멤버십 사이트를 런칭하고 회원 68명 모으기 | 랩탑 엠파이어스 029

And the only reason that I was able to continue doing that was because I had my one-on-one client side of my business that was paying my bills and everything there. So it was, I'm not going to say comfortable because it was frustrating along the way for sure, but that income from my one-on-one work allowed me to fail and fall forward learning the digital product side. So whether you have a job, an agency, you're doing one-on-one work, keep doing that while you're dipping your toes into this arena so you have that income and you can learn along the way. Cool. So let's get right into what actually worked for this launch. Now, the big thing that I did to get a lot of attention and build up a lot of excitement around this launch and, you know, most launch experts will tell you you want to make your launch an event. So what I did is I created a free course. Now, this was a five-day course with a bonus lesson. And what I did was spread out that five-day course over an email series. And here is the kicker. If they wanted to get the bonus video lesson, they had to share it onto Facebook and email a friend or two. So I had this really handy software called SmartBribe that right when they opt in, it says, hey, do you want to get this bonus video? And I'm also pitching that to them on every single video lesson and in the emails they're getting every single day. Like, hey, if you share this, you'll get this bonus lesson. So I was building in this viral effect where not everyone shared, but the people that did brought on more people to this free course for free, which was, again, building my list. So when I got to the point of my launch, I had a much bigger list. And something else I did with this free course is I reached out to a handful of influencer friends. And, again, I don't really love the word influencer, but people who had access to the audience that I was trying to reach. And I knew that they had that. So I went and I asked for their feedback. Like, hey, what's your input on this free course? And for those of you, I know you're probably watching this, you probably took that free course. It was on how to land easy marketing clients. And I took people through a five-step process of identifying, reaching out to, meeting with, and closing, and then onboarding potential marketing clients. And what I did was go to people who I knew had audiences who were interested in that, got their feedback, and included it in the free course. So that way, when the free course was live, I went back to them and said, hey, look at this thing.

You know, no pressure, but if you want to share it with your audience, I would really appreciate that. And a handful of them did, which got me at least 70 to 100 more signups on that day when one of them shared. And then the other ones, you know, it wasn't huge numbers like that, but they kind of trickled in, you know, a few dozen here and there from other people who shared that with their list. So I highly recommend if you're going to do some kind of event around your course or your product launch, you need to inject other people who could potentially share with their audiences. And again, it doesn't have to be a joint venture partnership. Here is the cool thing. A lot of people, you know, want to do a launch or do evergreen, you know, marketing funnels through webinars with joint venture partners where you split whatever you sell to their audience. But in this case, it was just good free content that they were sending to their audience. I could get on my list, sell down the road, and there were no expectations that I would have to pay them money for the people they sent to my list. They just did it because it was really good content and they wanted to share that. The other thing, again, remember I mentioned injecting that virality into your course or whatever it is, your three-part video series, whatever you're doing for your product launch to make it an event. And incentivize people to share so you're bringing on more people to your list for free. Cool. So the next thing that really worked well with this launch was creating a Facebook group. And this was a really smart idea because now this Facebook community, the Laptop Empire Entrepreneurs Group, is more than 900 members strong and still growing. And I'm using that in other ways in my marketing. But it was an extremely useful tool for this launch because what I did was everyone who took the free course that I was just talking about, what I did was incentivize them, not incentivize them, but encourage them to go join the Facebook group. Again, on every single page of the day of the course and every email that I sent out was encouraging not only that they share, but that they make sure they join the community. Now, during this time, I think I added about four to five hundred members to the community. And after the launch, the other, you know, four or five hundred have come on since then.

But yeah, just during that launch time, because I was building up so much, you know, excitement and energy and enthusiasm around this thing people were learning about, they were joining this community, asking questions, engaging with each other, and, you know, really forming this foundation of my community that I'm now really excited to have and be a part of. So, yeah, make sure you tie in some community element so it feels not only like you're more engaged and you're there with them, but it's also a great way with you're doing, you know, on Facebook. People are there on Facebook every single day. They might not see your email, your promotions and things. So if they're in this group and people are talking about it and engaging, they're going to see it there. So, again, being in multiple places in these people's lives so when you're ready to pitch them something, they actually hear it. And, you know, take action on it. Now, something else that I did, and this was something that I picked up from Teachable's blog, and I'll, at the very end of this video, share some resources with you that I used to do this. But what I did was I went and I looked at the most engaged people who took my free course. So I'm using ActiveCampaign now, that at the time I was using MailChimp. So I went into MailChimp and I looked at the people who had opened all of or most of the lessons from the free course that I sent. And I reached out to those people and offered to have 15-minute consultations with them. And it was really just a way for me to build a deeper relationship with them, give free advice, no strings attached. I wasn't pitching them anything. And just really learning about their business and asking them what they thought about the free course. And, you know, without even asking some of these people, I was getting extremely generous testimonials coming in from people saying, you know, how my content, my free content is better than paid content and paid courses they had done. So all these really great, even video testimonials people were sending me. And it was all because I was providing no strings attached value to the most engaged people who took that course. They obviously loved that content. I wanted to give them even more of me and even more access. Now, what I did down the road when I was getting ready to launch this community as I was building it, I went back to all of these people who I had had one-on-one conversations with and other people who I had had direct message conversations with in Facebook or through email.

And I reached out one by one and I asked them what they thought about this idea for membership community. I already knew that it was a good idea because I had validated this through seeing a lot of other people doing these similar communities. But I really, really wanted to validate it. And before I built everything out, I went to these people and I said, hey, what would you think about a community where I share courses like this? I do, you know, a private community. You get more access to me and, like, the feedback that I already gave you. And I got, I think, I mean, let me see where the numbers were here. Let me pull this up in Evernote. It ended up being 36 people who told me that they would pay for that. Not just that it was a good idea, but they said, yes, when you launch that, tell me because I would like to pay for it. So what I'm doing here is pre-selling. And if you, you know, have learned anything about selling courses online and if you've learned from other experts, I'm not claiming to be one, but the people that I follow, they all say to do this. You need to pre-sell your course or your product because if you go build something and you'll lock yourself away in a cave for months and months and reveal it to the world, no one wants to buy it. It's going to be extremely disappointing and you wasted a huge amount of time and potential money. When if you would have just gone and got a couple people to say, yes, I'll pay for this and then get that money from them, you will go, obviously. It'll be a lot happier and your project will go a lot further than if you just built something and threw it out there for the world. So pre-selling key. Now, this was something that I did and a lot of people talk about, you know, Facebook retargeting. And it's a really simple thing that we just kind of forget because it's so simple. So what I did was anyone who during my two-week launch period who visited the sales page or the checkout page, they saw a retargeting ad on Facebook. It was my face, a picture, again, of the laptop and the community saying, hey, I saw that you checked this out. I know that being a digital marketer can be scary, you know, blah, blah, blah. And just really saying, hey, I saw that you got this, but if you really want to take action, like join the community now. And out of the 68 people who joined before the launch ended, 20 of those people came from that retargeting ad. Just one simple retargeting ad. I literally paid, I think, $2 to $3 per conversion to get those people on board.

So, you know, something that took me maybe a half hour to set up after I created the ad and the copy for. I mean, 20 sales just from that and since then, it's generated even more sales because this community is evergreen. It's always open. And it's generated 10 more sales since that time from people who have come to the sales page or checkout page, but they don't convert. So very, very helpful when you're doing a launch. Bring those people back around and remind them to take action. Now, something else that I did was in the theme of scarcity. And before I share this, I'll just mention that the reason why you do a launch period over a limited amount of time is because you want people to take action. It's so funny how many messages I got from people who were like, this is awesome. I love it. I'm going to sign up. And they never do. I've got people who tell me they will sign up and they actually follow through on that. But I still have a lot of people who just don't take action because I didn't have urgency after the launch. Now, again, because this is open all the time, I'll share in a little bit how I'm creating that urgency now with an evergreen product. But during my launch, that scarcity was key to getting people to act at that moment in time. So what I did that also worked was during the launch, I added random bonuses and a new course into the laptop Empire Lab that they could only get if they joined before the launch ended. So I had these exclusive launch bonus resources that I gave away. I think they were anything from like some templates or an ROI calculator and some of these things that I was giving away only if they joined then and there. Again, just creating that urgency and scarcity that is going to get people to take action before. And it's also really simple. But if you're doing any kind of a launch or limited time offer, have a countdown timer. It's just so simple. And it, again, shows people like, look, this is a legit, you know, countdown. And when this happens, this will go away. And make sure you honor that. And you're not lying to people. Make sure you do take things away. But use that. And you can use it effectively. And when you use it effectively, I mean, it's a very good way to get people to take action and not just wait around and never actually buy your product. So the last thing that I did that really worked, I was excited about, was I built out a minimum viable funnel. Again, I mentioned this community is evergreen. After the launch, it's still continued to be open to anyone who wants to join.

And what I did during the launch, through the content that I created, again, I had some trainings in video form, my free course, which was the big one, a couple of PDFs that I shared with people. I used these things to build out a minimum viable funnel. Meaning, I took these pieces and throughout the launch, the landing pages I built, the email sequences that I built, the retargeting ads that I built, like I talked about, were all things that now once I set them up during my launch, they're in place for me to continue to use while I'm trying to now sell the product evergreen. So if I'm doing Facebook traffic or organic traffic or anything like that, parts of my funnel have already been set up so I don't have to start from scratch. Now, this is something I learned from Scott Olford, and it's, you know, an incredibly smart idea. Just use your launch resources and everything you set up during that to sell your product in the future, whether that's in another launch or just evergreen. So, very important. Now, something I don't have written here but I want to talk about too, with the free course that I did, it was funny, I was torn. I took it down during the launch saying that I was only going to give this to members. So, you know, it went away. It was a limited time thing, and if you want the lifetime access to the course, you have to join the community. And it was funny. I went back and forth on this. Then I was like, no, no, that's not why I made it. I wanted everyone to have access, so I put it back up. But then the next day I was like, you know what? I need to take this away. I can build more, and I'm going to figure out a different way to get people in without just having to use this one free course. And I'll share that with you in a little bit. So I decided to, in fact, take it away. And I told people, like, listen, I'm taking down my free course. This is your last chance to get into it for the next couple of days. And if you want lifetime access, join the community. Here's where you can get started. So that is what worked. And there's a whole bunch of other little things that are just so subtle, and I picked up from other places, but I don't really want to spend too much time talking about here. Everything from the $1 seven-day trial that I used to have that reverse risk, making it very clear that they could cancel any time, injecting crazy amounts of social proof in the testimonials that I collected during my free course. So, you know, before I even was promoting this, I had testimonials on my sales page and video testimonials from people saying how great my content was

and how they can't wait to learn more. So, there's a lot of subtle things in here, but those, what I just talked about, the free course with influencers and viral share loops, your Facebook group, one-on-one conversations, pre-selling, retargeting, adding bonuses, and taking away bonuses, and then building out your funnel were all the things that really, really worked on my product launch and I think you should focus on as well. Now, on to what didn't work. What didn't work was when I tried to repurpose the new course that I launched in the community into a PDF. Now, I mentioned I added bonuses and added a course for the things that worked. That was really great to get people to sign up, but when I took that course and created a PDF out of it to promote to the Facebook community, that just didn't work. A lot of people wanted to download it. I had over 100 people actually download the free PDF version of the course. And again, it was a highly, highly simplified version of maybe 13 pages of the course, where the course was almost three hours long. So, it was just a summary and I had more than 100 people download it, but only like two people took me up on the offer at the end to, hey, get the full course inside the community that we just launched. It was really strange. You know, I sent out the email to my list about the new course being added. People joined. When I sent them the free PDF with the call to action at the end, no one took action. So, a really interesting thing there. I know a lot of people in Facebook groups, I notice, come out of the shadows when you start to offer stuff for free. And the second you even hint at a pitch, they're gone. So, it's definitely, you know, a balance between providing a huge amount of value and being subtle when you're pitching your products to these people inside of a Facebook community. So, something else that didn't really work. It's funny when I look back at it. I didn't really warm up my email list. Now, I have a, I had at launch a 3,500 person email list. It's since grown to over 4,200 through some paid traffic and things that I'm doing. But, I really didn't warm them up enough. I've got a friend, Tom Morkus, who is incredibly gifted at managing launches. And I was, he was doing a launch just right after mine. And I loved how, over the course of a week, he used storytelling and built up rapport and interest and excitement to his list before he pitched his product. And I don't think he's gotten to the pitch yet. I think he's still on the build-up stage with that right now.

So, my build-up was really with the free course and all the people that I had inside of the Facebook group. And those were where I was getting people engaged. But, my email list, I was kind of lazy and I literally said, like, my first launch email was, Hey, I don't have a lot of time to warm you up to this. I have other things to focus on. It was kind of cheeky. And I basically just told them, this is what it is. Here's how you get it. There's two weeks to get it at this limited time founder's price of $25 a month. Take action. Now, throughout the next two weeks, I sent a number of other emails with the bonuses, reminders to sign up for the limited time offers, all those things, which did help. But I didn't warm the list up enough to really be prepared to get pitched. So, that's something I needed to do better next time. It's something I recommend if you have an email list and you're utilizing that for your launch, that you really warm them up before you get to that point. And the formula, just a quick tip that I've heard and that I use for myself and other clients, is the PAS formula. So, you, in three different emails, you introduce a problem. And in the second email, you agitate the problem. And in the third email, you solve the problem. And then you hint, the solving of the problem is, of course, a hint at your product or service. The following emails are your pitches. So, just a quick tip that might be useful for you when you're writing your launch series and engaging your list. Now, something that I'm just going to mention here that I didn't do but I should have done more of, is take your emails that you write and copy and paste them into your free Facebook community if you're launching with a Facebook community, which I highly recommend that you do. That way, you're getting more bang for your buck and you're repurposing content. And again, the people who don't read that email because you already invested a lot of time into that, you're going to be able to show that to them on Facebook and then get them engaged there. But be careful you're not sharing every single email. Mostly share the value-based ones. And if you're in the middle of a launch, maybe one or two mentions of the urgency or scarcity. Because if you, you know, have five emails going out in the last two days to your list, which is totally fine, five posts to your Facebook group in the last two days is going to be way, way too much. So, just keep that in mind and make sure you know and understand which people you're promoting to and how they like to be communicated with. Now, one more thing.

I wouldn't say that this is something that didn't work, but I think it could have been a lot better and made my launch even bigger. If I would have went to more people, more bloggers, podcasters, influencers, again, I don't like that word too much, but people who had the audience that I want, if I would have gotten more of them involved in the free course, more of them would have, in turn, promoted the free course to their lists, their audiences, etc. And it helped me, of course, build my list even bigger to have more members and have a bigger launch. So, again, it worked really well that I did that, but I think I should have spent at least another, you know, week just reaching out to people, being patient and trying to get more input. I think I had about eight people who gave me their input, but if I could have got, you know, 30, we could have been having a much different story here. But, again, this is why we look back and see what worked and what didn't, so we can improve and get better. Because, again, this is my fourth launch. I learned a lot of really shitty hard lessons during my first launches that just didn't work. And that, we'll save that for another video, but in the meantime, we'll keep rolling through this. So, my future plans for this community. Again, this is an evergreen community. And the month after launch, about three, you know, weeks after launch, I had a couple members trickling in, you know, maybe, you know, two to three a week. But that's really not enough. I'm really aiming for one member a day. So, hopefully, in a year, I can have more than 330. So, that would be my goal, really. But it wasn't happening at the rate I wanted. I had about 10 to 15 leads a day coming in through Facebook traffic and organic traffic. They were going through my funnel. I was making them offers, giving them email reminders. But just people weren't converting at the rate I wanted them to. So, I really thought back to, okay, what worked in the launch and why did it work? I just came back to, okay, it's urgency and scarcity. People need a reason to act now or they're just never going to do it. So, for my marketing funnel, the free course that I had during the launch, I'm using that now as a bonus for people to sign up for the community. So, I have a lead magnet, a PDF that when they download, it says, thanks, now it'll be in your inbox. But if you join my community for a dollar today or during the next week, we'll give you this free bonus. And if they don't, I take that bonus away. I'm not going to get into the details about how I'm using ActiveCampaign to do that, but it's pretty simple.

I just set up two separate lists. And after a week, they get dropped onto another list. And if they're on that second list, they don't get the bonus email. So, kind of simple, but I won't get too complicated with it right now because those email automations can get tricky and that probably requires a screen share. So, that worked okay. I started to see a little tiny uptick in visitors. So, the next week or two, I was getting five to six. But still just not enough. So, what I'm doing now and what I did, and it's actually, it's funny, while I'm shooting this video, we're in the process of it. And if you're watching this before Friday, September 1st, 2017, which is in two days from now, it's likely that you're not. But we are doing a promotion right now. And what I did is I had a new course that I created for my members in my premium community. I took one lesson out of that community or out of one of that course. So, seven lessons. I took one lesson. Now, I picked that lesson because I let my free Facebook community that I mentioned in the beginning that I'm still using. I asked them to vote. Of these seven lessons, which are you most interested in? And they told me. So, I pulled that lesson out of my membership community, The Vault. Disney does this with their DVDs. So, they'll pull a movie out of The Vault for a limited time. And I'm giving that away right now for people inside my free community and my email list 100% for free. And when they opt in to get that free video, they get a very small mini email series that pitches the community. But, even more importantly, during this week that I've had this promotion, I started it last Friday. It'll end this Friday. I'm giving away the full course, obviously. So, they have one video lesson of seven. So, they get the whole course, all seven lessons, plus bonuses related to the free video for a limited time for joining. And in the last week, I've stacked on as many members as I have in the past four. So, as a marketer and an entrepreneur, it's really, really exciting to be able to do that, to figure out what makes people buy online and just slowly crack the code after a year of banging my head against the wall trying to figure this out. So, it's building up some kind of micro... And so, this is, again, for an evergreen product. If you're doing a launch-to-launch, that's a different story. We're talking evergreen membership sites. So, when you can create these mini events for a limited time that they can get this thing, so you're getting a group of people acting at the same time and looking at you or your community,

when you can build that type of event and then give them an incentive to join your membership site during a period of time or you're going to take some bonuses away, that's what it is. That's what I've noticed that gets people, not noticed, but realized and came to the epiphany moment of realizing that that's what gets people online to buy. You give them what they want, ask them what they want, give it to them, and then give them an even better reason to join or sign up for your thing. And again, we're talking about membership site communities. This might be different for digital products and courses and things like that, but in my experience, adding as many members in a week as I had in the past month, that's pretty big for me because I'm just now figuring out how to do this. And I'm not really using paid ads, like zero paid ads. This is to my list and my free Facebook group. I was running paid ads for four weeks trying to get it to work, and they were just trickling in barely. And I barely, I wasn't even breaking even at all. I do this to my email list that I've been growing and through my free site, and it blew up. So it's crazy. I just went to free tactics back to organic, and it really worked. So more future plans, challenges. I'm going to do more of these mini events, and I'm going to test out challenges using Facebook bots so I get people even more engaged, and I can create more urgency and scarcity and give them some new offers. Of course, I'm going to continue doing this show and leveraging my free Facebook community and growing my email list through joint venture partnerships so I can either pitch their audiences or have new people on my list so when I'm doing these promos, they get in the loop as well and get excited about joining. So aside from that, just continuing to test my funnel and paid traffic because ultimately that is where I'd like to go with this. I still love doing challenges. I love engaging in the free community one-on-one, but I'd really want to master getting cold traffic to convert, so that is something I am focused on as well. Now, this has been a long episode, lots of good stuff in here. I knew it would be a long one, but we're almost there. I just want to quickly share some of the resources that I used on this journey that I think would really benefit you as well. So teachable.com, they sell course software for course creators, and I don't use it personally. I have a client that does, but their blog is incredibly valuable, and there is an article specifically by Nate Eliason, or Eliason, I don't know how to pronounce his last name,

but it's on using free courses to launch a product. I followed his ideas in there, and it was extremely helpful on the teachable blog. Russell Brunson's Expert Secrets book also had incredibly valuable insights that I used from leveraging the Facebook community and Facebook Lives and things like that, so if you haven't got that book, highly recommend it. Again, I already mentioned Scott Olford, but I took his course Leadcraft, which helped me figure out how to set up my evergreen funnels and leverage free courses and all these different email sequences to really build out my funnel. And the Entrepreneurship Alliance, that's a membership community that I'm a part of, and I just loved what they did so much and how they built a community around entrepreneurship, so I wanted to do the same thing for digital marketing entrepreneurs and service providers, so that really was what inspired me and helped me learn what needed to be done to not only launch a membership site, but maintain it and do all of those things, so I highly recommend that community as well. They don't pay me to pitch them, but they're awesome over there. And then the last thing, I'm gonna put this down, I don't even need to read that one. The last resource you're gonna need is the willingness to fail and try over and over again and not look at those failures as a defining moment that means you can't do this. You need to continuously push and figure out new ways to improve on what you've already done because that's what it takes. You know, Albert Einstein always said he was never the smartest guy. He was just the guy who stuck with the problems longer, and that's true in business as well. Consistency beats out all the rest. If you can have, like I mentioned at the very beginning of this video, an alternative source of income that helps you through the growing pains that come with selling membership communities or digital products online, that is going to be key in keeping you sane and helping you fall forward as you're learning this process. So, again, I know this video was a little bit longer today, but I think it is jam-packed with great advice and probably one of the better episodes that I've ever done. So I'm really excited to get this out there for you. So thank you for tuning in so much. Again, this is Laptop Empires, the show that teaches digital marketers how to build and grow a business anywhere in the world. I'm Brian Downard. And if you're interested in joining the Laptop Empire Lab, the community that I launched and have been talking about in this entire video, there should be a link below this video where you can get access.

And I would love to have you as a member so we can share even more details about membership sites, growing a digital marketing agency, getting clients, and everything in between. Thanks again so much for tuning in. We will chat soon. Thank you.