Starting a membership site is a smart business move, but only if you do it right. Every month dozens of people start membership sites only to shut them down just a few months later.

Often the failed site ruins their reputation because they didn’t deliver what they promised to members. In other cases, they didn’t pick the right topic to begin with.

Here are the top seven mistakes that you can make with a membership site and how to avoid them.

“Would you like fries with that?”

There’s probably not a single person reading this who hasn’t been asked that question many, many times in their lives.

“Would you like fries with that?”

If there is a McDonald’s® anywhere near you, then you’ve been exposed to the concept that we’re going to be talking about today. You ask for a burger and they respond, “Would you like fries with that?” And, just like that, they’ve increased their profit per sale when most people respond, “Sure”.

It’s called, the “upsell”.

And it’s not just burgers and fries, virtually all walks of business life offer an “upsell”.

It never ceases to amaze me how hard business owners work to gain a customer only to foolishly drive that customer away by treating them poorly.

There’s an age-old marketing principle that most of us can quote like it was Holy scripture or something -

It is much easier to get existing customers to spend more
money with you than it is to go find new customers.

That is a fact. It is an undisputed fact.

However — and this is a HUGE “however” — this principle ONLY applies IF…

Issuing refunds is a part of doing business online. There are many things you can do to minimize refund such as providing a quality product, offering great customer service, being clear and reasonable in your description of the product, etc.

But, let’s face it, in the digital world we live in, it’s easy for anyone to get a refund. Over the decade I’ve been doing business online I’ve seen all kinds of reasons for requesting a refund. Some have infuriated me. Others have baffled me. And still others have left me laughing to the point of tears.

After getting a record 17 refunds from the same customer within 3 days (yes, this really happened), I decided to have some fun. Instead of hunting the guy down and spray painting a scarlet letter “R” on his forehead (for “refunder”), I decided to go Jeff Foxworthy in my venting…

NOTE: The following is part of a regular series entitled “How Would You Do It?” in which I’ll take hypothetical situations and give my own personal response for accomplishing the objective.

TODAY’S SCENARIO -

“If you had to make $20,000 in the next 45 days with no list, no traffic, no affiliates, no nothing — how would you do it?”

I actually get asked this kind of question a lot. It comes in various forms, but the meaning is always the same: how can someone will no existing assets make a significant amount of money in a relatively short amount of time.

Here’s “how I would do it”…

One of the things several people have inquired about is this: should I join the newsletter or RSS?

Who said it had to be one or othe other?

The truth is, you should join BOTH. The reason why is simple: there is exclusive content in each. In other words, there is content in the newsletter that is NOT available on the blog. And there is content on the blog that is NOT found in the newsletter.

If you want the “best of both worlds” (That is, the two worlds of Jimmy D. Brown and not Hannah Montana!), then I’d recommend you join both *REVENUE* newsletter in the form at the top of the page -AND- the RSS feed in the right sidebar.