membership site

How to Launch a Membership Site – Part 4

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My graphic desiger finally sent me the final images for my site on Tuesday morning.  I spent the last two days working on the homepage and other than needing to add some testimonials later on it’s pretty much done.

It’s amazing how much it helps having professionally designed graphics for your site.  I’m actually embarrased to show people my old site now that I know how easy it is to have something quality put together for you by someone who knows what they are doing.

2 days might seem like a long time to work on one webpage but based on the prices I received from professional copywriters I think I made the right choice.  It’s no masterpiece but I think it’s certainly above average when compared to other similar websites.

I have also almost completely configured all the internal site files.  That means the first 4 steps of my 7 step to do list are pretty much done.

I plan to work on step 5 today which is to create some marketing tools that I can put into the “affiliate toolbox”.

I also thought of a few other steps I need to do…

5.1 – Create a bonus page.  Pretty easy.  Just need to grab the html for some free programs and create a page inside the site for them.

5.2 – Add Products – Since I haven’t created my product yet I haven’t played around with adding products into LFM yet.  I do have some bonus products I am giving away so I should probably figure out how that works.

5.3 – Test the Support Room – Yep, I added a support room to the site by installing osTicket.  It was free and ridiculously easy to install.  I just haven’t tried it to see if it actually works.

5.4 – Test Member Emails – I should probably make sure the email is configured properly, make some custom welcome emails, and get everything linked to my Aweber account.

Step 6 is to work on my autoresponder emails and Step 7 is to create the product though I may need to do that sooner than I was planning.  When the product is done I am going to have to send it out to have it made into a rebrandable ebook and I have no idea how long that is going to take.  It would also be nice to get some testimonials from people before I launch and I probably need a product to do that.  Thankfully I think writing all the sales copy in advance has given me a pretty good idea of exactly what the product needs to be.  It’s just a matter of organizing all the information in my head into something that people will actually want to have.

I would say everything is going great so far.  My best guess is that I am about a month away from an actual launch but I have no problem pushing that back further to make sure everything runs perfectly.

How to Launch a Membership Site – Part 3

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The waiting is the hardest part.

I received an email from my graphic designer early Friday morning telling me he would send me my revised site graphics in about 12 hours.  I did a show that night and was looking forward to seeing them when I got home.  Sure enough, no graphics.  It’s now Monday morning and there is a message on the site saying “we’re currently on a very heavy workload, thus there might be delays replying to your emails.  Turnaround time 6-7 working days”.  D’oh!

I kept myself busy yesterday working on the inner workings of the membership site… mostly the OTOs.  Creating the pages wasn’t that hard, just very time consuming.  The real problem came with trying to link those pages to upgraded memberships via PayPal IPN.  I have never worked with IPN before and there was nothing in the LFM manual/videos explaining how to use it.  Thanks to PayPal Sandbox I finally figured it out after about 30 tries.  I just hope it works when I actually launch.

So the OTO pages are done.  I also did the “Upgrade” pages in the site.  Today I will do the members homepage and maybe work on some of the affiliate sales tools if I have time.

I just hope I get the graphics soon.  If I get stuck looking for something to do I suppose I could always start creating a product… nah.

How to Launch a Membership Site – Part 2

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After a week of no responses from my graphic designer I finally got an email from him today.  Seems the email he thought he sent me last week never got sent.  The good news is that I got to see the first draft of my new website.  Other than my last name being spelled wrong on every image (oops) I have to admit it’s pretty freakin awesome.  About a bazillion percent better than what I could have come up with on my own.  It’s amazing what a difference it makes when you hire a professional to do the work for you.

Now that I know what my site is going to look like I don’t really have an excuse for putting off the rest of the project any longer.

Well, maybe a little longer.  First things first.. I need a to-do list!

Here’s what i’ve come up with…

1. Update my blog with my to-do list.  CHECK!

2. Work on the sales page – This one is probably going to suck because it is the most important part.  Gotta come up with a killer headline and subheading as well as a bunch of bullet points for a book I haven’t written.  Should be fun.

3. Create some OTOs -I already have a pretty good idea of what I want to sell in my OTOs.  I will probably need to talk to some JV partners to see if they want to contribute anything.  Also gonna to have to figure out how to price everything.  Also not entirely sure how to tie them all in with the LFM site.

4. Configure Launch Formula Marketing – I registered my domain name today so I should be able to install the membership script on my new site now.  Not sure how much configuring I am going to have to do.  I played around with LFM-Lite and it was pretty easy.  I just don’t know how much more there is in the full version but it should be a lot of fun setting it up.

5. Create Affiliate Marketing Tools – Once LFM is installed I will have to write some email ads and signature files for my affiliate to use when promoting the site.  I love the idea of hundreds of affiliates using my ads to promote my site.

6. Write autoresponder emails – Most of these I can copy over from my other email list.  This will be a good opportunity to tweak them, drop the ones that aren’t converting, and add some new ones that I know convert well.

7. Write Ebook – Oh yeah, I still don’t have a product.  No sweat.  I am intentionally saving this for last.  Am I crazy for doing it that way?  We shall see.

Hopefully that’s all I need to do.  Should be an interesting to see how smoothly it goes.

More to come…

How to Launch a Membership Site

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Yes, i’ve been gone for awhile.  Did you miss me?

Sorry.  I’ve been having some major financial problems lately and actually had to take a part-time offline job for a little while to help make ends meet.  I’ve also been busy doing light shows around town including a really amazing 5-day festival in downtown St. Louis.

Now that things are looking better and I should have more time to focus on getting my business rolling again which means more frequent blog updates.

So here’s what’s up… after kicking around the idea for over 6 months I am finally going to launch my first membership site.  This is something I have never done before so it’s going to be a bit of a learning experience.  I figure I can document the process here in my blog so hopefully someone can learn from my success (or failure… gulp).

I wouldn’t expect to see a finished product any time soon since I plan on taking my time and trying to do everything the right way.  So far I have purchased a copy of “Launch Formula Marketing” which although being very expensive is actually pretty awesome because now I will be able to launch as many membership sites as I want (assuming I can pull this one off).

I also hired a graphic designer to do all the layouts for me.  That’s right.  No more crappy do-it-yourself webdesigns.  It actually wasn’t that expensive especially compared to how much time I find myself spending trying to do my own layouts.  I’m still waiting for them to send me the first draft but that should be very soon.

The one thing I don’t have yet is a product.  Yeah, you would think that is kinda important but I am trying to do things a little different than what I did with Traffic Success Formula.  Rather than create a product and then try to come up with a bunch of ways to market it I want to create some killer marketing materials first and then create a product to go with it. This way I can be sure my product will be tailored to meet all the needs of the people I am marketing it to.

I also figure I will be a lot more motivated to actually create the product once some of the other stuff is done.

So does this sound like something you would be interested in reading more about?  I am much more likely to keep posting updates if you leave some encouraging comments.  You can also bookmark this page or sign-up for updates up on the top corner of the page.