One of the questions that gets asked frequently, is how long of a video someone should use to sell a product or service online.

Before you decide on how long your sales video should be you need to determine what type of action you are trying to get your viewer to take.

If you are trying to get your viewer to give you their name and email address you will use a different strategy than if you are trying to get them to purchase your product or service.

When trying to get your viewer to “opt in” to a mailing list.  You want to make sure that your message is short , concise and contains a strong call to action.

Consider a short 30 second video that explains the benefit of the information they will receive in exchange for opting in.

This video should repeat the headline, major benefits the information will provide them and explicit instructions for opting in.

If you are trying to get your viewer to make an impulse buy for a product in the $7 – $47 range, then you will need a longer video.

This type of video will be 5 to 10 minutes in length and will contain the same information as the opt in video with a few minor changes.

First, you will need to explain the benefits to the viewer in more detail.  Demonstrate the product to them in your video so they can “see” why they need your product or service.

Second your call to action need to tell them exactly what button to click and encourage them to complete the payment process immediately.

Many people overlook the importance of the actually telling them to buy.  This one small tip can increase your conversions.

Now that you understand there are different types of videos for different purposes you can choose the correct time for your need.

One of things that has really boosted my productivity is the addition of not only multiple monitors (most computers come equipped with dual monitor video cards these days), but also BIGGER monitors.

My current setup has two 24 inch widescreen monitors.

Bigger Is NOT Always Better!

In the case of monitors adding a second or even just adding a bigger monitor can actually decrease productivity if not used the correct way.

It is often very tempting to leave open an email client, IM client or some other time waster.

That is why I hesitate to do this…

BUT…

I have a 24 inch wide screen Acer F-22 Ferrari monitor and I am wondering if it has your name on it.

Here Is How This Is Going To Work!

I will ship this monitor (free of charge) as my gift to one lucky reader.

Comments on this post will be CLOSED on Wednesday, April 21, 2010  at 5PM Mountain Time

I will announce the lucky reader on Thursday April 22, 2010 and have this in the mail on Friday, April 23, 2010.

You must complete the following to be considered:

1)  Post a comment with the following information:

• What is the biggest obstacle you are facing with your business?
• What concrete action will you have completed by April 30, 2010 that will add to your business.
• How will this monitor help your business?
• What is your top productivity tip?

I hope this monitor has your name on it.  I will post the name of the lucky subscriber here on Thursday April 22, 2010

Congratulations to Mike Ippersiel for submitting winning my 24″ wide-screen Ferrari branded monitor.

Play Video

For the last couple of days we’ve been having a discussion about memberships sites.

We’ve been having a discussion about what you need to actually build a membership site, how to build content, how to technically overcome some of the barriers that a lot of you are having producing your membership sites.

I don’t blog very often, but I felt that this was a needed conversation. What I see happening in the marketplace is a lot of the “gurus” are basically telling you things about memberships when

a) they might not even have very many of their own

b) I really feel like they’re doing a lot of the “teaching” that they’re doing with ulterior motives.

So, what I want to do today is have a discussion with you based on the feedback that you’ve given me.

I heard a lot of common themes, and I want to squash the problems that you guys perceived that you’re having with creating your own memberships sites – because as we all know, most of us came online in order to earn a passive, recurring income and that obviously translates into a membership site, but what happens is that we find ourselves working even more than we did at a lower hourly rate than we did at our day jobs and you’re never going to get ahead that way.

I want to discuss with you today are the “membership site myths” that your favorite “guru” wants you to believe.

WARNING!!!

I want to start off with a very basic warning, and the warning is this – that this blog post is only for people who want the absolute truth.

If you follow me at all, if you read my emails, if you read my blog posts, you know that I’m not one to sugarcoat things, and when I see a problem in the marketplace, I like to talk about it.

So, why do you want a membership site anyway?

The reason why I wanted a membership site and based on the feedback that you’ve given me is that you wanted to work less,  you want to earn more, and basically you want to enjoy life.

Just to give you a real quick example, my partner, Robert Plank and I,  currently have over 20 membership sites up and running. Yes, that’s 20 that we’ve created in less than a year, there’s probably even more than that at this point now, but these membership sites bring us in over $20,000 per month passively. And when I say passively, we maybe put 30 minutes to 60 minutes per month of work into it. So, not a bad trade-off. If you ask me, it’s a great hourly rate, and one of the things that it lets us do is enjoy life.

So, just recently, we happened to be at a conference in Las Vegas and we were having a discussion, and Robert says to me,

“Hey Lance, it’s your birthday. I want to take you, your wife, your child, Grace, who is a very cute little girl, I might add, and his girlfriend, Sarah – to Hawaii.”

So, that night we got on the internet, he booked us first class tickets to Hawaii, went there for about 5 days. In fact, we’re big LOST fans. So, he took us on this all-day tour of LOST.

While we did that, our money kept coming in and we didn’t do any work. No work whatsoever. We just relaxed, enjoyed, recuperated. And the reason we were able to do that is because we have the correct setups in membership site, and what we want to do is show you how to do that as well.

The cool thing about this, like I was saying, is it all happened on autopilot. We didn’t even answer emails, log in to the internet, nothing while we were way at Hawaii.

Myth #1 – Use Free Software

I’m seeing this more and more and more over the internet is that “Free software and free membership site setups are good.”

Let me just get this right out of the way.

The argument that these “gurus” are teaching is that you should start with a free setup solution because you can upgrade later.

But let me ask you a question, how many PLR or Resale Rights Products have you bought?

And of those, how many have you actually set up online?

How many sales pages have you said that you’re going to go back and edit and make better?

How many products have you created that you said you’re going to go back and update?

My guess is, if you’re anything like me, you’ve got lots of this stuff and the truth is you never went back and upgraded.

The Truth Is This NEVER Happens

We’re so bombarded with moving our businesses forward that we never go back to do any, to go back and “fix” anything.  So, why not just get it right the first time?

Wouldn’t it be better to start with a solid foundation that you can grow with instead of trying to worry about the headache of how to change your whole system?

What they never tell you is that it’s next to impossible to migrate your setup.   They tell you to put it on all of this free software, they tell you that you can go back at any time once you’ve started to build an income and you can migrate that over.

The truth is it’s near impossible to do that.

Also, what happens if you need support?

Do you really think that the author of a “free plugin” is going to be really worried about helping you if you have a problem with their software?

Personally, I would much rather go with a big company who has a staff that’s dedicated to answering my problems when I have one.

Myth #2 – “I’m Not An Expert”

I hear this over and over,  and this was probably the biggest common theme that I heard from the emails that you guys have sent me.

“I’m not an expert.  Who will listen to me?  How do I get people to pay for the stuff that I want to know?”

“Who will pay for my information?”

Here’s A Little Secret

This is actually an overwhelmed tactics that the “gurus” want you to believe.

Why would they want you to believe this?

Why would they want you to believe that you don’t have enough information to become an expert?  That you don’t know enough in order to teach somebody else what it is that you know?

Well, it’s really simple.  If they can keep making you believe that you’re not an expert, then you have to keep buying their products.  Think about that for a minute.  It makes absolute sense, and if you actually step back and think about the people that are telling you to set up memberships sites, that are telling you to find a niche, and then they’re telling you you don’t know enough, it’s a tactic that they want you to believe.

The truth is, is that the majority of people online are looking for facts, concise information.  Can you find out everything about membership sites or everything about your niche online for free?

The answer, honestly is probably, but what people pay for is that consolidated, concise, no-fluff information.

I don’t care what niche you’re in, there is always a newbie or somebody that knows less than you that you can pass that information onto.  For example, I got started in internet marketing as a list builder.  Now, are there people out there that sell products everyday on how to build 10,000-person list?  How to build 100,000-person list?

Yes.

I couldn’t do that.  What I did was I used my results.

What I learned how to do was build a list of 137 people, and I sold that product. That product sold like crazy.

Why? Because there were people who didn’t even know how to do what I knew how to do  So, I could take them, and as I learned new things, I had continuing information to teach to them.

So, think about that for a minute. You are an expert to somebody and the truth is is that there’s many, many more beginners on the internet in every single niche than there are experts.  There’s very few “experts”.

So, if you feel like you know more than somebody about your hobby, your passion, your niche, as you should, then it’s very easy to market towards people who know less than you.  And as they learn more, you are going to be learning more as well.

So, don’t think that you’re not an expert.  Every single one of you, are and I’ve yet to meet any of the students that we have anywhere from $300 students to $1000 coaching clients that have come to us and not felt like they were an expert after our training – because the truth is it’s just a mindset shift.  Once you understand what’s happening to you in the marketplace, it makes it very easy to see that you actually are an expert.

Myth #3 – “I Can’t Generate Enough Content”

This one drives me absolutely crazy – because the biggest reason that people fail online with membership sites is because they think they have this one big idea.

They think they have this one membership site that is going to basically be their ticket out.  So what do they do?

Well, they try to create years and years and years worth of content upfront before they even launch it, and this makes no sense to me.

So, let’s think about this for a minute.  Why would you spend your time creating 4 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years worth of content when you don’t even have a subscriber yet?

Nobody is going to see that for 6 months, 2 years.   So what Robert and I do is when we actually create membership sites, we’re always just staying one step ahead of our longest subscribers.

Re-Think Your Idea Of A Membership

First of all, I want you to think about a fixed-term membership site.   Most of the membership sites that I run are what we call fixed-term, which means that it starts at one point and has a definite end point.  If there is 6 months worth of content, they pay for 6 months, and at the end of 6 months, they have lifetime to access to all the updates, all the information, anything else that we might add/change along the way.

The point is you’ve now moved from something open-ended, which most people, let’s face it, are afraid of pain.  If somebody told you you’re going to pay $47 for the rest of your life or you’re going to pay $47 every 2 weeks for the next 8 months, there’s a big difference in there.  You can actually see the end, you can see what’s happening, and it’s a much easier sell that way.

The cool thing is, is you only have to be one step ahead of your longest subscriber.

Now, this is a huge mindset shift for you and what you’ve probably been taught about membership sites. I know it was for me because when I got started, I thought the same way – I needed a membership site that would last forever. The truth is, is that you don’t know if there’s a market for it, you don’t know if people are going to like your content.

If you create 2 years worth of stuff to go in your membership site, you won’t even know people are going to like the content that you’re creating and you don’t have time to course-correct.  What we like to teach you to do is to actually just be 1 week, 2 weeks, maybe a month ahead of your earliest subscriber, so that

A) you’re not creating content that nobody’s going to like

B) you can course-correct as you go along.

So, if people need different information than you think because you’re going to get feedback, then you can adjust as you go

You also know where people are dropping off. So, you don’t end up with a bunch of empty content that you can’t use.

So, can you create enough content? Yes, you can, as long as you can shift your mindset and think a little bit differently about your membership site.

Myth #4 – “I’m Not A Techie”

Basically, people think they don’t have the technical expertise in order to build a membership site.  Again, this is something that your “guru” wants you to believe. Now, why would they want you to believe this? Very simple again – because they have a vested interested in you thinking that, so that you can buy their training, so that they can encourage you to stick with them and continue to buy their products.

All You Need To Know

You need to know how to set up a website, you need to know how to manage your members, you need to know how to handle payments. And by the way, most of the free solutions on the market don’t do all these, which actually means you spend your time working on these things rather than enjoying your life.  This is why I personally believe the free models suck. It’s too much technical work.

In reality, all that you need to build a successful numerous number of membership sites is WordPress – that’s 100% free product that comes with almost all hosting accounts. If not, you can get it at wordpress.org. Super easy to install, you just click a button, and it’s all done for you.

You need Wishlist Member.  Why do I like to promote wish list member and encourage you to use it?

A) it’s what I use for all of my sites

B) I know that they are a giant company, I know the owners of it, and I know that they have awesome technical support, and they’re always updating with the new versions of WordPress that are coming out and enhancing their features.  By the way, you don’t get that with free solutions.  They have a vested interest in beating things like WordPress upgrades to market.

The third thing that you need is a plugin that Robert Plank wrote, called WordPress drip.  This is a little bit more expensive. It goes for $2,495.00 $47.  (Click here to check out WPDrip )

However, if you’re a member of  Membership Cube, then it comes for free along with your Wishlist Member license and all of the training that you need to get up and started right away.

The cool thing is just knowing these three pieces of software that you need, you can have your membership site up and running today. Literally today, you can have a membership site up and running, and spend your time marketing your site rather than spending your time trying to generate all of your content.

I want to thank you for taking a couple minutes out of your day to talk about these “membership site myths” with you.  I hope that I’ve expanded your mind and helped you understand what actually happening in the marketplace.

I would really appreciate it if you go down to the bottom of the page right now, fill out a comment, let me know what your thoughts are.

Have a great day.

Play Video

Hey everybody, Lance Tamashiro here, and I’ve been telling you for a couple of days that there’s a lot of things on my mind, and this is a video that I’ve been thinking about making for a while here, and I think I’m just going to come clean, share with you guys my thoughts, and basically just see what your reaction is to this. So, a lot of things have been changing in the internet marketing as you’re probably aware in the last couple of weeks.

Things like the FTC cracking down, things like MasterCard and Visa completely changing their rules, shutting off major marketers’ accounts, and I think that this is actually a very very good thing. And what’s sad to me is that I’ve been getting emails from people, telling me that they’re broke, telling me that they don’t know how they’re going to purchase any products, telling me that they need training but that they don’t have any money, whatsoever. And frankly, this confuses me because you’re all building businesses on the internet.

And so, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit today about why you’re probably feeling that you’re broke, why you’re feeling that you’re not there, and what I really blame for all of this is the general mistrust in the marketplace. I don’t blame you, guys. I mean I don’t think the problem is that you’re broke. You all are sending messages from your Blackberry’s, you’re all on the internet, you have internet connections, you have computers, you’re actually trying to build something, but I think that you’re going about it in the wrong way, and I don’t think that it’s your fault.

What’s the point in me telling you all this? Well, what I really want to get across to you guys is that this feeling that you have, this doubt that you guys are having. This skepticism towards internet marketing and making money on the internet in general is not your fault.

How did you even get started with an online business? I mean I don’t think that typically most people are sitting around at home, they think one day, “Oh, you know what would be really great is to make a few extra bucks online.” And so, what do you do? Well, if you’re probably like me, you did some sort of like quick search on the internet and found your way eventually to some sort of squeeze page, and we’re all familiar with this by this point – those cool little pages where you go and they offer you some free gift in exchange for your email address and name.

So typically, what happens is you got home, do a quick little search on the internet, end up on one of these squeeze pages with this great sounding offer, you put in your name and email address, and the next thing you know is that you’ve got a bunch of people telling you every single day in your inbox that they’re making all of this money online and that it’s so completely easy, and they basically bombard you, but what happens is you get so many of these messages over and over and over again where you really started out with a very realistic thought process. You started out thinking, “if I could make a few extra bucks, I could actually build something up, wouldn’t it be cool if I had an extra $100, $200?”

But you got caught in this whole sales funnel and the next thing you know, you went from thinking you could make an extra 100 or 200 bucks to you could make all of this cash, retire rich, sit on the beach in your underwear, and mix drinks all day. Unfortunately, you start to think that this could work. You actually at some point start to believe that you could literally wake up the next morning and have millions of dollars in your bank account, and I hate to be the one to break this to you, but it’s not going to happen that way.

In fact, if you think that way right now, I’m going to give you the best tip you’ve ever got. Stop, change your email address, don’t read any more marketing, and go save your money and spend it on something good. Spend time with your family, spend time doing things that actually matter to you because it’s never going to happen. I mean if that happened, if it was that easy, then everybody would be rich on the internet and nobody would be saying that they’re broke or having all these doubts.

So, if you’re buying that dream, I’m here to tell you right now, it may not be what you want to hear, but it’s the truth.

And then what starts happening is the next thing you know, daily, you start getting the same emails from all of these major people, or who appear to be major, telling you about this great product. That their friend just released something really really cool, and because you don’t know any better, you believe them. You go and buy the product, and it leads you to some professionally written sales page where you spend all day reading these sales letters, believing this hype.

I mean these are professionally written 20, 30-page letters that are designed to draw you in, that are designed to sell you on that sort of dream. And what ends up happening is you end up jumping from product to product to product because every week, there’s a new launch and every week, you get all of these emails telling you that this is the next thing, this is the next thing, this is the next thing.

This never stops. It’s an endless cycle. And it’s all of the people getting together, sending you out these launch emails and when you see those emails, the first time you made your scheme over it. But then when you open up the next email and it’s got a different subject line but it’s the same message or for the same product, you start to think about it. And then by the third, fourth, fifth, sixth time that you see the exact same offer from a different person, you automatically think in your head, “Well all of these people are saying that this is so great, it must be.” And then you go and buy it, and typically you’re disappointed, you do nothing with it, and then you move on to the next big product, and they catch you in the cycle. And unfortunately, that’s the truth about what is happening to you.

So, I don’t believe that you’re broke. I believe that you’re not believing in people, that you don’t believe any of the hype anymore, and as you well shouldn’t. So, the other problem is you’re spending all of this time, you’re spending all of this money, and you’re only actually using a small fraction, if any, of the stuff that you bought. I know when I got started, I spent thousands of dollars with all of these major gurus, with all of these promises, and luckily, I ran into some pretty good guys early on who stirred me in a better direction and showed me that there were actually some good people online, some honest people online, and sort of let me know what was happening and why I was seeing all of these offers that I was seeing.

The other thing is that they’ve sold you on looking for a “magic button.” Again, like I said, I mean if you honestly believe that you’re going to wake up tomorrow with millions of dollars in your bank account, stop doing internet marketing right now. You’re not building a business. There’s no business offline that generates that kind of cash. Why would you think it would be any different online?

The truth is – is that it’s not. We are in a unique situation, we do have global reach, and we can build businesses from our house. But you need to be realistic. Remember, where you started from, it was probably with just making a couple extra bucks. And now suddenly, you’ve got this fascination that you’ve got to make millions of dollars and be rich. Well, it’s just simply not going to happen. So, the worst part about all of these cheap emails that you’re getting, these products that you’re buying is that you don’t even know these people. You don’t know anything about them. Most of them never even show their face. They don’t have any products. Some of them don’t even have blogs. So, I mean why would you feel compelled to spend money with this type of people? Maybe you should think about that real carefully.

I want to give you something to think about here. What would it take to educate yourself to start a business offline? I mean do you honestly believe that if you are going to go offline and start a business, you could just sign a paper, turn it on, and it would start happening? It’s not that case. I mean I think that we’ll agree.

Think about how much higher education costs. I know at least in America, it can run up to $30,000 a year or more. It’s not a cheap proposition, and people do that just to go work for the 9 to 5 grind.

Think about how much time, effort, and money it would take to actually start a successful offline business. It’s not something that you could do with no cash flow. It’s not something that you could just start up on a credit card. It’s something that you would have to seriously sit down, think about, plan for, and start it.

And the thing is – is that it’s no different online.

I hate to be the one to break that to you but there’s no difference online except that there’s fewer overhead and fewer tools that you need, and you can actually, with a single person or two people, start a very very successful business, but there still are expenses that you’re going to have to take. And unfortunately, a lot of it is going to be in education. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year to meet with my mentor three times a year to talk to him for 45 minutes – 45 minutes three times a year. I travel all over the country just to get those 45 minutes and some people think I’m crazy for doing that but I say that the investment is paid for itself over and over and over again.

So, what I want to tell you guys, the point of all this is that from my experience, the short time that I’ve been online, I’ve noticed that there’s basically three types of marketers, and just knowing this is going to put you ahead of the game.

So, the first type of marketer and unfortunately probably the type that you most early ran into when you were getting started online with your business is the ones that “sell the dream,” and these are the people that basically do what I was telling you about earlier, where they coordinate the giant launches, they coordinate together where they’re all sending massive amounts of emails for the same product on the same day over and over and over again. And quite frankly, they just do this in a rotation. And if you actually start watching and seeing it, I think that you’ll pick up on it. So, they are basically selling the dream and the truth is – is a lot of the claims they make, they could probably achieve those results, but the problem is you don’t have the connections, you don’t have the sized list, and you really need to think about keeping it realistic.

The second type of marketer that I’ve ran into online and unfortunately, I almost think that this marketer is more dangerous than the “selling the dream” marketer, and this is the “fake it till you make a crowd.” These are the people that always are talking about numbering, always talking about statistics, but never ever showing any sort of proof for it. I’m sure that you have run across these types before.

They’re very good at talking a big game, but when it really comes down to it, have they ever shown you any real proof? The other problem with the “fake it till you make a crowd” and one way that I always can spot these people is that they never talk about their failures. They never talk about their failures. I mean it would be impossible to think that somebody never has a failure online, that they never have a product that launches that didn’t go well.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people are at sort of the mid-level, I’ll say, in marketing where you don’t know what they make. They make these outrageous income claims, it goes up and up and up, and unfortunately, like I actually know some of these people, and I know that their list aren’t as big as they claim they are, I know that for a fact that their income isn’t as big as they say it is. And so, I would really encourage you to take a close look at the people that are telling you about what great product creators they are, how much they know about memberships sites. If you look around and they have no membership sites, if they have no products – I mean this red flag should be going off everywhere.

I mean the other day I saw an email come across from somebody who was claiming to be a master product creator, and then I went and looked and they didn’t have a single product. So, how do they have such a great product creation system and how are they such a good product creator if they have no products? It’s totally baffling. So, you don’t even really have to dig deep to find these people, but just do a little bit of due diligence and figure out if these people are telling you the truth or not.

Luckily, there is a third type of marketer that I’ve run across, and these are the honest entrepreneurs. These are the people that are actually “walking the walk.” These are the people that are actually doing what they say and providing real value to their customers. Because let’s face it, the truth is is that there are people out there that are making good incomes online from doing the right thing. And the real trick is just to find those people and hunt them out. Unfortunately, for most people, they never actually get to find those people because the hype sells much better.

So what now? Well luckily for you, at least there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The first thing is that just realizing how this game works and not there’s three types of marketers out there. It’s going to put you in an infinitely better position to plan out your business, to understand the types of people that you want to be taking advice from, and to actually figure out which type of person you want to be, and I hope that every one of you is choosing to go on the path of the honest entrepreneur.

I think that what you should do is look at the marketing that you’re receiving, look at the emails that you’re getting, look at the way that they’re marketing to you, and figure out if you’re getting any value from it. I mean I know a lot of people that are just on all of these lists, like they get thousands of emails every single day and it’s just from people going, “here’s my free thing, here’s my free thing, here’s my free thing,” and then typically, they’ll buy something eventually.

I mean honestly, if these people don’t even have their own products, if they aren’t teaching you anything, they’re just sending you links to go sign up to somebody else’s list, I mean what value is there in that? I mean you can study all day, but the fact is until you take action online, you’re not going to make any money and you’re not going to improve your situation. So, figure out if you trust these people. I mean I’m not saying like go do a massive research on them, but see if they have a blog, see if you can see anything about them, see the crowd that they run with, see if you can figure out if these people are actually worth you even reading their emails. And if they’re not, just get rid of them.

So, the best part is there is actually a lot of honest good people making real money on the internet. It’s your job to seek those people out. And luckily for you, I’ve given you some of the information that I have learned in my short time online and how to identify these people, understanding that they’re out there, and I’m hoping that since you’re on my list, reading my blog, you’re not going to get caught in the sort of traps that I see people getting caught in out there.

So, that’s all for today. I thank you for taking the time out for reading, for watching this video, and I wish you all the best of luck.

Play Video

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?

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.

Have you ever noticed how much PayPal fee’s are when you send money to a business partner or get paid from an affiliate promotion?

Did you know that you can automate your payments by uploading a simple spreadsheet?
Did you know that you can send large amounts of money to your business partners drop your fees to $1?

It’s true and here’s how…

Play Video

That is just one simple strategy to can use to manage your time and money more effectively.
Make sure you check out Time Management On Crack (look at the people who have bought this!) and learn how you can really become a productivity machine just like Super Robert.

I was reading some emails from my list and I realized that there is an important lesson that few people talk about when trying to build an online business. It was something that was very powerful for me personally.

When a lot people are getting started with their home-based, small business they want to do everything themselves. The want to be completely self-reliant.

That’s a terrible goal to have for a couple of reasons.

Building a Business Is LONELY

Having a person to reach out to and share your successes and failures with is vital.

If you don’t have friends that understand what you are doing your going to end up sitting at your desk for 20 hours a day and your going to be miserable.

Even worse you are going to sacrifice your relationships with your friends and family.

You need someone that understands your excitement when you make progress.

If you don’t build relationships with people that understand what you are building, you are just setting yourself up for failure.

Don’t Try To Do Everything Yourself

A lot of people miss the boat here. They want to learn and do it all themselves. I am not saying that you shouldn’t keep learning.

For me personally, I learn better through doing. So I need to find people that I can emulate.

The key to fast growth in your business is to find people with different skill sets than you that you can learn from.

Accountability

It doesn’t matter if you actually have a real “partner” (see the video.. ).

Just make a list of 4 things that you can accomplish today and write it down. Email it to someone or just post it on this blog.

Give it a try for one day. Post your accountability list as a comment.

About once a week, my daughter Grace will wake up early in the morning and “help Dad drink coffee”. I love these mornings when the house is quiet and it is still a little dark out.

One morning I did the “parent thing” and decided that I needed to take some pictures of her because she was growing so fast.

So I took out the camera, kneeled down to capture my memory…

“No Dad! No Pictures”, she ran off.

I was determined not to lose my Kodak moment so I went over her to and tried to explain, the best I could why I wanted her to smile and take a picture.

* For the memories
* To show mommy
* It would make me happy
* She will be glad some day

All of the reasons that made sense to me, but obviously means nothing to a little girl whose biggest concern is when Diego is coming on TV and if she can sneak a “jump, jump on couch”.

Finally, I asked her if she would like to take a picture of me.

Her eyes lit up, she grabbed the camera and did her best to take a picture. She giggled with excitement as she told me to smile and “took my picture”.

Then, she handed me the camera and told me to take her picture. We had a great time while she smiled and ran around the house posing with her toys.

Now she loves taking pictures and this has become a game we play and a way Grace and I connect. Oh yeah… and I get to have pictures like these for my old days…

It is funny how our friends, our families and our mentors can “tell us” over and over again what is good for us, but we don’t really grasp onto that until we are ready in our way.

My friends, Jit Uppal and James Rivers have been trying to get me on Twitter for months now.

They have laid out all of the benefits and even shown me proof of how it is working for them, but…

I never cared.

I even signed up one day just so they would stop bothering me about it.

That sounds bad I know, but like you I have a million other things I am working on in my business and Twitter just seemed silly and a waste of time.

Just over a week ago, Jason Fladlien and I interviewed Jit on his use of Twitter.

During the call, I had an “a-ha” moment and I sat and implemented all of the tips that Jason was sucking out of Jit, since then I have spent about 5 minutes a day on Twitter and am building a list I can not believe!

I am going to be honest with now. I was the biggest Twitter skeptic there was. I couldn’t believe that anyone really cared about 140 character messages or that they would help with my business.

If they did, they certainly wouldn’t see them in the mess of Tweets that are posted.

I signed up for a link shortening and tracking service called Cli.gs. This is a free real-time service that tells you how often your tweets are clicked on. I was shocked when I sent out a test to my small Twitter list of Followers and got the following results.

Who would complain with that amount of traffic from such a small amount of time and work investment? Lots of traffic streams is the goal right?

I was definitely starting to realize the power of twitter so I thought I would try one more experiment just to make sure.

This time I used a script called MyFreeViralTweets and sent an email to small portion of my list telling them that I had a free gift for them. I do this occasionally for my list so I knew I would get some decent traffic. Only this time I added MyFreeViralTweets to the page “just to see”

I was shocked. I generated a bunch of traffic from other people Tweeting about it!

Now imagine the amount of traffic that you can generate from Twitter if you build a decent sized list. I have been at it for less than a month now!

My advice is to start slow and small. Don’t get overwhelmed. Just sign up and spend a few minutes each day watching the conversation and getting used to it.

Who knows, it may even become one of things you wished you had started doing earlier! Just Get Started.

So what is holding you up with Twitter? Am I totally crazy and wasting my time? Are you building a Twitter list? Leave your comment below and don’t forget to tell your Tweeps about this post!

I admit it. I bought the dream.

I honestly thought that building a successful online business was easy, little work and would allow me not only financial freedom but also more free time than I would know what to do with.

I couldn’t wait to buy a brand new laptop and sit in a bar while making money sending out emails.

My wife bought it too. She couldn’t wait to spend more time at Sundance Resort “doing nothing”.

It was all so easy. While I admit I am not the smartest person in the world, I can usually figure things out after beating my head against the wall a few times. So I started building a list and my business.

Things were going great! Well except for the fact that I wasn’t making as much money as I thought and I was constantly tired, overwhelmed, frustrated and confused. I was literally working 2 jobs and didn’t feel any closer to financial freedom or personal freedom. The exact opposite was happening.

I rarely saw my wife or family. I didn’t talk to my friends for weeks at a time. And for what? To be able to pay myself $2 per hour? (If not less?)

This isn’t the way the dream was supposed to happen.

It got even worse for me about November of last year. My list had grown to a size that most people could not believe. It was even fairly responsive. I had learned how to make “just enough” from it. But it was nothing that could cover my bills, let alone take my wife on her getaway she had been planning.

I admit it. I panicked.

I could no longer justify the amount of time that I was spending on my “business”. And that sucked because I could see that I was so close. I knew that I almost got it. I just knew it was within reach.

Then I looked at my “business”. I looked at it hard.

I had a very big list. I did know how to earn some money from it, so I knew it was possible.

I was quickly becoming a stranger to Grace and my wife. I am so fortunate that I have a wife who believes in my and supports me. But this was NOT what was supposed to be happening. The dream I bought into was supposed to have me rolling around on the floor and playing with Grace. I bet she didn’t see me 1 hour per day during this time.

I had no real product, something I made. What? How could I not have a product? Isn’t that just mandatory?

My business was empty. I didn’t know the people on my list. I didn’t give them anything special. What I did was just copy and paste pre-made emails and hoped people bought the product. My list could care less about me and the way I was treating them I was showing I could care less about them.

I had basically decided that I need something to change or I had to give up, which I didn’t want to do.

I looked around me and contacted Jason Fladlien. I told him I wanted to talk to him about my business and I him paid him to do so.

What started as a customer – client phone call has no turned into a great friendship and my business has changed.

He convinced me.

Jason convinced me that I had all the foundation in place to create a new business, one that would achieve all of the goals that I had including more time with my family.

He convinced me that it wasn’t hard to make my own product.

He convinced me that I could connect with my list and they would forgive me for my “copy and paste” tactics of the past and that I had lots to share with them.

I got focused

Since that phone call my business is thriving, I feel better about what my business is and most importantly I get to spend time all day long taking “breaks” and playing with my daughter.

Her current favorite thing is to watch Diego and make dad do what she calls the “Diego Dance”. This basically means dad gets to jump around in circles and sing and laugh all ending with a big hug from her.

I also started getting emails from readers on my list. They were actually taking time out of their busy days to ask me a question or thank me for a recommendation or a product and a few times just to tell me thanks for the email.

So far this year I have launched 5 products (I think, yikes) and am consistently finding more time to spend with my family.

What changed? I watched what Jason and his business partner Robert Plank were doing and copied them.

What did they both have in common? They are both MASTERS of time management. In fact, I even like to refer to Robert as “Super Robert”.

I started simple and took on 1, just 1 of their time management tips and got amazing results.

First, I started not trying to plan everything at once. Robert talks about his grandfather having “lists of lists he needed to make”… that was me. No wonder I had no time. How did I solved this?

Start thinking of your day not in projects but just tasks. I write down 4 tasks that I can complete in a single sitting and do them, one at a time. It is amazing how much you can get done when you aren’t thinking about a million things.

In between each task I reward myself by leaving the office and going to play with Grace and spend time with my wife. Even if it is just 10 or 15 minutes. It’s amazing how much quality time you have when you focus on one thing.

Just Try It!

It may sound simple and might sound stupid, but you are still reading this.

Just try this one thing. Make a simple of lists of tasks. Not projects. And just complete those. Don’t think about anything else.

This simple little trick literally brought me one step closer to realizing “the dream”.

Be sure to share this tip with your Tweeps…