Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Read previous articles in this series:

• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 3: Technology

The previous three parts of this series focused on the marketing and technology requirements to successfully launch a membership site. There is still one critical component you must have in place before you move on to the prelaunch and launch phase - the content you will provide members in return for their membership fee.

Surprisingly, while content is of course a mandatory requirement for any membership site, it’s often the area that marketers spend the least time on. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t pay attention to your content - your goal should be to always over-deliver when it comes to content - but often so much time is committed to marketing that content takes a back seat.

The How and the What

You have two important decisions to make when it comes to content for your membership site -

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I know when I see a business opportunity and it’s titled “nutritional supplements” that I tend to cringe. Something about that just seems dodgy (or sketchy for you Canadians).

The guys behind the super successful Pipeline Profits program, Brock Felt and Buck Rizvi (Brock and Buck), are known for introducing co-registration as a marketing tool to the Internet marketing mainstream. You might remember I blogged about their launch a while back in this post - Pipeline Profits - A Million Dollar Internet Business With No SEO, No PPC And No Affiliates? - and of course they did super well with that launch.

I haven’t had a chance to really investigate co-registration yet, but in theory I like it a lot, but that’s not the topic of this post. The business Brock and Buck run that they leverage co-registration with, is a nutritional supplements business. I know absolutely nothing about their business, but I know Brock and Buck do extremely well with it and everyone’s favorite 4-Hour Workweek author, Tim Ferriss, also happens to run a nutritional supplement business online, so there must be some big opportunity in this particular niche.

Brock and Buck previously ran a private seminar called Supplement Millions, about how to launch your own multi-million dollar nutritional supplement business, which they only offered to their current customers. Needless to say it went really well and they are doing one last seminar, but this time the public is invited too.

Free Training Content

The Supplement Millions workshop is probably financially out of the reach of most of you reading this, but as always there is a bunch of free content coming out as part of the launch process.

If you want the info about the event and “Preflight Training” content (as they call it) you can opt-in here -

www.supplementmillions.com/live/

There’s a neat video on that page too where Brock and Buck explain the background story behind the event.

If you are still in the “seeking opportunities” stage of your business, then this one might be worth checking out.

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Blogging to the Bank 2.0 Book by Rob Benwell

Name: Blogging to the Bank 2.0
Creator: Rob Benwell
URL: www.bloggingtothebank.com
Purpose: Learn how to make money blogging using Rob’s blogging system.

I’ve been eager to get a hold of some of the blogging information products that have begun to surface lately, mainly targeted at the Internet marketing world, but certainly of interest to the blogging world or anyone who wants to make money online.

Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 2.0 book is the sequel to his original Blogging to the Bank book that did really well - it was a Clickbank best seller (I’d say his affiliates had a big hand in helping him with that because the book was everywhere!). As with most information products like this the pretense is how much money you can make and how little you have to work to make it, all backed up by the author who is walking the walk - living proof that his or her system works. That’s pretty much the case here with Rob claiming income of over $30,000 per month from his blogs.

Given I’m the lead mentor in a make money blogging program, Blog Mastermind, and a big chunk of my income also comes from blogging, I was very curious to see what Ben does to make his money from blogs and compare it to how I do it. I had some assumptions about his system and after reading the book they were pretty much confirmed.

I have to thank Ben for offering me a review copy of his book as well, so thanks Rob and as promised, here is the review.

Blogging For Money

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Read previous articles in this series:

• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels

The pieces of the puzzle to produce a successful membership site are coming together. Preeminence (credibility, reputation, key contacts) and marketing (an ability to communicate with your prospective members) are in place, or at least you know you need them to be in place, and now you can work on putting together the nuts and bolts technology to deliver your membership service.

To build your membership site you need to consider the following requirements:

• How will you protect member resources from public access?
• How will you take payments and process registrations/deliver resources?
• What content features will your membership site contain (audio, video, forums, chatrooms, webinars)?
• What email list service will you use to communicate with and how will it integrate with the rest of your membership site?
• How will you handle affiliates - track referrals, offer promo tools, pay out commissions and ingrate everything with your email list service?

As is typical with web technology, you have quite a few options to choose from to satisfy all the above requirements. The challenge is coming up with the right combination of tools that meet your needs and work well together.

My process to decide what technology to use started a long time before I launched Blog Mastermind, in fact years before I even decided to produce a membership site at all.

Before deciding to produce a mentoring program for professional bloggers I was planning to release an information product, an e-book along with some videos. This was about a year into my blogging career and at the same time I made my very first technology choice, which (eventually) impacted the structure of Blog Mastermind. I made the decision to use AWeber as my email list provider (AWeber review is here).

Thankfully AWeber integrates with pretty much every mainstream membership site software program, so although I made my email autoresponder decision early, it had little impact on what software I used to meet the rest of my membership site needs.

Membership Site Software

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I’m a fan of shows like the Apprentice and The Dragon’s Den where the focus is on business. They are often quite tacky (all reality television is tacky), but they usually find a way to entertain, and when you throw in some form of business element it tends to grab my attention. The Dragon’s Den in particular was good watching when it was briefly on in Australia because I knew the entrepreneur “dragons” well.

I’ve been hearing a lot recently about Joel Comm’s latest project The Next Internet Millionaire, which is a web reality show based on starting an Internet business. I have to admit I’m pretty skeptical about any Internet marketing experts branching into reality television (that sounds like a recipe for even more tackiness!). As long time readers of my blog know, Joel’s marketing tactics in the past have gotten my into trouble as an affiliate of his, but given how much money Joel is throwing at this project ($400K budget) I had to take a look.

Here’s the basic premise -

Twelve contestants will receive an all expenses paid trip to learn from the masters of marketing while they compete for cash, prizes, and the ultimate joint venture with Joel Comm.

Some of my personal mentors, Rich Schefren, Mike Filsaime, Mark Joyner and Jeff Walker are included in this project as teachers, so it’s certainly got the backing of the experts.

If you are interested to read more, check out the website, there are a ton of videos and info about what the project is all about and also audition videos with the 12 finalists.

Leaked Video?

There is a potential “leaked video” at YouTube from the set of the reality program, which probably is a marketing stunt knowing these guys and really isn’t leaked, although it certainly looks rough enough to be leaked accidentally.

You can check it out here -

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5TaDrizSCp4

As you can see from the video it’s a full television-style production (I can see why they need such a huge budget), so it should be interesting to watch how it goes. It would be great to see more Internet business covered on television and maybe this show is the first step towards that outcome.

PS - I’m not promoting this one as an affiliate, just a casual observer.

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