Hey everyone! Jason here digital marketing consultant and in this video, you're going
to learn about the three best types of membership sites to start as a beginner. And when you
stick around to the end, I’ll be sharing the­ power of upsells and how you can dramatically
increase your profits along with the three keys to success when it comes to creating
a membership website. And the very first type of membership website
you should start with is a course. Now there are a lot of different courses you can make.
You can make small seven-dollar courses, you can make forty nine or a hundred dollar courses,
all the way up to two hundred to a thousand dollar courses.
Now, when I talk about starting a membership site specifically for beginners, the best
place to start is around the 25 to a hundred-dollar mark. You don't want to invest a bunch of
time and energy into creating a full-blown implementation program or course before you
validated the idea. And when we get to upsells, you'll see how you can actually use this to
piggyback and get paid to make a bigger course or a bigger product or service.
So why put together a membership website when you're just putting together a quick three
to five video course? Great question, simply because when you create courses in the future,
you want to be able to provide people with a centralized location where they can log
in and get all their information in one place. That's really the advantage of creating a
membership website for your digital courses, because there are lots of different ways you
can deliver a digital course without having to go through the headache of setting up an
entire membership website. For example,WordPress, actually allows you to password-protect single
pages. So, you could actually sell a course and then just give them the password to that
one page. But going through the extra step of putting
together an actual membership website, will actually allow you to test multiple different
types of courses without having to recreate a site every, or page every single time you
do this. So, there are two pieces of software that I recommend for this strategy.
Number one is thrive themes. It is a WordPress plugin. And “thrive themes” plus member
mouse or member press, will allow you to easily create as many courses as you want and of
course collect payments via member press or member mouse.
Now, if you're looking for a one-and-done solution you don't want to deal with the headaches
of WordPress, I totally understand that then click funnels is the way to go, because they
actually have your landing pages, sales pages, shopping cart, upsell down sell sequences
and membership site all for the low price of $97 a month. And when you compare that
to something like Teachable, it's actually a much better deal to go with clickfunnels,
because the extra features Teachable offers you for your courses really don't need when
you're just starting let alone even when you're selling thousand-dollar courses.
Now the second type of membership website you should consider putting together as a
newbie is a “monthly mastermind” now there's big advantages and big disadvantages. So,
let's go through the big advantages first. Let's start with the positive stuff. The positive
stuff is you don't have to put together of course.
You don't really have to put together anything before you start the membership website. You
can start your membership website via the two tools that I talked about. And either
weekly or bi-weekly, you just hop on a Google Hangouts, Zoom or a Webinar Ninja call, Webinar
Ninja is a paid version. The other two you could get away with using the free version.
And you just hop on the video and for thirty minutes to an hour you answer people's questions.
Nice and simple. Now of course, the downside is if you don't
already have an email list or you're just starting it can be really embarrassing to
put together this membership website and only have two or three people showing up. If you're
luckily to get that, right? So the best way to combat this is if you have
an idea for a course or a product in the future what you can do is with your monthly mastermind,
you can launch your mastermind, charge a monthly fee for it. And then each week or bi-weekly
whatever your schedule is, you can go ahead and start putting together the course that
you want to put together. And what's awesome is you can go ahead and
have the first part of your live stream or you could do a pre-recorded if you just want
to pre record all the answers to your questions both is okay, where you each week, release
a module from the course that you're building. That way even if no one is asking you questions,
you have a valid reason for people paying a monthly fee. They're getting little pieces
of this course and then that way you're getting paid you're creating your next course or implementation
program, and then at the end of those videos if you're doing it live you can answer questions
live or if you're pre recording, you can go through and actually just answer the questions
that have come in. And I’ve seen this work in multiple different
types of membership websites that I’ve been a part of. I've seen the course after it was
recorded live and I’ve been there while the course was recorded live and I got value
in both instances. So, it's definitely a valid way to actually start getting paid, before
you're putting together your course. Now, a quick note about Facebook: So, a lot
of people talk about setting up a private Facebook group and creating a private mastermind,
doing live streams in there all that fun stuff. It's great because you don't actually have
to set anything up, but remember that it's on Facebook, which means you don't own anything
you're putting there. And Facebook at anytime can change the rules
and Facebook at anytime can just ban it-- ban your entire community, which is something
that happened to, personally to me. I was part of a Facebook ads mastermind and one
of the co-founders who is a manager of the account had a account that he was managing
banned, so they banned everyone connected to that that account and all the stuff they
were admins of. So just like that the entire mastermind was gone. And it was a whirlwind
of them trying to figure out how to recreate it and they had to give a lot of refunds.
So, I definitely don't recommend doing the Facebook route and also of course with the
Facebook route people are actually going to be able to see how many members you have.
So if you only have four or five members, that's not a good idea to do a Facebook mastermind
group, because at least with a website, you can somewhat fake it till you make it with
how many customers or members you have inside of your site.
Now the third type of membership site you can put together, this is specifically if
you're offering any services. And so, what you can do is you can put together something
called a “client portal”. Now if you've been doing services for any length of time
you know, that clients always have questions and after two or three clients you wind up
answering the same questions, having the same phone call, sending the same emails, and so
what you can do is you can take all that repetitive question asking and question answering, and
put it into a guide or video or a series of videos and then put it into a client portal
and what's great is while you're trying to get clients to work with you, it can actually
be a value add. Say “hey, not only are we going to work together and I’m gonna do
x y z for you. You're also going to get access to our private client portal…” or library
or mastermind or whatever you want to call it and then you can send people over there,
where they can get their common questions answered. You can actually deliver work to
them if you want through the through the client portal and you can also have a series of videos
that help slot clients through the process of working with you.
And of course, you can also use a WordPress plugin if you decide to go with WordPress
and have a support ticket in there. So that way instead of people emailing you, they just
log in and submit a support ticket via that way.
So, I hope you got some ideas from one of these three. I definitely recommend it starting
with one of these three, because it is very quick and easy to get up and running with
them, and you're minimizing the amount of effort you're putting into investing up front
to make sure that you can validate your membership site.
So, if you're still watching this video, go and hit that like button. It's time for the
three keys to membership site success. And then I’ll get into the upsells and how you
can double or even triple your income by just adding a couple pages to your checkout sequence.
Now, the very first key to success when it comes to putting together a membership site
is, having one big result. Something that's really easy to forget. When you're putting
the other membership website is you have all this awesome content in there, right? You
have all these awesome videos, guides, pdfs or weekly live calls, whatever's inside there.
And so, it's really easy during the sales process to talk about all the stuff they're
getting, cuz it's a large library of content, eventually, right? But what really matters
to the customer is the result that they are going to be able to enjoy as a result of going
through your membership site. So even though you might help them do a lot
of things, you want to zero in on the really the one big results. So, what is something
that they want that they're not going to be able to get enjoy or do, until they go through
your membership software. And that's really where you want to focus in with your marketing
messages to get people into the membership, it's great you have a lot of other stuff in
there, right? We all do and you of course you want to do the best job possible for your
customers, but in terms of selling it, you really want to focus on that one big result.
So, it's very clear why someone is paying either a one-time fee or monthly fee for the
membership site. Now, the second key to success when it comes
to creating your membership website and making sure that it's successful, is knowing what
the term is. And so, this is something where subscription-based membership sites really
fall flat on their faces. And this is you need to know how long is it actually going
to take someone to get the result that they're looking for. If it's gonna take them three
or four months, then it doesn't make sense to charge them a monthly fee or an annual
fee for information that they won't need in three to six months, because they've achieved
the result that they want. It makes more sense to just charge a higher price one time. So,
it's very important that if you're looking for a subscription-based membership website,
that the subscription actually makes sense, in the context of what people are trying to
achieve. Now, the third big key to success when it
comes to creating your membership websites, specifically your content, is that it needs
to be better than everything else. Something that's just destroying people's trust and
membership websites is the fact that a lot of them don't actually offer anything more
valuable than what's already out there for free.
Now what's really great is one of the quick ways you can make sure that your content is
actually better and more helpful, is making sure that it's extremely organized and it's
excruciatingly detailed in the exact steps people need to take.
So, think of it like you're explaining how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
You want to have every single step of the process outlined and organized so people can
just go into your course or your implementation program and they can literally just go down,
step one, two, three, four, five. That's something that a lot of free content fails to do, because
a lot of free content out there content marketers-- what they do is, they just choose one piece
of the process and they go really deep on it, but it's hard for people to conceptualize
what the entire, kind of process looks like for them achieving their success.
So you want to make sure your membership website goes through the entire process and gives
them every step they need every tip they need along the way and that will ensure that people
are happy that they purchased your membership site, as opposed to disappointed that they
feel like they could have gotten the information for free.
Now let's go through the power of upsells. So,I have two examples here for you based
upon a monthly mastermind and a short course. So, when you are selling your monthly mastermind
or short course, during the checkout process, you can offer another product or another service.
Now something that's really cool here is if you're making this for the first time, what
you can do is you can offer something as a pre-sale, something that hasn't been made
yet. So in an instance of a small course, that's
maybe fifty to a hundred dollars what you can do as as an upsell you say “hey, by
the way we are working on putting together this massive implementation program, it's
x number of weeks and it's going to be… you know, x thousand dollars when it comes
out, but if you jump on the early bird list right now, you can get it for you know xyz
price.” And what's really cool is as people go through
the checkout process, you'll actually see if people want the implementation program.
And you don't have to do any other marketing, right? People can just vote yes or no with
their cash right there. And so if you get enough people in a short period of time like
two or three weeks max, get enough people who actually purchase,“yes,I want to purchase
this presale”, then you can go ahead and make the upsell, right ?
You can actually make the implementation program, of course if nobody clicks it only two people
click it the worst thing that happens is you have to send an embarrassing email saying,“hey,
actually we had to cancel the project here's your money back.” And if you're doing a
monthly mastermind, you can test business services, which can have a much higher margin
if you offer to do everything for them as opposed to a monthly mastermind that is doing
everything with them. So why would you even bother doing this? Let's
go through a quick example of upsell math and that will wrap up this particular membership
site tutorial. So, let's say you have a front end product
and it's $25. Well, if ten people go through it your average transaction value is well
25 bucks, because that what it is, right? Well, let's say for example, you try adding
in an additional product or service at $50 and then maybe a done with your a couple consulting
calls at $200.Well, all of a sudden if we just had one out of three people take us up
on the $50 offer and one out of ten take us up on the $200 offer, all of a sudden our
average transaction value has gone from $25 all the way up to $60. And that's just by
adding a couple of pages to our checkout sequence that's something that clickfunnels can do
and also Member Mouse can do. So, I sincerely hope you got some value out
of this video. And most importantly, you have some ideas on what to do with your first membership
website. If you're still struggling to come up with some ideas go ahead and comment below,
I do read and reply to every single one. And until the next video go and hit that like
button, subscribe for more digital marketing tactics and strategies just like the ones
covered in this video. And keep building the business you love.