Should I Start a Membership Community?
Memberships are a one to many offer that allow you to give your audience access to premium content at an affordable cost but you might be wondering will this model work for me?
In this blog I’m going to break down the membership offer model, who it’s suited for and the key considerations you need to make when thinking about running your own.
What is a membership offer exactly?
Memberships are where your audience pays to get access to exclusive members-only content. The types of content you share are completely down to you and can include:
Mini-trainings/ Challenges
Group coaching
Podcasts
PDFs and other resources such as exclusive blogs
Recommendations
Live events
A community
Members only get access to this content for as long as they are a member and so making sure that members continue to stay for months and years on end is the main goal so that you can really start to build up that monthly recurring revenue.
Your membership can be about any subject matter - we have helped build and also seen memberships on the following topics:
Becoming a better artist
Getting support after an ADHD diagnosis
Helping other business owners to do their admin/ run their business with better systems
Learning how to knit
Spiritual women’s circles
Tapping (EFT)
Launching mini products
The list goes on and on….
What kind of business is best suited for the membership model?
To be honest any business can run this membership (or subscription) based model but one of the biggest things that trip business owners up when they first look into this is that they think that a membership can be completely passive! It is not and nor should you treat it as that.
The key to a successful membership is not only focusing on growing it but also retaining customers and that takes careful planning and work. You cannot post and ghost in your membership! BUT it is the perfect way to really nurture your audience (often at the beginning steps of their journey) and then potentially feed them into higher ticket offers down the line.
What do you need to consider when building out a membership?
If you’re seriously considering this offer model then here are 5 quick questions to ask yourself:
Do you have something that you can teach? What is your vision for the membership?
Do you want to better leverage your time?
Do you enjoy creating content and coaching/ training other people? (if you hate creating content and teaching it then this model is not for you!)
Do you already have an online business and presence?
Are you ready to really nurture your community and do the work to make your membership an amazing place to be?
There is a lot of talk in the online space about creating ‘passive income’ and memberships often pop up as one of these things but let’s be clear, a membership takes work! A lot of work!
However when you get it right, you can easily scale the number of people you help and the value that you provide them, increase your authority, increase your monthly recurring revenue and you can cut back your working hours (if you’re currently only providing a DFY or 1-1 coaching service).
How we have helped our client - A case study!
One of our clients had spent years running a very successful therapy clinic and over the years she had also grown a second ‘side’ business helping other therapists and mental health practitioners with their billing and admin paperwork.
She had built an incredible community of over 21 thousand other practice owners who saw her as the go-to for billing, admin and systems advice in their industry.
Before working with us she was constantly creating new adhoc one-off offers and workshops for her audience and hosting FREE live monthly Q&A sessions which mean that her income from this second business was inconsistent and dependent on her creating and putting out a new offer all the time.
As we started working together (initially we came in to help her ‘launch’ all these individual offers) I suggested that she start a membership. She was concerned that doing this would mean more work for her creating content and also doing big launches and she wasn’t sure if it would be ‘worth it’.
I helped her map out a strategy for building and launching the membership in a really simple way which involved:
Repurposing and refreshing a lot of her current content so that she had 12 months worth of membership content ready to go so she didn’t have the pressure of creating tons of new content up front before we opened the doors.
Created different tiers to the membership - standard, annual, VIP and Corporate so that there were different benefits to each level for the end consumer.
Made her free monthly live calls now a ‘pay to join’ for anyone outside of the membership
That client has now made close to $90k revenue in just over a year with just her membership alone. Not only did we create a more consistent stream of income for her by creating the membership but having someone guide her along the way and show her that we can make business simple and effective completely boosted her confidence and reassured her that she could streamline her workload and still support her students in a really impactful way.
PLUS she now has the space to create new content when she feels inspired rather than feeling the pressure of creating it just to make income.
This client had spent years establishing herself as a go-to expert in her industry but she was making more work for herself all the time.
I'm a big believer in working smarter and not harder in your business but sometimes we are so close to our own businesses that we can't see the opportunities that we are literally sat on.
OR maybe you can see them but you put them off because you've convinced yourself that it's going to be so hard to do it!
Ready to take the next steps?
Reading this blog and excited to start creating your membership? You can jump straight in and have a go at planning and launching your membership on your own, or you can lean into the expertise of me and my team! We’ve helped many of our clients plan, launch and manage their memberships over the years and we’ve helped them to make over £250k in the process! If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can help you then click here to book a free chemistry call!
