You're running a successful membership business…

Members are consistently coming in, they're consuming your content, taking part in your community…

And most importantly, they're starting to see results.

Sounds great doesn't it?

For some people this is the goal…

All they want is to hit a certain point in their business, and once that happens, they’re happy to steadily grow it on a monthly or yearly basis…

Beyond that, they don’t particularly aspire for anything more…

And that’s perfectly fine…

But for others this is just the beginning…

They want to take things to the next level, beyond increasing subscriptions and revenue…

If the latter sounds like you, then you should read on to find out how to make this happen.

Here are five ideas to take a successful membership to the next level:

1. Offering upsells

Never underestimate the power of a good upsell.

For most membership businesses, an upsell is positioned as the next level for enhancement…

This includes things like coaching programs, annual retreats, paid masterminds, one-on-one coaching services, and so much more… 

But with memberships taking more of a DIY approach, a good upsell could be more of a “done with you” or “done for you” service or product.

It’s taking things to the next level in terms of:

• The scope of what you're helping people do
• The level of facilitation
• The speed at which you can help members get where they want to go

Typically, these upsells are arranged in terms of what is commonly called a ‘value ladder'.

Customer working their way up your value ladder…

This involves offering a range of products with the low-ticket items at the bottom of the ladder and the more exclusive, big-ticket ones at the top.

With this model, you can market the products at the bottom of the ladder to your broader audience…

And once they buy them, you market the next level till they buy their way up.

It’s simple, it introduces some depth, and it works.

2. Create an ecosystem of products and services

If you find the value ladder approach a bit too cynical, then creating an ecosystem centered around your membership will provide more of a soft landing. 

Here, your membership is at the heart of everything, so you can spend the bulk of your time getting those subscriptions…

And then once a member buys in, they’re exposed to a range of ways in which you can help them.

This is more of an à la carte approach as opposed to the linear progression that the ladder upsell offers. 

So, let’s say you have a coaching program, paid mastermind, or some of the other products we mentioned earlier…

Instead of members starting with the low-end products and buying their way up to the high-end options, you simply put everything out there.

The logic here is that once anyone signs up for your membership, things open up…

And once they’re in your ecosystem, they can pick and choose how they want to engage with you and the services and products they want to buy…

If indeed they want to buy anything at all. 

3. Teaching the teachers

This approach does not necessarily apply to everyone, mostly because it’s very niche-dependent in its nature.. 

But, let's say your membership is successfully teaching people how to play the piano…

That's pretty straightforward, right?

You’re basically an expert teaching a skill to end-users. 

However, if you look at it on a broader scale, you’re a membership owner teaching hundreds or even thousands of students.

This means that you've most likely racked up an even greater wealth of knowledge about how to be an effective teacher. 

Altogether, that one-to-many element of the membership allows you to reach far more people than you could ever reach on a one-on-one basis.

So you could take that knowledge and experience and also use it to: 

• Teach other piano teachers
• Use the feedback from your community to develop teaching techniques that you can pass onto other teachers 
• Gain insight into the teaching method as a whole by delivering it online
• Teach teachers how to do stuff that doesn't involve teaching i.e. marketing, how to create worksheets and learning materials etc. 

There’s a variety of different industries that this approach can work in…

All you need is your own signature program, worksheets, exercises, training materials, syllabus, and so on.

At the end of the day, you’ll have a membership where you’re taking end-users through a program to develop their skills or knowledge and a platform to train other coaches.

4. Licensing your membership 

Sometimes when companies, schools, or even local councils want their user base to access your material, they’ll reach out to arrange a form of group access to your membership.

In these cases, there’s a single umbrella account that pays the bills and a designated number of user accounts under that umbrella.

When this happens you can take this approach one step further by licensing your membership to an entire company…

This basically involves creating a duplicate version of your membership that can be privately accessed by the company's employees… 

Keep in mind that this can be a little tricky to pull off with lots of different components within your membership…

But if you've got all the tech in place, the content, and any other additions ready to go, it won’t be too difficult to duplicate it…

In fact, the hardest part is probably attracting organizations that want a licensing arrangement in the first place. 

5. Replicate your model

So, you’ve built a successful membership and have a working model in terms of acquisition and retention… 

In a nutshell, you’ve developed a solid approach to content creation, among many other things…

A great way to take this to the next level would be to explore opportunities to replicate that proven model for other topics. 

Of course, if you’re an expert in one specific subject area, you may not have an equal level of expertise in another area…

At least not enough to confidently start a membership with you as the go-to expert…

But that doesn’t mean you can’t tap into new subject areas!

The solution lies in partnering up with experts in other fields and pairing your model with their expertise…

So, while they bring the knowledge, you bring the platform…

You replicating your membership model with an expert…

And together you can replicate your membership model in multiple membership markets.

This is not as simple as copying and pasting your membership in another niche…

There are challenges that come with doing this…

After all what works in one market isn't guaranteed to work in another…

But if done correctly, this is a fantastic way to level up your business.

So if you have a successful membership…

And are wondering what you can do next to expand your business…

One of the five options listed above may just be the right one for you!

But before you go full steam ahead with this there's one piece of advice that I have for you…

Decide on what the anchor point of your business will be…

Think about the big picture…

So if everything started falling apart and you could only salvage one element of your business, what would that be?

Latch onto that and let it be your North Star.