Membership Sites doing well In 2011

Ah sure.. As far as the body building membership site goes, the traffic was mainly affiliates and JVs. It's run through Clickbank, so had that exposure, but every buyer regardless of intentions was presented the chance to become an affiliate.

Doing that is excellent, btw. I know from being on the inside that a LOT of sales were generated simply by non-IM-oriented people liking the product and recommending it. Don't think that's likely? Look at Netflix: you know how many friends tell friends about it just to get their measly little $10 referral? A TON of them, and I bet less than 1% of them have ever even heard of "affiliate marketing".

On this note, a good script for a site like this would be Launch Formula Marketing or Filsaime's Butterfly Marketing script, since there's a simple affiliate back end build into it.

Now, as far as content, it was 1 interview + transcription per month. At first I didn't think that was enough, but later, after seeing courses like Paul Evans' Simple Six Figures, it made sense because of this:

If you only promise 1 thing per month, customers only expect 1 thing per month.

And that makes it a heck of a lot easier on content generation and membership fulfillment, since you're not overworking or under-delivering.

Here's another golden thing I learned from that experience:

In the IM niche, we're used to seeing "teleseminars" and "interview series" and such. I feel like they're losing their perceived value (in some cases), which is also why I feel there's a seeming transition to webinars, since more value is placed in video.

But, if you venture into non-IM niches, people aren't used to seeing interview series and for that reason they convert extremely well. And since you can effectively knock out your month's content in a 1-2 hour call, I'd say it's cost effective as well.

That leaves you an entire month to set up a call and jump on the line for an hour... Not even too much work. And if you're paying $50 for a transcription, it only takes 5 members at $10/month base to make back your entire monthly content production costs.

Other things you could do (that I saw tested):

When you get 5-10 interviews, you can either break them off and package them into one product (with a 1-time fee where they can then access all the interviews), or set up a fixed-term continuity for those 5-10 interviews (instead of just having the interviews go on and on indefinitely). Both could then be back-ended into other forms of continuity though..

Hope this helps to illuminate the process lol, there was a lot in here..

Andy-would you mind to elaborate on how you got the ball rolling with your investing site?