Hey everybody, Lance Tamashiro here, and today I want to talk to you about why you need to be thinking about having a recurring income for your online business. Now, a lot of people that I know and that I’ve worked with in the past think “Oh I’m just going to work really, really hard on this one cool ebook, I’m going price it at $7 dollars and everybody in the world is going to come buy it, and I’ll just be rich! The truth is that’s not the case. The whole key on making money on the Internet is to build a recurring income.
The Key to Long Term Income
Now, that’s the big point here. Everything else that you do is just spinning your wheels, if you’re not thinking of making a recurring income then all that you’re really doing is doing the same thing that you’re doing in your day job, you’re trading your time for dollars, and what you really want to do is get to the point where you basically put up a membership site, get something that’s recurring and get paid for it over and over again.
Niche is not important
Now, the one thing that I really want to stress to everybody here is that your niche is not important. Now, a lot of people think, well, I can only make recurring income in internet marketing, I can only make income trying to teach people how to play the guitar, that’s not the truth! The truth is, is that if you have anything at all to teach or a service to give, then, you can start your own membership site.
Every successful business model is based on “memberships”
How do I know this? Well, look around you! Every single business model that is successful both online and offline is based around a membership model. I want you to change the way you think about memberships right now, today!
A membership is not just something where you get new content every month. Its something where you get to bill people every month either for your information or your service, and let me give you a couple of examples, I bet the majority of you have a cellphone. Guess what? That is a membership site, they have a fix term length, usually it’s like two years and you have to pay over and over and over again. Guess what I bet you most of you have landline service if you don’t have a cell phone service. That too is a form of a recurring membership site.
Do you own a car? I bet you make car payments. Do you own a house? Or pay rent? All of those are types of membership sites, and all examples of things that you can do to trade your time for dollars that are recurring instead of one to one, you want to look at this as one to many.
Building a membership site is not hard!
I’ve recently pulled my list and the big thing that I found is that people thought, well Lance this is way too hard! It’s way too hard to setup a recurring membership site, its way to hard to get people to pay me time and time again for my information and I want to tell you right now, that’s false! You need to change the way you’re thinking about this.
Content – am I an expert?
So, one of the big things that I found out is that people said, Lance, I don’t have any contents. Am I an expert in anything? How am I going to get people to pay me over and over and over again? Well the truth is that if you know anything at all, then you’re an expert.
One of the big things, especially in the Internet marketing industry that people forget is that there is a huge learning curve. So, even if you just know how to put up a squeeze page, even if you know just how setup an autoresponder, even if you just know a good program, an affiliate program to promote, all of those are information that somebody just getting started doesn’t know that you had to learn and that’s enough information that makes you an expert on somebody, and that’s the key to learning more and more and being able to charge more and more for your membership site.
It’s not too technical!
The second thing that people told me is that it’s way too technical to setup a membership site. Again, false! All you need to know is Wordpress, you need to have the right plug-ins and you need to have the right scripts. This is cheap, this is easy to do, and it’s not hard at all. Even if you just re-think your model and rethink of your autoresponder as a membership, then guess what? You have the ability to make a recurring income and a membership site.
Stop Over Thinking!
So, what I basically want all you guys to do today is to stop overthinking this! It is true, the key to a successful online business or business in the offline world is recurring income but it doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it. You don’t need fancy scripts. You don’t need a ton of information.
You only need to be one step ahead
All you need to do is to start at the point where you’re at, whether it’s beginning guitar. Remember, if you’re learning guitar, you know something more than somebody that is just getting started, and you have something to teach that person. You don’t have to fill-up an entire membership site for years and years when you don’t even have a member, and that is something that is really, really bothers me. The truth is you only have to be one step ahead of your first member.
So, if you have a membership site, why would you spend a year building up content when you don’t even have somebody paying you yet? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to make weeks worth of content, find that first member and always stay one day, or one week, or one month ahead of that one person? It’s been told on the Internet that the average lifespan of a membership site is two to four months, so let’s round it up and call it three months.
If the average time that somebody stays in a membership is only three months why are so many of you spending months and months and months building six months, one year, two years of content? All you need to do is stay one step ahead of your longest subscriber. In that way you’re not spinning your wheels. You can start bringing in money while you’re increasing your own knowledge and starting to bring money into your online business
Where are you?
So, with that being said, I want to know where you’re at today. I want to know what kind of site you have. Do you have a membership site setup? I bet you, if you think hard enough, you probably do. Let me give you a perfect example.
A couple of week ago I was with my friend Robert Plank, hanging out in North Carolina, and we started to have this whole discussion where we were talking about what is a membership site. What constitute a membership site? What “officially makes it” so that I have a membership site, and you want to know what we came up with? It’s that all of these big terms that people are throwing around are untrue.
The only thing that you need to have a membership site is to charge one person one payment or more, and that makes it a membership site. It can be fixed term, it can be open ended, but think about the example like I gave you earlier. You have a car payment, you know exactly how many payments you’re going to have to make until that membership ends and you own the car. If you have an ebook that you sell for $97, guess what if you’re having trouble selling it at $97, make it two payments of $47 and suddenly you have a membership site. So, stop over thinking it, but I want to know do you have a membership site?
What is your membership site?
Finally, what is your membership site? If you think you have any sort of product at all, you have a membership site, and another thing that I want to tell you is that I personally own a membership site that is made completely of other people’s products. That’s right, I took master resell rights, private label rights, and different types of products, threw them up all on a single website and I charge people month after month after month to get access to these. So, without even owning your own product, you can successfully start your own membership site.
What is your Retention Rate?
Finally, one of the most important things that you need to know about your membership site is what is that retention rate? And how long do people stay in, and it’s sort of like what I was talking about earlier, what is the purpose of having a hundred days worth of content, if you only keep people on average for 30 days? You’ve just wasted 70 days worth of time, of content that people would never see.
Wouldn’t it be better to restructure that content so that you can build over and over and over, or stretch it out so that you can only have content for the amount of time that people are going to see it?
Lots of Easy Solutions!
So, the main point that I’m driving home here is that there’s lots and lots or easy solutions! In fact Robert Plank and I have six proven models that we use over and over again to build recurring income, and most people just think of us as like these “Products Creators” that’s people that are always pimping out new things but the truth is, is that we try to put everything we can into a recurring income because we would rather do the work once and get paid for it many times, than do the work once and get paid for it once, and that’s what I want to encourage you to do.
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