But among all the noise, what is actual fact, when it comes to the membership site model? To find out, I decided to create a survey.

Here are the results:

Survey Results Video

The Membership Model Lie

When you look at how-to-make-money-with-membership-sites type products, there’s always one big fat lie they perpetuate and that’s the idea of never-ending payments from each member. Inevitably, these products will have some bogus calculation on the sales-page, showing how much money you can be making if, say, 100 new members join the site every month. After a year, that’s 1200 paying members, right? And it just keeps getting better!

Except that it doesn’t, of course, because no one stays a member forever.

In fact, what you need to consider with any type of product, product line or membership is the customer lifetime value.

That’s the reality of a membership site. You’ll have a certain, average “stick rate” and with it a certain total average income from each new member. The income is simply spread out over a longer period of time.

Membership Pros

Having said that, there are also some advantages to the membership site model, if it’s done right, as mentioned in the video.

From a marketer’s perspective, I’d say an info- and community-based membership makes sense as an addition to a product range, because you can win over the smaller segment in a market that actually prefers this model over the one-time payment model. It’s probably best placed as a back-end offer, rather than an upfront offer. And most vitally, you need to really take care of the members, keep the site fresh and relevant and not join the ranks of sites that end up being a disappointment for it’s customers.

All the best,

I’ll also give you a detailed run-down of the four platforms I have personally had a close look at (i.e. I’ve used them and seen them “from the inside”): aMember Pro, Digital Access Pass (DAP), Kajabi, Nanacast, Premium Web Cart, FusionHQ and 1ShoppingCart.

Read on to learn pretty much everything you need to know about product delivery and membership sites, all in one post.

Dear Marketer, You’re Doing it Wrong

Concerning information products online, my impression is that about 90% of it is done very, very sloppily. Take your typical ClickBank product: These usually consist of only about a dozen html pages. You’ve got a squeeze page, a sales-page and your typical disclaimers, affilaite pages, privacy policy and so on. That’s the “front end”, what the general public gets to see. More often than not, once you’ve made a purchase, all you get are a bunch of download links on yet another html page, and that’s it. Often, this page isn’t even protected in any way (meaning that anyone can access it, even if they didn’t purchase).

This is pretty horrible, in terms of product delivery. It’s also often the case that the PDF documents are unappealing and sloppily formatted and the videos are boring, long-winded and badly produced.

This is bad product delivery. Too many product creators assume that it’s all just about the pure content, the information, and not at all about the “packaging” of that content. But the human brain does not work like that.

The marketing message in the Kajabi launch got one thing right when it emphasized how important the quality of your delivery is for the perceived value of your product. Not only that, it’s also important for the learning process your customers go through with your material. I’ll not go into details, but I’m sure it’s not a stretch for anyone to imagine that well put-together and intelligently, beautifully delivered content is more actionable than a sloppy PDF.

But of course, good product delivery is about more than just aesthetics.

What to Consider for Product and Membership Solutions

Here are all the points that need to be considered and that make a good, solid delivery system:

Autoresponder Integration

I’m putting this first because it’s absolutely vital that you get all your customers on a mailing list. Not only is a list of customers your most valuable asset, it’s also important that you can follow-up with them for non-marketing purposes: Letting them know about new content, updates, bug-fixes etc.

While all-in-one solutions are usually a good thing and you don’t want to need to integrate too many parts, when it comes to the autoresponder, you want to be using a third-party service. Making sure that your broadcast mailings are safely delivered to inboxes, making sure your sender address and IP aren’t added to blacklists etc. is a big and complex task and you want it to be in the hands of people who do nothing else. A product delivery system that comes with an integrated autoresponder for some basic features (sending password reminder e-mails, for example) is good, but you definitely want a solid and seamless integration with an autoresponder like Aweber, iContact or GetResponse (to name just a few), for handling your actual list and e-mail marketing.

Payment Processing / Shopping Cart Integration

The payment processing is a similar topic to the autoresponder integration. A third party service is generally preferable, because that leaves the complexity of payment processing up to “the pros”. But it is vitally important that the payment process is integrated with your delivery system as seamlessly as possible.

For one thing, it needs to work 100% of the time. That goes without saying. Having a seamless process, without too many clicks and pageloads required and without the payment pages looking completely different from the order pages, is also very important. Ideally, a membership site software should integrate with PayPal and support many different merchant accounts and payment gateways as well.

Good: The customer fills out one form to complete the payment and is automatically given access to the product/membership as well as added to the autoresponder.

Bad: The customer fills out one form to do the payment, reaches a new page where they have to fill out a second form to access the product and finally reach yet another page where they need to fill a form to be added to the autoresponder… (yes, I’ve seen it this bad).

Upsell, Downsell, Cross-Sell Management

This really comes down to the shopping cart features of any given platform. There are many ways in which upsells and downsells are handled, especially when it comes to “one-click” features (meaning the customer doesn’t have to enter the payment information and go through checkout twice to get an upsell or downsell). One-click usually works through a shopping cart system where the customer can add several items to the cart before checking out. In this case, it’s important that the shopping cart can either be integrated into your existing website or customized to match the look and feel of your website, otherwise it will visually break the flow and might cause confusion (“Am I still on the same website?”).

Upsells and downsells are a matter of redirecting the customer to specific pages, depending on their actions, and managing different products/memberships and their corresponding buy-now-buttons or order forms.

Content Protection

Your content delivery system should be protecting your content, so that non-customers cannot access it and it cannot simply be found via search engines. A good system should allow very easy to set up protection for all your on-page content, your downloadable content and your streaming content. At the same time, it’s very important that the protection is implemented in a way that is non-annoying for the users. The worst example I’ve ever encountered was a setup where the system asked me to login again every single time I tried to navigate to a new page or refresh the page I was already looking at…

In short, the content protecton should be easy to set up, impenetrable to “outsiders” and as un-noticable to your paying customers as possible.

Content Scheduling

This is mainly a concern for membership sites. In most cases, you’ll want to be able to “drip out” content to your members. A good system should be flexible enough to allow for “all at once” access as well as individual, scheduled and tiered acces for each member, depending on their join date and membership level. It should also be up to you whether members see none of the future content, an outline of it or all of it. Finally, it can be a nice bonus if you can set up the membership site to show “teasers” of the content to non-members and full content only to members.

Another important aspect is how a delivery system deals with cancellations: Members need to be able to access the content for at least the rest of the period they paid for (i.e. if they pay for 30 days and cancel on day five, the system should give them another 25 days of access). Even better is if members who cancel can still, at any time, access all content up to the point of their cancellation.

Affiliate Management

One thing is for certain: If you’re marketing info products, you need an affiliate program. Affilates can make all the difference in info-marketing. Depending on your business-model, this can go two ways. If you are only selling a few products and especially if those products are unrelated, then you’re probably best served with a third-party affiliate program such as ClickBank, PaySpree or DigiResults. In this case, it’s important that the product delivery solution integrates smoothly with these third-party affiliate programs.

However, if you are running a full-fledged info-business with lots of products and product ranges, you will very likely want to have your own affiliate management system for various reasons. One of the main reasons for me personally is that a “global” affiliate program is absolutely crucial for me. In other words, if someone sends me a lead, then I want them to get credit for any and all purchases that lead makes from my product catalogue. That makes the deal more attractive for affiliates and it’s also a fairer solution than what you get with something like ClickBank. Another thing to keep in mind is that affiliate networks charge a “per sale” fee. If you are selling products by the thousands, having your own affiliate management system can save you a lot of money.

Of course, tracking needs to be bullet-proof, redirects need to be fast and stats need to be detailed. If you can offer multi-tiered affiliate payouts, that’s an extra bonus as well.

Ease of Use

This is one of the biggest challenges, when it comes to product delivery systems. On the one hand, you obviously want to system to be feature-rich and flexible and to do pretty much whatever you want it to do. On the other hand, the more sophisticated and complex a software is, the more complicated and less user-friendly it tends to be.

For non-coders, this can often mean having to spend extra cash on hiring professionals to set up and configure membership site for them. Ideally, a system should find a good compromise between flexibilty and ease of use.

Next, let’s get into the nitty-gritty on all the membership and product delivery platforms that I’ve personally tested and have a look at their pros and cons.

1ShoppingCart

1ShoppingCart is one of the solutions that’s been around forever, one of the “old dogs”, so to speak. 1SC is something of an all-in-one solution, combining payment processing, shopping cart software, and affiliate management component and even an autoresponder.

Looking through the extensive dashboard, you’ll quickly notice that 1SC is clearly more geared towards e-commerce and the selling of physical goods than your typical info-marketing and selling of digital courses and media. That’s not to say that the latter is not possible with 1ShoppingCart, but you’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the optimal solutions (and instructions) for selling digital media. However, there is an integrated solution for protecting digital content, although it seems quite limited. What you can do is specify files to be made accessible after a purchase, including unique licenses for the purchaser and expiring download links. If you want to deliver content on a membership-style platform, you will have to integrate 1SC with a membershi site software to do that.

Concerning the integrated autoresponder in 1ShoppingCart, it seems to be a perfect example of what I described above: While you can use the 1SC autoresponder, it’s probably better to go with a 3rd party solution. I can’t say that I tested the 1SC autoresponder myself, but I have heard terrible things about it.

Overall, 1ShoppingCart is very feature-rich and well-integrated, especially when it comes to payment processing. Despite this, I believe it’s not the optimal solution for information marketers.

aMember Pro

Amember Pro is a membership software that can be used for standalone products just as easily as for continuity programs. If you regularly buy internet marketing related products, it’s very likely that you’ve gone through an aMember checkout or two, as it’s quite a popular solution.

It’s biggest strength is probably that it has a very good affiliate management system (allows global affiliate commissions across many products) and that it is, in a sense, very feature-rich and flexible. I write “in a sense” because where aMember falls short is with integration and ease of use. To really turn aMember into a good, seamless solution, you either need to be a programmer or hire one. Even the standard setup for a product can be quite daunting for the non-technical.

In terms of integration, aMember can basically integrate with anything – autoresponders, CMS like WordPress, vBulletin, you name it. Unfortunately, integration usually requires an additional plugin and often, these plugins are third-party plugins (i.e. not created and supported by the creators of aMember).

Personally, I was shocked to find that aMember does not integrate with Aweber or other autoresponders out-of-the-box. And the creators don’t even provide an official plugin for this. This necessity for plugins means two things:

1. The more customized your aMember is, the more potential “weak links” it has, where integration could go awry and wreck your entire setup.

2. Amember is much more expensive than it seems at first glance, since you’ll have to pay for plugins and quite possibly also for setup and customization.

I had an interesting discussion with Jesus Perez, a guy who specializes in local business marketing and knows far more about membership solutions than I ever will (because he sets them up for his clients). He told me of the many troubles caused by aMember plugin monsters when one part of the system gets and upgrade and suddenly, the plugins stop working. Then, you’re at the mercy of the third-party providers to deliver an update as quickly as possible (which they may or may not do).

Apart from all that, a personal issue I had with aMember is that you have to know quite a bit of coding to even just make the standard signup- login- and membership-pages look nice. The regular design is simply unappealing.

Digital Access Pass

Digital Access Pass, or DAP, is specifically made for membership sites on WordPress. While this can be a bit of a limitation (especially concerning the platform), it’s actually a very smart choice on the side of the creators. DAP does WordPress integration better than any other solution I’ve seen or know of.

It’s fairly easy to use – there is a learning curve, of course, but even I could master with only two or three support tickets posted (and that’s saying something). Among the highlights of it’s (very long) feature list are:

• Digital Access Pass gives you all sorts of options for dripping out content to your members on multiple membership levels. You can hide your membership content from non-member completely or show teasers of the content, you can set up a free membership level with limited access etc. etc.
• DAP lets members who cancel access all the content that they’ve already paid for. I.e. when a member cancels during month 3, they will still be able to access all the content from the first 3 months of the membership, but nothing else. This is an awesome way to be super-cool to your customers.
• DAP lets you set commissions for your affiliates in all sorts of ways. You can pay per lead or pay per sale. You can choose to pay 100% commissions (great for viral promotions) and you can set special commission levels for your best affiliates (attract super-affiliates with exclusive, higher commissions) and much more.

You can access all DAP features from within WordPress and since the integration is so seamless, it’s very easy to create beautiful product and membership delivery with DAP: All you need is a good WordPress Theme. The login-screens, membership area, product access, user profiles and everything else is placed within your WordPress site, so you don’t have to worry about styling.

The biggest weakness in DAP are the affiliate stats – these are so bare-bones that they might as well not exist. Digital Access Pass does not give you a clear idea abou who’s sending you traffic, how much they are sending, what conversions they are getting… (although I’m told this will be addressed in their next update).

I also noticed that quite often, the customers did not receive their login data automatically. This might have been a problem with the Aweber integration or a problem with Aweber itself, I can’t be sure.

Kajabi

It took me a while before I “got” what Kajabi is really good for. Kajabi is a super-simplified solution that is made for people who don’t have their own ideas about product delivery.

It may seem condescending of me to put it that way, but it’s not at all: Whether you have your own ideas about product delivery or not simply depends on where your focus lies. If you are a control-freak (like me) and you have a strong focus on your marketing and your product delivery, then Kajabi is probably not for you. If your focus is more on your products themselves, on your community or any other aspect of your business, then Kajabi might well be a very good solution for you.

To put it differently: If you think “I want a product delivery platform that does X, Y and Z.” then Kajabi probably won’t fit. If you think “I want to sell my info-product, but don’t know how.” then Kajabi is perfect, because it does all that for you (more or less, anyway).

Kajabi has one particular way of doing everything. You get one type of sales-page, one type of product delivery, one type of design etc. This can be great, because you no longer need to worry about those factors. And yes, I know it’s customizable, but it’s customizable to have different “feels” for one and the same “look”.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous video and article about Kajabi, this platform has some absolutely brilliant features in terms of what kind of sales-funnels you can set up with it and what community features it offers. Unfortunately, the pricing is very steep and due to limitations on how many products and customers you can have, it’s heavily skewed towards marketers who sell high-priced products and memberships and against marketers who sell one-off products at lower prices and like to give out lots of free-line content.

Second-biggest weakness: No affiliate management. This makes the product a no-go for now. An affiliate module will be added later on, though. This is a very young product and it’s reasonable to expect it will evolve and improve over time.

Biggest weakness: Complete loss of data upon cancellation. The policy is clear: There’s no easy way to export data and as soon as you stop paying, it’s all gone.

Nanacast

Nanacast is a hosted solution, just like Kajabi. Instead of having the bells and whistles out front, Nanacast has all it’s power and potential under the hood. Nanacast has such a ridiculously huge array of features, it’s impossible to convey in an article like this one. Let it just be said that every feature related to memberships, product delivery and ecommerce that you can possibly imagine is likely to be in there, along with lots of features you never even thought of.

Integration with payment processors and autoresponders is also part of the package and for the latter Nanacast can even unsubscribe cancelled customers from your autoresponder’s customer list and move them to a different list.

They also offer state-of-the-art affiliate tracking and more stats than most of us can make use of. You get the idea: This thing is the 800lbs features-gorilla.

You can host all of your pages with Nanacast and have it do the entire delivery. However, unless you do some heavy html and CSS editing (you can add html content to all pages), it will all look quite ugly. Luckily, Nanacast also integrates with WordPress through a very simple plugin. Surprisingly, the WordPress integration is not quite as deep and complex as, well, everything else in Nanacast, but it gets the job done.

In short, this service has pretty much all the boxes ticked and it’s only downside is a the learning curve, as you’ll initally be overwhelmed by the complexity of the system and the interface isn’t particularly user-friendly.

Premium Web Cart

Premium Web Cart seems to have been primarily concieved as an e-commerce solution, however it’s also suitable for info-product marketing as it comes with a ton of features, membership and affiliate management as well as a seamless integration with the Wishlist Member WordPress plugin.

Premium Web Cart boasts a very user-friendly interface and a lot of detailed instruction videos (although most of those are clearly geared towards e-commerce). It does not come with any content management system (i.e. website builder) or any of it’s own pages. PWC is meant to be used on your existing website, rather than being a system that builds the website for you.

In terms of features and functionality, PWC is very impressive. In addition to your “usual” array of features, it also comes with a popup-creator, a coupon system, live chat and “click-to-call” functionality, an analytics solution and a support-ticket system.

If you are starting out and want a ton of features plus a user-friendly interface, Premium Web Cart is an excellent platform.

FusionHQ

FusionHQ is an all-in-one solution that most closely resembles Kajabi, out of all the systems presented here. It handles products, membership sites, sales-funnels, content-protection, shopping-cart and autoresponder integration,… the lot.

In FusionHQ, you start out by either creating a product or a membership site (there’s a drag-and-drop site-builder included) and then setting up a “process”. The process is basically your sales-funnel and it can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. You can create squeeze-pages and sales-pages using a large collection of templates, graphics and a drag-and-drop editor. FusionHQ also handles upsells, downsells and exit-popups out of the box and all these can be added to your process with relative ease.

Just like Kajabi, the only downside to a system like this is that it’s best if you don’t have too concrete a vision of what you want your membership and product delivery to look like, as a FusionHQ user, because it has a certain way of doing things and the pages and sites all have a certain “FusionHQ-look” to them. For most users, this is not a real problem, though. Also, you can import any custom HTML pages you want to use and edit the HTML of any of the pre-formatted pages in the system – this means that for advanced users, the system is extremely flexible. FusionHQ also comes with a WordPress plugin, which I unfortunately could not get to work on any of my test-sites, at the time of writing. I will update this section once the issues have been resolved.

FusionHQ is currently not yet available to the public. Once it’s released to the public, it looks like it could become the long-awaited one-stop solution and true Kajabi alternative for many marketers.

Overview and Comparison

• 1ShoppingCart
• aMember Pro
• DAP
• Kajabi
• Nanacast
• PWC
• FusionHQ

1ShoppingCart is a very extensive and fairly priced service that’s good for a lot of things, but not quite ideal for information marketing. It’s strong point is that it’s very well established, integrates with all sorts of payment processors and is very feature rich.

On the downside, the digital download protection it offers is… well, not exactly to my liking and it does not come with any kind of membership site model. For the record: I included it in this roundup because it’s so well known and I got asked about it a lot. Having said that, it’s worth mentioning that 1SC does integrate with several membership site programs.

From what I’ve heard, I’d stay away from their autoresponder.

Price: Starter $34/month, Basic $59/month, Professional $99/month

Get it Here

aMember Pro is initially quite affordable with a price-tag of $180 and no running costs. It’s very likely that you’ll have to spend at least another 100 bucks or so on plugins to make it work for your purposes. The more plugins and integration you use with it, the higher the maintenance will be (higher time investment or more money spent on hiring a coder to take care of the technicalities for you).

All the standard pages aMember creates are pretty ugly, but customizable. WordPress integration is flexible and seems solid enough.

Overall the biggest downside of aMember is that it is too complicated and too reliant on (often third-party) plugins, which makes it a high-maintenance solution with too many potential points of failure.

Price: $180

Get it Here

Digital Access Pass is one of the user-friendliest solutions of the bunch, not least because of the extensive and well-sturctured knowledgebase, which includes many detailed video-tutorials.

DAP’s biggets strength is how well and easily it integrates with WordPress. You can simply use a nice-looking theme and add the DAP specific date (like user accounts, signup-fields etc.) using short-codes and end up with a professional looking membership or product-delivery site. Content protection is solid and easy to use, as well.

My biggest issue with DAP was a severe lack of detail when it comes to affiliate stats. Having said that, in every other way DAP is a very good choice.

Price: Single Site $167, Multi-Site: $297

Get it Here

Kajabi is all about flashy presentation, but also puts a lot of emphasis on user-friendliness.

Of all products tested, it certainly creates the most beautiful sales-pages and membership areas, without further customization. The fact that it is cloud-hosted and boasts some smart media delivery functions is nice, but those aren’t important features for most users (who won’t generate server-melting traffic anyway).

The biggest downsides, are the pricing and the lack of an affiliate system, which makes the product pretty much useless, at this point. After all, if you are looking for an expensive product deliver solution that needs to be integrated with all other components (payment processing, affiliate system, autoresponder…), there are more than enough options available.

Price: $99/month, $199/month, $299/month

 

Get it Here

Nanacast is not the easiest platform to get acquainted with. The user interface, as well as the entire system, are geared towards maximum functionality, not user-friendliness.

I personally don’t use the hosted pages for Nanacast, since I like to have my content A) sitting on my own servers and B) look nice (which I use WordPress for).

Nanacast shines with a very good affiliate management system and just generally very good features concerning integration, payment processing etc. If it were just slightly more affordable, it would be the ultimate choice for anyone.

Price: $97/month, $147/month

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Premium Web Cart offers an amazing array of features at a lower price-point than most of it’s competitors. That alone makes it worth a second look.

To be honest, PWC is the solution I would have personally chosen, if I didn’t already have many of my product/membership sites set up and ready to go in WordPress. PWC’s own membership system is quite good, if you start with it from scratch. As is it’s affiliate management system and the slew of other features it offers.

Price: $40/month, $80/month, $100/month

Get it Here

 

FusionHQ is a very complete all-in-one solution for serious product creators. Priced at $97/month, it’s an extremely comprehensive system at a more than reasonable price. Yes, you can get all the features in FusionHQ using other systems and tools as well, but it will cost a small fortune and you’d have to make them all work together.

In short, it looks like FusionHQ is the system that Kajabi claimed to be. From setting up a very simple sales-funnel in just a few minutes, to integrating a complex funnel with upsells, downsells and exit-pops and leading it all into a stylish, multi-tiered WordPress based membership site, there seems to be nothing product-delivery related that FusionHQ doesn’t handle.

Price: $97/month

Get it Here

Honourable Mentions

Here are some more options and solutions that I didn’t take a close enough look at to write about extensively, but that are still worth considering (from what I saw):

For a nice-looking all-in-one solution, check out Adobe Business Catalyst. Like Kajabi, Business Catalyst also boasts design and a polished look as one of the big features, next to all the “inner workings” features. It comes with analytics, an autoresponder, lots of e-commerce features and much more. This is a solution I would have given a thorough test if it weren’t for the fact that I simply don’t want to learn a new CMS (it took me long enough to get WordPress figured out).

Mentioned above, in conjunction with Premium Web Cart, Wishlist Member is a plugin that turns your WordPress site into a very deep and flexible membership site. I’ve been told that it’s one of the best WP membership solutions out there and I’d give it a close look if I were planning to create a few membership sites like that. As it stands, I don’t have too much use for a membership delivery system of this magnitude, at least for the time being.

Of course, I also need to mention Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft eclipses almost anything else in terms of functionality… and in terms of pricing. This platform offers a very cool affiliate management system and an integrated shopping cart. It’s main function is as a highly advanced autoresponder, however. Unlike most autoresponders, Infusionsoft can load up all sorts of automated response sequences, depending on the actions your subscribers take. For example, it can tag subscribers according to what links they click, save all that data in it’s CRM and then allow you to target subscribers very specifically. It’s a very impressive solution, overall. Unfortunately, you need to pay at least $199/month to get all of the essential features, you’ll probably need to hire someone for setup and customization and if you want to run membership sites or protect your download pages, you need a separate solution or you need an outrageously expensive plugin for Infusionsoft.

Recommendations and My Personal Solution

Which platform is the best? That depends a lot on your individual needs.

If you are new to information marketing and aren’t sure about how deeply you want to get involved, I recommend using a third-party affiliate program like ClickBank or PaySpree for one-off products. Except, don’t use ClickBank, because it sucks. Instead, my number one recommendation for an affiliate network goes to DigiResults.

If you want to create a single membership site, then I recommend using Digital Access Pass. DAP is quite affordable and it will grow with your business, should you decide to expand it and start new memberships etc.

If you want a more complete solution with affiliates, coupons, upsells/downsells and all that jazz, then I recommend either FusionHQ,  Nanacast or Premium Web Cart. FusionHQ gets my top recommendation, but the other two solutions are definitely worth a look as well and you may find one of them more suitable to your specific needs. Both Nanacast and Premium Web Cart offer free trials, so you can take a risk-free look inside and decide for yourself.

I have personally decided to go with Nanacast as I like the way it integrates with WordPress, the affiliate management module lets me do all of the crazy things I want to do with it, I can have my users create a single login for multiple website (how cool is that?) and much more.

Thoughts, questions, comments? Join the discussion in the comments section!

Cheers,

As you can tell by the title, I’m not exactly recommending Kajabi. However, I want to make it clear that I don’t mean to bash the product unreasonably and i do think that it has some absolutely phenomenal features. But I’m guessing there are already enough “reviews” out there, that will tell you all about how great Kajabi is…

Read on to see what the two biggest problems with Kajabi are…

Who is it Good for?

As I say in the video, I do believe that Kajabi is useful and a good choice for some purposes.

If you:

• Plan to create only a limited amount of products
• Plan to create membership products with recurring billing
• Charge relatively high prices for these memberships and products
• and don't have a strong opinion about how sales-funnels and product delivery should be set up, what it should look like etc.

...then Kajabi could be the perfect choice for you. In the scenario above, none of the weaknesses of Kajabi will really impact your business and you'll just be happy to be able to create nice looking pages and memberships with relative ease.

For other business models, it's probably not the right choice.

Mini Warning

I guess this goes without saying, but let me just mention that Kajabi will not solve any problems for you if you do not yet have a running business of some kind.

Before you make an investment, you should have at least one existing product of your own already out there, plus a clear idea of what products and memberships you'll be creating and delivering through this new platform.

Personally, I will not go with Kajabi and you'll see a rundown of many different alternatives to it as well as my personal setup in a post in the near future.

Cheers,

So, what is their membership about and is it worth the price of admission? Read on to find out.

The IM-Advantage Overview:

As an IM-Advantage member, you get access to a lot of material, including tools, resources and info-products. In the words of the creators themselves, you’ll also be on the bleeding edge of development in online marketing, as they alledgedly share all of their new discoveries etc. with the members. I personally doubt that’s entirely true, but I can confirm that you get access to some valuable resources not available outside the membership.

Here’s a list of (almost) everything you get access to in the IM Advantage:

IM-Advantage Tools:

• Bookmark Blueprint (Automated social bookmarking tool)
• Blog Blueprint (High-PR blog network, comparable to Linkvana)
• Link Blueprint (Link-exchange system for all the members)
• Article Blueprint (Low-quality article distribution service)
• Authority Hub Finder (Finds common backlink sources for competing websites)
• Keyword Blueprint (Keyword research tool)
• Offer Evaluator (Evaluate earnings potential for PPC keywords/offers)
• PPC Ad Optimizer (Split-testing setup for PPC campaigns)
• Peel Away Ad Software (Peel-away ad script for your websites)
• Hippojaw (Click tracking and PPC optimization tool)

IM-Advantage Resources:

• Free Hosting
• Keyword Databases (Specified for AdSense, PPC, SEO and more)
• Backlink Database (Huge database of high-PR sites where you can get a link)
• Landing Pages and Site Templates (Including PPV landers, CPA templates, AdSense site templates and more)
• Videos and Articles on Various IM Topics

IM-Advantage Info Products:

• Commission Blueprint 1.0 (Note: This is not the current “2.0″ version of Commission Blueprint)
• Project Archimedes (Site Flipping Course by Ben Shaffer)
• Automated Traffic Blueprints (Traffic Generation Course by Ben Shaffer)
• SEM Business Blueprint (Steve Clayton’s “Offline Marketing” Product)
• Mining Money Online (Beginner IM Course)
• Domain Flipping Theorem (Domain Flipping Course by Zach Booker)
• Get More Buyers (List-Building Course by Michael Rasmussen)
• Unnamed Facebook Marketing Course

As you can clearly see, the “quantity” part of the equation is pretty much covered, so the main question is: Is this stuff any good?

More About the Resources

The resources and info-products in IM-Advantage are generally high-quality stuff. Obviously, I didn’t go through each and every one of the products in detail (I do have other things to do…), but from what I saw, the courses are solid and useful. The site templates are also a very nice addition and can be used 1 to 1 or just serve as inspiration for your own sites and campaigns.

The keyword databases are interesting, but they are selected using questionable criteria. For example, the big SEO keyword list consists of keywords with high broad match search volume and a low number of phrase search results. If you’ve gone through my free keyword research guide, or if you just have any experience and know anything about keyword research, you’ll know that this makes the list next to useless. There are some interesting keywords in there (almost by default, I guess), but it’s not the goldmine of opportunities it’s made out to be.

All in all, though, the resources and info products are nothing to be frowned at.

More About the Tools and Services

At first glance, the collection of tools is nothing short of incredible. Quite a few of them focus on PPC and since I have very limited experience with PPC, I can’t really make a good judgement about how useful or valuable they are. I can say that a click-tracking solution such as Hippojaw can be very valuable, especially when you’re using paid traffic sources.

The link-building tools are all slightly disappointing upon closer inspection. I’m not saying they’re horrible, just that they don’t quite live up to the claims made about them. For example, Bookmark Blueprint only submits to five bookmarking sites. It’s supposed to be expanded and growing, but nothing has happened for several months. Considering that it doesn’t have the most intuitive interface ever and doesn’t have any special twists (e.g. members bookmarking each other’s sites), that makes it the weakest bookmarking tool I know.

Another example: Article Blueprint used to submit to a collection of article directories as well as Steve and Tim’s own network of almost 500 sites. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, since the last update it no longer submits to the article directories and if you go and find the sites where your articles are submitted in the private network, you’ll find that they are “hidden away” on the sites and have absolutely no on-page optimization going for them. This means that the links you get from the articles could hardly be weaker if they tried. As a concrete example, here’s one of the Article Blueprint articles. For a test-page, I submitted five articles to the network and out of the more than 2.000 links this should produce, only about 160 were picked up by Yahoo. That’s not epically bad, but it’s not great, either, considering these are very low quality links.

Worth the Price?

Maybe you’re wondering why I’m harping on about a few of the tools in the membership when there’s so much more on offer, so let me explain: First, we need to consider the price. If you purchase the membership in the front-end, it will cost you $147 a month. If you get it as an upsell to one of their products (including one of their free ones that you can get here), it will cost you $97 a month. In the former case, it’s one heck of an expensive membership and in the latter case, it’s still not exactly cheap.

The SEO tools in particular are the main element in the membership that really warrant a monthly cost. Sure, there are a lot of resources and products in the membership, but chances are that not all of them are interesting/relevant/useful to you and if you would pick and choose the “good” products and buy them publicly, that would probably cost you a few hundred dollars, as a one-off cost.

Those few hundred dollars will only get you a couple of months worth of the IM-Advantage membership, so there needs to be more there, to justify the price. Unfortunately, updates and new additions are relatively sparse. There’s generally one update per month and while they sometimes throw in another info-product or two, sometimes it’s also just a minor update to a tool or a small resource (in one case it was actually a promotion disguised as a resource).

So, it’s really up to the link-building tools in the IM-Advantage to keep you coming back for more. Are they good enough to do that? Just barely, yes. At the higher, public price, I have to say that IM-Advantage is not worth it. You can easily get in for the lower price, though and at 100 bucks a month, with all the resources and the link-building tools, I’d say it’s still a good deal. Certainly good enough to sign up, grab some valuable resources, give the tools a go and then make an assessment about whether it’s worth it for you or not. The stuff in the IM Advantage is definitely worth money, it’s just that it’s only barely worth as much as they’re asking for, in my opinion (and as you may know, I always have something to nag about).

So, if you’re going to subscribe to the IM-Advantage, make sure you do so at the lowest price possible and to get that price, just click the link below (takes you to an article about Mining Money Online) and sign up through the form at the bottom of the post. You’ll arrive at an upsell-page where you can get IM-Advantage at the lower price:

-> Click Here for the “Back-Door” Lower-Price Access to IM-Advantage <-

Check out the audio below and further down, I’ve listed and described all of the relevant links to sites we talk about during the interview. Enjoy!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download Link

Millionaire Challenge – This is Mark’s personal video blog where you can follow his progress and everything he’s up to with his online business.

Millionaire Mentor Coaching – This is the site he mentioned where you can listen in on Mark’s coaching calls. I think this offer is especially remarkable from the product creation perspective: Mark is simply taking something he’s doing anyway (coaching) and turning it into a product. Pretty clever.

Internet Marketing with Brad Gosse – Brad Gosse is Mark’s coach. I’m a subscriber to his blog and I definitely recommend you check it out, too.

Finally, Mark mentioned a very good research method. Go to Google and type:

site:warriorforum.com “how to”

You’ll get about 20’000 results from people asking how to do one thing or another in the Internet marketing niche. Now, I’m sure you can see how this same method can be applied to any forum in any niche and with different queries… Easy way to find out what people want. All you need to do after that is find or create a product filling that need and connect the people looking for it to the product.

Questions and comments are welcome, as always!

Cheers,

A few days ago, Darren Rowse (Pro Blogger), Chris Brogan (Trust Agents), Sonia Simone and Brian Clark (both Copyblogger) launched a new membership site called “The Third Tribe”. You’ve probably heard of it, since it made something of a splash.

This post is not another Third Tribe rant. Others have already done that better than I ever could. If you take just one thing from this post, let it be this: Go to Griz’s Third Tribe review and read it. It makes a more than excellent case and is very much worth reading.

If you take another thing from this post, then it’s a clearer and less biased overview of Internet marketing “tribes” that follows below:

Third Tribe

First, here’s the skinny on the Third Tribe:

This product is marketed using a common marketing technique: You establish a scenario in which there is a very apparent need and then you fill that need. This is often described as “creating the market for your product”. As I’m sure you are aware, every product should have some kind of a unique selling proposition (USP) that answers the modern consumers ever-present question: “Why should I buy this instead of one of the other, similar products on offer?”

It’s not always easy to create a USP for your product, especially in saturated markets such as “make money online”. What the Third Tribe says, is: “So far, there were two tribes in Internet marketing: Slimey, dishonest and obnoxious sales-types and hippy social media types who want to be everyone’s friend and are all broke. Now, there’s the third option: Real, honest, non-obnoxious marketing that will still fill your pockets with cash!”

It’s a pretty clever setup, in my opinion. Of course, it’s dead wrong, but what can you expect from something you see on a sales-page?

Tribe or No Tribe?

As I’ve confessed previously, I’m a bit of an information junky and I spend more time than is reasonable on different forums, reading blogs, ebooks, books etc. about Internet marketing. It seems to me that there really are certain types or tribes of Internet marketers, all coming at this same subject from a different angle.

Below, I list the groups and types of marketers I’ve encountered online. What can you get from reading about this? You might be surprised at how many different online marketing philosophies and methods exist and you might get some new ideas and a fresh perspective.

The Bums

As far as I know, Travis Sago is the guy who coined the term Bum Marketing. The term simply comes from the fact that bum marketing methods all rely on free traffic sources (i.e. a bum could afford it). Many beginners in Internet marketing start out with some variation of bum marketing, relying on article directories, Squidoo/Hubpages, free blogs and classifieds to make their first few dollars.

Bum marketers also seem to have a certain affinity towards Clickbank and the Amazon affiliate program and the most successful among them tend to produce a very large volume of articles every day, often making use of article spinning to get more mileage out of their work.

The SEO’s

The SEO’s are all about getting free traffic via search engines (primarily Google). There’s quite a bit of overlap between the SEO and the Bum tribes, since both swear by free traffic.

While the bum marketer mostly drives traffic to articles on article directories, the SEO drives traffic to self-hosted websites. Articles may or may not be a means towards this end. SEO’s often make use of social bookmarking, profile-links, article and video distribution, three-way link-swaps (not as kinky as it sounds) and other methods to get more and better backlinks to their highly optimized pages. They are also often engaged in heated debates among each other, since no one really knows how the Google algorithm works, but everyone has their theories.

The Involved Marketers/Product Creators

Involved marketing (I got this term from the Smart Passive Income blog) is all about being transparent, open and honest, getting out there, getting in touch with people and building a “personal brand”. Think Gary Vaynerchuk.

Involved marketers spend a lot of time building relationships with their potential customers and are often heavily involved in social media platforms like facebook, twitter and Digg. They also tend to make more use of video than marketers of other tribes.

Since involved marketing is all about personal branding and transparency, these marketers are often also product creators. After all, once you’ve built real trust and you become recognizable and liked by the crowd in your niche, selling something made by yourself makes the most sense.

The Traffic-Arbitrage Crowd

Why work your butt off to get pages and articles ranked in search engines and to get people to notice and like you when all you need to do is give a search engine or CPV company some money to get floods of traffic almost instantly? That’s the question that describes the Traffic Arbitrager’s take on online marketing.

These marketers have an affinity towards CPA offers and a bit of a love/hate relationship with Google, since AdWords has enormous traffic-potential but also strict rules and a twitchy trigger-finger when it comes to banning accounts.

Paying for traffic is something of a daring gamble and for everyone who hits it big-time and starts making unspeakable amounts of money in a short time, using PPC or CPV, there are hundreds who lose a lot of money and give up before they ever see a dime in return.

Marketers in the traffic-arbitrage tribe are perhaps the most technical and tend to spend more time and effort with testing, tracking and tweaking than marketers in any of the other crowds.

The Bloggers

Blogging is another thing many beginners in online marketing get into. One hears stories about people making fortunes with blogs and there are many “blogging for money” related products and, of course, blogs.

Bloggers, like involved marketers, are all about building a community and connecting with others. They leave comments on other blogs, write guest posts and do the social media thing.

Blogs can be monetized using ad-space, AdSense, promoting affiliate products in posts or as platforms for selling self-made products.

Since blogging is as public as it is, in this tribe, the vast discrepancy between the few who make it big and the thousands who struggle to make a dime is very apparent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that making money from a blog is more difficult than making money with “real” marketing, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered, I happen to believe so.

Conclusion

People have a strong tendency to form groups and identify with them. They also have a very strong tendency to think of themselves and their own group as superior to others.

You will see that in each of the above mentioned online marketing tribes, there are people who are very firm in their belief that their way of doing things is the only “right” way or the only “real” way of making money online and that all the others are just scammers, time-wasters and/or idiots.

For this reason alone I encourage anyone to become familiar with more than one method and more than one crowd. Wherever you are involved, if you get in too deep and follow just one direction, you’re always blinding yourself to many opportunities and ideas that can be found outside of your particular tribe.

What tribe do you belong to? Or do you think this entire concept is rubbish? What about the Third Tribe, do you have a rant about that you need to get off your chest? The comments are all yours!

Cheers,

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and have been looking around for some information and guidance, it’s quite likely you’ve come across some promotions and recommendations for Wealthy Affiliate, sometimes also referred to as the Wealthy Affiliate University (WA or WAU). WA is a membership site that aims to be a launching platform for Internet marketing, offering lots of learning material, an active community as well as research tools and more.

Does Wealthy Affiliate deliver or is it just a newbie trap? Read this complete review to find out.

Overview

There are three main components to Wealthy Affiliate:

• Training Material
  Lots and lots of information about affiliate marketing, setting up websites and monetizing them, Pay-Per-Click advertising etc.
• Tools
  Applications that help you in doing keyword research, finding good products to promote, writing articles etc.
• Community
  A forum as well as personal blogs every member can create and some facebook-esque community features like adding friends.

Features

Let’s look at the main features in WA in a little more detail.

Training Material
In the so-called Training Centre of WA, you can find lots of articles, tutorials and videos about many different aspects of online marketing. And when I write “lots” I actually mean “tons and tons”.

Some of the material is made by the WA owners, Kyle and Carson. But every WA member can contribute their own training resources, so it’s not limited to “official” WA material.

The abundance of resources can be a blessing and a curse. While information is invaluable and it’s great to have access to so much of it, I found the training to be unstructured and somewhat chaotic.

As far as I can tell, there used to be an “Eight-Week Action Plan” that people were encouraged to go through, to start out with online marketing. This has been replaced with a more modular training setup and I guess that was a bit of a step back. The greatest problem I see is in the interlinking of training material. If you start out with the official first lesson in Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll find “learn more about X” links all over the documents. So, you’ll be reading along and every time you come across something unfamiliar, linking to a more detailed explanation, you get side-tracked.

If you don’t have good discipline to keep yourself on track, you’ll probably end up confused about what to do (PPC? Article Marketing? Building a List? Squidoo/Blogger/Hubpages?).

Tools
The tools available to Wealthy Affiliate are the following:

• Keyword Research Tool
  Actually a collection of several KW research applications that pull data from Google, let you sort through them and arrange them by traffic volume, let you expand keywords and search related terms and check on who’s paying for advertising for any given keyword.
  Something I really dislike about the research tool is that it displays competition strength, PPC competition and article marketing competition on arbitrary number-scales. The problem is that this teaches you nothing about how competition strength is determined and relying on the tool’s data becomes a crutch. Apart from that, the KW research tools are solid and useful.

• Site Rubix
  Site Rubix is a website building tool with an easy to use drag-and-drop interface. You start out with a template, upload images you want to have displayed and then add menu-items, links, text and images in an intuitive interface. Site Rubix is a pretty easy way to create html-websites without programming knowledge, however, I find it to be nowhere as easy or as flexible as using WordPress (but maybe that’s a question of what I’m used to).
• NicheQ
  NicheQ is a collection of pre-set data and content for a series of niches. You can pick a (broad) niche like dating or weight-loss and you’ll receive a list of keywords, PLR articles, a report on what kind of content and promotion works in that niche, some pre-written promotional e-mails and some website templates.
  I have to say that I’m not sure about this component of WA. I’m skeptical of anything pre-made and I’ve never worked with PLR or pre-written mails. On the other hand, I see the usefulness in having something put together, just to see what kind of content an experienced marketer puts together for a niche.
• WA Web Hosting
  Wealthy Affiliate offer free web hosting does what it says: You get to host your sites on their servers for free.
  Once again, I’m going to be a bit mean here: I’d be wary of making use of this service before I was entirely sure that I wanted to stay with WA on the long run. Also: Hosting isn’t very expensive.
• My-Linker
  Neat little tool for cloaking and tracking all your affiliate links. Using this, you can keep an overview of all your campaigns from one central location.
• Clickbank Research Tool
  
  Clickbank’s own search function is quite tedious and uninformative, so it’s great that there’s a better solution within WA. It lets you search for trending products (see screenshot above) or do custom searches through the entire Clickbank catalogue.
• Rapid Writer
  This is an article writing program that integrates with some keyword research and lets you check keyword densities. There’s also an article spinning/rewriting functionality that I found to be incredibly clumsy compared to something like CRewriter or even manually using spinning syntax.
• Website Templates
  A collection of html/CSS templates you can download and use. The templates are okay, in general and some might be useful for creating simple squeeze-pages. As an avid WordPress user, I once again have to state that I didn’t even consider trying the templates.
• STF Marketing Blueprint
  ”Blueprint” of a marketing campaign that was apparently very successfully run for a weight-loss product a while back. I’m not sure how useful this is, since there’s already almost too much information in the Training Centre and the NicheQ tool.

Community
As already mentioned, there are several community features inside Wealthy Affiliate. The most frequently used one is perhaps the members forum. You’ll find quite a lot of activity going on in the forum and while it can’t quite hold up to the best Internet marketing forums in terms of expert members and variety of topics and posts, it does have one huge quality: The Wealthy Affiliate forum is the newbie-friendliest forum I’ve ever seen.

There are some extremely helpful members in the WA forums and you’ll find lots and lots of basic questions asked and answered.

Apart from that, you can keep up to date with other’s via their WA blog entries, add people to your buddy-network and send private messages as well as public messages to each other. Another interesting feature is the WA Gold: At the beginning of each month you receive a certain amount of WA Gold, that you can give out to other members, much like “Thanks” or “Rep” in some forums. You can give gold for helpful forum posts, good training resources or any other reason you like. WA Gold can even be traded in for actual money (though you’ll need a lot of it for that to be worthwhile).

The Gold exchange is another interesting feature that helps strengthen the community and I think it’s a nice way of showing appreciation.

Further Thoughts

The training material in Wealthy Affiliate is focused mainly on article markteing, PPC and e-mail marketing. That covers the basics quite well, so no complaints there.

However, I found that the emphasis among users and in the forum is mostly on article marketing and more specifically, the use of Squidoo. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it just seems to me that there’s almost too much weight put on those two options. It might just be a personal impression, though.

Ratings

Fluff-o-Meter

There’s a lot of good, solid and useful information to be found on WA, no doubt about that. However, the information is currently too loosely structured, it’s too easy to get sidetracked while going through the training material and since every member can contribute training resources, it’s quite likely that you’ll come across material that is not useful for you, not very well put together and just distracting overall. For this reason, I can only rate WA as medium on the Fluff-o-Meter scale.

Lots of info, good info, but not enough structure.

Spam-Factor

The spam-factor is minimal when joining WA. You will get occasional e-mails, but they are very rarely pushing product.

Inbox mostly spared.

Scam-Scale

Again, no problem at all. There are no hidden fees, no false promises and no agressive upsells. While there are some upsells within WA, they are not pushed on the members at all. Respect to Kyle and Carson for not trying to exploit the WA members a bit more.

No annoying upsales and no member exploitation = very good!

Overall Rating

Wealthy Affiliate is not a bad place to start, if you want to learn about Internet marketing. It’s greatest strengths are the community features and the overall beginner-friendliness. There are two things I think WA could do a lot better, though. For one, the information should be more clearly structured. Secondly, I think some of the tools could be vastly improved. The keyword research tools pale in comparison to what something like Market Samurai or Keyword Elite offers and the Rapid Writer could very easily be made a lot easier to use and much more powerful, to name just two examples.

PLEASE NOTE THE UPDATE BELOW!

In short: It’s good, but it could be better.

This is for you if:

• You are new to affiliate marketing
• You want all your resources and tools in one place
• You have enough discipline not to get overwhelmed and sidetracked by lots of information
• You appreciate being part of a community

This is not for you if:

• You are already experienced in Internet marketing
• You are prone to analysis-paralysis