Cindy Battye – Owner of a 7-figure Online Membership Site Business

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Cindy is a mom, the wife of a pastor, and has an amazing story of triumph over cancer and building a business on the internet. She has great information on membership sites and gives advice based on her growth online.

Check out Imwealthbuilders.com.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire Podcast. I’m Jaime Tardy and today we have Cindy Battye on the show. Cindy has an amazing story of having to stop going to school because of a health issue and now she’s working from home and created a seven-figure business with her partners. She has multiple membership sites online and you can find out more info at Wealthbuilders.com. Thank you so much for coming on today, Cindy.

CINDY BATTYE: Hi Jaime. It’s great to be here. I am Wealthbuilders. Just a joke in there.

JAIME TARDY: Oh great. Excellent. So tell me about how you got started. I mean going from having to quit school, you were going to be like a primary teacher to doing what you’re doing now. That’s I’m sure a huge story but if you could give me a piece of it, that would be wonderful.

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, it’s definitely not, right now where I am in life is not where I thought I was going to be five years ago and everything changed so dramatically. What happened for us, my husband is a pastor of a church and not a whole lot of money in it. I mean we were quite fulfilled because we just loved doing that stuff but we also liked cash so what we decided was that I was going to go to university and study to be a primary school teacher and I got about half way through the degree. I went as mature age student so I wasn’t like 17 or anything.

I was 29 when I got diagnosed with breast cancer and that there was a massive shock because we were pretty much, I was very gung ho getting my degree and stuff and for anyone that has gone back to study you’ll know it is quite a big decisions especially if you’ve got little children and stuff. So I was very well settled into study and everything and this threw a bit of a curveball. Short story I guess, while I was having my treatment, I created my first membership website. I totally fell in love with the membership model and just that first buzz of getting your first, I still remember it was $10.99 membership thing that someone bought and I was like “Oh my gosh, I just made money!”

Because I’m in Australia, it sounds really corny, but I actually did make money while I slept because everyone, like all of my business stuff happens in America which is usually when I’m sleeping. I created my first membership website and by the time the doctors finished my chemotherapy, I had lots of different surgeries because of my age and the type of cancer it was very aggressive. So they hit it really hard and by the time I was finished with all of that, I was earning, it wasn’t massive, it was probably about 100 bucks a week at that time and that’s what the government was paying me to go and study.

I thought I’ve actually really enjoyed this process and learning more about myself and I think going through breast cancer and stuff makes you confront a lot of what are you doing and why are you doing it and what you want to do. So I thought I’m going to give this a go. I quit Uni, dropped out of Uni and just threw myself into this and haven’t looked back.

JAIME TARDY: So when was that? What year was that?

CINDY BATTYE: This is really exciting and I just love this time now because I’m coming up to five years. I don’t know if you’ve had anyone close with cancer or deal with cancer but five years is when the doctors give you the all clear. So I’ve been doing my business now for almost five years and I get to party. Come October/November I’m going to throw a huge freaking party.

JAIME TARDY: Wow! Congratulations!

CINDY BATTYE: Thank you.

JAIME TARDY: Gosh, the last five years have completely changed your life.

CINDY BATTYE: Incredibly. Oh my gosh, yeah. I have seen parts of the world I would have never imagined I’d get a chance to go and see and just met people. Man, the people that I’ve met, it’s just crazy. Just really exciting stuff.

JAIME TARDY: So what made you decide to start that very first membership site where you, I’m a computer geek so I say that term endearingly, are you a computer geek?

CINDY BATTYE: I love being a geek but what’s a geek? I used to like playing games, that’s about it.

JAIME TARDY: That’s how they start. That’s how the geeks start.

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, I used to love playing games but I don’t know. I think it was just a challenge. I wanted to set myself a challenge and it was something that I wanted to just prove to myself that I could do because to me building a website seemed really difficult and to me I’m always about challenges. I love taking on new challenges and then proving everybody wrong. That’s kind of what I did for university except I didn’t finish my degree.

JAIME TARDY: You moved on. You moved on to bigger and better things, that’s all.

CINDY BATTYE: But yeah, I kind of like setting challenges and my first website was just a community of people that shared different traffic sources. So it was just, I don’t know, I kind of saw a need, looked around and saw what needed to be done and it’s not a massive income earner but it was a gateway to discovering different things and what can be done with membership websites and just the power of membership websites which I absolutely adore.

JAIME TARDY: How hard was it to do that very first one? I mean five years ago, Word Press wasn’t a big thing. I know because I blogged back then and it was difficult. So how was all of that creating your first site?

CINDY BATTYE: It was tough. Fortunately, for me, because my first website was a traffic exchange which was kind of, it’s different now. Traffic exchange is different now but back five years ago it was still a pretty decent way to get traffic to your websites and people still use them know but they need to be used a little bit differently. But when I first started, there were probably only a handful of successful traffic exchanges, maybe ten at the most. So competition was really easy to break.

It was just perfect timing I think for me. I just bought a software, a script and I didn’t even know how to install it. It took me about two weeks to install the damn thing. Wait, that’s not saying that it was difficult because my first Word Press install took me about three weeks. Now I can do it in 30 seconds.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, definitely.

CINDY BATTYE: It’s really hard. I didn’t really start out now knowing anything. I bought a software that it just like installed the software, membership software onto my site and then I just looked around and got someone to customize it and at the time, there were a lot of people using this software but not really too many people were actually doing too much customization so all I did was get a designer. I hired a designer. It cost me about $120 which was a lot of money at that time and then got him to install it.

It was just about customizing things and on a side note, a lot of people these days will try and build businesses out of PLR or private label rights content and that kind of thing or just grab a piece of software like a membership software or something and the key to make it actually really successful is to customize it and make it your own and personal. So people often times will upload private label rights stuff and say, “I’m not making any money. It’s not making me…” Or install a membership software and not actually do anything to it and just keep it as base.

But if you can customize it and you can make it competitive with whatever else is around there, and it’s not actually too difficult to do these kinds of things. You just need to put your creativity into it and if you haven’t got creativity, then outsource it to people that can because it’s worth doing.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, so now we’re getting into sort of the technical stuff.

CINDY BATTYE: Sorry, sidetracked.

JAIME TARDY: No, no this is good. This is good because things have changed in five years so as much as I want to talk about how you started five years ago, it’s not the same now unfortunately.

CINDY BATTYE: It’s not. No, it was easy. It was a lot easier back then.

JAIME TARDY: Let’s go back five years and have everyone that’s listening start, right? So private label rights, PLR, in case somebody doesn’t really know what it is. You can purchase already written articles and already written things and that way you can use it on your site, right?

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, basically. I love PLR stuff. It’s so cool.

JAIME TARDY: I’ve heard both ways so I love to hear it.

CINDY BATTYE: I don’t use it for my major products because you can use private label content as a base and then build from it. If you treat it as a template more so than as a product, then you’ll be in a much better position to actually make sales and that kind of thing. I think where people mostly fail with private label content is that they just upload it and think that they’re going to get rich and it doesn’t work that way so customizing it, making it your own.

But private label right stuff is a fantastic way to get started because you don’t have to know a lot about the content. You have someone else do all the research for you and then you can just draw from that and then build upon it. As you’re building upon in, you’re actually learning more about it so you do become an expert in the topic so you’re not being misleading or anything. But I think it’s a great place to start.

JAIME TARDY: I’m wondering how many membership sites do you have because I know it says multiple membership sites but how many do you have?

CINDY BATTYE: I don’t know.

JAIME TARDY: Too many to count.

CINDY BATTYE: It’s probably only like maybe 12, I think.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, somewhat manageable with lots of other people helping you. Excellent.

CINDY BATTYE: I think the main key to any online business is to set up systems so that everything can run by itself as much as possible. It’s all about expanding and stuff because physically there’s only so much that one person can do and when you can systematize things then you’re able to expand and develop so much faster and get more income. I mean if you can spend $10 to make $20 the, of course, you’re going to do it. So often times it does cost you money and you want to make sure that the money that you’re investing is actually money that you’re investing and not just throwing around.

But, if you can set up stuff like, the reason I love membership websites is because it is so easy to set up and systematize like you can have so much of it automated. You can have all of the order respondent series automated, the actual content of the membership site now automated so you can put in the effort at the start and it might take you a little bit longer to get it set up than just setting up a download page or whatever but you’ve got it set up forever. So it’s really good to invest the time now, set something up and get the process all working properly so that you can walk away from it and it can still make you money.

JAIME TARDY: Passive income, the coveted thing that everybody wants, right? Make money while you sleep.

CINDY BATTYE: That sounds corny, yeah.

JAIME TARDY: I know! Corny but wonderful, I know, right! And when you have it working, I’m sure. It’s funny because what I’d love to do is talk in terms of I created a membership site and actually just launched a beta to a few internal people so we have some awesome members in it right now but I have so many questions for you. So I’d love to sort of, I want to make it awesome and really rocking and I’m looking for sort of your best tips and advice and we can sort of talk about it in terms of me so that way everybody can sort of have a tangible thing to work on.

What I’d love to do first is sort of talk about the internal site of the membership site so we can talk about like the content and then we’ll go into like marketing it because, you know, if you have a great content but you can’t get anyone in, that doesn’t really matter.

CINDY BATTYE: That’s right.

JAIME TARDY: So what do you recommend in regards to how to set up a membership site, videos, audio content, that sort of thing? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

CINDY BATTYE: First of all, we use ClickBank as our payment processor because everything is, they have an API there so you can just plug it in with your membership side which means more automation. You don’t have to monitor if people refund or cancel stuff, etc. So we use ClickBank but coming with ClickBank, especially in the internet marketing vehicle, there is a whole ton of, there is a massive refund, I don’t know, they like to refund. So having it in a membership site makes that a bit more difficult for them to actually refund.

So with membership sites we like to, I mean video is awesome. If you could do a whole bunch of video content, that’s still probably viewed as the highest value content and having PDFs with that is good too. But, as much as possible, you will like to try and deliver it from within the site. So you have the videos playing in the site, in protected member’s pages, so that they have to log in and getting them to log in too is also a really good thing because then you’ve got extra monitorization strategies that you can use, if you can get them to come back to your site often. So having as much content in your membership website locked down so that only members can access it. Are you using Word Press?

JAIME TARDY: Yes, I’m using Word Press and Wish List Member for the membership side of it to keep it protected.

CINDY BATTYE: Okay, so does that protect the video and all that sort of stuff?

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, so I have a whole log in, you know what I mean, nobody can get it in unless I say. Only allow the few, right! That’s what I sort of have. I have videos and I got PDFs that are writable. I’m really trying to make it with audio, with transcription, with everything to really make it high value.

CINDY BATTYE: Do you have fed content or you delivering all at once?

JAIME TARDY: That’s a really great question. I’m going back and forth so I’d love to hear your opinion. Some of the problems that I have and I can let you know and then you can tell me your expert opinion on it, I just signed up with a course because I did a webinar recently and I wanted some more information. I’ve done a lot of teleclasses but I hadn’t done a webinar so I was all excited trying to get as much information as I can and I signed up for this course.

I think it was like $300 or something like that and it was drip fed content and I didn’t get, none of the webinar stuff would have happened until after I would have had my webinar. I was like no! But I didn’t know. So I sort of go back and forth, you know what I mean, on whether or not. I’ve heard it’s a really good thing but I’m not sure so tell me your thoughts.

CINDY BATTYE: We have different things because we use membership websites to deliver everything and that’s something that another side track, I’m sorry. I’ve just got to mention this but a lot of people when you think of a membership website, actually just think monthly continuity. You need to have some kind of monthly payment, monthly delivery or something along those lines. But we use membership websites for everything. We use it as a content delivery system also and that’s something that we’re very passionate about because we’ve delivered stuff from $1,500 pieces of software all the way down to free giveaway products.

I’ve got a website called Daily Niche Idea and it provides people with a weekly private label package and all those kind of things but that there is an auto responder itself. The entire thing is set up to be drip fed, which I’m probably just giving away my secrets.

JAIME TARDY: I know, please do! Give us all your secrets!

CINDY BATTYE: I don’t sit there and do it weekly but I have a staff member that goes through and updates the statistics and everything so that all the numbers are still going to be up to date and all that kind of thing. But, you can do it. You can use a membership website for pretty much any kind, it’s very varied. You can do it. Whatever is going to work for your product really. If you have a ten-part video series, why not give it to them all at once? I think it is sometimes better to just give everything at once in something like a training situation because everyone works at their own pace.

I get frustrated if I have to wait like eight weeks or something like eight months to get through a course. I’ll be bored out of my brains. When I learn something, I just like burying myself into it and I will just lock myself away for three days and just go through the whole thing until I understand it. Some people that’s how they work and that’s how I work but some other people need time. They need to process one thing at a time. We all do but I think it’s good to have options.

I suggest that you deliver it all at once but then hold back some, if you’ve got some bonus videos or something and drip feed those. Deliver a chuck of it at once so that they can work through the course or whatever this is doing, but then have extra stuff because you actually want them to keep coming back and to not forget about you. The more you can get people to keep coming back to your website, the more they’re going to remember you. They’re going to remember your website. They’re going to appreciate what it is, you know, all the work you’re putting into there and actually put it into use. Whatever you do, you want to keep them coming back.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent advice. I like the bonus video idea. Right now what I have is the first four weeks out and then I’m doing drip fed for the rest because I couldn’t decide on whether or not I wanted to do one or the other.

CINDY BATTYE: That’s a fantastic way because then you’ve given them a chunk. They’ve seen that they’ve got their value for money but then you can keep them coming back.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent and now we’re giving away all my secrets. So I have a question about ClickBank. I know a lot of people that have used it before. I’ve also heard it’s only good for make money online products. It’s not good for any other products nowadays. What are your thoughts on ClickBank? I know that’s what you make the bulk of your money with, right?

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, make money online stuff probably gets more noticed because usually the products that are released make crazy dollar amounts. It’s not uncommon to see a ClickBank product do $2 million or $1.8 million. It’s getting a little bit less common now but you can still like, pretty much every week, you’ve got a product in there that’s doing seven figures in launch week. So they’re kind of the more high profile stuff.

But with internet marketing, like I mentioned before, you actually get really high refund rights because in internet marketing a lot of people have been taught how to refund and it’s just a whole culture of refunding now and because it’s people want to make money, get rich quick and everything without applying themselves and putting any of this stuff into practice.

JAIME TARDY: We have to use it? Are you serious? We actually have to use this stuff in order to make it work? It’s like a lottery ticket, right?

CINDY BATTYE: I think at the moment is happening is that so many people are buying, getting caught up in the emotion of it, buying the product and then not actually doing anything with it or even trying it for a day and then it’s not working, well maybe the product is crap anyway. I think that I’m actually doing more stuff not in internet marketing now. I’m starting to do a bit more niche stuff. I found that the refund rate is not nearly as high in stuff outside of internet marketing because they haven’t been told how to refund. I mean they’re told that they can but they haven’t been told here you go and do this.

In internet marketing, everyone is on these lists and they get told to buy one product and then they go and buy it, it doesn’t work so they refund it and buy the next one and it’s just a whole vicious circle and the problem is, I mean internet marketing there’s still a lot of money there to be made and people are still making the money. It’s just shifting around to people, I don’t know. I need to be careful because I’m on a little bit of a campaign at the moment because I don’t know if you’ve seen ClickBank. There’s been a lot of rubbish on there and it has cleaned up quite a bit in the last probably three months or so. I work quite closely with the guys from ClickBank because we hang out and stuff.

JAIME TARDY: You’re on the inside.

CINDY BATTYE: So they’ve seen that the industry in internet marketing in particular has been getting really feral. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the stuff. They’ve been, probably the one that got the most attention was the stripper website. Did you see that one?

JAIME TARDY: No, I did not.

CINDY BATTYE: Can I tell you this story?

JAIME TARDY: Yes, please. We’ll cut this out if it’s too R rated but no, I think it will be fine.

CINDY BATTYE: There has been a whole bunch of these people who have created fictitious characters and they just hire an actor and get someone to present this product so they present a story, something that has happened apparently to them. How they used to be poor and now they’re rich with this million dollar software. The first one that really made a splash on ClickBank was about this lady who was a stripper and she was upset. She didn’t want to be a stripper, that’s just the way that life pushed her because she was poor and stuff.

This is how the story went on the site’s page. As she was dancing for these guys they were like throwing their money around and everything and it turned out that they were internet marketers. They were gurus and they had all this money now, flashing it around and stuff and she got really upset about that so what she did was she took some photos of one of the guys getting, he was like doing drugs and getting a lap dance or something. So she took photos and she blackmailed him to get a copy of the software.

JAIME TARDY: To get a copy of the software. Oh my gosh!

CINDY BATTYE: So that was the product.

JAIME TARDY: Wow.

CINDY BATTYE: So yeah, there has been some really, really dirty stuff. There has been quite a few, a whole string of them and so yeah, I’ve been working with ClickBank to help them clean up and they’ve now got a list of requirements and stuff concerning these kind of products but they’re not allowing them anymore. So it is starting to clean up a little bit. It did mess things around pretty well.

JAIME TARDY: Well I think that’s what hard too. I’ve heard of a lot of negative things about ClickBank and wonderful things. You know what I mean? So it’s hard to know.

CINDY BATTYE: ClickBank is an amazing marketplace.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me more about it because I’ve never used it. I’ve thought about using it. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for me or not.

CINDY BATTYE: You’ve never used it?

JAIME TARDY: No. I mean I think I bought one thing a long time ago off of it but that was it.

CINDY BATTYE: Okay. ClickBank, the reason I love it is because you can create one account and then you’re instantly an affiliate for like thousands and thousands of products. I think at the moment they have about 20,000 different products in there. It’s fantastic as an affiliate or a vendor and as an affiliate that means that you can go into the marketplace and you can just look through, find the product that’s going to relate to your list or your membership site or your blog visitors, whoever. Find a product that they’re going to be interested in and then they give you a link. It’s just called a hop link and then when someone buys through that link, then you get a part of the sale.

The reason that I love doing affiliate marketing online is because you get to have such high commissions because it is digital product in most cases so there’s not a whole lot of overhead and stuff. So most people are willing to giveaway 50, 75 percent of the sale because the vendors are benefiting and the affiliate is still happy. But ClickBank is fantastic for affiliates because you can just create a single account. It’s free to join up and then you’re instantly an affiliate for all of the products. You don’t have to go and apply for each product.

As a vendor as well, if you’re owning the product, it’s excellent because they have over 100,000 I think last I heard over 100,000 active affiliates and by active that means over 100,000 people who have actually made a sale in the last four weeks. So there are a ton of affiliates out there looking to promote and then they do all of the work and effort sending traffic to your website which I look too.

JAIME TARDY: See, that’s what I like. I don’t have to work for the traffic, that’s great.

CINDY BATTYE: Actually, I’m happy to give them 50 percent for doing that.

JAIME TARDY: Oh yeah, definitely. It’s funny because I didn’t know how it went either. I had a friend who signed up. I think it was last week for ClickBank for a product that he just created or he has had it for a couple months but hasn’t used ClickBank and he’s like within two days I had like 32 people that signed up to be affiliates for it and he didn’t know like how much traffic and he hadn’t made a sale yet in those two days but he’s going that’s crazy that I sign up and then two days later 32 people want to send traffic my way. That’s really cool.

CINDY BATTYE: That is fantastic. All it takes is just the right people with the right lists and the right websites and you can start making sales. Yeah, I like it. I think it costs about 50 to list and submit your product and their product review now, like I’ve just mentioned and touched on earlier is quite strict but if you can get a three day, if you put it, you don’t want to promote products anyway that are not FTC compliant and all of that anyway. As long as it’s FTC compliant and you’re not making any outrageous claims, then you should be able to get it through ClickBank.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. So what would I do if I were to go about, as a vendor, how can I set it up the best way for the affiliates and stuff and to make sure, I don’t know much about how I could do a launch within ClickBank or anything like that.

CINDY BATTYE: Well the technical side of stuff I can’t help you with because I outsource that.

JAIME TARDY: You said you were a geek, come on!

CINDY BATTYE: I’ve got people. I don’t want to learn that stuff.

JAIME TARDY: I know, right.

CINDY BATTYE: That’s stuff you could outsource really cheap.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, good.

CINDY BATTYE: Anything that I can outsource cheap I do because I don’t like doing that sort of stuff. But what I do, in your membership area, do you have an affiliate program at all, Jaime?

JAIME TARDY: No. I have not done anything. We’re beta, not many people know about it. The first time I’m saying it on my podcast is now.

CINDY BATTYE: Okay, well I would like to encourage you really look into getting an affiliate program of some kind. We use ClickBank just because we’ve done most of our stuff in ClickBank now we can easily push people from one site to the other and still honor the affiliate cookies. So we kind of do it that way. But whatever it is that you plan on doing, make sure that you get an affiliate program of some kind in there because then you’ve got, it’s all about automated traffic.

If you have people come into your website, they like your content, I always do everything in steps. So my first step will be, or sometimes I’ll work with Soren Jordanson and sometimes he’ll make me put the first step as go and be an affiliate, go and make money. My usual first step would be go and look at the product. And then second step will be make money with this product and we’ll actually pay you if you want to go and tell your friends because not everybody knows about affiliate marketing. So make it super clear and say do you like this product, send this link to your friend and then if they like it too then you’re going to make money.

I actually invest quite a bit of time in creating the affiliate area because the more affiliate tools that you can provide for people then the more likely they are to promote it. You want to encourage as much of that as possible because you put the effort in once which is what I love doing with everything, you put the effort in once and then every time you send a person through into that website, whether it’s a free or a paid one, you’re putting them in front and getting the opportunity for them to share virally and it’s all about viral stuff because if they tell friends then they buy it and then they, the more affiliate stuff you get in there, the better.

So we use stuff like I always put email swipes in. Make sure that you have email swipes so that people can just copy and paste and on a side thing, by having it set up as a membership site, you can make that even easier for your members because you can use the membership details. It’s a bit geeky and stuff but if you get, you can use like meta tags so it will import your membership’s name and email, not name and email but name. So they can just copy and paste and the easier you can make it for them, the better.

Something else that we do in our affiliate section is tweets. So we have a click here to tweet button and that will link straight to their Twitter account and post it up on their Twitter already embedded with their affiliate links and that kind of thing. We also provide banners of course and so you want to have some kind of banners and it’s worth investing. I know a guy, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Warrior forum but if you go on, I might get in trouble for telling you this but, all right, okay. There’s a guy in the Warrior forum, don’t completely steal him. I hope everyone doesn’t go and steal him.

JAIME TARDY: Don’t steal him. I’m writing it down. Maybe I’ll bleep out his name and I’ll be the only one that has this information.

CINDY BATTYE: But there is a guy in the Warrior forum. His name is Albert and if you go and do a search for Albert and mini site, you’ll find him and he is in the Warrior Special Offers Forum and he does a mini site design, that’s the full design. He will do eight cover graphics and promotional materials and all of the graphics so that your site comes up completely awesome for like $70 or something. It’s like crazy, crazy cheap.

JAIME TARDY: Almost like fiver, right? That’s where I’ve gotten my eBook cover.

CINDY BATTYE: Albert and fiver, man. Those are my two favorite spots but Albert is really cheap and really good quality. The stuff that he does I’ve paid most places about $400 to have created. So get him. He can do your banner, if you just need like a batch of promotional banners for your website; he could do those for like probably $30, if that. So invest in getting some nice looking banners. We also add blog posts.

You can have copy and paste blog posts. There are affiliate links in there. You can do articles, if people would do article marketing. All sorts of things and, as a side note, if you do put together a, I love these side notes, I’m sorry.

JAIME TARDY: No, I love the side notes too.

CINDY BATTYE: I just have p.s. and stuff.

JAIME TARDY: I have a question about that. You have like four p.s. or something like that in one of your sites I want to ask you about later but that will be later. So go ahead.

CINDY BATTYE: I was going to say if you set up an affiliate tools area, it’s a perfect place for integration marketing as well because, if you have, for example, some click here to tweet button and you have it all set up very quickly to tweet this, what you could do is put a banner just above it that is promoting a ClickBank product, for example, that teaches people more about Twitter marketing. So if you’re interested in Twitter marketing then tweet here, click here and then you can get affiliate commission. So having a bunch of, there’s a whole bunch of article submission tools and that kind of thing. Stick a banner in there. You’ve got members in there, stick a banner in there.

Another one and this one is one that Soren came up with that’s super sneaky is on, another one of my secrets, if you go out, you know on a membership site how you have a lost password page? If you can’t remember your password you click on a lost password. On that page, stick an ad for an affiliate program like Road Guide or there’s another one Ninja Password is the one that we promote. So we just stick an add on there and we get so many sign ups because these people have forgotten their password and you stick an ad on there that says do you want to make this easier because you don’t want to forget your password again. But not many people would do that so stick an ad on there.

JAIME TARDY: That’s excellent. That’s such a good idea. Those are the people that need that product right then.

CINDY BATTYE: Yes, that’s right. It’s totally targeted.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. It’s funny because we already started talking a little bit about this stuff in general about marketing it. So this is sort of the affiliate side with ClickBank and stuff like that. How do I, if I were to go ahead and put it on ClickBank, how do you really optimize that first week? I know gravity. I don’t know much about gravity but I know there’s a number which is called gravity and that’s supposed to tell people whether there’s higher conversions or not, so whether it’s a good product or not on ClickBank, right? How do I get high gravity?

CINDY BATTYE: I think that’s a good question. Usually ones that rank really high in the first week because they’re doing a JV launch. So they’re doing a whole big launch. We’ve kind of moved away from the launch model a little bit. I’m not sure it’s as effective. I mean it depends on your business model. Everything that we do I like to set out so that it kind of, you can use a launch as a bit of a boost and then just keep it running from there but you want to make sure that the product is something that people are going to want to tell their friends about so that you have a kind of growing.

A lot of the ClickBank products that do launches often die within like three months and you see them selling them off because they made a whole bunch of money and it’s just drop it and run kind of thing. So everything that we do we do it to build it long term so these products that we put our affinity we might sell them, who knows, because we’re running a business here – everything is for sale – but we build it with long-term strategies in mind. You don’t just drop it and run.

So the JV launch is great for getting noticed but you want to make sure that your business model provides for having long-term longevity so you want to have something that’s not just drop it and run. If you do want to do JV launches and stuff then you need to start getting yourself out there and getting, the way that we started was to start promoting. Have your analyst release a product, get your own list building and just with general traffic so you ad swaps, buy solos or however it is that you plan on sending traffic to your website.

JAIME TARDY: Wait, say what those are – add swaps or, I don’t know what those are so tell me more about those before we move on.

CINDY BATTYE: Okay. Sorry. I’m trying to do too many things at once.

JAIME TARDY: No, this is good. This is perfect.

CINDY BATTYE: Let me throw this out. Ad swaps, first of all, because it takes you different ways to get traffic to your website and you’ve got a membership website so there’s a lot more options out there for you by having a membership site set up. Do you have an auto responder set up?

JAIME TARDY: Yes and I do have a list.

CINDY BATTYE: Right, well that’s good. So what you can do is you can leverage your list and leverage the fact that you have a membership website by doing ad swaps and there a whole bunch of ad swap communities out there. There’s, I think, there’s one called Ultra Swaps. There’s a forum by Matt Garrett and I can’t remember the name of it now and he’s going to kill me for not remembering, but there’s a forum out there as well. If you do a search for ad swap and Matt Garrett, you’ll probably find it, which is just a community of people that want to do ad swaps.

All that means is that they’ll mail for you about your product and you can mail for them about your products. They’ll mail for you. That way, everyone can grow together. See, the beauty with affiliate marketing in particular is that, because you haven’t got an affiliate program set up then you won’t be able to take full advantage of it but when you start doing ad swaps then you can actually find people to promote other products and then instead of you just promoting someone else’s product, contact them and say would you like to swap and I’ll do a promotion for yours and you do a promotion for mine.

Then, if you both have affiliate programs set up, then you can make commissions so you will both get extra sign ups to your website and sales for your website but you also get commissions if your people buy from their product. Does that make sense?

JAIME TARDY: Yes, it completely makes sense. So I’m assuming it depends on the size of the list, right? So I’d swap with someone who has the same size of list that I have?

CINDY BATTYE: Yes, but you need to get started. I mean there’s people out there that have lists of 20 people or 50 people and you just leverage what you have. So you start out with 50 people and ask for someone to join ad swap with 100 people. If you’ve got an auto responder series you’re in a better position too because you can say, if someone can mail for me with 1,000 people in their list, then I will put an ad for you in my auto responder series and that has got a lot more leverage because every single member that comes through your website is going, forever, is going to get an email from them.

So leverage it just a little bit. Do that until you get 100 people on the list and then start asking for people that have swaps of 200 and keep building that. That’s how we’ve built our list. We’ve got sizable lists now and we all start doing little ad swaps.

JAIME TARDY: Do you mind telling me what the size, I know this is bad questions like asking how old someone is but, do you mind telling me what the size of your list is?

CINDY BATTYE: I think all out we’ve probably got about over 400,000 people who are subscribers now and this is just through membership websites. So we do them either free membership websites or lead capture pages or stuff that we sell. So all different methods.

JAIME TARDY: Let’s get into that then because that’s sort of what I was going to talk about. You talked about the sales funnel a little bit so I’d like to know about conversions, what’s the best copy. I mean I know we only have so much time left. Tips on your lead capture and what you guys do that works.

CINDY BATTYE: Right. Well I’m banned from touching copy. I’ve been banned. Soren is the copy genius and he makes that all work. Copy is scary for me so I am happy to let him do that. I work mostly on the graphics and making sure that it feels right because something that a lot of people don’t think about is the feeling of a website and especially if you have a membership website, you want it to feel as if they’re part of it. You want to build that psychological connection and have them commit themselves to your website.

The more committed they are, we get people in our mailing list and people don’t say I’m on Soren and Cindy’s mailing list. What they’ll often do is I’m a member of ClickBank pirate or I’m a member of Daily Niche Idea or whatever it is. They commit themselves to you. So you could still be mailing them. You email them and they’re on your list but there’s a connection. So you want to try and get that as much as possible. So I’m not sure that I can help you with copy.

JAIME TARDY: Find a partner. Maybe we’ll ask you later how you found your partner that is good at copy.

CINDY BATTYE: Sure. He manages all the email marketing and stuff too. I love him.

JAIME TARDY: Actually, okay, so we’re going to take a side note. How did you find him? I heard a bit of a story but I didn’t hear the whole story as far as when you were newer and you were trying to learn more information you somehow found these partners that are wonderful at email marketing and copy.

CINDY BATTYE: I went and told them all, because I found this forum and it was just a bunch of people that have similar websites because my first website was the traffic exchange. So I found people who were doing the same thing and wanted to start, talked to me about doing some ad swaps so they could mail for me and I mail for them. I went in there and I thought I was the bomb because at the time I just gotten my first $10.99 subscriber so I was like rolling in the dough. I just thought I knew everything.

So what I thought I would do, my plan, my brilliant plan was to go and make like 10,000 of these things. If I could make 10 bucks off of one site, I’ll just make 100 of them and then, but obviously that’s a stupid idea because…

JAIME TARDY: Well you only have 12 now so I guess that didn’t work out so well.

CINDY BATTYE: It’s a bit of a silly idea because you kind of have to make what you’ve got working really well before you can expand on it and that’s what these guys in this forum told me. I’m like you guys know nothing. Really, dummies, what have you done? I just gave it to them and pretty much it was pretty bad. I was new and I was silly. So I ended up leaving that forum and then about six months later, a friend of mine contacted me on Skype and said, “Hey have you thought about dropping by?” I’m like I’ve been thinking about it a little bit.

I went back to the forum and I apologized and said actually the last six months I’ve just spent a heap of money just buying domain names and software and getting all the end, it’s all been rubbish. I haven’t done anything and anything productive. Can you please show me what it is that you’re doing and through that I met Soren and Soren worked with John Merrick. He is the uber geek of our team and I absolutely adore the guy.

So we decided, we just started working together. Yeah, we just started talking more and then it was kind of weird. It was just a bit of a gradual growing like we started promoting each other’s stuff just doing ad swaps and promoting whatever products he was releasing and then I would do the same and doing just joint stuff like promotions together. Just little stuff. Then we both started promoting each other’s stuff without affiliate links. We just started this is a really good resource go and check it out.

Then we decided that we might as well just do something together so we created ClickBank pirate which was huge. We did our first $100,000 in sales in like 14 hours. It was really, really huge and that’s where we got a lot of our mailing lists from too, probably about half of our mailing list is from that one website.

JAIME TARDY: Wow, 200,000. That’s crazy.

CINDY BATTYE: So it was pretty massive. We went from just meeting in a forum, connecting on Skype and then working together. That’s a fantastic way. I use Skype so much. Do you use Skype?

JAIME TARDY: Yes.

CINDY BATTYE: Skype is just amazing for connecting and building relationships. I mean you can beat getting to offline conferences. If you can get to an offline conference, by all means, seriously, try and get yourself there because sharing a drink with someone just totally connects you, hanging out and that kind of thing will do heaps more than Skype. But if you can’t get to those sort of things, start out at Skype and start building relationships and connecting with people.

JAIME TARDY: That’s great advice that I 100 percent agree with. I know conferences are huge for every business owner that I deal with and for me.

CINDY BATTYE: That’s a fantastic place too to meet people. You were talking about meeting copywriters. Get to these offline things and you’ve got your own strengths. You know what you’re good at. Find people that aren’t good at that but also good at other stuff and set up some kind of partnership. It doesn’t have to be, we’ve gone all in and set up a company and everything, you don’t have to quite.

JAIME TARDY: You don’t have to marry him, right? You can just date him for awhile.

CINDY BATTYE: Gosh no. If anyone needs to know, I’m not married to Soren. We’re just friends.

JAIME TARDY: I meant business marriage.

CINDY BATTYE: Soren is needy. But no, we’re not married.

JAIME TARDY: Business marriage, right?

CINDY BATTYE: I just have to clarify. Because Soren is definitely not a pastor.

JAIME TARDY: I know, I was going to say now we live happily ever after and he’s a pastor.

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah.

JAIME TARDY: Perfect.

CINDY BATTYE: Cool, thank you for the conversation. So where were we?

JAIME TARDY: It’s funny because I have a couple more tech or your wonderful marketing skills question and then we’re going to have to wrap it up unfortunately. Maybe I can have you back on or something. So what is your advice for like squeeze pages and stuff like that, video? Like what works the best for you guys?

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, we like video. Get a video on there and you can get videos done super cheap or you can use something like animator. Animator.com. I think they have a free vision or it’s like really cheap. They have a version there where you can do, I think you can do free ones and just do a slideshow video. We love video just because it’s has got that sound, it’s got something that grabs their attention and then just like four dot points. So you need like a headline, something that’s going to grab their attention and then a video and dot points and then an opt in box so that’s pretty much it.

JAIME TARDY: That’s simple. Not a lot of work. That’s excellent.

CINDY BATTYE: It sounds simple. It’s probably, if you’ve never done that before, it’s probably a little bit more involved.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, definitely. I was actually surprised. I just started doing videos and I was surprised at, besides I didn’t edit it, so I guess that’s probably a big thing. But yeah, I was actually really surprised at how much easier than I thought it was going to be. Even though I’m a geek, I was still like oh no video. Oh gosh.

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, but animator is really easy if you want to do video without having to actually do video. It’s super easy because you can just upload images and write whatever text you want to put in there and then it just, and what music you want, and you can pick from their library too and then hit produce and it makes you a video.

JAIME TARDY: Great. That’s a great resource. Thank you very much. So now we’ve talked a lot about wonderful things that have happened to you and it sounds like everything was sort of easy besides the hard work it took in putting in to the membership sites. But what obstacles or challenges or failures did you come up against as you were building it in these five years?

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah it was not easy. I really struggled with the mindset side of things because I grew up in a family that was always struggling for cash and it was tough. My parents worked hard. Never seemed to have enough money. I had three younger brothers so we had quite a big family and always strapped for cash and so my mentality was always you have to get a job, you have to work, you have to do this and maybe one day you might end up retiring and owning your own house.

It was kind of very much a mentality thing and I met a guy who, I bought one of his products. It was a word press plug in and I used the plug in and it had a couple of things that I think could have worked better. I wasn’t full entrepreneur back then. I was just starting to sort of see what potential there was there. I had my first website and I sent him an email and he emailed me back and then I emailed him back and I asked him if we could get on Skype and just touch base because it turns out he was in Australia. Just found a common point of interest and we started talking.

Through that, he runs a big business and I said, “Hey would you like to mentor me?” He obviously knew what he was doing and I kind of got mentored by him and he totally kicked my butt a lot. He made me cry a lot. I probably spent like six months of crying because it he was really just pushing me to getting me to stop thinking so small, push my boundaries a lot and I thank him for it now. I still used to thank him for it then because he was very encouraging, just it was a very uncomfortable period of time. Now I’m a little bit more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

I would suggest, if anyone is listening and they’re wondering what kind of actions to take to find yourself a mentor. Find someone that you can be accountable to and what Daniel did, that’s my mentor, he got me to and this sounds so tortuous now, he got me to document every 15 minutes what it is that I did with my day. So I had to create a spreadsheet and he made me do that for like a couple of weeks. I was like going crazy.

JAIME TARDY: You know what’s funny. I’m laughing because my mentor made me do that too.

CINDY BATTYE: Oh my gosh. It was torture.

JAIME TARDY: Not for weeks. He only had it for a couple days but still, I can only imagine.

CINDY BATTYE: I think I did it for, it felt like months. But it does, it makes you refocus and look at everything it is that you’re doing. Then through that, we just assessed what it is, where I’m productive, where I’m slacking and where I can do better. So I would keep a daily task sheet and then I would report it to him every day and what it was that I had gotten done and then what it was that I planned to do for the next day. I just worked my little tail off and got a whole week of stuff done.

A lot of the stuff was just learning about doing a course and then implementing it and just learning and learning and going to Google and learning more. I just kept doing that. Back to what I would say, if you’re not sure about the direction, you need to find direction and then find yourself someone to be accountable to so that you can stick to what it is that you’re doing because online you don’t have anyone watching over your shoulder.

I’m in a pretty good position because I’ve got Soren and John, my business partners now and we all want to work together. None of us slack. But having each other, we don’t want to let each other down. But if you’re working on your own, it’s sometimes hard to get motivated and you can find yourself spending hours on You Tube and Facebook and you say that you’re doing Facebook marketing or whatever.

JAIME TARDY: You’re really just checking stats.

CINDY BATTYE: Yeah, so find someone to be accountable to and work out what your goals are so that your mentor or your person that you’re accountable to is going to be able to keep you on track.

JAIME TARDY: That’s great. It’s funny because usually the very last question that I always ask everyone is what’s one action they can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million and what’s funny is you pretty much just said that. So I assume we’re going to use that as the tip but then I have one question to follow it up. You told the story of how you found them, did you have to pay them or what was the conversation like of going, hey will you be my mentor please and I don’t want to pay you but I want you to kick my butt every day?

CINDY BATTYE: I’m really blessed. I did not have to pay him. He did it just for the fun of it.

JAIME TARDY: To see you cry, right?

CINDY BATTYE: I think he just likes to push people. No, and finding someone who is willing to do that is hard. But if you can find someone that is willing to do that, do whatever you can to impress their socks off so that they keep kicking your but because then you’re going to grow. You’re going to keep progressing and you’re going to get where you want to go. So before you even do that, you need to find out where it is that you want to go.

Like what your goals are. Sit down, unless you can find someone that is going to do that for you, but you find a mentor that’s going to guide you through the process of working out your plans which is what Daniel did for me too because he’s amazing. I’m sorry, I just love the guy.

JAIME TARDY: See you sing his praises even now so it was totally worth it for him, right?

CINDY BATTYE: Totally. I would promote, we would promote anything that he does because he’s my hero.

JAIME TARDY: That’s excellent. That’s funny because I have…

CINDY BATTYE: You can find people that are willing to do that. All you need to do is find someone. Go to the warrior forum. Be a bit careful in the warrior forum because there’s a lot of people that are totally newbie and you might find someone that’s not positive. See if you can find someone that’s positive and that is kicking butt. Then ask them would you, first don’t come out and say would you mentor me. Just try and contact them.

I talked with Daniel probably six months before I actually asked him if he would do the butt kicking thing. So it was more about building a relationship and him saying that I was serious about working online and making this a business and then progressing from there.

JAIME TARDY: I think that’s hugely key. I have people emailing me about how to find mentors and I’m like don’t just go up and ask someone to be a mentor.

CINDY BATTYE: I would say no.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, exactly. A lot of people are busy. They don’t know who the heck you are.

CINDY BATTYE: I love taking mentor, sorry, people in to mentor but I only do it for people that I know and I have built a relationship up with and we connect because it’s quite a process. It’s a very emotional process and you put yourself right out there. You have to trust them and you have to, for my position, I have to know that the person that I’m investing my time in is going to actually do the work and not just get slack and go offline for six months.

JAIME TARDY: For sure. Make them run through the ringer beforehand, right?

CINDY BATTYE: I did that with someone this morning. That was fun.

JAIME TARDY: Did you? See, then you’re on the other side. Now you can make them do 15 minutes.

CINDY BATTYE: Right, because they know Daniel as well and apparently, yeah, he said, you sound just like Daniel. I’m like, really? That’s awesome.

JAIME TARDY: I’ve made it! Screw the money, I’m now the mentor. That’s excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on. Where’s the best place to find you online? Where do you want people to find out more info from you?

CINDY BATTYE: Probably an I am Wealthbuilders or yeah, if you go to I am Wealthbuilders you can get on our mailing list and then you can just see what we’re up to. That might be a good spot. I don’t know or just Google me.

JAIME TARDY: Google you. I’ll definitely link to you in the show notes and on the blog and stuff like that too so everybody will be able to find you because this has been a great interview. I really appreciate it especially because it’s what I’m going through right now. So I was eating all this up. This is wonderful. I really appreciate you being here.

CINDY BATTYE: If you want me to have a look around and stuff and give you some ideas, then shoot it over. I’m happy to check it out.

JAIME TARDY: Excellent! I always say excellent way too much on the podcast. So this works out well.

CINDY BATTYE: Well I always say side note so there you go.

JAIME TARDY: We have our own key phrases. We should coin them. Well thank you very much.

CINDY BATTYE: Thank you so much for having me, Jaime. It has been fun.

Just to note, you can download the Top 10 tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on eventualmillionaire.com.

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