspect was the weight surgery and so forth.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah.

Yaro Starak: There’s another story there that’s not really Internet marketing related. So, we’ll leave off and people can go find out about that on your blog.

Jeremy Schoemaker: If you want, I can just briefly touch on it.

Yaro Starak: Go for it. Why not? We’ve got time.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Basically, when I met my wife in Des Moine Iowa, and I was pretty much comfortable before I met her with the fact that I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I really…I was probably going to die before I was 30. I was 420 pounds, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and was like 50,000 in debt. So, I was a real catch for the ladies. But, for whatever reason, I met this young lady who was going through medical school, and doing all the stuff and going on to this great career and it really kind of showed me like, if I want something out of life, I need to get my crap together. So, I decided to have weight loss surgery and kick smoking, and get my finances in order. And it was really a life-pivoting altering moment and it’s really continued. My wife was really the pivoting moment for me.

Yaro Starak: Good motivation there. All right. For like a lot of your story hinges on past successes especially when it comes to capital. Most people don’t have the capital. If you went back to right at the beginning, you’re sort of first story there of success were almost falling into it having the passionate subject that you have developed a web site for which just happened to get a ton of traffic. Obviously, you put in some work in to make that traffic appear. But you really didn’t go into it expecting it to be what you are today obviously. So, I’m sure you’ve been asked this a lot of times but for those listeners who are at the beginning of this curve, who come into this with no capital and, so many times I meet people like this too. They start to get a feel for how the Internet works. They know kind of what paper click is. They kind of know what search engine optimization is. They get affiliate marketing. They get blogging. They understand they could sell their own product. But all of this is sort of overwhelming and they don’t know which direction to run with first.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Right.

Yaro Starak: And where the best way to get there, the cash flow starts so that they start building on that. What do you suggest to those people?

Jeremy Schoemaker: You know, the one thing you can’t teach a person is confidence in themselves. And so that’s really the bottom line is I mean I’m a very, very confident person and I think that kind of…every person I’ve met in this industry who’s been successfully kind of has the exact same traits. I mean they’re not going to quit. They’re extremely confident in what they do. And they’re extremely passionate and so, anyone out there, if I met them and they know what they’re talking about, my question for them is like, “Why don’t you have more confidence in yourself to do what you want to do?” I mean and maybe confidence comes over time. I mean for me, I just kind of always had it. I mean not so much when I used to be really overweight. That was kind of changed when I met my wife and I started to develop a lot of confidence and I got to say it was probably her that gave me confidence. So, I don’t want to act like it was all me and I have everything figured out. I mean because I didn’t. I thought my life was going to end before I was 30 before I’m in Illinois. So people out there, there’s something holding you back. For me, I lack the confidence to go for it. I had to work for somebody else because I needed that security. When I met my wife and she was going through medical school, even though we were racking up debt and I was…I had like 50 grand in credit card debt, she had confidence in me to start my own stuff or this was like, “You’re doing pretty good with that. Why don’t you continue with that?” you know, and blah, blah, blah. And so, for me, that’s what I needed to go forward. And a lot of people I think they need to find that inner confidence to really go for it because if you’re passionate about what you do and you know what you’re doing, you really have no excuse. I mean capital really isn’t in excuse. I mean massively in debt when I fell into these things. And I was it’s just because my passion and my ability not to quit, that I found it. I mean if you look at almost anyone successful, they’ve failed. They’ve been in debt I mean like that’s everyone’s story. And they don’t stop. They don’t quit. And that’s the thing that you find with everyone is true is they don’t give up. And right now, I mean there’s no excuses for anyone. I mean you can start…it’s much easier for somebody to do what I did now. I mean it’s…for me Jeremy Schoemaker to do anything, if I want to do anything affiliate related, it’s watched like a hawk. Every time I register a new domain, I get emails. “What are you doing with this domain?” People have all these alert set up to alert them. I mean it’s insane for me to do something. Everything goes off the radar. So, I can do these things and make money. I don’t understand why people can’t. I mean they might lack experience but there’s always ways to get free traffic, still that I do like there’s just so many things. I mean there’s never… I’ve never met anyone with a legitimate excuse and I’ve…at all these conferences, I get this question all the time and people were like, “Well, you say that now because you have a blog and you can launch whatever.” I’m like, “Really?” because here’s all the negatives that come with that. And then people are like, “Wow, I mean I get it now.” So for those out there that want to start and if you really get it and really, truly believe in something and you’re passionate about it especially now with venture capital out there, I mean if you’re really, truly passionate about it, pitch it to me email me with your idea. I mean we funded various things and we’re not…we don’t have a very good track record with that but I wouldn’t say it’s a total loss but I mean we’re always open to new ideas. And what’s the thing I love about the TechCrunch conference that I go to is that they have these 50, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but they have 50 startups that pitch on stage but I don’t go to those. I go to the ones in the demo where they have hundreds of these ones who have these awesome sites who were bagging groceries by day. And these guys, I love then sometimes we’ve acquired technology or assets of those people. I mean you can just see these people…there is people everyday with awesome ideas and I mean you just reach out to somebody, just make a connection. Just don’t give up on it. If you really are passionate about what you’re doing, don’t quit.

Yaro Starak: Right on. Awesome. Well, that’s pretty much it, Jeremy. We didn’t talk much about your blog but I think that’s a subject we both covered significantly before. So, I think that was just the nice point to end on there. So, I’m not going to continue this. And we’ve been going for a good chunk of time. So, Jeremy, one shout out to what web address would you like to direct people to. I’m thinking ShoeMoney.com the best place to go if they, by any chance don’t know who you are.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, sure. I mean like the one thing I’m not good at is like self-promotion as crazy as that sounds.

Yaro Starak: Try it.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Like, so I always sound weird but yeah, so if you wanted to do ShoeMOney tools, sign up. It’s tools.shoemoney.com. Elite Retreat is my conference that have once a year and then ShoeMoney the blog. You can just keep up on everything at ShoeMoney.com.

Yaro Starak: And I mentioned to Nate that you should bring Elite Retreat down to Australia. Is that going to happen anytime soon?

Jeremy Schoemaker: You know, we’ve had. It’s funny that you mentioned that. We actually have had a venture capital firm in Australia, an advertising company and another company asked us and we got four people who have been to the Elite Retreat, one of them who had been to every one we’ve ever had. He’s made the trip. So, everything is in place. We’ve had all these people like actually basically to say, “Hey, we’ll back it so you won’t lose money,” you know. That’s only the risky thing. So, I don’t know. I mean we could have it. We’ve talked about having more events and changing it and mixing it and we’ll just have to look into it then see if it makes sense. I mean I wouldn’t mind that.

Yaro Starak: Have you been down here?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I never have but I’ve always wanted to travel that way.

Yaro Starak: It’s a nice place, far away but it’s a nice place.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. How did you get down there?

Yaro Starak: Born here.

Jeremy Schoemaker: OK.

Yaro Starak: Born and raised but we can save my story for the other interviews. So.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. I would love to hear your stories so you got to come on my radio show.

Yaro Starak: Definitely. I’d love to. All right. That’s fantastic Jeremy. Thank you for joining me and I think everything got a lot that was really good stuff.

Jeremy Schoemaker: All right. Thanks for having me.