James Schramko here with my friend, John Lint, from 10XPRO.io.
Welcome, John.
Hey, everybody!
John, we've been answering lots of questions around memberships and courses,
and you have 10XPRO.io, which is a platform for handling putting your information online
in an easy fashion. That's very cool, because you can set it up easily.
Once you've hooked it all up, you can collect your payments.
So if you have any kind of knowledge, or if you've got access to someone who does,
and you want to put a course online, this is the platform.
But you do get asked the question a lot. I've heard this question float around, too, today.
We're going to tackle the question,
should you have a course or a membership?
So tell me about people who asked you this question, John.
Yeah, it's usually people who are getting their business started.
And, you know, they have great ideas. They have selected a niche, they have selected the market.
But now they're thinking, hey, what should I do first?
Should I do an online course? Or should I actually do a membership site?
And that's really the main question and they're not sure what they should do first.
So, there are multiple ways to answer that.
I'm sure that you're going to have your take on that, James.
What I say to people is really, there's no right or wrong answer to be honest.
There's not like, Oh, yeah, you should just do a membership site and never do an online course,
or you should just focus on online course and never do a membership site.
No, that's not the case.
I like to have both because they both serve different purposes.
Obviously, the membership site is awesome, because we want that continuity business.
We want to be able to have members who are going to pay us every single month or every single year,
and they are going to renew. That's a subscription model.
That way, it's great, because we know that we can expect X amount of revenue each month,
and we can grow our members and it's awesome.
But the online courses are also very powerful, because you can price them with different prices.
They can be lower-ticket items, they can be master classes, so like premium type of pricing,
and they will allow you to do different strategies.
The low-ticket items will allow you to get people on board.
And then, you know, so they can kind of test drive you and the way you teach.
The master classes will allow you to do awesome promotions,
like maybe you want to do a big launch and you want to have affiliates on board
or you want to do deals or different things like that, you know, so that is very useful for that.
The membership site is fantastic, obviously, as a front-end type of strategy,
but also as a back end. For example, they buy one of your online courses
and then the next logical step is to get more support, to get more community,
to get more coaching from you.
Well, that's where the membership site comes into play.
Then after the course, they can jump into the membership site.
So my answer is like, well, it depends on what you want to do.
If you just need to get started with something, you haven't done anything before,
well, of course, doing a one-page type of online course, which we call quick products.
Basically, it's like a page and you have maybe seven lessons in there.
It's obviously much faster doing that then setting up an entire membership site.
But it really depends on the type of business that you want to build.
I actually like to have both. And I think that every single online business
could benefit from having both because like I said, you can do different strategies with all of that.
At the end of the day, they are business assets
that you can kind of like, you know, set up in different ways
and leverage against each other which I really, really like.
Wow, I mean, that's a pretty cool answer.
I'm going to share my thoughts on that, too.
Now, we put together a little course
Yeah.
that takes you step by step through all the processes. What's the best place to get that?
Yeah, onlinecoursesystem.com.
That's where you and I have created, I think, one of the hottest online courses around
to teach you exactly how to create, how to launch and how to profit from your online course.
If you're thinking, Hey, I have a great idea. I'm an expert.
Or maybe you want to partner with someone who's an expert in a specific topic,
and you want to package that information into an online course,
then check out onlinecoursesystem.com because we teach you exactly our process
on how to create that online course, how to build anticipation for that online course,
how to set up that sales page, the emails that you should send,
what you should do during a launch campaign, and all of that stuff.
And then even we go out much further, we give you the tools,
we give you 10XPRO.io, we give you the swipe files,
there's a ton of cool stuff that we have put together.
And I'm really proud of what do we have done together. So, thank you.
Fantastic! So, my answer would depend on the audience that you have.
So, it's very similar to you, John. I think there's merit for both.
Often when people are starting out, I'll actually teach them to put together cheat sheet
or some kind of a small product that they could initially either sell for $10 or give away,
depending on just where they're at.
If you can't even give away the report, then it means you've got absolutely no audience
and you've got no compelling offer.
Yeah.
If you've already got an audience, there's a good chance you could sell a small product
for $10 just to nibble out into the market and see if you've got anything.
Yeah.
When I started out, my first information product was called XSP cheat sheet.
I didn't want to infringe the trademark of XSite Pro, which was a hot software tool way back.
You know, I've always had a sweet spot for the best online tools. And back then, that's what it was.
And we're talking about 2005, 2006.
Yeah.
Fast forward to now, the best tool is 10XPRO.io. So that's clear.
Now, I gave away a cheat sheet that helped people use this.
Initially, it was just a few lines of the product from a spreadsheet turned into a PDF,
and it was just a dozen pages or so. It wasn't big. And I sold it for $40.
Now, it expanded over time. And then it ended up being its own little membership
but it was a one-time fee membership. People would pay $79
and they'd get access to the products, they'd get continual updates.
And I started doing things like webinars for members and adding more resources.
And I was able to make affiliate income from suggestions.
And then I evolved into what I have now, SuperFastBusiness Membership.
About 10 years ago, that's when I was ready to step up to the major league
and help people in an ongoing scenario.
Let's face it, there's a little more work with a membership, generally,
because you will have to keep providing value for people to keep paying you.
Now, I do that by effectively releasing a new course each month.
I do a new training each month in my membership. And that is how I've sustained a membership.
So if you want to think about it this way, my membership is more or less a commitment
to keep buying my courses as I published them. So that's one way to have a subscription business.
At the same time, there will be someone watching this who has a really hot audience,
they're already established as an expert, and they may already have a book or products,
I would say go for a top-level subscription solution.
You could have a one, two or three or $5,000 per month subscription program
that you can set up in 10XPRO, where the main deliverable is your content,
and you, and the other members networking with each other.
It's effectively what I have at SilverCircle.com. That level membership can be very profitable.
It can be really enjoyable for high-level expert, and there's a lot less moving parts.
There's so many moving parts to putting together intricate courses
if you want to get excited about it.
Some people build out their entire course, before they even validate or test the market.
Now that can be hit or miss.
We cover a very solid methodology for researching your market before you ever do that.
But I would say if you've got a fantastic audience, you already know what's selling,
they're already asking you for solutions, so set up a higher ticket recurring solution
as your first product.
That's counterintuitive to what most people would tell you.
If you're just starting out, you don't know your audience that well,
you're not validated as the trusted authority in the market, and you just want to get ease into it,
start with a course. Just start with a small course.
Or even one step before that, some kind of a cheat sheet or product
which you can still set up on 10XPRO and get your feet wet. Learn how the mechanics work.
This will force you to write sales copy, it will force you to add your payment options into the cart,
it will force you to drive traffic to your offer. All of these essentials will be master skills
to help you scale at a higher level. So, that's my answer. You got John's answer.
You should be ready now to go and build your course or membership using 10XPRO.
And that URL again for the course, John?
Yeah, onlinecoursesystem.com. That's it.
Onlinecoursesystem.com, check it out.