Over the last few days I have noticed a number of blogs and postings in various places about 2010 and the experiences of the writer's of those comments.
When I look back, as I'm sure we all do at this time of year, I tend to reflect on what has happened during the year, what effect the year has had on me and on those members of my family and my friends.
It occurred to me that rather than the lessons learnt; perhaps we should try and compare ourselves today against ourselves one year ago.
• Has anything happened that has fundamentally changed the way we think or act?
• Has our character been modified by any of the events of the closing year?
• Do other people we know see us in a different light perhaps?
• Have people around us had to change to manage our changes (if any)?
My wife Clare, a friend of ours and myself talked about this very subject last night. Clare made a remark about how different I was to the man she married twenty two years ago. We reflected on what I was like and how I had changed. After that period of time it is much easier to see the changes that we go through.
• Then (apparently) I tended to be irrational!
• Then (apparently) I was much grumpier than I am now.
• Then (apparently) I was much more demanding than I am now!
• Then (apparently) I was much (much) more unreasonable than I am now!
Of course, I am only joking (apparently), but later, privately reflecting on the conversation, I guess I have changed a great deal. Those changes are as a result of the process we call maturing. Our sharp edges are worn down by the continual bombardment of life. Our brain slows down and we react less quickly, if indeed at all. We become less grumpy (as there seems little point as no one is listening anymore to our humps and grumps!)
Applying this process over a shorter period such as a year is much more difficult. This is partly because it is so new and that admitting any fault is like admitting that you still have that fault.
However, some years hold events that do make a huge difference. Those events can be nothing to one person yet change the life of another. My experience of a suspected heart attack then being diagnosed with bowel cancer, surviving major surgery, and suffering the horrible side affects of chemotherapy has had an effect on my life this year, leaving a huge scar. A death of a family member recently added to the pain and the complications of a troubled childbirth by one of my daughters just piled it on even more.
But what is more important is the way that my six children, my ten grandchildren, brother, sister, mother, wife, in-laws (some anyway) and friends have supported me (and each other) not just while I was ill, and during this period of recovery, but by the way our attitude as a family unit has changed. It has brought us much closer together; it has made other things seem less important, whilst unimportant things of the past are now more important.
If one year can change us so much, maybe reflecting on each month, week or even day is a worthwhile thing to do.
• Have we upset someone today?
• Did we act in a proper and respectful manner?
• Could we have done something better?
• Did we listen and did we hear?
All these reflections and many others can only result in small lessons being learnt that can be applied each and every day in the future. Maturity is not just about getting older and wiser; it is also about using that knowledge we have gained to better our lives and lives of others.
Whilst 2010 might not have been a great year for me or indeed for you or anyone else, let us at least learn what we can and apply it in 2011 and I trust that this new year will bring many more blessing and even further maturity.
Happy New Year!
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Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Niche Online Membership Sites … Are They Your Future?
My background in the deep and distance past was in Continuity Marketing. That is where perceived expensive products are sold on a monthly basis. You order the product, say a set of encyclopaedias, and each month you are sent the next volume until eventually you have a complete collection.
I started late in February 1981 when Prince Charles announced his marriage to Lady Diana. What we had was simply this … postage stamps from all around the world that would celebrate this Royal wedding. I worked for a company that produced stamps on behalf of many smaller countries and the chairman of the company saw the huge opportunity that had presented itself. Without hesitation a deal was done with Stanley Gibbons International for a new company to promote Royal Wedding stamps to the world.
Now I don’t remember all the figures but over just a few months we recruited over 60,000 people to join the programme and what’s more everything was sold pro-forma. Yes, paid for in advance!!
If my memory serves we right about 32,000 people took up the programme and continued spending somewhere between £25 and £30 each month for many years until they had a complete collection. I think the basic collection had over 40 units in it.
Remember back in 1981 these were substantial sums of money. Thousands of members also took up other collections of First Day Covers, Stamp Pairs, Non Commonwealth collections etc.
I left the programme after a couple of years and repeated the concept with other thematic postage stamps, collectable toys, books, cd’s and many other products. Businesses like Book Club Associates were big business back in the 80’s and 90’s although they changed their way of operating later as it became more difficult to get customers to commit to buying complete sets of books. I was very privileged to be mentored by the founder of Book Club Associates.
What is powerful about the concept is this. Imagine - 32,000 people are invoiced for £29, a total of around £928,000 each month. We knew that 95% plus would take up the offer and at the time of invoice we had not even purchased the product. The money would flow in and be banked. The product would be ordered and delivered and paid for after 30 or 60 days. This made large additional revenues from simple over night investments of bank funds.
The success of the project was mainly down to the celebrities involved. The future King of England is perceived as a worthwhile investment. Lady Diana even more so! Now we have another Royal wedding, also a future King of England, but this time the interest will be different. The market has changed, people view it differently and although a market does exist, it will be much smaller this time.
But why this story?
Well this programme and all the others I was involved with are nothing more than simple membership type programmes. You effectively take out a membership, pay each month and in return for your payment receive a product or service. Most of these types of continuity programs are based around physical products such as stamps, toys, collectables, books, records etc, but that has now started to change. Information has become a major collectable product. By information, I mean organised and correctly presented information that is valued and can add value to the person who owns it.
A couple of years ago I worked with Rob Winnett (another BlackStar) in developing the concept of a Continuity Marketing Centre. This was a complete service which would enable people to sell their information products via books, CD, DVD and video on an ongoing cyclic basis. It had the hallmarks of success but faced major development costs to launch especially as the downturn had started. As a result the idea was shelved and that turned out to be a good thing as time has marched on and now we have much better ways of delivering content in the form of online membership sites.
I rekindled my interest in this area late last year and started to look at the potential considering the availability of facilities such as YouTube (for video), iTunes (music and podcast downloads), blogging software and the ever increasing number of social networking sites providing a quality route to market. Software for membership sites now exist and some of it is top quality and can be leased at reasonable cost.
So what can be achieved today?
Well let’s say that we could find a profitable niche that would benefit from a quality membership site. Let’s say that we want to keep it very special so we set a monthly membership fee of £49.95. We would like to recruit a maximum of just 500 members and will run the site using a product such as MemberGate which provides all the main facilities we need. Members will be encouraged to recruit other members and will receive a monthly affiliate payment for each person recruited equivalent to 50% of the monthly fee.
Once the membership level is achieved any further applications will be put on the waiting list. Members not paying will be replaced by waiting members. Experience has shown that a site of this type and size would probably need one or possible two full time customer service people to manage the day to day working.
With 500 quality members participating in the site, creating content and helping each other, we would be providing real value to those members. Once the membership is fully recruited this site would generate around £8,000 per month (£96,000 pa) after all costs. The owner would use some of that income to add further value to the site, arrange events, promote other products and services etc. The potential is huge. Once you know how to do it with one site, why not have two or ten or even twenty?
The secret of course is simply this:-
You must provide real value! Just another networking site won’t work anymore. You have to ensure that the members are using the site and receiving real benefit. Chris Farrell on his membership site offers free hosting to each of his members for as many sites as they wish. This is real value and encourages them to stay as members.
I know a gentleman who runs a private member club offline which has over 22,000 member’s world wide, each who pay him $120 per year (plus postage) to receive his TEN newsletters that he sends out. They contain real value in the content which is only available to those members. Now I accept that he is rather unique but it shows that if you provide real value then there is always a real market.
A close friend of my family has a private online club which has a tiny membership of just 200 people, the maximum he will permit. Each member pays a simple monthly fee of £49 to be a unique member of that site. If they fail to pay, they leave and the next waiting person gets the membership. My friend makes over £4,500 per month after all costs, doing something that he loves. He told me that there are over 500 people on the waiting list.
Finally it is worth saying that you could plan to have a membership club with 20,000 members each paying £10 per month. The issue here is that the more people you have, the more difficult it is to provide real value and justify a high monthly fee. It would be better to have ten clubs of 1,000 members and charge £20 each or even have 25 clubs and charge £49, £77 or even more each month. Never judge the market!
Over the next few months I will be developing this whole area of Online Membership Clubs and will be blogging about the idea again. In the meanwhile you can have a look at a great example of the idea at the website of my friend Chris Farrell. He provides a host of free stuff and interacts with members via video as often as possible. His objective is to get people to join his site as a paid member (which costs just $49 per month), not by keep blasting them with messages but by building a real trusting relationship first. He provides real value and knows that if he fails to do so, then he will lose members and his reputation would be tarnished. His super hook is the free hosting, that encourages members to remain as a paid member. This works really well because the membership effectively become free after you are hosting a handful of websites, and the contribution of the membership is of real value to you.
You can visit the site through this link:-
Chris Farrell Membership Site
If I can assist you in anyway in relationship to Online Membership Clubs then please let me know. Please look out for future blogs on the subject. I will be creating a newsletter list shortly and will invite you to join so that you are kept right up to date.
Regards
Jim
I started late in February 1981 when Prince Charles announced his marriage to Lady Diana. What we had was simply this … postage stamps from all around the world that would celebrate this Royal wedding. I worked for a company that produced stamps on behalf of many smaller countries and the chairman of the company saw the huge opportunity that had presented itself. Without hesitation a deal was done with Stanley Gibbons International for a new company to promote Royal Wedding stamps to the world.
Now I don’t remember all the figures but over just a few months we recruited over 60,000 people to join the programme and what’s more everything was sold pro-forma. Yes, paid for in advance!!
If my memory serves we right about 32,000 people took up the programme and continued spending somewhere between £25 and £30 each month for many years until they had a complete collection. I think the basic collection had over 40 units in it.
Remember back in 1981 these were substantial sums of money. Thousands of members also took up other collections of First Day Covers, Stamp Pairs, Non Commonwealth collections etc.
I left the programme after a couple of years and repeated the concept with other thematic postage stamps, collectable toys, books, cd’s and many other products. Businesses like Book Club Associates were big business back in the 80’s and 90’s although they changed their way of operating later as it became more difficult to get customers to commit to buying complete sets of books. I was very privileged to be mentored by the founder of Book Club Associates.
What is powerful about the concept is this. Imagine - 32,000 people are invoiced for £29, a total of around £928,000 each month. We knew that 95% plus would take up the offer and at the time of invoice we had not even purchased the product. The money would flow in and be banked. The product would be ordered and delivered and paid for after 30 or 60 days. This made large additional revenues from simple over night investments of bank funds.
The success of the project was mainly down to the celebrities involved. The future King of England is perceived as a worthwhile investment. Lady Diana even more so! Now we have another Royal wedding, also a future King of England, but this time the interest will be different. The market has changed, people view it differently and although a market does exist, it will be much smaller this time.
But why this story?
Well this programme and all the others I was involved with are nothing more than simple membership type programmes. You effectively take out a membership, pay each month and in return for your payment receive a product or service. Most of these types of continuity programs are based around physical products such as stamps, toys, collectables, books, records etc, but that has now started to change. Information has become a major collectable product. By information, I mean organised and correctly presented information that is valued and can add value to the person who owns it.
A couple of years ago I worked with Rob Winnett (another BlackStar) in developing the concept of a Continuity Marketing Centre. This was a complete service which would enable people to sell their information products via books, CD, DVD and video on an ongoing cyclic basis. It had the hallmarks of success but faced major development costs to launch especially as the downturn had started. As a result the idea was shelved and that turned out to be a good thing as time has marched on and now we have much better ways of delivering content in the form of online membership sites.
I rekindled my interest in this area late last year and started to look at the potential considering the availability of facilities such as YouTube (for video), iTunes (music and podcast downloads), blogging software and the ever increasing number of social networking sites providing a quality route to market. Software for membership sites now exist and some of it is top quality and can be leased at reasonable cost.
So what can be achieved today?
Well let’s say that we could find a profitable niche that would benefit from a quality membership site. Let’s say that we want to keep it very special so we set a monthly membership fee of £49.95. We would like to recruit a maximum of just 500 members and will run the site using a product such as MemberGate which provides all the main facilities we need. Members will be encouraged to recruit other members and will receive a monthly affiliate payment for each person recruited equivalent to 50% of the monthly fee.
Once the membership level is achieved any further applications will be put on the waiting list. Members not paying will be replaced by waiting members. Experience has shown that a site of this type and size would probably need one or possible two full time customer service people to manage the day to day working.
With 500 quality members participating in the site, creating content and helping each other, we would be providing real value to those members. Once the membership is fully recruited this site would generate around £8,000 per month (£96,000 pa) after all costs. The owner would use some of that income to add further value to the site, arrange events, promote other products and services etc. The potential is huge. Once you know how to do it with one site, why not have two or ten or even twenty?
The secret of course is simply this:-
You must provide real value! Just another networking site won’t work anymore. You have to ensure that the members are using the site and receiving real benefit. Chris Farrell on his membership site offers free hosting to each of his members for as many sites as they wish. This is real value and encourages them to stay as members.
I know a gentleman who runs a private member club offline which has over 22,000 member’s world wide, each who pay him $120 per year (plus postage) to receive his TEN newsletters that he sends out. They contain real value in the content which is only available to those members. Now I accept that he is rather unique but it shows that if you provide real value then there is always a real market.
A close friend of my family has a private online club which has a tiny membership of just 200 people, the maximum he will permit. Each member pays a simple monthly fee of £49 to be a unique member of that site. If they fail to pay, they leave and the next waiting person gets the membership. My friend makes over £4,500 per month after all costs, doing something that he loves. He told me that there are over 500 people on the waiting list.
Finally it is worth saying that you could plan to have a membership club with 20,000 members each paying £10 per month. The issue here is that the more people you have, the more difficult it is to provide real value and justify a high monthly fee. It would be better to have ten clubs of 1,000 members and charge £20 each or even have 25 clubs and charge £49, £77 or even more each month. Never judge the market!
Over the next few months I will be developing this whole area of Online Membership Clubs and will be blogging about the idea again. In the meanwhile you can have a look at a great example of the idea at the website of my friend Chris Farrell. He provides a host of free stuff and interacts with members via video as often as possible. His objective is to get people to join his site as a paid member (which costs just $49 per month), not by keep blasting them with messages but by building a real trusting relationship first. He provides real value and knows that if he fails to do so, then he will lose members and his reputation would be tarnished. His super hook is the free hosting, that encourages members to remain as a paid member. This works really well because the membership effectively become free after you are hosting a handful of websites, and the contribution of the membership is of real value to you.
You can visit the site through this link:-
Chris Farrell Membership Site
If I can assist you in anyway in relationship to Online Membership Clubs then please let me know. Please look out for future blogs on the subject. I will be creating a newsletter list shortly and will invite you to join so that you are kept right up to date.
Regards
Jim
Would a Scrap with Death Make You Think?
As most of you already know I was diagnosed with bowel cancer earlier this year. What is interesting is that my condition and the resulting operation left me with six months of chemotherapy and also a pain condition that is most telling.
Reflecting back on the last few months made me realise that I had been seriously ill and although I never considered it life threatening at the time, it was. I could have died during the operation, from the subsequent treatment or from the chemotherapy. Indeed the ongoing pain issue was so horrible that perhaps I might have considered other ways to die!
But on reflection I never considered any of the events as a possible threat to my existence. It never occurred to me that I might die on the operating table, likewise that the chemo could also bring my life to an abrupt end.
Why not?
Well I believe that we are so wrapped up in our own person that we do not allow those negativities to enter the picture. We inherently believe that we are, as a person, indestructible. We know that things happen to others, but never consider that they might happen to us. We take risks in our everyday lives that if we reflect back on, perhaps should question as to if they were a sensible course to take. How we see ourselves when subjected to such a catastrophic issue as death is wildly different from what we would perhaps have expected prior to such an event.
Does it change how I feel?
Most definitely it does. I suddenly realised that my six children and their partners, the ten grandchildren, the parents, siblings and of course the thousands of friends that I have, all mean something different than before I became a human liability.
How do I progress from here?
Should I take them all under my wing and make good the lack of attention I have failed to give them in the past?
What do I need to do now?
(1 hour later)
Well I have considered the situation and reflected back on all the events of the past few months, and as a result have decided the following two things:-
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- I really appreciate every one of my family and friends and all the concern they have shown, and time they have put in the make me feel better … THANK YOU I shall never forget it!
- I always was a GOM (Grumpy Old Man) and that is, I reckon, why they like me … so why change now!
Finally, back on a serious note … I mean it!
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