Superficially, continuity programs are attractive and are the ultimate product when they start generating ongoing revenues. In theory, they are very simple and easy – create a membership site, come up with some new content every week or month, and generate a stream of monthly income. However, this is not always the case for many people.
Unless you are selling a vital piece of software or access to web hosting, many people will eventually consider your membership a luxury item. This means that when they want to cut down on expenses, the first thing they will cancel is your membership if you are not delivering excellent value to them every month.
Offering a single product for sale such as an audio, a video or an ebook will only get you one-time results. They pay you once to get the product, and until you come up with another product to offer to them, you don’t make any more income from that customer.
However, a one-time product is a lot easier to sell than selling a membership subscription. That?s why I would recommend that you go for a hybrid of these two modes of payment. They will help you accommodate a wider range of customers.
Analyze your niche and look for a problem people are trying to solve. This should be a subject that requires a fair bit of education. For instance, how to increase traffic to websites.
Avoid choosing topics that are too simple as they will not work for this hybrid model.
In addition, go for a topic that is highly valuable to your customers. Again a topic like increasing traffic to their website is substantially valuable and can keep them immersed in your program for the duration of your course.
After choosing the problem to solve, create your product in stages. For instance, if you are teaching 12 ways to increase traffic to your website, you can create 12 videos, one for each of the 12 ways to get traffic. Also, you can provide 12 modules with multiple videos in each module, depending on the depth of your content.
Release your modules one at a time for a given duration. For example, one every week works great – but you can make it every ten days depending on the depth of your content. Bottom line – choose a duration that works best for you.
Come up with a killer sales letter and give two payment options: one to have members pay in full and the other to break payments up into partial payments.
Let?s say you are offering your full course for a one-time payment of $99. You can offer an option of three partial payments of $40 each and this way they will get a discount if they decide to pay in full upfront. These two methods will help you increase orders for your product since people who cannot afford to pay the full course can still benefit from it by using the 3-month pay option.
As long your course has valuable content and is worth the money, you are likely to find that most of the people making partial payments will indeed go ahead and complete paying for the whole course irrespective of whether you are taking payments after one month, two months, or even longer; as long as it is a fixed term.
Should anyone cancel their partial payments before paying the full amount for your course, they will keep access to what they have already paid for but will not get access to the entire course. This can easily be accomplished by dripfeeding your content.
One way to motivate members paying partially is to hold back any bonuses until they make the final payment. For example, if your product has three monthly payments, members can enjoy the bonuses once they make the third payment. Or you can dripfeed the bonuses too, giving them access to the most valuable bonus after the final payment.
In a continuity program, offering products or courses that are highly priced is more profitable than selling inexpensive programs or selling memberships. And like any other product, you can create it once and continue getting revenue for years to come. That?s why you need to set up several programs or courses to diversify your income. So be sure to set up a new profit stream as often as possible. You can release a new product on a monthly basis if you like, or even more often if you can outsource the product creation.
It?s a very profitable business model anyone can do, but always keep in mind that quality is the king so offer valuable courses with excellent, in-depth content.
