Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

The day after I arrived in Vegas I got an email from Tim Kerber, the guy in charge of Membership Site Bootcamp, a training program for people who want to profit by creating their own online membership site.

Tim was super nice to me. He gave me his cell phone number via email and asked if I wanted to meet up early before the official mastermind the next day. I had plans to go see Cirque Du Soleil that night, so I had to give him a raincheck.

The next day, Tim was one of the first guys to come up and say hello at Jeff Walker’s mastermind meet-up and to be honest, besides knowing his name from the very successful Membership Site Bootcamp launch from 2007 (1.7 Million in sales), I didn’t know much about him.

It turns out Tim is a regular reader of my blog. I chatted with him for a good half hour at the networking event and I was impressed by how down to earth and friendly he is.

My Favorite Business Model – Membership Sites

It’s no secret that I have made a big chunk of my living from Blog Mastermind, my first membership site. I made over $100,000 from this one site in the past year alone.

The money is obviously great, but what I’m most happy about is how the steady income proves that my members receive so much value that they choose to stay a member of my program for the long term. This is very satisfying intrinsically, as well as financially.

Membership sites are a solid business model because you foster an ongoing relationship with your clients. The recursive income is obviously a motivation, but as anyone who runs a membership site understands, the money is a result of delivering ongoing value, it’s not a one-hit-wonder style product where you make your money and then walk away.

I’m not a fan of releasing one product after another, going from launch to launch. Creating and marketing products is a lot of work, so I prefer to have flagship products that you invest in over time and improve to the point that you have a superior position in your marketplace. If you focus your energy on just your membership site, it can become the basis for an entire six, or even seven figure business.

Membership Site Training From Tim Kerber

This week Membership Site Bootcamp reopens again for only the second time.

Tim’s currently in prelaunch mode for his flagship training program and as usual, that means there are free videos and other educational materials flying around the Internet marketing community. This is a great opportunity to grab some training on what is definitely the best online business model I know of so you can learn how to start your own membership site.

You can check out Tim’s latest video here –

Membership Site Bootcamp Video

This first video shows the outcome of some of Tim’s recent student’s successes launching membership sites.

Some of the numbers Tim shows from his previous students are impressive, but don’t let that daunt you. I aimed for 50 members when I first launched my site because I figured even 50 members times $50 a month is a great starting income of $2,500 a month. I ended up with 300 after the launch week, which obviously was a great result and fully convinced me of the viability of the membership site model.

Put it another way – if you can attract just one member a week, that’s 52 members a year and even with a 10% dropout rate, you are still making good money. Chances are your site will grow quicker, so you won’t stay at one new member a week for long.

If you have an idea for a course or a subscription service or any kind of membership site, it’s worth checking out what Tim is doing. Take a look at the free 8 minute long Membership Site Bootcamp video and if you like what you see, opt-in to grab the rest of the free videos.

www.membershipsitebootcamp.com

I’ve put together a new video of the footage from around the Vegas strip. In this video I take you for a walk down the main casino and hotel strip, showing all kinds of crazy sites and sounds.

The strip is obviously a very commercial area, probably one of the most commercial places in the entire USA.

Spending time in Vegas is like entering a different world, with airplanes flying low to land in the airport which was in the backyard of my hotel the MGM Grand (almost!). The lights and sounds and visual stimulation makes the place feel very surreal, like you have entered into a movie that features an entirely new theme every 100 meters or so.

There a few interesting observations to make when it came to marketing techniques that I took away and can relate to you now. Obviously a place as commercial as this has to be able to market themselves. Here’s some thoughts –

1. Vegas offers comparatively cheap hotel rates. Even the most fancy hotels can be booked for under a $100 a night if you search the web and you can go much lower than that if you stay at the hotels just off the strip. These are some of the most impressive hotels in the world (the MGM Grand is the second largest hotel in the world) and if you don’t drink or gamble it’s quite possible to have a “cheap” holiday in Vegas, especially if you just want to lounge around the pool and walk up and down the strip.

   As soon as you start spending money on shows or gambling or drinking, that’s when the cost tends to rise up. This is of course a deliberate technique – make the accommodation cheap to get people there and then trust that the will spend up big. There’s no many products that offer as good a profit margin as gambling, so the hotels are quite happy to let people stay cheap.

2. As I pointed out in the video, there’s evidence of social proof and other forms of proof all over Vegas. One casino had a “wall of winners” showing photos of all the normal everyday people who had struck it rich showing off their big checks. Some had even become new millionaires.

   This is a classic technique that creates excitement and most importantly – hope. The whole idea of gambling is to purchase just a little potential for winning big with every bet. It’s this hope that creates the excitement that keeps people gambling away more money, despite fully understanding how bad the odds are in most situations.

3. The whole marketing image Vegas has developed is one of decadence and uninhibited pleasures. The psychology means people who come to Vegas leave their usual self-imposed restrictions at home. It’s okay to eat bad, drink lots, gamble and sleep with strangers in Vegas because that’s what people do. This frame helps the businesses benefit financially since money is spent a lot more frivolously than usual.

In my next post I’ll have the video up from the Jeff Walker Mastermind, including some short interviews with the experts attending. The networking was by far the highlight for me and I think you will enjoy my behind the scenes take of such a high-level meeting of marketing minds.

As always, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed and follow my Twitter profile if you want the latest from Vegas.

Yaro Starak
Not Gambling

Here’s a video I just edited together of some of the early footage I recorded after arriving in Las Vegas. Please excuse some of the commentary – I was quite tired so I went a bit silly at times.

I’ve been in Vegas for a few days now and finally found some time to string together some of the video footage from my Creative Vado.

It’s an amazing yet bizarre place, and I’ve got lots to share with you including about 15 minutes worth of video footage and some photos. I did some short interviews with people at the Product Launch Formula 2.0 Top Affiliates Networking bash plus some shots from around the hotel strip.

Today is my last full day here so I’m going to venture out now. Over the next few days I’ll publish more video and stories. It’s been an amazing trip so far, especially the networking yesterday with some of the top Internet marketers in the world.

Make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed to catch the videos coming up and I’ve also posted updates to my Twitter Profile, including links to some of the tools I’m using to create and edit the videos and what I’m up to around Vegas.

Tonight I’m heading to the bright lights of Las Vegas and no, it’s not to gamble and drink since I don’t do either, although I do intend to see a Cirque Du Soleil show.

This is my first trip to Las Vegas and the main reason I’m heading there is for a special invite-only mastermind session with the top affiliates from the recent Product Launch Formula 2.0 release from Jeff Walker.

Normally I’m no where near the top of the affiliate standings but recently I’ve been able to get into the top 30ish area quite consistently, peaking at top 15 for StomperSMARTS and making the cut for the special invite to the mastermind with Jeff and his partners for the PLF 2.0 launch.

Here’s a list of some likely attendees in Vegas -

• Rich Schefren
• Tom Ham
• Mike Filsaime
• Tom Beal
• Joe Jablonski
• Ed Dale
• Colette Marshall
• Mark Widawer
• Brian Clark
• Willie Crawford
• Jeff Dedrick
• Tim Houston
• Michael Cheney
• John Carlton
• Stan Dahl
• Shawn Casey
• Ray Edwards
• Greg Poulos
• Dave Mizrachi

I’m looking forward to meeting some of these people in person, who I only know from names on websites and in emails.

Sedona and Chicago Next

After Vegas I’m renting a car and doing a road trip to Sedona for a brief holiday, then driving on to Phoenix for just long enough to catch a plane to Chicago. I’ve got a couple of days in Chicago then I’m back home to Toronto where I move into new house down at the beaches.

Throughout this trip I’ll have my trusty video camera and hopefully get a chance to do some more wandering entrepreneur posts, so stay tuned.

If you want to keep up with the latest details on this trip, make sure you subscribe to my Twitter feed.

In this final piece of a four part article series on customer service we look at one of the key components of a successful Internet business – a good customer support person.

If you have been following along this journey you will remember how Starbucks taught us the importance of good customer service as a powerful tool for reputation management, which can lead to a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

We then switched to the Internet business world and followed along the typical path of a solo entrepreneur growing an online empire. With success comes pressure to continue to deliver personalized support, despite less time available to do so. In the end one person can only do so much, and customer service suffers.

In the most recent article I went back in time and reviewed my own personal experience developing various Internet projects and how I evolved the system I use to interact with my constituents. The major conclusion of this piece was the importance of Angela, my customer service person.

Now let’s take a look how you can take the next step with your business and outsource your customer service role.

Start With A System

It’s likely you will begin by providing customer support yourself, especially if you work your way up as an independent operator. Along the way you can install a help desk or set up a customer support email account. You may go as far as replicating the ReplytoYaro.com support system I use.

The previous article looked at a several technology options available to you to implement a system for online customer support. I suggest you use my story as inspiration to build your own support system, and while you do, think about how eventually another person (or people) can run it for you.

Most help desk scripts are built for multiple users and as I explained in the prior article, a Gmail email is a great basic solution to get started and can also handle multiple users through the use of message flagging.

Once you have something set up, your next task is to find a customer support officer.

How I Find Good People

Read the rest of this entry >>