Pamela Mitchell has been a professional coach since 2003, with a focus on helping people to reinvent their careers so that they can live a life that they love. When demand for her services became too high, she decided to launch a membership offering – the Reinvention Launch Club – in order to help more people.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though and in this episode Coach Pamela discusses the mindset shifts that needed to happen for her to be able to move from creating a more traditional content focused and high volume membership to a smaller, more curated and intimate experience where the focus is on individual and group coaching.
We also talk about how Pamela makes use of associate coaches to provide a more one-to-one experience for her members without needing to spend all of her own time coaching, the challenge of finding your own path and being clear on what you enjoy and what’s going to give your members the best results when creating your membership model, and the quest to find the perfect community solution.
Plus lots more!
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Is your membership community a ghost town?
Are you constantly banging your head against a wall trying to figure out ways to get your members to actually converse with each other?
It’s been said many times before – people come for the content but they stay for the community.
However, establishing an active, thriving community inside your membership is easier said than done.
Here are our top tips for getting the conversations flowing…
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John Michaloudis from MyExcelOnline, a membership which helps people to become Excel experts, is this week’s guest on Behind the Membership.
John started his membership just two years ago after growing tired of running course launches, and with 1600 members is already a third of the way to his goal of making $100,000 per month with the membership.
In this episode John is talking all about how he is using evergreen webinars with fast action bonuses to make sales every day, and how email marketing and Facebook ads also contribute to his sales.
John also shares how moving from a Facebook group to a forum for his community is one of the best things he’s done, and how John isn’t actually the person answering members questions in his community.
Plus we talk all about the benefits of adding things like Trustpilot reviews to a sales process, creating a business you can take 6 months away from and how member success stories make all the work worthwhile.
And of course, much more!
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Wow… 5 years of Membership Academy!
And what a rollercoaster ride our fifth year has been.
Listen in as Callie and I recap the highs and lows of the past 12 months of Membership Academy, and look ahead to what’s in store in the next year and beyond.
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Marisha Mets from SLP Now, a membership for speech language practitioners, is this week’s guest on Behind the Membership.
SLP Now has been running for over four years and over that time has evolved from a simple membership to a full web app offering thousands of practitioners teaching resources and even their own CRM and case tools.
In this episode Marisha talks all about how she went from creating resources for her own use to launching a hugely successful membership and the challenges she’s had along the way, including learning how to manage her time effectively and finding the right developers to create her app.
We also talk about the benefits of starting simple, and how a membership has helped give Marisha more freedom and flexibility, particularly when faced with health challenges. Plus how running a twice yearly online summit works well for attracting new members, and how she utilises tools like Net Promoter Scores and Intercom to get feedback from members and provide additional support.
Plus much more!
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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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