This week I want to pull back the curtain on a new business concept I’ve come up with that is really, really exciting. Trust me you’re going to love the simplicity of this one.
In today’s eletter I’ll explain to you what ‘member licensing’ is and give you some ideas of how you can get into it.
Let me start by explaining how I came up with this concept. Then I’ll give you some actual business ideas that you can get started with today and go and make some cash with.
Membership websites are one of, if not THE most lucrative industries to get into online. Earning a residual income and knowing you’ve got X amount coming in every month is an amazing feeling.
I’ve had a membership site running for two years which people pay me a twenty quid a month subscription for. The thing is, it hasn’t been updated for a year, yet people are still paying me twenty quid a month. Why would they do that? Surely the whole reason someone stays on as a member of a membership site is to get new content each month.
That’s true. But memberlicensing is a whole new ball game…
Memberlicensing – monthly moola in the bank
Now I wish I could tell you stories of how I invented this new idea and how Einstein would be jealous of this. Truth is though I stumbled upon it purely by accident. And that’s not same fancy pants marketing talk. That’s the truth.
You see I’m a guy who’s straight down the line. I realised people were paying me twenty quid a month and that I hadn’t updated the site so I emailed the few (ok there are only still twenty two paying members but that’s not the point as you’ll see shortly) and explained that the site was now old and they should cancel their subscription. I also offered to give them back the extra they had paid since the site had last been updated.
However I got three emails back that got me thinking of how much of a genius I had been without even realising it!
You see what I had done, all be it inadvertently, was let the subscribers have a licence to use one of my training videos. They could use this to give away from their web site and build their email list for as long as they were a member of my site. When they cancelled, the licence was revoked and they couldn’t give away the videos.
In other words they weren’t interested in the content of the site. They were only interested in the licence they had to the videos which was helping them build their email list. As one of the subscribers said, “I’m making a lot more from the email list than the twenty quid I’m paying you each month Jon. So I’ve stayed a member so you can’t take away the licence to the videos.”
This idea hit me like a ton of bricks. What had started out as a membership site with content still had subscribers paying two and a half years later because of one simple video I had let them have a licence to.
Ay up. I was onto something…
Memberlicensing ideas you can start today
I started thinking about this whole memberlicensing idea. The more I thought about it, the more profitable I realised it could be.
You could start a normal membership site, say in a niche market like Dog Training, and add articles and content each month and charge ten dollars a month per subscriber.
You could do that. But it would take a long while to make any serious cash. And I don’t get out of bed unless I know I’m going to make a killing.
You won’t need to either if you put any of these ideas into action.
Memberlicensing email newsletters
Here’s one idea you could use. Your member licence site needs to solve a problem for a niche group of web site owners. All web site owners should send out a weekly email newsletter to their email lists. Problem is they’re so bloomin’ lazy very few do.
That’s where you come in.
You pick a specific group of web site owners, let’s say site owners in the weight loss market, and you go to a site like www.elance.com and hire a writer to write four weekly email newsletters. You also get them to write an email promoting a product in the weight loss niche market.
You then sell licences to this email newsletter for one hundred dollars a month and they get a weekly email newsletter written for them. They can also earn money from the list by signing up as an affiliate to the site the email promotes.
Now let’s say a site owner has an email list of five thousand in the weight loss niche. Do you think they’d be willing to pay you one hundred dollars a month for a licence to a ‘plug in’ and sit back email newsletter? You bet they would.
You’re probably thinking: can’t they just go and hire a writer themselves? Yes they could. But if they’re too lazy to have done that already chances are when you come along they’ll bite your hand off.
Monthly product programs
Here’s another idea. There are literally millions of web sites in the self help niche market. There are also thousands of books in the public domain (books without copyright) on self help – books that the majority of these site owners won’t even know they exist.
There’s a Memberlicensing opportunity here.
Each month you grab one of these self help books from the public domain and read it out into a basic microphone that you can get from PC World. You then turn the audio into a video series using Microsoft PowerPoint (another PC World buy if you haven’t got one already).
Now you could just sell this yourself. But it would take a lot of work and a lot of marketing.
No. What I’d do is create a site where people pay you ninety dollars a month for a licence to sell that self help program. Each month you give them a new self help program.
You could even have their sales letters written and sell it for one hundred and fifty bucks a month.
Why not hire someone to write their email newsletters for them each month as well and sell it for one hundred and ninety seven dollars a month?
Let them burn the audio or video onto CD or DVD and sell it for three hundred bucks a month.
Why would people be willing to pay you that much? It’s a lot of money yes. But if they’re then selling the audio program for, say, forty dollars, all they have to do is sell five in a month and they’re in profit.
People go nuts for this kind of turnkey opportunity. And the fact of the matter is you could create a member licence using either the email newsletter idea or the ready made product idea to any niche market on the planet.
It Gets Better…
Remember my subscribers not wanting to cancel in case I revoked their licence? Yours won’t want to cancel either.
Think about it. If someone has an email list of five thousand and the email newsletter they pay you a monthly licence fee for building a relationship with their subscribers (and earning them extra cash) why on earth would they want to cancel their membership and have you stop their licence? If they stopped paying you a licence fee they’d then lose that relationship with their email list.
Same goes with the monthly product idea. If they’re selling these programs and earning more than what they are paying you a licence for, why would they stop?
And that’s the key with Memberlicensing. If you create (or hire someone else to create) a licence to something that helps people grow their business they will be willing to pay you big money every month – and stay with you for years.
Think about this for a second. If you had just ten people paying you one hundred quid a month you’d make twelve grand a year. Just ten. That is crazy. Think about how you would be doing with one hundred plus subscribers.
Crazy isn’t it?
I’ve gone pretty nuts since I accidentally came up with this idea. I’m so excited with it my own member licence project is very nearly finished. Next week I’m going to send you a video, no charge, showing you a case study of how I set this up and how easy memberlicensing is. Trust me you’re going to want to watch it, it’s pretty mind blowing!