Building an audience is essential to the success of your membership.
After all if you have no audience to speak of, then who are you going to sell to? Where are your members going to come from?
“Build it and they will come” is, unfortunately, a myth – so you need to invest time in growing your own audience in terms of your email subscribers, website visits, podcast listeners, social followers and, of course, paying members.
But where do you start? How do you actually find your audience?
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Felicia Lo from School of Sweet Georgia, a membership site for fibre artists, is this week’s guest on Behind the Membership.
Felicia first started her blog way back in 2004 and her physical business manufacturing beautiful hand dyed yarns, Sweet Georgia Yarns, in 2005. Over the years Felicia has also taught classes for companies like Craftsy, written a book, and run a yarn based subscription box, so by the time she started her membership School of SweetGeorgia in 2017 she already had a huge amount of experience in her market.
In this episode, we’re talking all about how Felicia is able to run the membership site alongside her well established physical business, and how having the two overlapping, but still separate, sides of the business works well for her and gives her more flexibility and stability.
We also talk about how Felicia used Patreon for her initial idea validation, which gave her the incentive and accountability to create her full membership site. And we talk about the team she has helping her to keep both businesses thriving, plus how she focuses on YouTube for attracting new members, her plans for bringing guest teachers to her in-person studio to record courses, and much, much more besides.
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One of the more challenging changes that comes with moving to the membership model is dealing with the increase in how many people are contacting you and vying for your attention.
Supporting hundreds or thousands of members can certainly take its toll and becoming uncontrollable without procedures and a solid approach for dealing with handling communication.
In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast I talk about how you can set boundaries and expectations in order to ensure your membership remains manageable.
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On today’s episode on Behind the Membership Callie is talking with Warwick Brown who runs the KAM Club, a membership site for key account managers which has been running for around nine months.
Hear all about how Warwick came to start the KAM Club and how he utilised existing resources, like his previously free blog content, to get him started much quicker – although he still put off launching the membership for a long time!
Warwick also talks about the challenge of consistency, particularly when it comes to content creation, and how finding a way to link his free and paid content together has made his life so much easier.
And discusses finding time to do everything when running a membership site solo, how Warwick provides a lot of personal support in his membership site, from 30-minute welcome calls, to personal videos and check-in messages, despite it being low cost. And how, despite quitting his high salary job, and not yet making the same amount with his membership, he couldn’t be happier.
Plus, of course, much, much more!
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So many membership owners live in fear of their members cancelling.
It kind of makes sense, because the goal of a membership site is to retain its members for as long as possible and so when someone leaves – whatever the reason – it’s hard not to see that as a negative.
However when a member cancels, it doesn’t have to be the end of the road…
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Trish Blackwell, a confidence coach and creator of the College of Confidence is our guest for this episode of Behind the Membership.
Funnily enough, Trish’s biggest challenge with her membership initially was actually having confidence in her ideas and what she wanted to create. Fortunately this was something that she was able to overcome in order to build a thriving membership site that’s now been running for over three years and which is continuing to grow and evolve.
In this episode, we’re talking all about how Trish overcame her original doubts and how the membership model has allowed her to 3x her private coaching fee, while still helping even more people.
We’re also discussing the challenges of running a business with small children at home and how hiring support for her community was a game changer for Trish and her membership, plus much, much more.
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Most online membership owners use content marketing as a means of attracting new members.
Sharing useful articles, podcasts or videos on their blog is a proven way to generate traffic, establish credibility and build the trust that will have your audience wanting more from you.
But how do you connect the dots between your blog and your membership, so that readers go on to become members?
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Carole Copeland Thomas, a diversity and inclusion expert, is talking all about her membership site the Multicultural Symposium Series in today’s episode of Behind the Membership.
Carole’s online membership actually evolved from her long running annual conference with the aim of providing somewhere business owners could have a year round conversation around important topics that relate to becoming a more multicultural and inclusive business.
In this episode we’re talking about the importance of Carole’s work and the impact it’s having, how she’s able to keep her membership very low cost and affordable because of corporate sponsors, and how her current focus is on scaling the membership even further.
We also talk about how she mixes her offline events and online membership and the monthly webinars that she runs which are available to attend live for free, but then only available within the membership.
Plus of course much more!
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If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that we are… let’s say skeptical about the value of closed door memberships (that is, only opening your membership for new members at set times).
We make no secret of our preference for the evergreen approach (letting members join at any time) and the vast majority of successful memberships in the world follow this model.
It’s not controversial to say an evergreen membership is preferable to a closed door one.
But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) we don’t live in a world of absolutes.
There are some situations in which a closed door membership model is the smart choice and we would actually encourage you to give it a try.
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Welcome to the third ‘edition’ of the Membership Toolkit – a monthly round-up of our favourite tools, tech and teachings for online membership owners.
Every month we highlight everything from plugins and platforms to software and services, books and blogs to courses and conferences; giving you our top recommendations for what will help you and your membership business.
This month’s recommendations include a tool that gives you complete control over the look and feel of your WordPress site, a nifty service for repurposing podcast and video content, a very powerful plugin for turning your WordPress admin into a CRM and our favourite tool for creating marketing images.
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On this episode of Behind the Membership, George Reid is talking all about his membership site for Amazon based businesses, the LaunchPod Academy.
George started the membership 15 months ago after originally working for Amazon in the UK and then creating an Amazon agency. Over the last year, the membership has become the main focus of his business though, now accounting for 80% of his revenue.
One of the things George is most passionate about is ensuring he is giving his members the best experience and making his membership as ‘sticky’ as possible, meaning his retention, even for annual renewals, is great.
In this episode, we’re talking all about how George originally started the membership with his brother but is now flying solo, how he is utilising guest experts for creating content, and some of the new strategies he’s trying to improve his retention even further.
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When assessing how engaged their membership community is, most people tend to focus on the number of posts and comments they rack up.
But activity and engagement are not the same thing!
This is what trips people up – they think that more activity (posts, comments, replies, etc.) equate to higher and better engagement.
More often than not, that is not the case.
Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to community engagement.
So you need to think about your Signal v Noise ratio…
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Caryn Liles from the Centre of Canine Education is this weeks guest on Behind the Membership, and while her membership is only a few months old she is a great example of what’s possible with memberships, even when you have to launch quickly and in a market that you may not think is a fit for online training. Because when COVID-19 first hit earlier this year, Caryn could have easily thought the worst when she had to close her brick-and-mortar dog training business down overnight.
Instead, she chose to pivot quickly to an online membership model for both her existing clients and a wider audience as well. And it’s been such a success that she isn’t even sure if she’ll open up her physical business again.
In just a few months having a membership has quite literally been life-changing for Caryn, giving her more time, less stress and a better work-life balance than she ever thought possible.
Listen in to hear all about her journey so far.
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Member retention is critical to the long-term success of your membership website.
It costs 7-10 times more on average to win a new member than it does to hold on to an existing one; and if you’re losing more members than you bring in then your business won’t last long!
In this article, we’re giving you 21 quick tips for improvements you can make to your membership strategy in order to improve your member retention.
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Today’s guest on Behind The Membership is Steve Pavlina, a prolific name in the personal growth space and owner of the Conscious Growth Club.
Steve actually has a bit of a different membership model to most you’ll hear on this podcast, offering a 12-month membership at a price point of $1997. He also only launches the membership once a year, so his membership is small and intimate by design.
Steve shares some great insights into why he picked this model and why it’s worked well for his audience and the kind of results he helps his members to achieve.
Steve has really fine-tuned who his membership is for and isn’t afraid to remove those that aren’t a good fit, realising that alignment and attracting the right members is absolutely key for the kind of community that he is creating.
Listen in to hear how going to Disneyland every day for 30 days was what inspired Steve to first start his membership, how 30-day challenges work for his membership community, and how his low-key five-day launches bring him six figures, allowing him to focus on his members for the other 360 days of the year. Plus, of course, much more!
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Every industry, topic and niche has its fair share of jargon.
And memberships are no different.
There’s already so much to juggle as a membership site owner, so the last thing you want to have to worry about is needing to wrap your head around all of the lingo!
So to make it easier for you, we’ve rounded up the 9 key terms and phrases you need to know if you run a membership.
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