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Need insight on how to make successful membership launch?
Listen in on how today’s guest did it and lear strategies on how to take your online business to the next level!
We have another amazing member on call this week, sharing her story of what got her started, why and how she did it, we have none other than, Nikki Massie.
Nikki is a staff writer for an international non-profit organization by day, food blogger and social media convener by night. She had started her online blog 9 years ago when she had gastric bypass surgery.
She wanted to help people who had undergone the procedure have and maintain a fulfilling healthy lifestyle by teaching them creative ways to cook their meals. Her audience swelled to 32,000+ followers, all of them benefiting from Nikki’s innovative and informative content.
Nikki recently launched to a segment of her wide audience, and had gotten 50 members. Her website, Bariatric Foodie, hosts her cookbooks, online blog and supportive community.
She has tried a number of ways to generate income through her website; such as selling advertisements, doing some brand relationship work, as well as awareness campaigns. She is now ready to focus on turning it to a more consistent and sustainable business.
We keep saying, “Success leaves breadcrumbs,” so we’re going to help Nikki follow the trail towards her online business dreams.
Join us as we help her maintain and encourage member engagement, plus some effective onboarding strategies to help get her members started.
Do you have the same struggles? Need proof that there is money to be made online? Then look no further and tune in to another information-packed episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, let us help you take it to the next level.
You Will Learn:
- Advantages of the membership model
- How to welcome your members into your community
- Nurture Sequence: How to keep them engaged
- What is onboarding and how it works
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Nikki’s Website
- Evan Burse’s Website
- Jeanette Stein’s Website
- Elementary Librarian
- Flip Your Life community
- Flipped Lifestyle Patreon page
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s can’t miss moment is taking some time to go over and see my 97-year-old great grandmother. There are not a lot of 36-year-old people who can say that they have a great grandmother. My family is a very young, which is good and bad in some ways. She is still here, she just start celebrated her 97th birthday, and we went over to hang out with her. The amazing thing is, she still lives at home.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast we help Nikki grow her weight loss support community.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. For those of you who may be new to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, our show works a little bit different than other podcasts about online business. We do not bring on experts or gurus or anybody promoting any kind of products or books. We bring on real members from our Flip Your Life community. Actual people out there building real online businesses online.
We talk to them about their successes, we talk to them about their struggles and we help them get to the next level. This is going to be an awesome episode because we’re bringing on another successful member who has just opened a community, and just launched. And we’re going to talk about what she did, how she did it, and try to figure out how we can make it grow even more, and we’re going to share all that information with you so that you can take your business to the next level as well. Every guest today is Nikki Massie. Nikki, welcome to the show.
Nikki: Hi, I’m so excited to be here.
Jocelyn: Yes, it is awesome to have you today. We are really excited to talk to you because you’ve been doing some really exciting things since you’ve joined our community. So before we get started, let’s tell the audience a little bit about you, your background, and what you’ve been up to online, and throw in there a little bit how long you’ve been doing this and what you’ve tried in the past.
Nikki: I am, by day, a professional writer for a non-profit organization in Baltimore, MD. But by night, or any other time of the day, for the past seven years, I have been running a community online which has been a food blog that I started about nine years ago when I had gastric bypass surgery. For seven years, I’ve been helping people learn to make alternate recipes and eat healthily in ways that are more joyful. When you think of a healthy diet, you think of, I don’t know, lettuce and tomatoes, and all sorts of unexciting, unappealing things. What I try and do, people who have had weight loss surgery help them cook creatively so that they can still eat the things that they like. They don’t like what we like, but they can eat them in ways that are healthier and more creative.
Shane: Basically, people have this surgery, they lose a lot of weight and you help them to make that sustainable, be more enjoyable, and not be miserable on this diet for the rest of your life. That’s your goal, right?
Nikki: Yes. That is very much so. The tagline of the main website, “Play with your food,” and we really take that to heart. We like to do creative types of things. We’re working with people in that capacity for a long time. But more and more, I found myself being drawn to the “head” side, the emotional side, the lifestyle side of living a healthy lifestyle for the rest of your life. Getting into conversations with my readers about exactly how once you lose weight you have to also maintain weight loss, and how do you do that? How do you keep your head in the game, and things like that?
I formed a really close relationship, I mean, I have a pretty big Facebook following. I’ve got 33,000 people on my Facebook, and I have a fairly big website following there. I started to wonder how I could connect the people on a deeper level; help them to carry out the changes that they made for the rest of their lives.
Shane: The last seven years, you’ve been putting this content out there, you’ve been building kind of a community, you’ve got a Facebook group with 32,000 members– that’s amazing by the way– that’s awesome. I know you just launched your membership and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. But how had you been monetizing that before? Were you selling courses or you just selling advertising? How are you doing that before you decide to build in like a membership? And then why did you switch? Why did you add that layer? You’re clearly growing an audience but that doesn’t always equal dollars. Tell us how you were monetizing before. Tell us what led to you pursuing some kind of membership?
Nikki: Before on the bariatric studio website, I was the regular food blogger. The way that most food bloggers make money is advertising. I sold advertising on my site. Most of them, direct advertising as opposed to Google Ads and things like that. I also did brand relationship work, like things like product reviews and giveaways and awareness campaigns for different plans that serves the weight loss surgery come easy. And I also have three cookbooks on Amazon. Those have been a pretty sustaining source of income for me over the years.
Shane: Basically, you’ve got a couple different revenue streams, selling ads, you’re doing things like that. You are generating some income of this. What made you switch or want to add a membership to that as opposed to going out and finding more ads, or writing more cookbooks and things like that?
Nikki: Well, there’s two reasons really, and one is a head reason, one is a heart reason. The head reason is because the income streams I had, they tend to be variable even with my best effort at marketing and things like that. So sometimes the books will sell well, sometimes they wouldn’t, sometimes brands come to meet the work, sometimes they wouldn’t. And so the gain from that is just very invariable, even when I feel like I’m on top of my marketing game, which is not that often. But I do recognize that the amount of income that I’m bringing in actually supports the amount of time I’m spending working on it. But then the heart reason is because within the weight loss surgery community, people tend to hit struggle, that very defined point, and we are such a cohesive community now. It may not happen on the same day of the same month for everybody, but we all hit certain milestones of struggle, and I went through those struggles. I see others go through those struggles, and I feel like I’m really in a good place right now. When I work with people who are a little bit newer out, I’m really passionate about helping them find their own sustainable way to live healthily and to actually enjoy the progress that they’re making because these folks or some of these folks have been obese and spending a lot of their time worrying about re-gaining weight, sort of missing the boat. I’m helping people to not miss the boat, to learn how to incorporate some simple ways of fashioning your lives around your healthy lifestyle, and your healthy goals, and really just enjoy life instead of worrying all the time, which is what a lot of folks tends to do.
Shane: That’s amazing. I love the way you put that in the head and the heart, because when I think about it, that’s what’s the power of the membership model. We did the same thing. We tried a lot of other ways to monetize. We even tried one-off product launches and things like that, which is similar to your cookbooks. But we found the same thing. It wasn’t necessarily just feast or famine, but it was definitely more or less. Your story reminds a lot of Evan Burse’s story from the cartoonblock.com because when Evan came to us, he had 400,000 subscribers on YouTube and 100,000 something followers on Facebook — I can’t remember the exact numbers.
It was a huge following, but he was only making a few hundred dollars a month. It was like, there was a disconnect there, of a consistent, reliable, predictable growing income. No matter how much effort he put into it, he couldn’t grow it. But then, he switches to the membership model, he launches his membership, he makes like 30 grand, and then he quits his job. Now, he’s living full time off of that. He put four, five years of work into something. He made one change, and it just made everything more safe and stable.
So, thank you so much for sharing that because that was an excellent way to just tell everybody a great way to think about why the membership model is important.
Jocelyn: Alright, so that’s some great background information about why you wanted to change to that model. Tell us a little bit about what happened when you decided to do it, and how you launched it, and what happened during the launch of the membership area.
Nikki: I’ve been thinking about the membership model for a while, but my big thing is, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was I was offering. I’m not a bariatric health coach, I’m not a personal trainer. I knew I had something because I have all these people who were coming to me all the time for advice and things like that, but I wasn’t exactly sure what I was tossing people. I had this huge challenge that I do every schedule where you basically it’s called ‘goal setting and accountability challenge’. My readers sort of describe as ‘The Accountability Olympics’. It’s this four-week challenge that’s lot of fun, there’s a lot of branding, and at the end, there’s this big grand prize award. I think this year’s grand prize is worth something like $1,000.00 from all of these brands, which folks are really encouraged to get into their processes and make goals, and be accountable for themselves, and others and things like that.
The more, I thought about it, the closer we got to that launch date for that challenge which was January 29, I thought, “There is going to be no more perfect time than this to launch this member site.” Because every year, when folks go through it, at the end, they’re always, “Oh, man, I wish we could do this off the phones. This is great. I really love having you in particular to support us.” I said, “Well, I have to do it.” I wasn’t exactly sure that I could do it, we will just place how many hours in the day. But with you guys helping, I really have these awesome things. We went through this four week-challenge, but every week during the challenge, I would do a Facebook Live on some sort of topic.
The last Facebook Live was the last week of challenge when folks naturally texted to be asking themselves, “Well, what’s next? What do I do? How do I keep this up?” I gave a Facebook Live actually focused on, “So you’ve done this big old challenge. What do you do next?” One of the options I gave was that, “Increased level of support, work your healthy goals, somebody to hold you accountable. Somebody to help you make goals.” I have created this community, and that’s really how I introduced the soft launch, so I have not launched it to… there is about 1100 people participating at this challenge. I hadn’t launched to everybody who followed me on Facebook yet. Out of these 1100 people, I gave them I think about 4 days to get in at a founding member rate, and I think I got about 50 people who has joined at the founding member rate.
Shane: That is awesome, that is absolutely awesome. What’s great is you haven’t even released that to your whole list, you haven’t even released that to your whole community. We only built a mini-sales funnel for this one challenge to get people from it to the membership. You haven’t even opened it up to the cookbook people or the other people who are following you for different segments of all those people that follow you. That is what is so encouraging here is, you had these people go through this challenge, which a challenge is a great way to launch a membership, by the way. And then, bam, you get 50 people to show up and pay.
Jocelyn: Yeah, that’s awesome. There’s so many people out there who are like, “Wow, I would love to launch with the 50-person list.”
Shane: If I could get 15 people or 5 people, some people are like that. The context here is you put so much time. You built audience, you’ve got that.
Jocelyn: And you got them to know, like and trust you.
Shane: Know, like and trust: that is where it all comes from. They knew you, they liked you they trusted you so when you said, “I’ve got an answer, here is your problem, here is your solution,” it was really a no-brainer for them to jump on board.
Nikki: I’m not sure what to expect. I listen to you guys’ podcast for a while. I have been doing so much. My business model for this point has been ‘charge friends to get people’. This is the first time that I’m asking people to give me money for anything, and I was really nervous. I didn’t know if whether the people were going to call me a phony. I just had to sort of swallow it all, and go for it, and see what happens. I figured either I’m going to go all in, and set it to be successful — or not going to be successful, but either way, I know that someone’s going to need this for the best.
Jocelyn: Yeah, you will be surprised how many people that that very thing holds them back just worrying about somebody being mad about something, and it sounds crazy if you think about it, because there’s probably not going to be that many people. There will be some people. And I always recommend for people to just write a little response. Just anticipate this in your mind: write a little responses about why you’re doing it, so that way, when you do get haters, it’s a lot easier just to send them that responses that you’ve already written. It is going to happen. It always happens but don’t worry about it because the few people who are mad about it, their voice just shouldn’t be louder than the people who love it.
Shane: I always think about this way. One, we build fears into ourselves. We’re like, “Oh my gosh, you worked so hard, for so long with these free-mium kind of model, and just selling ads.” That you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got all these people, and if I launch this product, they’re all going to unsubscribe from my Facebook group in one day.” We tell ourselves that. One, that’s not true. Then I start thinking to myself, like, “Okay, what if we could get a thousand people in their world and change their life? What if we could really take a thousand people with our products or brands or everything; everybody listening. What if we could really take a thousand people and change their life forever in the positive way?”
If you could do that, and you could make a living doing that, and then a hundred thousand people talk bad about you or didn’t like you were doing, would it really matter? You still changed a thousand people’s lives. You’ve got to be a magnet. You’re going to bring people in, you’re going to repel people, as long as you are doing good and changing the world, and making a living while you’re doing it, because you have to eat, right? Everything is okay. That is what I want anybody listening to hear from your story is, you swallowed that fear, and you did it. Bam! 50 people showed up. That’s not a tenth of what is going to come now that you’ve started this ball rolling.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and you deserve this, and that is why I wanted everybody out there to know that you can’t just keep giving and giving and giving. At some point you have to get something in return or you’re going to be burned out, and you’re not going to want to do it anymore.
Shane: Here’s the flip side of that, Nikki, is let’s say the model you’re currently doing, you said earlier, you wanted to make enough money to justify the time that you put into this, right? That statement usually I hear from people when they are at kind of a crossroads. It’s that decision of, “Do I do this, or do I not?” What happens is, a lot of people choose, “Okay, I’m just not getting my return. I’m done.” But then, where they could have done and launched a membership, and started promoting it, and making enough money to live on, and keep going and helping so many more people, but they just quit, and all those people who have had the surgery, all those people who need your help would not have gotten it, if you had kept going down that road of, “Is this worth it?” But you’ve changed something, and now you can see it’s going to be worth it.
Nikki: I have a good friend, a trusted friend that I talk over things with, and I told her that I was in fact at a crossroad. I said, I’m at the point now where time-wise, I either have to get better at making an income from this because I’m spending a lot of time on it. So, when you just said that, that’s what gave me the chills, because that was my next thought process. I was at that point that I’m spending way too much time on it.
Shane: What I’m proud of you for, and what I’m happy for you is like the first action you took was, you said, “Okay, I’ve got to go figure out how to do this.” You invested in yourself, you join the community, you kind of figured it out, you throw it together. Then you took action and overcome your fear. Bam, it worked. Now you can see. We always say in the community: every time somebody that sells their first membership. If you can find one, you can find a hundred and one, or a thousand and one. If you can find 50, you can probably a whole lot more than fifty. Now the ball is rolling, and man, that’s just awesome that you took action and you did that. Jocelyn and I just usually push people off the cliff. A lot of people know what to do, they just need someone around them to do it. Same thing with people in your community. They know what to do for their health. They just need a community to be a part of, and that is why they will keep paying month after month, year after year instead of maybe just buying one cookbook and then going away.
Nikki: Accountability is my thing. It’s the thing that I talk about in my community a lot, it’s what I’m building this community around, and I find that for me, my word is my boss. If I tell people I’m going to set this site to launch by the end of this challenge, once I said it, I was like, “Uh-oh, I just knew it.”
Shane: Right, exactly.
Nikki: Scary, that’s holding myself into actually doing it.
Shane: Yeah, and I always tell my kids when they say, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid,” and I’m like, “That’s okay,” because you can’t be brave until you’re afraid. If we were never afraid, we would never have a chance to be courageous. The difference is, some people choose to be brave, and some people don’t, and usually they choose that because there is other people around them that bolster them and help them move forward.
Jocelyn: Alright well, you’re obviously doing great so far, I mean you’ve had a lot of people respond, which is awesome. You’re working on growing this thing. I know that it’s still really brand new. With that in mind, what can we do to help you move this thing forward, and get it to go somewhere?
Nikki: Okay. Most of my questions are about, I have this membership community, what do I do now, sort of questions. The first thing that I wanted to ask you guys about is, that I know that it’s important to get your members off on the right split when they first join your community. I know nothing really about onboarding people to a membership community, and what I should do. I just wanted to ask you guys, how should I be welcoming people to my community help us get on, because I want them to go on from my membership community, recognizing that they didn’t go to other places, like Facebook, or Twitter or wherever, and recommend me because I want folks to know that they get taken cared of when they get to my site. What are some things that I can do to just onboard and welcome people in a good way that helps them get off to the right start?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I love this question, I think that it is really, really good to start thinking about that immediately because you want people to have a great first impression of your community, you want people to really feel that connection with you so that they want to continue not only for your sake, but for their benefit as well. The first thing I would do is on your thank you page, after someone purchases, I would put a video on that page that basically welcomes them and tells them how to log in. Give them very detailed instructions. On my Elementary Librarian site, I even go into my e-mail, pull up a username and password e-mail that I have sent to them, and show them how to find it, and how to log in. You will be surprised at how many people don’t understand those very simple, what we think are, simple steps. There are a lot of people who don’t know how to do that. It’s really important right away that you go ahead and get them involved, tell them how to log in, tell them what to do once they’ve logged in, tell them “Hey, come over here, and tell us about yourself. Are you new here?” Write a Hi-I’m-Jocelyn post, and let us know you are here. Tell them what to do, tell them a next step to do. What I do is I send an e-mail each day, or every other day or so on Elementary Librarian. So the very first e-mail I send, right after I send them the video on how to log in, is where to find lesson plans. I know that that is the main reason people are there at my site. If they know how to find the lesson plans and resources, they’ve gotten one thing that they’ve come for.
Shane: I always have an analogy for my head when we set up onboarding for someone. Imagine that you’re standing on a road. Jocelyn loves my analogies, don’t you, Jocelyn?
Jocelyn: Oh, they are great.
Shane: Jocelyn’s very logical and just tells things how it is. I have to have this big visual picture in my brain. But imagine you’re standing there. Your person’s in the dark. That’s why people search for answers, because they’re in the dark about something. So you’re kind of like the lantern holder. You can’t just walk up to that person, and say, walk on this road, blowout this lantern and walk back into the darkness. That’s not going to work. They’re not going to stay on the path, they’re going to get off the path. What you have to do for the first little bit of your membership is you’ve got to be the lantern holder, and you’ve got to move them forward down the path. It has to be linear, it’s gotta be straight like a railroad track. You’ve got to walk them straight to where you want them to go for the first part of your membership. You’ve got to tell them what to do, tell them what to open, tell them what to say. We say, “Hey, go introduce yourself, tell us about where you are, where you’re from, how many kids you’ve got.” Give them something immediate to do, no brainer, easy to do. Keep walking along that path. What happens then is, as you get them down the path, well, there’s your other members, and they all have lanterns. Eventually, you light the new member’s lantern, and he or she can kind of go out and find their own way. Your job at the beginning is to be the guide. Light the road for them, and tell them which step to take, exactly where to go, exactly what to do. For maybe the first week or two of their membership, and then create your content and your community in a way where it kind of takes over and then does some of that for you.
Nikki: Yeah, I think, I learned that e-mail setup that welcomes them. I have a video that comes in a second e-mail, and I was just looking at the Flipped Lifestyle community right before I got on to this call, and one of the members had noted that it’s really long, so he suggested making it shorter. I’m probably going to do that so people actually watch it.
Shane: Put that stuff on your Thank You page. Show them how to get the e-mail, show them inside your community because there’s only one thing you know will perfectly be delivered in your entire onboarding sequence: it’s the Thank You Page. E-mail filters can take your e-mails and throw them into spam. People can’t find them, but for sure, 100%, you know when they hit ‘pay’, they’re going to be redirected to the page that you chose. Make sure that your first bit of the road that you’re lighting up for them is accessible not through e-mail, but it’s right there in front of them. Like, “Here’s how you log in, and here is a tour of your community.”
Jocelyn: Yeah, and I love it how you mentioned the length of the video. It’s just really important. I like to make mine no more than 3-5 minutes generally because people just don’t have a very long attention span. Especially, when you just bought something and you’re excited, you want to log in and see what’s in there. You don’t want to watch a 20-minute video explaining how to do everything. That’s why I cut everything into bite-sized pieces. I send them one every day, every other day for the first few days, and I just tell them different things. For Elementary Librarian, I tell them how to post a forum post. A lot of people don’t understand that. I tell them how to get the most out of the community. Here are some extra things for you. These are things that people may not watch, but if they do, then they’re there for them. Another place you might put them is, if you have a community forum, go ahead and put those in the Welcome forum. I’ve done that on Flipped Lifestyle. We have a few different videos that show people what to do. I just pin those right there in that forum so that if they didn’t get the e-mails or maybe if they wanted to go back and revisit that, that they’re there for a long time. Another thing that I wanted to mention that you should do is make a nurture sequence for your members. That means you just send an e-mail every so many weeks, so many months, however you want to do it. A good way to start so that you’re not overwhelmed is to do one once every month, and just show people, “Hey, here’s a resource I think you would like. Here are some discussions that are going on that I thought you might find helpful.” Get people to keep coming back, keep coming back, that gets their engagement up and will keep them to be members for a longer period of time.
Shane: Go back to the lighting and the road example that I was using earlier. If you found this person on the road, you’re not going to say, “Hey, Jim, we’re going over here. But first we’ve to walk 200 yards down this way, then we’re going to take a left. We’re going to walk 300 more yards, we’re going to see a big tree, we’re going to turn right. Then, there’s going to be two dogs sitting on a corner. We’re going to turn right at them dogs. You’re not going to tell them everything about the entire journey. You’re going to say, “Hey, Jim, come on.” And you’re going to walk to the next step, then you’re going to say, “We’re going to take a left.” and then you’re going to walk to the next step. That’s how onboarding should work. It’s what is exactly the next step they have to take. Tell them how to do it, tell them what to do, tell them when to do it. They’ll go do it, and then you’ll tell them the next step after that. Onboarding is not throw everything about your membership in their face.
Jocelyn: That’s the thing. You just have to have consistent effort. It sounds like a lot but what I do is I write mine ahead of time so I write all of the so far I’ve got 6 months of Elementary librarian emails done. I just have my virtual assistant go in and pull relevant conversations but everything else is written. You could link to content you’ve already written. You can link resources whatever it is that you want to link to, just keep people’s attention. Keep them coming back for more.
Nikki: Yeah, that is great. Yeah, thank you so much because honestly it was tripping me up. I wasn’t sure exactly what to send, when to send it, so this is really helpful. Thank you.
Jocelyn: Well, awesome. So I think that that takes care of your on boarding question. What else can we help you with as far as moving forward?
Nikki: Oh, you started to get the second question that I had already, but I can already see that it is sort of old school. You know, login and logout. Maybe they will post something. Maybe they will post something, maybe they won’t. With my membership, I do have Community forums inside the membership and hopes are in them. But I guess I don’t know whether this is realistic worry or not, but I started worrying that people are just going to get bored. I am still trying to get things up and running. I do feel like I have a small cushion of time to get lots more content. I just worry about keeping people engaged, but I think that the suggestion that you made about pulling relevant conversations, and doing those e-mails and things like that, those sorts of things help. But I’m wondering if there is any other great tips that you guys have on your membership community actively engaged on what you are doing on the membership.
Shane: It’s one thing I tell everybody especially when they are starting their membership. It’s like the myth of passive income. Passive income is never truly passive. Passive just means you can work now. It will make money when you’re not working. But then you’ve got to come back to it and work some more. You can make money 24 hours a day on the internet, but you’re going to have to work some of those hours to keep it rolling. That’s what this is.
When you start a membership, I think people think, “Well I’ll just throw everyone in this room and they will all talk.” But it’s kind of like a fifth grade dance. At the fifth grade dance, everybody is standing along the wall for the first 10 minutes. And then finally some kid works his courage up and goes over and ask somebody to dance, and they go out and dance. Then the next one builds little courage from the last person, and then two people build more courage because there’s more people out there. When you start the membership, you were that person that comes off the wall first.
You are the leader. You have to be the example. You have to go get people and encourage conversation. You have to go tell them how to come into the conversation. You have to give lurkers things to lurk about. Eventually, what happens is, other people rise up in your community as it grows. They become the leaders, they become the second person off the wall, the third person off the wall. And then suddenly before you know it, everybody is dancing. Just like our community now. We have 50,000 conversation posts in our community. I promise you, me and Jocelyn did not write all of those. But first for the first three months of the Flip Your Life community when we launched our membership, we were in there every minute starting threads, every day. As much as we could to drive conversation. You’ve got to be the leader first, you’ve got to get people active as your community gets bigger. You will find people will rise up, they will start talking to each other, and it will become kind of a build momentum where it goes on by itself, but you be a leader right now and also, don’t worry about people not talking all the time. In any community, 10% of the people are going to do 90% of the talking, okay? There is going to be a lot of lurkers. Jocelyn is a lurker. She likes to lurk. I like to talk.
Jocelyn: Not in my community.
Shane: Not in our community, not the Flipped Lifestyle community. But in most communities that she is in, she just likes to consume the content. Don’t worry about those people because I think people think they have to talk if they are going to keep paying. That is not true. They have to be present.
Jocelyn: They have to feel that they are getting value and as long as you are consistently sending value, and as long as you are consistently talking to people in the community. I love it when communities are kind of small because that gives you the opportunity to really get to know people. Maybe set up some Skype calls with them, and asked them what they would like to see in the community. You don’t have to do this with everybody but maybe choose a few people, and say, “Hey I would really like to get your feedback!” and that is a great way to keep people engaged even if that they are not actively typing to every day.
Shane: Don’t worry about so much about, the type of engagement. Just worry about engagement. As long as someone is reading or writing in our community, either one of those is fine, just be there. Just come get the value. Take it to the next level. You don’t have to be the extrovert in the room. Some people are going to just read all the stuff. I think you are doing a great job. You are building this business kind of our challenges that you are famous for. Why not have a challenge especially for members only every couple months, maybe once a quarter, so people have something to aspire to. That is another reason that people keep paying. They look forward to something. It is not just about right now, today, what are they doing in my community. It is, “Hey, guys, in May, we’re going to have a challenge. And we’re going to prepare for this challenge like this in April. So, get ready, stay in the community, be accountable,” and people will go through that process and then we looking forward. So they are going to pay for three months until they get to the challenge. Do stuff like that to keep everybody moving.
Nikki: I love that idea, actually, because I do do challenges, and I love those, and I do think it is a great thing not only to keep people engaged, but real opportunity to help them with the actual things that I want to help them like building habits, that could send them challenges about building healthy habits, and just working on things together because sometimes it’s more helpful and motivating when you are working on something together.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I love that. I think that is perfect, especially for the niche that you are in. It is a perfect way to look at it. So love it.
Shane: That is a way to combine your marketing. You can say, “We’re going to start a challenge in May to drink more water.” You can do a mini challenge for three days the week before and then say, “All right, if you want to jump into the community for this member’s only accountability challenge, you know you just did this last week, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and you drank more water. Now, we’re going to continue it, but you’ve got to be in the community.” You can blend those two things together so now you’re having challenges outside, but then you are having a private challenge inside with even more in depth stuff, and members are not only going to come in, but there’s other members are going to keep paying.
Nikki: Awesome, awesome.
Jocelyn: I think this has been a great call today. You’ve have some great questions. We are super proud of you for putting yourself out there, for taking action, we love people who are action takers so we’re right in your corner behind you all the way, and thanks for being a member it has been really good so far. Before we had our calls, we always ask people what is one thing that you plan to take action on say, in the next one or two days based on what we talked about here today.
Nikki: I definitely feel like I need to take you guys’ advice, and light that lantern, and lead my mentors as they join me step-by-step. I think I am going to do that. I’m going to do some work on my thank you page, so that there is that welcome on what to do first and then I’m going to rewrite the emails that I have so that I am not trying to tell everybody everything.
Shane: That is an awesome action step. Make sure you go and put that in the community forums. As soon as we go get off the call, go into the Flip Your Life forums, put that in there. Give us a really quick outline, and we’ll help go through the process with you today and kind of see if you are missing anything. Actually, if you want me to, I will log in, I will go through your process once you set it up and we will see if we are missing anything as someone coming into your community.
Nikki: Well, thank you very much I appreciate that.
Shane: Alright. Thank so much for sharing your story with us today, Nikki, it’s just been absolutely amazing watching this. I love when people come in, and they do something, and then it just explodes, and thank you so much for letting everybody on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast listen in so that they can take their business to the next level as well.
Nikki: Thank you guys for being there.
Shane: Have a great day.
Nikki: Thank you.
Shane: Super call today with one of our Flip Your Life community members. We would love for you to be a member of our community as well. If you would like to join our Flip Your Life community. Head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can show you how to join today.
Jocelyn: It’s now time to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment. These are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 job. Today’s can’t miss moment is taking some time to go over and see my 97-year-old great grandmother. There are not a lot of 36-year-old people who can say that they have a great grandmother. My family is a very young, which is good and bad in some ways. She is still here, she just start celebrated her 97th birthday, and we went over to hang out with her. The amazing thing is, she still lives at home.
Shane: It’s just awesome because, when someone is getting up toward 100 years old, you just don’t know how much longer you are going to have to see them. We get so busy in our lives, that you know, through no fault of our own, you can’t help it that some people get excluded. I would hate to my kids would never have met their great-great grandmother, or never got to hang out at the end with their great-great-grandmother while she was still around. I love taking pictures when we go over to grandmama’s house. It’s like five generations or something crazy sitting there whenever she is holding Anna Jo, and Jocelyn and her mom are sitting beside her, and we have all these cool pictures of moments like that. It was just really good to get over and see grandmama. She still spunky, still tells great stories. I’m glad that we had some extra time in our schedule to be able to just drive over. She lives about four or five hours away, but it was cool to be able to head over there, and see her. We weren’t going to be able to make her birthday, so we decided to carve out some time and see her before that.
Jocelyn: Yeah, it is always a great time to see her. She is amazing. She still is very sharp mentally. She has a bit more trouble getting around these days, but she is doing really well for the most part. It is good to see her anytime I can.
Shane: Before we go we like to close every single one of our shows with from a verse from the Bible. Today’s Bible verse comes from Proverbs 11:3 and the Bible says, “Honesty guides good people. Dishonesty destroys treacherous people.” Make sure you are always building on an honest online business that’s full of integrity and you treat people the way you would want to be treated. That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We will see you then.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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