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I'll talk a little bit about the different types of membership sites, my own experience with membership sites, talk about some of the membership sites. I've seen other people, either people I've interviewed on my podcast, people who have, you know, been mentors to me and also coaching students who've gone on to launch membership sites. So I've kind of seen a whole range of different methods used effectively to launch membership sites and some, you know, not so effectively because you've also learned the behind the scenes of what parts are working and what parts are not. We'll talk about attrition. We'll talk about, you know, even a little bit about software and how to run a membership site. So there's a lot to cover in today's very exciting episode of the EJ podcast. So with all that out of the way, let's dive in from the start and get your pen and paper ready, because I think you're going to be learning a lot in this episode of the EJ podcast. So my own experience with membership sites actually began when I was considering the release of my first ever product. So prior to being a blogger, I had a couple other businesses. If you know my story, you know that very well. But none of that was subscription or membership based. It was all one time sales, either physical products or services. Sometimes it was affiliate products. But really, I wasn't selling information yet and I wasn't selling anything on a recurring basis. It wasn't until I became interested in this world of selling knowledge, which I'm sure you're also interested in. You're probably already doing so or working towards selling your knowledge because that's why you're listening to me and my podcast. I'm very much one of those people out there today who stands for this idea of packaging up your ideas, your knowledge, your expertise into products like e-books, online courses and membership sites. And then selling that through a blog, through your email list, building an audience through content, written content, audio content, video content. That's the business model I teach. But of course, for me to reach the point where I can talk to you as an authority, I had to go through the beginning phases as well. So it was really around 2005, 2006, where I first started to get really interested in this idea of first of all, selling information and then secondarily selling it possibly on a subscription basis. So around about 2006, I was actually getting prepared to release my first product, which was going to be an e-book. That was my dipping my toe in the water taste potentially of selling my first product.

And I'll be honest, I really dragged my feet with that process. It took me about nine months to reach 80% of a written e-book. And considering e-books are usually less than sort of 60 pages, they're not like a full-blown novel. So it shouldn't have taken me nine months to reach that point. So clearly, I had some resistance. I had some fear there. And it wasn't until I got exposed to the work of Andrew and Daryl Grant. You might know of them. They're long-term internet marketers on the internet. Plus, they do a lot of in-person events, running workshops, weekend workshops, and they have a huge mentoring and coaching program. Back then, I was, first of all, exposed to what they were doing. They were kind of focusing on the idea of selling e-books because that was their first success online. But they were also doing more than that. And one of the main things they were doing was a, I won't call it a membership site. It was really more of a drip release subscription service. And they were selling essentially a course through drip release content on how to replicate their e-book model. Bearing in mind, this was very early days. So they were one of a few people who were really succeeding with this model. And they were also teaching it as is common. So I came in touch with them. I eventually actually spoke a bit on stage at some of their events. But what really blew me away during the very first kind of time I got to know them was this product they had that was essentially, I think it was $49 a month. And they sent you one email every month. Really not an email. It's more like a lesson, I guess. But a long email. Let's call it a long email. And it was a step-by-step training program on how to essentially sell e-books on the internet. And they had great success selling this subscription service. And they had incredible retention. This is one of the things that blew me away. They said their members stay subscribed for over 12 months. And to create this, sure, it was work. But they wrote a lesson, set it up to go out through an email autoresponder, wrote the second lesson, the third lesson, the fourth lesson. But by the time they'd written 12 lessons, that was already done. So a new member would start at lesson one. So although they had to keep producing year two and eventually year three and four in terms of content, I can't remember how many years they did in advance. But I know it was multiple years. They were done, though. After that, that content would continue to be drip-released to new customers. And they also had a very basic starting point for bringing members onto this subscription service.

They did local meetups and small talks in front of small audiences of about 10 to 20 to 30 people. At the end of those talks, they would sell this subscription course. They'd even take payment the old school way, fill out using pen and paper, your name, your credit card. And then they'd go home and sign them up, charge them their first month, and then start drip-releasing this content. So that's how they started. And then, of course, they switched to doing bigger events. Not really switched, but they just grew. And they got more people at their events. They started to run their own events. And they also did more things online. So that was my first really eye-opening experience with the potential of a very simple subscription service. I won't even call it a membership site because, to me, it was really just a bunch of emails going out drip-released. And that was exciting to me because I was already just getting interested in email autoresponders and what they could do. And if you combine email autoresponders with a subscription business model, I thought, wow, this is amazing. So it was partially because of my exposure to their work that I decided to scrap my e-book and launch a drip-release training program on how to make money blogging. So in 2007, I really put my foot down and started to actually get that ready to launch. And you might know that eventually became the very, very first version of Blog Mastermind, the 1.0 version, which was just written lessons. It was a bit of video and audio. I made an audio version of every lesson. But really, it was me sitting down there and writing these weekly lessons. I decided to do weekly. And it ended up being, well, here's what happened. So I did that. I went through this launch process and released my first subscription product. And it did really well. I was absolutely stoked. Great result. Over 400 members by the end of a fairly intensive launch campaign, my first ever launch campaign with affiliates and everything. And I had these 400 members who expected to get a lesson a week, plus do coaching teleconferences with me. And I'd only written the first, I think, two lessons by the time the doors open. So I then had to basically write a lesson in advance to stay ahead of the current membership. So I'm doing that at the same time as learning what it takes to run a subscription site. So over the following months, I realized, it didn't take long, in fact, that this was the wrong model to use for what I was teaching. So I thought I'd do what Andrew and Daryl did, which was have this open-ended drip release series of content.

And I'd essentially have this recurring income stream for a long time. But what happened was I had a very high attrition rate. Now, if you're not familiar with what attrition is, it simply means cancellations, dropouts, people leaving your membership. Now, in the case of my first course being drip released, people were cancelling very quickly. It was like they, you know, even before the end of the first month, I think I was down 10 or 20% of my membership. Now, part of that could have been, well, I didn't have the right product or I had a bad fit with my product to who I'd sold to. But I think there was more to it. I remember back then going, I wonder why people are cancelling. And I had some assumptions. I thought maybe the training was a bit too beginner-ish for the more advanced people. So by the time they got through the first month, they thought, you know what, I already know all this. I'm going to cancel. So maybe 30% of my members were just too advanced. So I ended up creating an advanced series of lessons. And that helped. It didn't really solve the problem. And then only after a few months later, I really realized the problem here is I'm trying to sell a course through a subscription-based model. Now, for some reason, it worked great for Andrew and Daryl, but it's not working for my audience. So I'm going to change my membership site, my subscription, into a course with a beginning and an end. And that became the Blogmaster Mind training program that back then was six months. Today, it's only six weeks. People want much more contracted periods of time for taking a course. No one has six months time anymore to study a course. Now it's a few weeks. But back then, I got away with having a six-month course. So from that point forward, my subscription product became a course with a payment plan or a one-time fee. Now, before I move on to talking more about membership sites, I want to briefly cover this topic of subscription payment models versus flagship course or one-time course payment models and payment plans. Because as time went by, I experienced all of these. I went on to have two more different types of subscription membership sites, lots of courses, e-books. A lot of these things had payment plans and one-time payments. So I got to really taste the full gamut of these different types of pricing and what worked well for me with different models. And I came to realize, and this is purely my experience, obviously. Other people will say they had a different experience.

But I'll tell you, from my experience, I made more money from having one-time or larger-priced flagship courses than I ever did from any subscription or membership site. Which might be an eye-opening idea for you because you think you only get paid once for a course or maybe you put them on a payment plan for maximum six months, maybe a year at most. But after that, you're done versus a subscription site, which could go on forever. You'd make more money. The truth is you don't. You really make more money with a larger-priced product, one-time fee up front or a payment plan. That's from my experience. Again, I'm not going to say it's going to be the case for everyone. There are some people who only do subscription products out there and they do very well. And there's a whole discussion we could have here on low-priced, high-volume subscriptions versus high-priced, one-time course payments. And they're different business models. So it's not really a case of simply saying one's better than the other. It's just different ways you can sell your content, your product. And it's something to consider when you're deciding what you want to build. I think it's great to have everything. Have a high-priced flagship course and have some kind of subscription-based product, which is what I had for the last four or five years. And that works great. But if you're starting out, you might be thinking, do I do a membership site at a low price? Do I launch a course at a high price? And where does the payment plan fit in with that? I can't answer that question because a lot of this is your strategy, what you're teaching, who you're selling to. A lot of variables come into play. But I can tell you, in my experience, selling a $500 or $1,000 or $2,000 course and maybe having a payment plan on that, it might end up looking a lot like a subscription because it ends up being $99 a month over 12 months to cover your $1,000 course. Something like that, which I've done myself. It very much looks like a subscription, although it obviously has an end date with the payment plan. What's interesting is often subscription-based products, you'll find the marketers behind them don't really see them like a membership site. They see them as a way to just increase the per-customer value. What does that mean? Well, you can sell, say, an e-book for $19 and then include a subscription product with that. That's $9 a month. And on average, people will spend three months before cancelling. So that's an extra $27 in revenue. So your $19 e-book ends up being a $50 to $60 value customer instead of only $19.

So they don't see it as a recurring subscription forever product. They just see it as basically like an upsell. It's a way to increase the value of one purchase, one transaction that happens. And they know, on average, three months is how long their subscriptions last. So I knew, for example, with my very first subscription version of my course, that I was getting this high attrition rate. And very few people were making it all the way to six months and beyond of paying subscriptions. So if I turn into a course that ends after six months and they all complete their payments, either paying one time up front $500 or $100 a month over six months, I was actually making more money per customer than selling that as a $29 or $49 a month ongoing membership. Plus, the retention was higher because people knew when the end period was going to hit. So in a course model, a beginning and an end can make a huge difference. So I would definitely consider that, you know, the format of what you're selling matters a lot when it comes to membership sites and subscriptions. So that was kind of my initial taste of selling, first of all, an education product, second of all, a subscription product, and then learning it really should be a flagship course model and kind of coming to terms with the differences. Now, going forward in time, as I said earlier, I've been exposed to other people doing various different things. And I'm going to cover basically the different types of models you can work with when it comes to selling a membership site. But I want you to be very cognizant of the fact that this decision of what to sell, how to charge for it, and what to charge is a very unique decision to make to your situation. What you're selling, your customer base, how much do they expect to pay for a certain solution, what formats matter to them? Are they expecting, you know, some kind of beginning and end video course, or they just want some kind of drip released information that goes potentially forever or years and years? You have to figure this out. It might require testing. It definitely requires you get to know your audience more. At the end of the day, you're going to just have to go out there with your best researched estimate of what the right product and the right pricing model and the right business model is for what you're selling. But just be aware that you might need to change it over time. And that's totally fine. That's what it's like to be an entrepreneur. We change things as we learn about our audience. What's great, though, is this experience might open the door

to having multiple products using all these different business models, which is what I teach in my blog sales funnel model. So if you've never seen that, go check out blog sales funnel dot com. That should redirect you to my blog post. There's a nice big fat infographic picture of what I call the blog sales funnel. And you'll see there various products using various pricing models and how they might fit together in a theoretical sales funnel. You don't have to copy it directly as it is, but it will give you a great overview. And it's very much what I used certainly in the last five, six, seven years with my information product business to have multiple products at different pricing points using these subscription and flagship course and low entry price products to build this funnel. So that's blog sales funnel dot com. Or you could just Google for blog sales funnel dot com and you'll probably find that blog sales funnel should get you to my post. OK, so let me cover some basics first of all. With a membership site, and I'm going to assume we're kind of focusing around this idea of you being a knowledge expert and you want to sell content or something around your expertise. There are three main aspects of a membership that you can include. You include all of these or you can focus on only one or two. In fact, it might be smarter to focus only on one of these as some of the people I've interviewed and talked to over the years have demonstrated. But let's cover those three first. So first of all, the obvious thing is education or training. So a lot of membership sites really are like a library, a database of your training. It doesn't have to be a course, though. And that's actually probably an important distinction to make. If you feel like you're kind of putting together one big course, then it's probably not a membership site. It's actually a flagship course. And I would recommend you price it as a flagship course, because like I said, you probably will make more money with that anyway, despite it not being a forever recurring income, which probably there is no such thing as a forever recurring income. There's, you know, three months, six months, 12 months, a year. If you're selling education, it's very rare for you to get multiple years, except for your very ultra, you know, people who love your work and just want to be involved with you forever. And that's going to be a very small group of your overall audience size. So educations first, I recommend you see this if it's a membership site. It's more about having a buffet. So it's smaller bite-sized pieces of education.

You know, maybe a 30 minute course here, a small handout there, but it's not this structured 20 hour video course, which would be a flagship course. And that can be anything. You can even take what you already have. You can take your podcast that you might've been giving away for free, put them all together into a section in the membership site of audio training. You might take some of the handouts you've created, maybe some of the stage presentations you recorded or workshops you've done. You might sit down and, you know, create a few new videos, 10, 20 minutes each long and put together a short course. Whatever it is you've got available, it could be a membership site. Right. Now, I also think it's great to pair education with coaching. Now, coaching is often the part that a lot of people love about membership sites, which is that chance to get some kind of interaction with you or another coach who might be part of your team. Now that can take all kinds of forms. It can be over the phone coaching, one-on-one. That's obviously going to be sort of a higher end membership site if you're offering one-to-one coaching as part of it. Usually it's group coaching. So it's like group webinars, group teleconferences. Some membership sites at the elite level actually include live in-person workshop experiences, but that really isn't the membership site. It's just something that members can come and be involved with. But there's definitely an overlap there. Coaching might simply be replying to posts in some kind of, you know, online interactive environment, which I'll talk about in a moment when I cover the third aspect of a membership site. Whatever it is, it's some way to get a direct response to questions that you are offering to your members. The third thing is community. That's the part where coaching could overlap with. So community is usually a forum. Sometimes it's bulletin board or something simple like that. But there's some way for the members of your site to interact with each other and with you, possibly with other coaches. That's where the coaching can be used. But community is really more about the members interacting with each other. This is about them wanting to be part of a group of people all working towards the same goal. And that's a powerful glue to keep a membership going. In fact, I think it's the strongest. Personally, I think you will have a longer term successful membership site with a powerful community than you will with education or coaching. I almost see education and coaching as gravy on top of the community aspect. The community aspect is what will bring people back every day.

The thing with education and coaching is they might just show up once a month for your coaching call or maybe they'll drop in at the beginning when they first join, download some of your training programs, but then never use your membership site again, in which case they're probably going to cancel pretty soon down the line. But if you have community, then a lot of people, now not everyone's like this, but a lot of people love to go in every day, ask questions, reply to questions. It's kind of a sharing, a learning experience. It's learning through teaching because members help each other as well. And because everyone's at a different phase, a lot of people who succeed like to go back and help those who are up and comers. So that's where mentors or leader style members of the community can surface, even without you looking for them. They just happen to be further down the track in their skill experience and outcomes so far, which is fantastic because they can become pseudo mentors without you needing to be present necessarily as the only teacher. There can be other teachers just within the community. But that requires a certain critical mass of a membership site, which is a really important point. I want to talk a little bit later about dealing with attrition and audience. So I'll leave that for that coming up next. But in terms of the three components, education, coaching, community, you can have one, two or three. Obviously, if you have all three, you're giving yourself the best chance to have a better quality membership site. So it's up to you. An important point to make, though. So I did an interview maybe a year or two ago with the Merrymaker Sisters down in Australia. You can go find the Merrymaker Sisters interview in my podcast archives at ejpodcast.com. Now, that interview, they talked about their whole journey, growing their Instagram following and then getting into selling information as well. They're in this sort of healthy lifestyle, very much about eating healthy. And now I think they're also into yoga and exercise, meditation. But when I interviewed them, they were telling their kind of beginning story. And it was very interesting because they launched a membership site that had a lot of these components. They had education. I think they also had coaching and they had community. And they also had basically recipes. So I guess you could call that education. So it was recipes to eat healthy, to create healthy food. And what was interesting, they talked about how over time it became very clear that the members were there primarily for the recipes.

They didn't really care about the community or the coaching. They just wanted a series of recipes on a regular basis. So if I recall correctly, the girls decided to double down on recipes and cancel the rest of the stuff out of their membership site. And in many ways, that was easier for them. All they had to do is drip release a series of recipes in an autoresponder. Kind of goes back to the early days with my Andrew and Daryl Grant experience from maybe six, seven, eight years earlier. Similar idea. In this case, the Merrymaker sisters discovered this is what the audience wants. Let's just give them what they want. We'll charge a recurring subscription free. There isn't really a membership here. It's not like a case of everyone's talking every day and they're having to go in there and lead. It's just, here's a new recipe. Here's a new recipe. Here's a new recipe. So you might find that that's a relevant example to your niche, but you don't know until you go out there and start figuring out what your audience wants. I know from working with my community, the people who I guess I could say are the heart and soul of my membership are more there for community, less for coaching. And certainly education plays a part, but they're coming in usually already somewhat familiar with my education, having studied my free stuff. It's almost like the community is just the next step up for them to demonstrate their commitment to their own process of improving. Sometimes a membership site, it's not about even them getting something specific. It's about them saying to themselves, I'm taking what I'm doing seriously. I'm going to spend money to join this support community, this membership site. And I know I've done that too. I've bought a course, I've gone through it once, and then I've learned from it. And I've never gone back to look at it. And same with membership sites. But it's the paying of the money that makes me execute what I'm learning. Sometimes it just makes me execute what I already know. I didn't even need any of the education or the coaching or the community. It's just the fact that I'm saying to myself, I will spend $50 a month on this membership site or $100 or whatever it is. And I'm going to do what I'm saying I'm going to do because I'm spending the money. It's like that extra push. And that's important. It's a very important thing for you to make available, especially as you grow a larger audience. Which is really the next topic I want to look at now. So we've covered already different models from courses and subscription payment plans to

one-time flagship courses and payment plans that have an end date to now looking at the sort of three different types of things you can have in a membership site, education, coaching, community. And you may not need all three. And sometimes you only need one core thing like recipes in the case of the Marymaker Sisters. Let's assume you've gone through that process and you've already got the outline for what you're planning on launching a membership site about. I want to help you now with what to expect after the fact. So once you've opened the doors and hopefully you've got some members in there, how do you deal with these things like cancellations? How do you make sure this is a sustainable business, an income stream that continues? So with a membership site, there's usually a couple of ways people release them. A opening campaign where you go to the world and do a launch and you have this new product. It's a membership site. You do the usual marketing campaign. I'm not going to go into a launch campaign course. That's a whole different podcast I'd have to do for you. Or you could check it out in my membership site. I have training on how to do a launch in there. If you're already a member of my Laptop Lifestyle Academy, you can find that there. But basically, you go out into the world and say, I have a new product. It's a membership site. This is why it's going to change your life. Join. And hopefully you get a bunch of new members because you have a deadline. You have some bonuses, all the usual launch stuff. And maybe you get 10 new members or 100 new members or 1,000 new members. Whatever you get is your starting point. And that's fantastic. You're excited. You do the number crunching. Oh, I've got 150 members, $100 a month. I've just created $1,500 a month or $15,000. I should get my calculator out and make sure I get the basic math correct here. 150 plus 2x to zeros is 1, 2, 3. Oh, see? $15,000 a month. Okay, even better. So it's simple math. And it's powerful math. It's 150 members paying $100 a month. And suddenly, you've got this $15,000 a month income stream. Which that's not a small amount of money. That's a life-changing amount of money potentially for a lot of people in the world today. I know when I was getting started to go from making a few thousand dollars from advertising income and affiliate income to suddenly having this recurring subscription income. I really, it did massively change my business, changed my future in a lot of ways because I went and released something that had in that first experience a recurring income source.

Obviously, it eventually became a course, like I said. So, yeah. Long story short, it's a big change. $15,000 suddenly dropping into your account every month based on your calculations. However, month one finishes and you've lost 5% of your members already. You've had people cancel before they got to the second renewal period. And suddenly, you've gone from 150 and you're down to 142 or whatever. You've had eight cancellations or something like that. It doesn't seem too bad. But you realize if you have eight next month, and you probably will depending on everyone's different. But usually, there is a consistent attrition. You should expect there will be a cancellation rate. Sometimes, it can be incredibly low, less than 1%. Sometimes, it can be incredibly high, 10%, 20%, 30%. As I said, my very first taste of this was, I think I was at 30% during the very worst months. And that's huge. Within three months, you've lost almost all your members. So, you've got to be careful. Sometimes, of course, 30% is one month. But then, the 70% left over are the serious people. So, the next month, you only have 2% attrition. So, sometimes, it's about finding the right people for your membership. But whatever the case may be, you will experience attrition. It's depressing, but you have to expect it. And in fact, you need to build it into your strategy. And that's where these next two points really matter. So, as I said before, you've got the two ways of selling. I kind of missed one. The first one is doing the launch campaign. You get your 150 members in, and it's great. But the other way, or perhaps the second way, you also make your membership available, it's not launch-based. It's just open through existing campaigns. It might even just be open publicly. You might have a sales page that's always live, and you promote it not through launches, but just, you know, you mention it in a blog post. You mention it on a podcast. You talk about it in an interview. And you get this trickle of new members joining. It's probably not going to be nearly as exciting or effective as a launch campaign with a deadline and bonuses. But you might find you get 1, 2, 10, 20 new members joining every month. And that's completely conditional to your traffic, the size of your audience. Some people never do launches. They just focus on having a membership site that they're constantly promoting through all their content. And they just have a huge audience. If you've got a million followers on Instagram, and every third post you're making mentions your membership site, you're probably going to get a consistent growth.

However, if you only have 20,000 followers on your Instagram, it's going to be very, very difficult to continue to grow a membership site. Because you're just not going to have a high enough conversion rate. And you don't have a large enough audience to keep that membership site growing to combat attrition. And that's really the point here. You have to get to a situation where your growth rate, either through launch campaigns or through just having an ongoing open membership site or a combination of them both. Sometimes people actually set up their launches just to happen every month. It has to be greater than your attrition rate or at least equal to it if you want to maintain the revenue you're getting. So, you know, subscription sites and membership sites, the way they're sold is as recurring income. The truth of the matter is it is a recurring income, but you've got this fluctuating base of audience size. You know, even the best of the best subscription companies out there, let's think of the biggest, most obvious answer, or maybe two of them. One is Netflix. Another one is Amazon Prime. You know, they're probably the two world's largest or least mainstream known membership sites. And as we know very well, every time we learn about earnings calls, when Netflix reports membership growth, it's all about how many millions new members that they join their service this year and where they come from. And or do they go backwards? You know, I was just listening to one about Snapchat reporting they lost three million of their users. Now, those aren't paying users, so it's not a membership site, but it very much is a similar idea. Netflix, since every member is a paying member, their revenue, their bottom line, their share price is dependent on that. Now, usually with a large company like that, they're always growing until they reach a saturation point. Then they usually have to find a new business model or a new product to sell in order to keep the growth happening. But you can't grow forever. You run out of human beings. So, in our case, though, you know, we're doing small niche marketing. So, you probably will go through months where you actually go negative, not positive when you lose members more than you gain. Some people, they're based entirely on a one-year launch campaign. They launch once a year, one open and close. You cannot join the membership site throughout the rest of the year. So, 11 months, it's closed. Two weeks in one month a year, it's open.

You get your 300 members and then 12 months later, you're down to 100 members, but you do another launch and you've got another 300 members or something like that. So, you know, it's a bit of a roller coaster. It could be a sudden jump and then a slow decline if you look at a graph of your membership. But it's really up to you to figure out what works based on your needs, your finances. But you really need to consider a basic membership. You have to have a core group that keeps the community going if your membership is about community. Now, I haven't touched upon some alternative methods of memberships, really not membership subscriptions. Like you might be selling software and something like an email autoresponder is technically a subscription product. You know, I currently have been paying the company Entreport a monthly fee to access. Well, actually, I pay yearly, but it's essentially, you know, I'm getting a slight discount to pay a year in advance. But it is a subscription product that's charged monthly and I pay for it because I need to use this software. Most of the time, what I'm talking about here with the membership site, it's really more about education, coaching, community. You're taking your knowledge, your expertise as probably as a coach or a qualified or, you know, a person who has value to teach others and you're putting together a membership site. So you have to be prepared for the fact, especially with education based membership sites and coaching community, there will be cancellations. It's not this is not a must have. This is a nice to have. If you're selling something that's more, you know, must have, like once you build a business, you have to have an email list. So it's very unlikely you'll cancel your email subscription. I don't think Netflix is a must have, but I think a lot of people on this planet certainly consider it one of the most important things in their life because it's a huge source of entertainment. I probably would agree with that. Netflix is pretty important to my downtime as well. So, you know, that has a very low attrition rate, a very high stick rate. OK, so I think I've covered the different strategies there on how to continue to keep a membership site growing. You've got launch campaigns or ongoing promotions where your membership site is always available. And you have to make sure that either your incoming slow increase in members is greater than attrition or each year during the opening campaign, you fill up enough that it sustains your membership despite the attrition you get.

One thing to factor here is in almost every situation where I've been coaching a person who is new to membership sites. This is where they get stuck. They underestimate how difficult it is to get enough people into a membership site to keep it alive because they think, oh, if I just get 10 members, it'll be good to go. And that's not a bad, you know, basic goal to aim for. But 10 members quickly become zero members in three months, especially if you have no new members joining. And those 10 members, you know, they're not enough to keep the community going. Maybe two or three of them will talk to each other, but it will very quickly die out. You know, I've had my membership sites have always had several hundred members, you know, as much as over five, six hundred members during the peak times. And even with that large a membership site, there's only a very small percentage will actually be active in a community. So, you know, these are my experiences. Every situation is different, but you'd have to expect, especially with education based membership sites, the participation rate will be low. You're talking 10 percent, maybe, of the members you have who are paying you money will actually actively communicate in some kind of community. You might get higher, might even get lower, but don't expect 100 percent or even 90 percent or 80 percent to be active. You might get that happening in the first month, but I can almost guarantee you by second, third, fourth month, there will be a drop off and you will, you know, there'll be that buzz that's gone. And you'll kind of feel like, wow, why is it so quiet here? These people are paying money. Why aren't they asking questions? Why aren't they communicating with each other? So that kind of leads me to one last sort of point before I wrap this up. But attrition is something you can combat. So obviously you have to figure out what are the main reasons why people are leaving? What are the drop off points? There could be all kinds of reasons. Like I said, my first ever taste of this subscription selling experience taught me that in this case with that particular product, I need to have an end date. That's why when I launched my most recent membership site, an actual membership site, the Laptop Lifestyle Academy, I made sure that it was never pitched as a course. Yes, there are some very short courses. There are many of them in the community, in the training section. That's one part of the overall membership site. You're not paying money just to get one big course. That's a flagship course. That is not a membership site. So, yeah. And I have both.

Obviously, I sell my blog mastermind training program too. So that was my goal. That was my strategy. That's why I aim to have the blog sales funnel include both a membership site and a flagship course. So when I built my membership site, I knew attrition would not be because of that reason. It wouldn't be because people were confused about it being a course. No, no, no. I had to be very clear that they're getting coaching and community as well as education. So when it comes to cancellations, there's different reasons. For example, some people cancel simply because they no longer are working on their business in my case. So sometimes people just stop doing what the reason they originally joined your membership site for. Some people, they'll tell you. That's the great thing about this. You can ask people why they're leaving. And sometimes you might need to have a bit of a discussion because they won't give you the real answer without a few very strategic but indirect questions about why they're canceling. Because some people will just say, oh, I ran out of money. I lost my job. Oh, I don't need this anymore. Oh, I love your stuff. But I decided I won't need it until next year. So I'll come back then. But they rarely come back. So there's all kinds of things you will learn as you launch and figure out your membership site. And then sometimes dealing with attrition is simply a case of changing the way you interact with your membership site. Like, for example, sending a certain resource at a certain time period might actually keep people in a program. So, for example, you might learn that there's a certain group of people, maybe the majority of your members, are struggling with one issue. And if you can just send an email that includes the one resource that really deals with this issue in the first week, then you help them move past that quickly so they don't cancel because of frustration. Because often that can be a reason for canceling a membership site. It's lack of results or that painful feeling of, I can't do this. So why am I paying money for a membership site when I'll never be able to do this? So if you can help get them to make some steps towards their goals, especially during those first few weeks of your membership site, that's more likely to keep them in there. Now, I could talk about dealing with attrition forever because I've created or used to have a course on membership sites. And I really talk a lot about the different things we do and we have done with my various membership sites and courses to deal with attrition.

Everything from surprise bonuses to timing of releasing information to sending things in the physical mail to getting people on the phone and having a conversation about what they're doing. There are a lot of ways to deal with attrition. I'm not going to go into them. Again, that could be an entire podcast. But understand there will be one or two main reasons why people cancel. If you can get on top of those, you can drop your attrition rate to a much more manageable level. Ideally, you get it below 10% and you get your new sales above 10%. So if your membership is 100, you're losing 10 a month, but you're gaining 12, you know you're going to win out. It's a simple mathematical reality. Or maybe you've got 100. You know every time you do a launch campaign, you get 200 new. And maybe you'll do two launches a year. Then you know even with a 10% or 20% attrition rate, you're always going to be kind of ahead of the curve. And everything comes down to traffic and conversion and marketing at the end of the day too. So you've always got both sides to deal with. Cancellations and new members. Okay, so I'm just going to mention software. I'm not going to talk about all the different options when it comes to running a membership site with software because that, again, is a topic in and of itself. It's huge. And frankly, I don't really know every piece of software out there nowadays because there are so many. I will tell you that to get started, you don't have to get a full-blown membership software. You can really start, like some of the examples I gave in this podcast, with just a drip release email sequence giving people information. My first membership site was a WordPress blog with a password over it. And then all I did was send emails saying, here's your lesson. Here's your next lesson. Here's your next lesson. We have a conference call coming up this week. Here's the link. Here's your next lesson. And so on. That was it. Really simple. Nowadays, you can get yourself something that's a little bit more robust. A lot of people will go to specific learning management tools like Thinkific or Teachable or Kajabi. They're also designed for selling courses. They're designed for teaching online. So definitely check out those for the more advanced. But you'll just spend way more time setting them up. So I don't recommend them necessarily if you have something simple to sell. If you're planning on really building something out over time, then you might want to start there and slowly add to it and improve it as you go along. Bearing in mind, WordPress, the blogging platform, can password protect content.

So there's no reason why your first version can't simply be WordPress plus email. And Thinkific would be the place I'd go to first if you want to check out a more advanced option for delivering education online and really presenting it with a modern style. All right. So I'm going to wrap up this podcast now with just, I guess, a couple of points going forward as you plan to release your own first membership site. Let me start with this. If you have some kind of audience already who really love you and it needs to be sizable. It can't just be 100 subscribers on your email list and 1,000 followers on your Instagram and something similar on Facebook and maybe 300 visitors to your blog per day. But you're not even sure if they're really humans or bots or whatever. To run a membership site, you really need to get a core group of fans and people who really love your stuff, especially for the community part. I mean, if you're just going to focus on education and there's no coaching and no community, you're just going to drip release content. And that works for your business, then you might not need as high a number because you can simply have 10 members to start with and you don't need them to interact with each other or interact with you to create value. It's just the content that you're selling them, the education. It could be a lesson a week or lesson a month, for example. But if you're going to have a forum, if you're going to have teleconferences, webinars where people ask you questions, you're going to have some kind of interactivity between people. You need a critical mass of people to be there. So I would suggest, you know, look at some basic indicators right now. How many feedback points do you already have? Are you getting a lot of emails sent back to you? How many downloads are you getting in your podcast? How many views are you getting in your YouTube? And by far, the most important thing, how many email subscribers do you currently have? Because if you were to send out an email today to your 10,000 subscribers and you know that of those 10,000 email subscribers, 1,000 to 2,000 of them will open your email. And then 500 to 1,000 of those will click the link in your email to go to whatever it is you're recommending. And in this case, if you send 500 to 1,000 clicks to a sales page for this new membership site that you've released, and you know you're going to get a 2% conversion rate to be conservative, let's say you get 500 people to go to a page and 2% of them join. 2% of 500 is 10. I think my math is right there. 1% is 5, 2% is 10. So you've got 10 people.

So you might have 10,000 subscribers to your email list, but you've only just sold 10 members. So you've got to look at your numbers and be very clear on what your open rates are, your click-through rates are in your emails, and then the number that you may or may not know, your kind of average conversion rate. And I like to be conservative. I like to say, will this succeed if I only have 2% of the people who reach my product sales page buy? Will I be able to sustain a community? So I know the last time I did a promotion for my membership site, as I'm recording this podcast, we got about 65 new members. That was without affiliates and no Facebook advertising or paid advertising of any kind, just promoting to my email list of people who've not bought my other products. So my house list, as I call it. I can look at that list and go, okay, yep, I know there's about 2,000 active people on that email list. Probably 500 of them will actually reach the sales page. Maybe more than that over the course of a campaign. You know, I'm sending obviously more than one email. So eventually we got to 65 new members. It's obviously a different story with a launch because you've got a deadline and you're going to have a better conversion rate because of that. If you're just having a forever open membership site, your conversion rate might be even far lower than that. So you got to be realistic about what it takes. I can't give you numbers. You might be able to thrive with 50 members. You might need 500 just to make it work. A lot of it depends on your personal goals, your financial goals, your current situation with your community, your audience. What I can tell you is if you continue to nurture your audience, continue to release great valuable content, grow your email list using whatever channels you have, YouTube, podcast, blogging, social media, there's an opportunity to continue to grow a membership site as well. You know, there are new people discovering you every single day. So the next campaign you do can bring in another 50 people and then another 50 people. So it is possible to build an entire business based simply on some kind of content marketing plan where you grow your audience online and a membership site as a recurring subscription income source as your main product. And there have been people who just use that business model and do incredibly well. And that could be you. And of course, that's one of the things I teach. So if you want to learn more about content marketing, I'm available. Get involved with my stuff, as you probably already are since you listen to my podcast.

And there's a lot more to learn. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the EJ podcast, a Yarrow solo edition on membership sites. A lot of information covered there. We'll put the links to some of the things I talked about in the show notes for this episode. You can go back and find that. And yeah, I hope you got some value from this. I wish you tremendous luck with your own membership site, your own subscription service. I do still think it is one of the most enjoyable businesses to have. I think anything to do with digital education is incredible. And recurring revenue, while it's not my number one income source over the last few years, it's been a pretty solid number too. And I guess I'd call it the most consistent. I don't have to worry about a launch. I don't have to wonder how much is going to come in. You can always go, well, there'll be this number minus attrition each month. And that's a nice thing to know that there's that stable revenue source. So if that's what you need, a membership site might be the perfect product for you to create. Add to existing product suite. Maybe launch as your first product. Whatever the case may be. Anyway, I wish you good luck. My name is Yarrow. You can find everything to do with this podcast as well as my blog and all my free training content at yarrow.blog. And yeah, I'll speak to you on the very next episode of this podcast. Talk to you soon, guys. Bye-bye. Hi again, this is Yarrow. I'd like to take a moment now to invite you to take part in my flagship course. This is my big training program for people who want to launch a blog as a platform for your entire business. So essentially, it's the main marketing tool you use to build your brand, to grow your email list, and ultimately sell your products and services, which is what I've been doing for over a decade. And all my best case study graduate students have been doing as well. I teach you how to do this inside my Blog Mastermind 2.0 course, which is available now if you go to www.blogmastermind.com. On that page, I break down who the course is for, what's included in the program, how you get coaching from me, everything you need to know to decide whether Blog Mastermind is the right next step for you if you're in a situation to take advantage of the power of blogging as a marketing tool. Once again, that's blogmastermind.com. I'd love to see you in the current updated version of the program. I'll see you on the very next coaching call. Here's a sneak peek for the next episode. The publisher came up with this really clunky subtitle.

And I said, this is a terrible subtitle. Why are you doing this to me? And they said, because we're alerting your audience that this is the book for them. And I was offended at that. I said, this is a book everybody needs to read. And they're rolling their eyes like every author hasn't said that to them before. Most people very much overestimate, number one, how much an author earns. And number two, how many copies of books actually sell. They had published that year 3,000 different titles. Only 200 out of the 3,000 had even sold 2,000 copies. So writing books is not the path to financial success. But that doesn't mean you don't write them. Thanks for listening to the Entrepreneur's Journey podcast, the original Entrepreneur Interview podcast established in 2005. For more episodes, head over to ejpodcast.com. See you next time. Thank you. Thank you.