Come See Me Speak At Blogworld About Growing Membership Sites & Listen To This Podcast I Did With MemberCon
Posted by Timothy Sykes on Tue 13th of Oct, 2009 07:40:45 AM
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REMEMBER: You have until this coming Friday, October 16th, to register to attend this special event. from the comfort of your very own home or if you can’t make it live buying that 2-day pass will serve as your order for the DVD of the event, which will be 12+ hours of footage and come with an instructional !.
If you’re gonna be in Vegas this weekend, maybe a day or two early for my Sunday and Monday seminar, to which you can still purchase 2-day live webinar access, pop over to the Convention Center to hear Pallian and I talk about “How To Make $60k/Month From A Membership Site”…if you’re already attending, you can register to attend our speech HERE and definitely check out the whole Blogworld schedule as there are some fine presentations.
We’re schedule to speak Saturday afternoon 4:15-5:15PM Vegas time in Room 233 so if you can’t afford to pay to get in, I dare you to sneak in…be warned, bloggers are tough and so are their security personal.
To give you a taste of what we’ll be talking about, check out this interview I did with the fantastic Tim Bourquin, who also interviewed me a while back on TraderInterviews.com, about how to grow a premium website…the entire podcast is here on MemberCon.com, but check out some of the convo below:
MemberCon.com: Well, so I followed you now for a couple of years, I think. How long have you had your membership site?
Tim Sykes: I started in June of 2008, so just over a year.
MemberCon.com: At some point, were you doing your newsletter for free or was it always the intention to have a membership site?
Tim Sykes: Yeah, now, I started my blog in November of 2007 and I was just posting the results of my stock trade after the fact and it’s all verified by Covestor which actually taps into my brokerage account but people wanted, you know, real time trade alerts. So, I eventually came up with the idea of TIMalerts, which is just real time trade alerts and then that created a whole membership site. So, I basically just listened to what my audience wanted and then created it.
MemberCon.com: You got a great story I think that probably helped boost you into that paid membership site about some money you got and turned it into a whole lot more money. Tell that story, if you could, real quick.
Tim Sykes: Yeah. Basically, my parents gave me control of my bar mitzvah gift money. I was a tennis player in high school and I was injured so I had nothing to do so my parents gave me control of $12,000. I thought that I would lose it all. Instead I turned that $12,000 into about two million dollars by the time I graduated college. I started a hedge fund. I realized I wasn’t that great at running a hedge fund but while I was running it, I was in this TV show called Wall Street Warriors. That was a big hit. It’s now in 14 countries. And thanks to that, I learned that a lot of people haven’t the faintest idea of what stock trading and Short Selling is about. So, I decided to create a blog and a newsletter and a book and just basically teach what I’ve been doing for the past decade.
MemberCon.com: Yeah, that’s good you got to build this audience actually and you had this kind of built in audience before. You started your membership site which I know helps a lot but could you basically start the membership site at zero and develop it from there or how important was that to have that built in audience first?
Tim Sykes: Yeah, I mean I did have a little bit of an audience thanks to the TV show but a lot of people were skeptical. I mean it was a reality TV show and it wasn’t my greatest minute. So, I basically had to prove myself and I think when you’re starting any membership site in any niche whether it’s the stock market or cooking or plumbing, you know, you have to prove that your content is valuable. And luckily, I had had six months before of just free content. So, I had a lot of people who were making a little money off of my picks but then they wanted something more. They wanted it real time. So, this added to what I was already teaching. So, you just take it to the next level and you have to prove why people should pay you.
MemberCon.com: A lot of membership site owners will say that their most valuable part of their membership site is a forum or some sort of community. Looking at your site, it looks like, yours is a little bit different in that it’s almost a membership to you and that’s the most valuable part. Was that different? Did you ever think about starting a forum or develop the community or was that not important?
Tim Sykes: Yeah, I mean I would love to. The problem is that most people don’t know what they’re talking when it comes to Penny Stocks and Short Selling. So, my view was kind of different from everybody else’s. I have this problem before. Back in ‘99, I was a just basic Yahoo free group. This was before I even made my millions. And I was just part of a group and everyone was sharing trading ideas and I realized that my ideas were better than everybody else’s. So, I kind of learned that if you have some kind of edge over everybody else, then you can use that edge and kind of charge for it because you know that it’s worthwhile. So, yeah, I mean again, I’m still looking for partners. But in the penny stock niche, it’s very tough to trust anybody and to find good information.
MemberCon.com: One of the things I’ve seen on your blogs that I followed pretty much from the beginning is you have kind of this outward persona that is sometimes controversial. You’ll call people out when you think they need calling out and some of your post have this kind of edge to you. And yet, I’ve met you, Tim and you’re very calm, very, “even-demeanored” guy. It didn’t seem like the persona matches. Do you kind of use…is it almost like an act in the sense to get publicity initially?
Tim Sykes: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because you do have to kind of act a little bit but then also, I use my blog as kind of therapy like I just let it all out. This is my personal diary online. I’m not that…you have the same reaction that a lot of people do because in the blog, I really rip into people. I really let it all out. It’s like my alter ego. And people like it and it’s good for me when I’m sitting in front of the computer all day. So, I get to feel excited. My audience seems to like it. So, it’s a win-win. You don’t have to do that. You can be yourself. The key is really just giving good information and most importantly, collecting testimonials. I mean the only way to really promote my product is due to the fact that I have literally hundreds of people making money almost every single day. And every single testimonial, I capture and I save for future use to show, “Look, these people are making money based on what I’m telling them.” So, the alter ego thing is nice entertainment. It’s a nice therapy for myself but it’s not the core of the business.
MemberCon.com: In an investment type or kind of a stock picking site, it seems like it would be very easy to sell the value. “Look it’s 40 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month, or whatever it is but the picks I’m giving out can make you thousands of dollars.” Is that the number one way you market it or are there other ways do you think to draw an audience?
Tim Sykes: That’s it. You just need to create some kind of value proposition and I hate to use that term because it’s so formal but that’s what it comes down to, you know. Very rarely do you find anything in this world full of like just scheming, manipulative people, especially in the finance world, where, you know, you can see everything happening in real time. You can partake in trades if you want to. I’m not trying to recommend anybody to buy or sell any stock. I’m just trying to teach what I would do and how I’d profit. But if you can make that pick, you know. Everyone is so used to spending money. You buy a sofa for like a thousand dollars. Sure it’s a good sofa but you don’t get any money back. This is kind of like a sofa that gives you money and it can teach you over time. It might not be as comfortable as a sofa but you can actually make your money back and that’s very important.
MemberCon.com: What’s been the biggest return on your investment in terms of marketing dollars to get new members, whether it be email or paper click or something else. What’s worked for you?
Tim Sykes: Despite my success, I’m really bad with marketing. I just started emailing a few people but most of it, I just like expressing myself through facebook and Covestor and Covestor, I guess, would have to be my number one thing because Covestor taps into my brokerage account. It verifies all my trades. I’m number one out of 30,000 traders so it gives me…it qualifies me as an “expert”. Really, all I do is just let it out. It’s kind of a nice business model because, again, if you’re an expert in any kind of industry, whether you have five or 10 or 20 years experience, and you just talked about what you know, it’s okay to be wrong, but the fact that you have so much experience means that there’s value in what you say. So, I would have to say the number one thing is just letting it all out, good or bad.
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Related Reading
TIM Trades
View All| Date | Stock | Buy | Sell | Net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 19 | AENY | $2.80 | $3.02 | $1148 |
| Nov 18 | NLST | $4.16 | $4.40 | $947 |
| Nov 18 | IMGG | $1.42 | $1.64 | $2094 |
| Nov 17 | NLST | $5.04 | $5.59 | $2195 |
| Nov 13 | VRMLQ | $21.50 | $22.97 | $2901 |
| Nov 11 | EONC | $2.61 | $2.80 | $687 |
| Nov 10 | EONC | $2.74 | $3.36 | $9784 |
| Nov 6 | QXM | $4.31 | $4.80 | $1936 |
| Nov 4 | COT | $8.66 | $8.88 | $642 |
| Nov 4 | QXM | $4.61 | $4.89 | $822 |
| Oct 30 | DDRX | $25.70 | $26.53 | $812 |
| Oct 29 | CTDC | $4.00 | $4.42 | $781 |
| Oct 26 | AWSL | $3.24 | $4.10 | $2516 |
| Oct 23 | RODM | $5.27 | $5.23 | $301 |
| Oct 22 | AMLM | $2.69 | $2.97 | $820 |
| Oct 22 | USEG | $6.12 | $6.09 | $85 |
| Oct 20 | CBOU | $8.93 | $9.06 | $243 |
| Oct 16 | VRMLQ | $16.79 | $18.65 | $2773 |
| Oct 13 | YONG | $11.05 | $11.66 | $1202 |
| Oct 13 | NPHC | $0.59 | $0.71 | $583 |
| Oct 12 | IMGG | $0.60 | $0.70 | $682 |
| Oct 9 | ZAGG | $5.50 | $6.10 | $2380 |
| Oct 7 | GVBP | $0.03 | $0.27 | $702 |
| Oct 1 | NPHC | $0.70 | $0.85 | $1482 |
Total: $98,094 (681%)
