Membership Model #4. Recurring Subscriptions with Lifetime Recurring.
Basically, they pay until they cancel. It's obviously easy to do this if it's a SaaS product - SaaS is the acronym SAAS - which stands for Software As A Service. Like Leadpages, or Dropbox. Even at DigitalAccessPass.com, we offer a pseudo-SAAS model. DAP is basically a WordPress plugin that you install on your own site, but we packaged a lot of things into a saas like offering, where you get DAP, you get set up help, ongoing monthly support, a whole bunch of plugins from WickedCoolPlugins.com, and we made it a monthly subscription. So in this model, you get the benefits for as long as you pay. And when you stop paying, you lose all of the benefits. Like your gym membership. Or phone service.
Now, you might wonder, what if you have a regular online course? How to make it a perpetual subscription? That's where positioning and packaging comes into the picture. Of course, not all membership sites are created equally, and not all digital content can be charged for every month. If you're selling an ebook, for example, then.... obviously you are not going to be able to charge $10 a month - or even 1 dollar a month, that too as an ongoing subscription for life. So with a life-time recurring subscription, your mindset as a site owner, has to shift a little bit.
So instead of thinking, how can I charge every month for my ebook and a couple of videos, you have to think from another perspective: The question you should be asking, is what all can I package together, and how can I position the offer in order to make this membership site worth $10 a month? Now, I don't want to get into pricing yet, because that's a huge topic and I will certainly talk about it in a different episode. But for the purposes of today's discussion, let's say you already know whether you want to do a $10 a month subscription, or $50 a month, or $100 a month. Let's stick with $10 a month. So you should take careful inventory of everything you have ever created - whether it is an article you wrote, an email autoresponder series, any tweets you sent out, any content marketing you did, and make a list of every little thing you have in your content library right now, then to that list, add a comprehensive list of things you have the capability of creating in the future. In a future episode, I'll also get into how you can get your content from third-party sources, other than yourself. And you need to think about everything you can package in order to make your membership a complete no-brainer for the $10 a month that you're planning on charging.
In the beginning, you may look at your ebook, or the few videos of your course, and wonder how the heck you're going to be able to charge $10 a month for something so little. Don't necessarily go by the volume of the content. It's always the quality of the content, and the value it provides to your members. Remember, the bigger the benefit to your audience, the larger the value, the bigger the subscription fee you can charge. So even if you start with a basic 7 video course about, say, piano for beginners, you can identify the life-cycle of a piano student, all of their wants and needs as a beginner and as they start getting better, getting more advanced, and you can create courses appropriate for their advancing skills over time. Don't forget to check out episodes 24 and 25 where I talk about how to brainstorm content-creation ideas, whether it is for content for your membership site, or content that you can use for marketing. You can find those episodes at SubscribeMe.fm/24 and SubscribeMe.fm/25.
So that's membership model #4: Recurring Subscriptions with Automated Lifetime Recurring
