Hello, it's Carrie here. And I want to make you this fun little video to show
you back in time to when I first launched the Members' Club. And the
reason I want to do this is because so many of you come to me asking how I
built the Members' Club, how much content Do you need to launch with? How
many master classes do you need to create a no so many of you see what I've
created and think that you need to create something like how the Members'
Club is today, with all of our master classes, and I feel like you know, our
Members' Club is nearly seven years down the line for when I first launched it,
and we have incredible masterclasses, we have worked with amazing experts like
Amy Porterfield, and Jada Salma, and Selena Sue and Stu McLaren, and all
these incredible people, Gabrielle Bernstein to create these phenomenal
master classes that cover a really wide range of topics. And the website looks
lovely, it looks beautiful, but I'm telling you something, it didn't look
anything like it looks now back at the beginning. And I think that so often, I
mean, I am just as guilty as this, we all do it, we end up comparing our
chapter one to someone else's chapter 20. And then we get so overwhelmed with
what we need to create and what we need to do, it feels impossible to just get
started. Today in the Members' Club, I was sat on a goal setting and planning
workshop. And I was asking everyone like, what is your number one priority
for me and so many people said they wanted to launch a membership site in
May and you know, get going with a membership site. Right now I'm doing a
lot around membership sites. My amazing friend and mentor Steve McClaren has
been in the middle of his free workshop series, we're building a membership
site. And every year he opens enrollment to his course tribe, which is currently
open right now. So there's a lot of people within this community that are
excited about building a membership site and have been part of like all the free
action that are going on or even joining tribe. But I just feel like so many of
us and so many of you out there are getting hung up on thinking that this
needs to be perfect that your membership site needs to be perfect that you need
to have tonnes of content in there. And, you know, it needs to look really
beautiful. It doesn't, it really doesn't. So, I want to take you behind
the scenes and show you how mine looked when I started out just to put into
perspective, how things evolve over time. And you the goal for you, if you
want to build a membership site or to profile, it could be anything, it could
be a course it could be an e commerce store, anything, whatever it is, like we
all start somewhere. And the key is that we get going with it. And it doesn't
need to be perfect. So with that said, I'm going to show you the My Little
attempt to a pre launch, I'm going to show you the email that I sent when I
first launched the Members' Club, I'm going to show you the first ever piece
of content I created for the Members' Club and what it looked like. Just in
the hope that this makes you feel okay. I'm good. I can do this. Okay, so let me
take you inside. The first thing that I want to share with you is this post I
put out now you have to bear in mind this is on the existing FDA website. So
it didn't look even this good back in 2013 when I put this out because the
website didn't look that good. So you have to bear that in mind. But this is
the post I wrote, I wrote about becoming a founding member. And I said we've been
working on something very exciting lately. The Members' Club, the Members'
Club is for women who want to achieve incredible things, and build successful
businesses and have fun along the way. And so wrote this post, I will link to
it so you can go and check it out if you want. And I put so basically said what
the opportunity was said who this is for and said we're nearly ready to go live
with it. And so we'd like to invite a small group of people to become founding
members. What does this mean? As a founding member, you will get early
access to the Members' Club. We've also got a president we want to post out to
you and we would love to organise a one on one Skype chat to get to know you
more. Find out what you think about the Members' Club and see how we can help
you more you can ask any questions you got to if you would like to become a
founding member, please pop your details into the form below. And we'll send over
all the details. This is the beginning of something exciting and I can't wait
to share it with you. So I just gave people the chance to be part of it from
an early stage and get excited about it. And this is something that all of us can
do when we're about to launch anything whatsoever is create that excitement get
that connection going with a small group of people who are interested in what it
is that you have to offer. So then once I had done that I put out there the next
thing is the first thing I launched with was something called the 30 days to
programme your mind for success. It was called my success month my success
bundle. Back then my I created a bundle of what I called a bundle of business
love every month
and the first month was successful and launched at the very end in November. So
success month was for the whole of December and then in January I was going
to release a new bundle which was going to be like a kick Start the year bundle.
Beyond that I had no politically what I was doing. So I was just going for it.
And I was not overthinking it. Because if I started to think about what my plan
was, I got so overwhelmed, and it made me procrastinate. So I just was decided
to keep it really simple. So I had one piece of content, that is how I
launched, there wasn't anything else. And so I'll share this page with you
too. So you can check it out, you can see the lovely launch video. I mean, it
was back in the day. And it's, Hey, everyone, it's Carrie here. And I am so
excited because the Members' Club is officially live, I am so happy to be
able to share that with you. Because over the past few months, I've been
working really, really hard on it. It makes me cringe, but whatever. And I
basically said, you know what it was I believe that in business and life
mindset and attitude and support and things, you can have all the skills and
talent in the world. If you don't believe in yourself, if you constantly
hold yourself back, if you focus on the worries and the doubts, chances are that
it's going to be hard to succeed. I actually think I ended up writing this
in my book, do word for word. And so I kind of wrote about, you know why this
was such an important thing for me and why I love it, and why I think everyone
should really invest in programming themselves for success. And then I said
over the next 30 days, that's exactly what we're gonna do. We've created the
programming mind for success bundle. Anyway, the point is, this is what it
looked like the website looked different like that, and but it's like joint
access here. And this is what there was. So there was a daily planner, that was a
success guide, there were affirmations printable, a checklist, a workbook, a
success, visualisation. So that's what the bundle consisted of. And it said
this bundle is only available in the Members' Club, when you join up, you
will get instant access inside of our members area. And so that is all it was.
And then on the 27th of November 2013, at 3:09pm. I did not know based boat
bearing in mind that the FAA audience is mainly from the United States of
America. I had no idea that the next day, the first day, the November the
28th, was Thanksgiving. So I launched this the day before Thanksgiving, I had
no idea I launched it to 18,748 recipients, the subject line was the
Members' Club is live, we had an open rate of 23%, we had a click through rate
of 5.2%. Yeah, so it was amazing. We got like, over 1000 clicks through to the
sales page that I was directing and do. And this is what my email said, Hey,
first name, I'm so excited to share with you that the Members' Club is officially
live, I have loved every second of putting it together. And I really hope
you enjoy it. So let me tell you a little bit about what's involved in the
Members' Club. I will link to this as well. So you can see this in the blog
post on the FDA website. But But yeah, and like says what it is. And I tried to
create some nice graphics, but this is what the website looked like that and it
was like success month. And and then you could yet you downloaded these little
printables. This is it. This is how I launched the Members' Club. But I really
wanted to show this to you so that you could see how simple it was when I got
started and how far from perfection. It was. And I was really proud of what I
what I put together, don't get me wrong, and I drifted my absolute best to try
and make it as good as I possibly could. But like, it wasn't that I had so much
content planned out, I didn't have it all figured out. in it. I was terrified
at the same time. And I just think sometimes you have to just go for it.
Like if you have an idea or something you want to achieve or a dream to create
success, you have to be willing to have the courage to just go for it and just
see what happens. I think for me, my top pieces of advice for you are one, just
get started. Just get started, stop overthinking this, stop trying to figure
everything out, stop trying to plan everything out. Just bloomin' take
action and go for it. The second thing that I would say is create visibility.
You know, for all of us in business, we have to be able to create visibility
around our businesses. Because if we don't then how the heck are we going to
sell anything? You know, if you've got no one listening to you, no one pay
attention to you've not built that know like and trust factor in with anyone
then who on earth is going to buy from you. But you have to create that
somehow.
I have spent the previous practically two years building up my audience. I'm
not suggesting that you need to spend two years building up your audience by
any means. But I had bought built up an email list of 18,000 people now you
don't need to build an email list of 18,000 people to have a successful
membership site or a successful course or a successful product launch. But you
do need to have an audience. You do need to have visibility. You need to have
visibility either on social media, on an email list traffic to your website.
Somehow, someway, people need to know who you are what your business is about.
And they need to be getting to know you and connecting with you. And building
that know like and trust factor they need to like you and trust you in order
to buy from you. If you are not putting the effort in to do that right now, then
it doesn't matter what you create, it was going to be so hard to get it off
the ground. So my number one piece of advice would be focus on creating
visibility for yourself, because I promise you if you can do that, and you
can go all in with that your future self is going to really thank you. And like I
said, you don't need a huge audience, our podcast episode recently with
Michelle roar, it's incredible. Check it out on the website, but she did we
dissected a launch that she just did, she made $16,000 in two weeks launching
a $50 digital product. And she did it with an email list of 3800 and an
Instagram following of 2000. So you don't have to create huge, huge numbers
here to create a lot a lot of success. But what you do need is an engaged
audience, it doesn't matter if you have 300 people, 3000 people, 300,000 people,
if you have an engaged audience, you can create success, and you will be able to
make money doing what you love. That is a fact. And so definitely take time to
create visibility. Number three is it doesn't need to be perfect. Like, it
really doesn't need to be perfect you. You just need to show up and get going
with it and worry about making it look good as you go worry about developing it
as you go. But doesn't need to start off being incredible, like, make it the best
you can possibly make it and leave it at that. And don't be afraid to put it out
there. And just to test it and see how does it go on. That kind of leads into
my fourth point of like, you've got to work with your audience. So work with
them, collaborate with them, listen to them. Exactly. Like for example, in this
founding member page, I was like saying to get let's get on a one on one Skype
chat so that we I can get to know you more. And I can find out what you think
about the Members' Club and see how I can help you more. Like you've got to do
things like that you have to be willing to reach out to your audience and have
those one on one conversations and connect with your audience. You need to
be like I've done so many surveys with my audience and with my community to get
to know them and to get to understand what is it that they want? What would
they love to see how can I help and serve them more deeply. And when you
work with them. And it's a co creation between you and your community, that's
when you can create something truly beautiful and truly successful, because
you're listening and you're paying attention. And that means when you get
started, it's even if you get started with one other person, one of the
clients, one of the member, one of the customer of your course, or whatever it
is, reach out to that person and have a conversation with them, get to know
them, get to understand them, you know, use the opportunity to really connect
and go deep. And if you can do that you will create so much more success. And
let's be honest, it's so much easier, because then we don't have to come up
with all the answers ourselves. They're telling us the answers. So listen to
them, give them the opportunity to speak up, and then listen and go with the flow
with it. So I hope it has been inspiring in some way just to see like what it
looked like for me at the beginning. Because I do think, you know, we do get
caught up in the social media and seeing what people have created when they're
like so far down the line. And then we think crap, that's where I need to be
out to put anything out there. And the answer is we do not need to be there. We
need to be exactly where we are right now. And all we need to do is the best
we can do right now. And that is good enough. And we need to give ourselves
permission to just show up as ourselves where we're at and go for it doesn't
need to be perfect. It can be super simple. And we can create so much
success if we do it and just get started. That is literally how I got
started fumbling my way through this fumbling. I'm always fumbling. But I am
willing to fumble because I want to show up in great success. I want to live my
best life, I want to see what is possible. And the only way I can see
what is possible is if I give myself permission to fumble.
So fumble and enjoy the imperfection and how liberating it is to just go for it.
So yeah, leave a comment and let me know what you think. And also, I'd love it if
you just I don't know how but I don't know maybe tag me on Instagram at Female
Entrepreneur Association, or post in the Facebook group if you're part of the
Members' Club and just take a screenshot like there's a there's a website called
wayback machine. And if you go on the Wayback Machine, you can basically look
at what your website looks like. So if you've been doing this for a few years
and you you've got like a few generations of your website, go back to
like when you first started it and post a screenshot of what your website looked
like originally and then tag me because I would love to see and I think it'd be
great that everyone else to see. So if you tag me on Instagram or if you tag me
in the group, we can all share them or we can all see and it will be really
cool. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. And I hope it's inspired you to
realise you just have to go for it. That is how we all create success. We have an
idea, and we just do it. So get out of your own way and go for it because you
can create so much success is yours for the taking. So just take it. I really
hope you enjoyed this. If you happen to not be on our email list, then
definitely sign up because every week I will send you a new piece of content and
your podcasts and your interview video. Something to really inspire and empower
you to build a business doing what you love. So definitely subscribe and I will
see you next week.