How To Create Killer Membership Sites & A Great Customer Experience Latest 2012

Times have changed. You can’t just send traffic to a sales page and expect people to buy if they’ve never heard of you before; relationships are critical now-a-days.
Oh, and let’s not forget about the customer experience. If you piss anybody off with a crappy product or a bad buying experience, you can be sure that their 10,000 twitter followers will hear about it – and they won’t stop there…
With forums, Facebook and YouTube at their disposal, they can vent ’til their hearts’ content.
I don’t say this to scare you, only to let you know that because of Social Media, People Have A Voice. So, it’s our job to make sure that we deliver a great product and a great experience for the sake of our own business.
But, how exactly do you do that?

Downloadable Products v.s Membership Areas

Here’s step 1. STOP selling downloadable products.
Now, hold up – before you throw anything at me… let me explain. Downloadable products are quickly becoming a thing of the past and if you continue down this path, you’ll be playing catch up for a long time while your competition steals your customers away.
What I suggest you sell is access to your information; have your customers go through their purchase in a sleek-designed members area. The great news is that with today’s technology and brand new products like, OptimizePress, you can do this easily and inexpensively.
The image above is the members area of my upcoming product, Podcasting For Bloggers and it literally took me a few minutes to set up after I installed the OptimizePress wordpress theme.

There’s gonna come a point in your business where you’ll have to update your products; maybe because of new information, changes in tools and resources or maybe you’ll change your mind on a particular topic.
Membership areas allow you to update your product without you having to create the whole damn thing again. By breaking up your information into chunks, you can go right in and change the video, audio or chapter that you wanna change, without messing anything else up.
Imagine having to re-do an entire 90 minute product on video because the guys at Facebook decided to change something or because you found that the best way to gain muscle is to eat protein within the first half hour of waking up. If this new (and updated) information is not in your product, you’ll be doing your customers a disservice.

Don’t Take The “Easy” Road…

Do you like downloading a ton of videos, mp3′s and PDFs to your hard drive? How much more can you fit in there anyway?
I sure don’t, and you customer probably doesn’t either; so give them a place where they can login and consume what they’ve just bought. It’s easy to just show them a link that says: Click here To download your product (347 Mb), but easy isn’t going to make you stand out.
Easy isn’t going to make them buy again, and again. Easy isn’t going to make you money. Think of you customer before you think of yourself; and when you do, you’ll never take the “easy” road again – I guarantee you.
OK – I’m done talking about great customer experiences. Let me now take you behind the scenes of Podcasting For Bloggers so I can show you how “easy” it is to create killer membership areas for your products.

My “Not-So-Secret” Weapon

Here’s the video where I show you the theme that I’m using to power my membership site for Podcasting For Bloggers. It’s the best investment I’ve ever made for my internet business, hands down. Check out this quick 5 minute video:

Action Steps…

Step 1: Decide to sell access as oppose to just downloads
Step 2: Buy OptimizePress.
Step 3: Use it. :0)
I’m curious: What are you selling? Are you creating PDFs, MP3s and MP4s for your customers to download, or are you packaging your information and offering a great user experience? Leave your answers and questions in the comments section below..