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Just like us, Paul’s online membership started small. He started the way we did, building brick by brick. However, with our help and following the Flipped Lifestyle blueprint, he made a 70% jump in membership in a matter of months. In doing so, he hit our first goal of 100 memberships joining his online community.
Meaning, he now has enough monthly income to solely rely on his online memberships to provide for him and his family.
The ‘lowdown’ on Paul Clifford:
- Specializes in online live streaming, online church training ‘ProPresenter’
- Started working for himself in 2011
- With Flip Your Life, grew his online membership by 70% in a matter of months
What You’ll Learn:
- You can be a solution to any problem (5:35)
- God-Given experiences stack up (7:37)
- How memberships are more feasible (9:47)
- Adding fuel to the fire (21:19)
- There’s a light at the end of the tunnel (24:11)
- Use marketing as a launching pad (29:01)
- Grow + expand to help others in their mission (39:50)
Show Notes
100: ‘The Magic Number’ to make a living for you + your family.
Paul is the king of persistence. He has literally been growing his online business brick by brick since 2014, when he joined the Flip Your Life community.
While he stayed steady at 25 members for a while, he set a goal to double that number by the end of 2019.
While he fell just short of that goal, through advice from the Flipped Lifestyle, in 3 months, Paul’s memberships grew 70%, now keeping 100 members a month!
Take what you’ve got or create something new, to create a content area.
Curate a blueprint or path for people to follow with your content.
Build some kind of community, this can be Facebook groups, member calls, or anything like that, to keep your members connected. In that, make sure to position yourself as the leader. Lead people through this process over months to help get them to the next level.
This is how you truly begin building your online business, your memberships. Taking yourself and this community you are now leading into the next level, together.
Go from your foundation to adding fuel to the fire.
Answer your own, ‘what do I do next?’
Marketing is your launchpad. Do this in a way that makes sense for you. For instance, let’s take Membership Masters. We know from experience how easy it is to sign up for a course, leave it in your inbox, and never to be opened. We decided, the best way that we, ourselves, remember to do something is to have it stare us in the faces. That is why, we send out a physical paper newsletter to doorsteps each month. It’s kind of like our monthly Christmas present to our members. It holds us all accountable and keeps us all on schedule, to make sure we grow as much as we can.
Set a goal. Paul’s goal was to grow his memberships numbers by 50%, from 25 to 50, by January 1st of 2020. He ended up in the upper 40s, but ultimately got more than he expected by fueling the fire through his own promotions and marketing. Since February of, he has maintained 100 monthly members, and growing.
By finding out what works for him and applying our strategic membership blueprint, Paul took his static online business and is now thriving.
Once you find that prolific promotion, every day is a raise.
That is what truly makes a Membership Master.
Give yourself a promotion every single day. Look at your new members not only as win-wins, but as your raises.
Switch your mindset from numbers to dollars. By doing this, each new member becomes your daily ‘hey, I just got myself a $20 a day raise,’ not just ‘I only got 3 new members.’ This way, you see your online memberships as your wins in the bigger picture. Each one, getting you closer to that 100 member a month goal, that allows you to quit your job and make an income for you and your family.
Remember: you can’t give yourself daily raises like that with core sales, coaching, or even services. But, you can with online memberships.
‘The king of persistence’ found his momentum and took his online memberships from foundational to thriving.
By following the Flipped Lifestyle blueprint, going from brick by brick to finding your own promotional offers that tailor to your online community, is 100% attainable. That is how you get and keep your own 100+ monthly online memberships.
Transcript
Jocelyn (00:02):
Hey all, on today’s podcast we celebrate Paul’s 100th member.
Shane (00:08):
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 that figured out how to make our entire living online. Now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let’s get started. What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Super excited to be back with you again today because we have an amazing success story that we are going to celebrate on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast today. We have got a member who has crossed the one hundred member milestone in their own online membership. Our guest today is long time flip your life community member Paul Clifford. Paul, welcome to the show brother.
Paul (00:59):
Hey, glad to be here.
Shane (01:01):
I am super glad to be here because you sent me a message last week that made me jump for joy. Cry a little tear and just celebrate and be super happy. So tell everybody why are you here today, Paul. What are we celebrating with you today?
Paul (01:16):
Well, I think we’re celebrating that I have a hundred paying members to my community.
Shane (01:23):
Oh my gosh. That is the magic number baby because all you need is a hundred people to pay you every month to make a living for your family.
Jocelyn (01:29):
Which doesn’t mean we don’t want more.
Shane (01:33):
It doesn’t mean don’t want more. But man, there’s something special about getting that one a hundred members.
Jocelyn (01:38):
And y’all think he’s joking when he says he cried?
Shane (01:40):
No, I really do. I seriously cry every, every time somebody has a success story that sends it in and then something big happens for them, I just break down like emotionally. We’re going to get into the whole story because your story is fascinating and you are the King of persistence by friend. You’ve been crushing this for a while now and a clawing and scraping ahead to get 100 member mark. But tell everybody about you. Tell me about your background, where you’re from, and tell them a little bit about what you do in your membership.
Paul (02:11):
Yeah. So I do online church tech training specifically ProPresenter, but as we’re recording this, we’re still in the quarantine lockdown and you might know that churches aren’t allowed to meet. Well, another thing I do is live streaming. So that’s at least been part of it that a lot of churches have been like we were afraid of technology last week and now we have no choice.
Shane (02:41):
Oh no, that’s amazing. That’s how you begin like a surge of members lately.
Paul (02:43): It’s true.
Jocelyn (02:44):
And I think this is going to affect all different aspects of our lives. I think it’s going to affect businesses because they’re being forced to think of things differently. It’s affecting churches because they’re being forced to think of things differently. So I think there’s going to be a lot of exciting things to come out of something that is really negative thing. There are going to be some positives that come out of it.
Shane (03:04):
So you teach people this software called ProPresenter. And this is like the industry standard in churches, but tell everybody a little bit about what ProPresenter is and like what it does because I don’t know if people would have heard of that outside of that space.
Paul (03:19):
Yeah. So imagine PowerPoint only all the things that annoy you about PowerPoint don’t exist. So ProPresenter… A Volkswagen beetle is a car, so is a Ferrari, but they are totally different. PowerPoint is like a Volkswagen beetle. It will get you from point A to point B. But ProPresenter, it does it so much better. It does it with style. And its so well created that there are secular organizations that are using it like the US house of representatives for example. It’s big.
Shane (04:01):
It’s an amazing piece of software. But I will attest to this, like Jocelyn and I volunteer our kids at our church in the children’s service. And our church it’s almost like a little mini sanctuary for the kids’ church. You know what I’m saying? So the kids go upstairs and we stayed downstairs. But when we volunteer up there one of the things that sometimes I will help do, and I usually there’s a kid running this thing because none of the adults can figure it out and they’re sitting there, they got their screens up, the kids will run this ProPresenter. It’s very intimidating when you first look at it because it’s not laid out like you’re used to like with PowerPoint or Google slides or something like that. And you actually do a lot of sound and tech work. Like actually go into events and do stuff like that. So that’s how you use this software now you’ve just started teaching it to other organizations, correct.
Paul (04:53):
Yeah, so I’ve been volunteering at my church since 2000. Probably, I don’t know 2007, we switched to ProPresenter and I was the guy that was in charge of our satellite campus. So I’d go in every morning, set everything up and go from there. I thought it was just this easy software, anyone could figure out how to do it in like five minutes. But I kept getting questions from people that couldn’t figure it out. And I guess it’s just that I think the same way that the programmer does or something.
Shane (05:35):
So you figured it out and that’s always the sign that you should start teaching something online is when people in real life start asking you questions because you are now being perceived by your circle as the expert in that topic. And if there are people locally asking you questions, there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people online typing in those same question. So anybody listening to this podcast, that is a great example of when you should think hey, maybe I should teach this online. Okay, go ahead, Jocelyn.
Jocelyn (06:08):
Yeah, and I feel like things that come so simply to really anybody, there are a lot of other people that it does not come simply to technology is something that comes pretty simple to me because that’s just the way that my brain works. I’m a very logical person. Computer technology stuff is very logical, so it just clicks with me really well. And so everywhere that I’ve ever been, like when I worked at school, I was always the building’s technology person by default. I just always got nominated for that position and to me it’s like so simple. But then to other people they’re like wow, you’re a wizard or something.
Shane (06:46):
And what’s amazing too is when you have mastery over a topic, you have all these unfair advantages of working with different tech and different sounds and different audio and different videos, something like that becomes like much simpler. I think that’s why we actually were able maybe put a few of the pieces together early in our online journey too Paul because like Jocelyn was good at tech. She’s a nerd. And I actually had written some HTML in the past. I decided back in my 2003 I wanted to learn how to write HTML code for it like a month. I changed interest really fast. That happens. And I kind of knew that. And then I’d worked with a lot of audio and video too in football because we have to edit highlights and like, I would edit videos to show the clips to the kids and I would do the highlight video every year and we would put sound on it.
Shane (07:37):
So it’s funny how those unfair advantages just from our God given experiences stack up as we’re starting to get into this online world. And like you can realize like that’s what gives you the advantage. So, Paul, tell me a little bit about when you started your online journey. Now, what year did you actually start building a website? Or like when did you discover like the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and when did you decide, hey, I think I might want to do this and kind of jump into the community?
Paul (08:05):
Yeah. So I started working for myself in February of 2011. And I had no idea what I was doing. I just was like I’m going to try this and I’m going to try this. And so for a while I had a freelance gig. There’s a race horse race course here in Lexington, which is right outside of called Keeneland. They monitor the horses during the race in real time. And my job two months a year was to press the right buttons on the computer so that that would happen. And so I did that and that was helpful, but that was only two of 12 months a year that I had money-
Shane (08:53):
Kind of work more months than two, you know what I’m saying? You need to stay warm, dry and fed all year long, not just for two months.
Paul (09:01):
Yeah. So I was like whatever I could do to make it until I could discover what I was supposed to do. So I’ve been podcasting on and off since 2005. So there’s a podcast consultant named Dave Jackson who’s in Ohio. So I was listening to him one day and he was saying that there was this really great guy named Pat Flynn. He was like a business dude. So I listened to his podcast and I’m like, well he seems pretty cool. Seems pretty family focused. He’s not as with the F-bombs, or scary V. So I could listen to him. And then one day there was this couple that was on from Kentucky and I thought well, Kentucky, I’m from Kentucky.
Paul (09:53):
And I listened and one was a librarian and I thought my kids’ school, their librarian just left. Maybe it’s to say it wasn’t, but that’s the kinds of thoughts I had. And so you guys had a lead magnet that was like how to make an ebook with PowerPoint or something like that. So I downloaded that and I started listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast pretty early on. In fact, I think I’m a little behind, but other than that, I think I’ve heard every single episode. So when you launched the course, I’m like, if only I had more money, I could join the course. But then you not long thereafter you switched to a membership. And I’m like, I can afford that money for the membership. The course was outside, but the membership I think I could do. And so that’s how I got hooked up with you guys.
Shane (10:54): That’s amazing.
Jocelyn (10:55):
You have been around a while.
Shane (10:56):
You’ve been around a while. I mean because like if you heard us launch the course, that was probably in 2014 or something like that. And the original course, we hadn’t created it yet. We just made an outline of what we thought it should look like.
Jocelyn (11:11):
A few people are here, few people were listening, let’s just throw it out there.
Shane (11:14):
So I think the original course was like $400 but the reason we did that is because we were going to spend all of our time for two months creating that course so we wouldn’t be able to work on anything else.
Jocelyn (11:26):
And we really did like every single day we talked to those people, we ask them questions, what do you want? What questions do you have? It was a very labor intensive thing.
Shane (11:33):
So we sold two or three beta groups. I can never remember, I’ll have to go back, maybe too. We’d sell to beta groups and then we decided, wait a minute, we were school teachers. Like we couldn’t have afforded $400 either when we first started out. So when we were school teachers, we couldn’t have afforded $400 either. And we thought wait, we can’t keep charging $400 for this. Because our mission is to help real families who have bills and who have children to feed and who have gas that they have to put in their car to get to their jobs until they can quit their job. So that’s why we said hey, let’s do a membership model.
Shane (12:12):
Let’s make it a monthly cost. Let’s split this out where people can go out and afford it and they can get the education they need. And we just put all the courses in there, all the forums in there, all the member calls in one place. So that people could like go out and do this. Because man, when we were looking back in like 2012 when we started every course you had to buy, it was like a thousand dollars, $500. And like we were selling everything and we ran out of stuff to sell to learn how to do this. And we’re like that can’t be the path. That’s why we went to the membership model.
Jocelyn (12:44):
So you jumped in with us when we started the recurring a model, which I believe is in ‘15. And what were you doing at that time?
Paul (12:52):
Well, so I had some courses. I had some books. I did NaNoWriMo, the national novel writing month only. I did nonfiction back in 2010. So I had that, that I thought when I launched, I’m going to sell a bunch of books, but not so much. So I had all these kind of a few dollars here, a few dollars there, a few freelance opportunities here, a few over there. Introductory course to ProPresenter and all this stuff and it wasn’t making a living really.
Shane (13:36):
All right, so this is the general path that people follow when they come into the flip your life community. You either take what you’ve got or you create something new and you create a content area. You curate a blueprint or a path for people to follow with your content. You build some kind of community around it, Facebook group, member calls, whatever it is, and then you become and position yourself as the leader and you lead people through this process over months, and help them get to the next level. So you start building out what would become your online business, your membership or whatever. Do you remember when you sold your first membership? Do you remember that?
Paul (14:17):
I think it was 2016. Yeah. So it’s 2020 now. So like four years ago, I was really excited. It was a yearly membership that I sold for $97.
Shane (14:31):
Hey man, first you got to sell one. If you can find one, you can find 101 or 1,001.
Paul (14:37): It’s true.
Jocelyn (14:38):
And correct me if I’m wrong, but I can remember many times, like inside the community we would have like very lengthy discussions about this and that and the what should you offer and what should it look like and why isn’t this working? And I just seem to remember having those like recurring conversations.
Shane (14:55):
Jocelyn calls them talk people off the ledge conversations. I sold one where are the other 101 Shane always talks about.
Paul (15:05):
Well, I mean I even had those thoughts as recently as the look your life event. So I did-
Shane (15:12):
You are talking about 2019, right?
Paul (15:14):
Yeah. So September, 2019 as we’re recording, it’s April, 2020. So not that long ago. I had 25 members that I’d gotten to over the previous three and a half years. So I’d gotten to 25 and I started to think maybe there aren’t any more people out there.
Shane (15:35):
These are all the churches that use this software in the whole world. Like getting 25 people over three and a half years, Paul is literally the definition of brick bye brick, but not just brick by brick. You’re like going out and carving your own bricks and baking them in the sun. Each brick one by one. And I can see why that could be. That is frustrating. And we’ve seen this happen many times where people like man, it’s just not working man. It’s just not working.
Jocelyn (16:05):
Like we know that they have something, we know that there’s something special in them and if they can just tap into the right thing, they can make it work.
Shane (16:14):
So you’re at 25 you’re at the flip your life live event in Lexington in 2019.
Jocelyn (16:18):
That was in September. And I’m still a little bit upset because Paul doesn’t like my country music.
Paul (16:31):
That’s right.
Shane (16:31):
You got some problems here. But like, rock and rock. Paul is a rocker. That is for sure. So what was the tipping point? What happened after Flip Your Life Live that literally poured gasoline on this little fire? I mean for your membership. And just a few months.
Jocelyn (16:48):
Well and also talk about what happened when you were there. Like was there something in particular that really just sort of lit a spark for you or like people that you met? Like tell us a little bit about the actual event and then after.
Paul (17:01):
Well, I do remember that we had a session where we were supposed to go meet in groups and discuss our stuff. And in this group, three or four other people and we’re down in the lobby of the hotel and I’m right by the restaurant and I’m just discussing stuff with some of the people that are there. And I only have 25 members. I don’t get it. Why is it I keep hearing like it felt like I was in the middle. There was a contingent of people that were just starting and they had a lot of hope. And then there was another contingent of people that had over a hundred members, some 200, 500 members.
Paul (17:49):
I actually helped out with the AV the next week. Of, a Flip Your Life member who had enough members to fill up that hotel just in her niche. So I’m just like, why am I stuck in the middle? Have I chosen poorly? Do I not know what I’m doing? And one of the people said, “I think you’ve got everything ready. It’s just ready to go. There’s some piece that needs to push you over, like something that you need to get to you don’t have yet.” And I thought, surely there is. And so then as part of it Shane offered a special price for what was then called prolific monthly, which is now called Membership mass.
Shane (18:37):
Look at that. He’s holding up the coffee baby. He’s got the last month’s edition in hand. That’s awesome.
Paul (18:43):
So like every day I look at this thing and Shane says do that. Like the first month I did like a couple of things and I stayed above churn. And so I’m like, I got two members, but I lost two members. Well that’s better than going down, which is probably what I would have done. And then the second month I did more of the things that Shane said, so October I did a couple of things, stayed above churn. November we had the Black Friday and I did everything that Shane did. And I think I got to like 35 members and I’m like-
Shane (19:22):
Oh that’s big time. That’s like 50% growth almost. You know what I mean?
Paul (19:30):
And I’m like, then I thought what would I have done without Shane’s input? And I said, okay. So like Thanksgiving I would have sent out an email and I would have gotten one or two sales and I would have been pretty happy with one or two sales. But I was at my in-laws for Thanksgiving, and I’m sending out the emails. I turned my brain off.
Jocelyn (19:55):
People are like, what are you doing? Like it’s Thanksgiving. Why are you writing emails?
Paul (20:00):
Well I love my in-laws, but sometimes I need a little time away. So when my father-in-law gets on one of his rants, I’d just excuse myself and I’d write an email just to calm down. And then I’d send out the email and then I’d run back up because my wife’s childhood home is in the basement. They’ve got like a split level house, and the family rooms up right by the kitchen on the top floor. So I’d run back up to the second floor and go, I just sold another one, and everyone seems happy. And my father in law was distracted from his rant. So it was a win-win for everyone. So I’d be like, I need to do more of this.
Jocelyn (20:56):
And so let’s for the benefit of other people, that’s kind of explain what Membership Masters is.
Shane (21:01):
So basically when people launch their membership, they go from this building stage of creating the foundations and the fundamentals and the courses and the community and all the infrastructure that you have to have in place.
Jocelyn (21:15):
In other words what you had when you got to the event.
Shane (21:19):
Exactly. Like that’s what it’s for. Like that’s what the Flip Your Life community is for, is to help you start building, grow your membership. Get those first couple of members. But then the problem, what people run into is wait a minute, how do I get noticed? How do I get attention? How do I add fuel to the fire? And that’s where marketing comes in. But marketing is hard, copywriting is hard, and there’s so many variables at play and so many things you could do. It can become very overwhelming. So the biggest question that we would get immediately when anyone would be like, there’s my membership is, what do I do next? If I just had somebody that will tell me what to do every single day to get and keep more members, this thing could blow up. I mean, if I got one member a day for a hundred days, that’d be a member, a membership. So we started membership masters. It’s actually a calendar that tells you what to do every day.
Jocelyn (22:12):
And it’s literally a paper newsletter.
Shane (22:14):
It’s a paper newsletter. We mail it to your door. And the reason that I do that, the reason we chose to deliver this specific thing by paper is because just like Paul just held it up on camera, if you’re watching this on YouTube, he’s got two issues in his hand now. They’re multiplying like gremlins. You got it wet. Whenever you have something physical in your hand staring you in the face, you can’t ignore it. And like if you’ve engaged with it and you’ve took a note on it and you’ve highlighted it and it’s laying beside your computer while you’re setting up the promotion, it’s like I’m sitting right beside you looking over your shoulder saying, Paul, do this on Monday. Do this on Tuesday and on Wednesday you’re going to get and keep more members.
Jocelyn (22:55):
It’s real easy to download your PDF-
Shane (22:58):
And put it in the box. How many courses have you bought that you’ve never even logged into? You never even watched them. I’m guilty of this.
Jocelyn (23:08):
I have like three or four right now.
Shane (23:09):
I bought one. I bought a Frank Kern sent an email out and I just had my wallet every time that guy sends me an email. But I bought his course and I’ve not even looked at it yet. I haven’t even logged into it. I haven’t even opened the emails to deliver it and I’m like, I’ll watch that later. I want to get that now. But like you can’t do that with that newsletter, and it’s like Christmas. You got a present every single month for Shane like in the mailbox. So like, so that’s what Membership Masters is. And what Paul’s saying is there’s usually four promotions a month, give or take inside of membership masters and they’re all time-specific. They’re all relevant to the exact month that’s going on, so it’s really relevant in your audience’s mind. So the first month is like, I’ll try this one. The second month is like, wait a minute, I’ll try a couple more. Whoa, Black Friday dropped to 35 members, let’s go. Then all of a sudden he starts saying, maybe I should read this every day.
Jocelyn (24:02):
And the cool thing is like it tells you what to do every single day. Like you get up and you do the thing. Like you don’t have to think. You opened it up to the calendar, you do what it says to do.
Shane (24:11):
And every month I also put in an article to improve your membership sales funnel. That’s one thing that me and Jocelyn are really good at is building million dollar membership funnels, right? Because we’ve seen hundreds of different funnels and we know what works and what doesn’t work. And then we also focus on retention too. Johnson puts in retention tips because keeping members is just as important as far as getting them. So tell me what happened. So Black Friday hits, we go into the new year, we go into 2020 but you’re like, I’m all in, I’m using this thing every day. So tell me what happens, how in three months you just exploded 70% up to a hundred people.
Jocelyn (24:47):
And one of the things that we did at the event is we set a goal for the end of the year. So what was your goal?
Paul (24:53):
Yeah, so my goal was to get 50 members by January 1st. And this isn’t a fake out. I might do one of those later, but I actually didn’t get to 50 members. I was like in the upper 40s so still that’s a lot better than it was. It’s almost double. Not quite. So I have some hope that I could do it-
Shane (25:18):
There’s light at the end of the tunnel and it wasn’t an oncoming train as old Dave Ramsey says.
Paul (25:23):
So I thought if you aim for the stars and you land on the moon, you’ve still left the planet. So I was like that’s pretty cool. I don’t know. This is something that helped me just very recently, not even something that you guys did, but yeah, this might help someone else. There are two kinds of people and I am the guess kind and I’ll define that. And then there’s another kind that’s the ask kind one of my daughters is an ask person. And what that means is some people if they want something they’ll just ask for it. And if you say no, you say no. There’s another kind of person that’s a guess person. They will guess if you’re going to say yes and if they think there’s any possibility you say no, then they won’t even bother to ask. But it could have been that you would have said yes and they guessed wrong. So I think Shane is an ask kind of guy.
Shane (26:22): You think that?
Paul (26:24):
And I think that’s why you guys are so successful is because Shane goes ‘hey, I’m going to see if anyone wants this.’ Jocelyn’s like, ‘so you’re going to annoy everybody’ and then you ask it like a bunch of people buy it. So a team you’re great like that.
Jocelyn (26:42):
I have to say that I have come around some of his ways and I think that he’s come around to some of mine too, so I think we’re kind of better because of it.
Shane (26:48):
Yeah. It’s like salt and pepper. Well what do you say?
Jocelyn (26:53):
It’s kind of like you’re the salt that you’ve put a lot of salt on which is not healthy. And then your pepper, you don’t need as much. You still need a little bit.
Shane (27:02):
That’s right. And like if you put too much salt on it, it kill you and make it taste bad. So Jocelyn like keeps me from pouring the shaker too hard. And then she comes in and just dust it off. Everything’s perfect. You know what I mean? So what happens after the new year? So you missed your goal just barely, but you feel that hope happening and what happens in January, February and March.
Paul (27:21):
So January it just stayed solid. Like I did everything and it just stayed solid. But then I thought, I’ve heard that there are some times that there are seasons where it’s like running through tar. It’s just impossible to make any progress. But I didn’t lose anybody. Had I not had all these new people come in, I’d be down like 10 or 15 members. So the fact that I’m staying even is pretty cool. And then just with some of this stuff in mind, Superbowl happens at the beginning of February and I’m like, I’m going to do something crazy. I’m going to send an email out that says for the week or two or three days after the Superbowl, however many points to lose her scores. That’s your new membership if you join. So I did and I think it was 21 points. The losers got, I’m not a big football guy. Sorry Shane. But I did watch the Superbowl and all the sudden I get like 10 new members and I’m like, so $21 a month isn’t a lot, but I can still think of something to do with $210. So I did that and then I followed Membership Masters after that.
Shane (28:52):
So it basically, that’s what I love to hear actually about Membership Masters is it’s like a ramp or a launching pad. I tell people, you don’t have to do everything I do.
Jocelyn (29:02):
And you don’t even have to do it exactly the same way.
Shane (29:05):
But it’s like you can bend it to your niche and like it’s there to spark ideas and they get you thinking. And so you’re not having that marketing writer’s block where you’re just sitting there like, what do I do? How do I get a member? Well, here’s a bunch of ideas. It’s almost like a conversation where you can start coming up with these new ideas yourself and then when you’re stuck, you go back into the newsletter, you do a promotion and like that’s exactly how you’re supposed to use all the information and ever since Masters, that’s a genius sale by the way.
Jocelyn (29:31):
Yeah. I love what you did. Like you took something that was relevant for most people and your target market and you said hey, I’m going to find something to talk about in February. I don’t really have a lot to talk about right now. So guess what, the Superbowl Is coming up. Let me talk about that. And I love that that’s what marketing is. It’s finding a way to reach people every day.
Shane (29:51):
And also too, like I know how this story ends, so it’s like I can tell the future here in the story a little bit. I can feel the way you tell this, the momentum building because it is addicting. Once you figure out that prolific promotion every day is what makes you a membership master. That is what it is.
Jocelyn (30:11):
And people are going to hate you for it. You may get one or two emails that say, I hate you. You’re a scam artist, but for the most part, people are going to be really nice. They’re going to be really receptive.
Shane (30:19):
Yeah. The thing I tell Jocelyn every morning is how am I going to give us a raise today? I want to raise every day, and you can’t do that with core sales. You can’t do that with coaching. You can’t do that with services, but you can do it with a membership. You can get a member every day. If you get a $50 member tomorrow, that’s a $50 raise. If you get 10 new members of $50 that’s a $500 a month raise. Walk into your boss and say, hey, will you give me a $500 a month rise? They won’t do it, but you can go out every day and market and promote you can get, I remember every day. So tell me about the momentum in March and all of that and how you got to a hundred.
Paul (30:57):
Yeah, so March starts building even more. I get into the eighties, I’m starting to see it. My wife and I had a little bit of a disagreement because I’m an optimist. In fact, I’m a like a crazy optimist. Like that’s part of why I haven’t given up because I just know that it’s going to work. So I’m a crazy optimist in that way. So we had this discussion and I had a like a sale where after last month it was the dollar trial. So I did a dollar trial and then after the trial it was a $50 a month, which is the full price. So it wasn’t like a dollar trial to a discounted price. It was a dollar trial to the full price. And so I got a few and then she’s like well yeah, some of those are going to cancel.
Paul (31:53):
And I’m like okay negative Nelly. Maybe they are, but I’ve got more than I did before and I don’t think 100% of them are going to cancel. And then I did another thing where it was like a free trial. And that got me into the nineties and I’m like, well, I’m going to approach this from her perspective. I sound like I’m brilliant art. The marriage counselor told me to approach it from her perspective. So I said to her well, some of them will probably cancel. And she’s like yeah, but you’re doing good. So then we get into the nineties, and then all this Covid-19 craziness hits and the new membership masters comes in and Chain says hey, you need to do like a crazy offer, one that people have no choice but to take. And so I did a two month trial and because I’m in the church niche.
Paul (32:54):
The sale was supposed to start like two days after Easter. But I’m like look, I’m in the church niche. I need to get these people some help for Easter. So I said okay, I’m going to continue the two months free at after Easter up until like Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week. But if you were to pull the trigger early, I’m going to knock 10 bucks off per month for you. And some people were like, well, I don’t want to spend that $120 when I can get the exact same thing. So I got up to 97 members. After all that was done before the two month free trial ended. And then Shane sends me a message, how’s it going? And that was on the day that the trial ended. So I’m like I got 98. Then I go to get some coffee or something.
Paul (34:00):
I come back, I got a 100 members. And I was really excited and I did what I would have never done before this because I would been afraid that I was annoying people. So I said, now that another email, same day, second email. I get like two or three more members. Then I with an hour left, I send out one final email-
Shane (34:27):
Three emails in one day.
Paul (34:28):
Three emails in one day.
Jocelyn (34:30):
And did everyone on your list then subscribe Paul.
Paul (34:33):
No, like I had a couple of people, but I guess they probably weren’t going to buy anyway. So I do that. And what’s really funny is when I was in the eighties I got an email from someone was like, you’re such a scam, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like well, 80 some odd churches don’t agree with you. Joliette then I got another email that said, your content is good, but I don’t like your delivery. Well, the 6,000 people that subscribed to me on YouTube, disagree, delete. And now I’ve got 113 members and they’re paying me. Grandfathered in some of the old ones. So I’ve got some that are really cheap. But now instead of the $50 a month price being the aspirational price that I hope someday someone will pay, probably over half of my members are paying me the full $50 a month price.
Shane (35:38):
So proud of you dude. I’m so proud of you man. And it really just chokes me out every time I hear it because like you said, stuff that you made me cry because you recorded me a video and you and you sent it in. Like you were talking about earlier how you were a freelancer and you were just hustling and a couple of months a year you had some money and a couple of months a year you didn’t know what you were doing and you said something that really like profound, like it just made me totally like collapsed Johnson was in there when we were watching your video. You said I used to worry about being able to have enough money for my family and now because of my membership, I don’t have to worry about that anymore because it is all growth from now, Paul. You just keep stacking man. You just keep helping churches. You just keep helping people and like your mission is so important because you’re not just teaching people how to use an amped up PowerPoint, like your helping people deliver them the message of Christ every single Sunday.
Jocelyn (36:39):
Some of those people that you’ve been training like they probably have never broadcast anything
online. And think of how many additional people they were able to reach with their services.
Shane (36:49):
Think how many churches on Easter Sunday when the whole world was shut down and we couldn’t go to church? I think how many people just because your membership maybe we’re able to turn on that presenter one time and reach hundreds of people that I wouldn’t have been able to before.
Jocelyn (37:06):
And we will never know the full impact of all that. But just the thought of it is pretty overwhelming.
Shane (37:12):
Like not only are you taking care of your family, but like your throwing your stone in the pond and your ripple is hitting all those churches and that ripple reaches out from that pulpit or that Facebook live and hits hundreds of people every single week and everybody wins because you decided to start asking for the sale. You know what I mean? And man, it’s just amazing and we’re just so proud of you. And I’m so glad that your wife’s a believer now. What’d you see the members coming in?
Paul (37:47):
Yeah, So you said that one of my members, one of my probably in the seventies or eighties I remember just a couple of months ago she joined because her church their head tech person was leaving and she knew that they were leaving at the beginning of March. Bad timing. This wasn’t something she knew then. So she found me and joined up and then Covid-19 hit. And so she’s like, Paul, what do I do? What equipment do I need? We need to live stream, blah blah blah. So I helped all that because one thing that I didn’t mention is I write a monthly live streaming article or a magazine in the church tech niche.
Paul (38:38):
So that was a little bit more money that I built up over time. And so I knew all this stuff that I was just waiting for someone to be interested in and now a lot of people are interested in it. So I helped her and her church was 200 ish members. Now they haven’t started meeting in person again yet because we haven’t reopened the country as we’re recording this. But she sent me a screen cap of her Facebook live after the first week and her 200 fish member church had 1200 engagements on their video.
Shane (39:18):
Wow. That is unbelievable.
Paul (39:19):
Yeah. The pastor is like I am so glad we authorized you to spend money on equipment. This was brilliant.
Jocelyn (39:28):
That’s a perfect testimonial for you. Like you need to do a test-
Shane (39:37):
That’s because like what your real value proposition is use ProPresenter so you can grow your church. You know what I’m saying? Like it’s not just so you can deliver a speech or-
Jocelyn (39:50):
So it looks pretty when people come in on Sunday.
Shane (39:52):
Exactly. It’s so you can grow and you can expand and you help people with their missions. So man, I’ll tell you what, if anybody’s listening to this and you’re not freaking inspired, I mean, like you start in 2016, you grind your hustle, you bake the bricks, stack the bricks, one of the bricks falls off, you bake another brick and you just keep going until you build that momentum and that system. And then all of a sudden you’re not only taking care of your family, what’s your impacting other people in the world? And like you can’t do that anything else. But the membership model, it’s not possible. Well, there’s a lot of other things you can make an impact, but the ripple that you can send out by starting and leading a membership community, not only for your family and your family’s future and your family tree, but for other people, it’s just Epic Paul.
Shane (40:39):
And I just know that this is not going to stop here. I already see a thousand members in the future. Like it’s going to happen. And you’re going to go out and grind it. You’re going to go out and do it and your reach man is going to go so far. It’s going to be incredible. So tell me this, what are you planning to do next? How are you going to get to 200 members? Like what is your next big thing that you’re thinking? Or is there anything, any place you’re stuck right now that we can help you take that next step?
Paul (41:08):
Well so one thing that I’m doing is I’ve got a free Facebook group. Actually the company that created the software, they reached out to me in October and they said you’ve got a Facebook group, it has like 9,000 members. Should we partner with you to expand this and then it can be a Facebook presence for us. And I said yes. And now as of today, we’re at 19,167 members in the Facebook group.
Shane (41:48):
You got to put all your… any email you write, you need to paste it in that group too.
You know what I’m saying?
Paul (41:54):
I’m doing like Facebook lives. I’m doing advertising to webinars because when they sign up to the zoom, I’ve got their email address. So I’m doing that. I created the lead magnet at flip your life live that I’ve been kind of putting off doing. It might not work well it turns out it worked better than all my other lead magnets.
Jocelyn (42:16):
It’s funny how those-
Shane (42:19):
[crosstalk 00:42:19] but there was a session and then you took action and then it worked really good.
That’s amazing when you take action, isn’t it?
Jocelyn (42:25):
I have one more thing. I just want to know if there’s somebody out there who’s listening to this and maybe they’ve tried things. Maybe they’ve also been at it since 2016 they’ve made a little bit of progress, but it’s just not catching on. Like, what would you say to that person?
Paul (42:40):
Well, I’d say first off, there’s probably just some little thing that you’re missing. And so you just need to find that. Don’t give up. If people will pay you money, there are more people and we have the internet. So surely out of the billions and billions of people on the internet, you can find a couple hundred that will pay you for your stuff and you’re worth that. The Bible says actually st Paul said it and so did Jesus. So it must be good that the worker is worth his wages. It’s not wrong to make money. It’s wrong to steal money. It’s wrong to take advantage of people. But if someone has a problem and you can help them solve that problem in less time than they could do it themselves, you should get a little money for that. Then you could take that as a seed and build on it and find the thing that you’re missing may be you or someone that just guesses if people want something or not.
Paul (43:50):
And if they don’t, you don’t even ask. Maybe you need to ask. And if they say no, they say no and you go, no big deal. Maybe that you need to add a live component. Someone else was offering a live version of these propers in our classes and I’m like, they’re doing that live. I’ve already got all of the information, I’m going to do it live. And so I’ve gone through all that. I’m on my second go around. So I added something else to my membership to make it more valuable. And really what I was missing was the marketing piece. And so for me, membership masters was the way to go.
Paul (44:32):
And maybe that’s what you need to, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s something else, but just keep trying. Don’t give up. If you’re making money even a little bit, you’re probably on the right track. You just need to tweak something to get to where… Now my membership more money than I have ever made before. I have a spreadsheet. It’s telling me that I am making more money than I have ever made per year in any other job. And I’m not a millionaire. It’s a decent middle-income-
Shane (45:09):
But you flipped your life. You’re living that flip lifestyle, baby. You ain’t got to be a man little flip lifestyle. You got to take care of your family. You got to have that contentment and that comfort and time and freedom. And you’ve got all that man. So, listen dude, I appreciate your story. I’m so glad that you came on the show. I cannot fully expressed how excited I am that you’ve got a hundred members and Paul, I really do believe that you’re onto something really big here. And we just really appreciate you for coming on. And sharing and just being so vulnerable and transparent. And that may be preaching a little word the day, man. So thank you so much Paul for being on the show.
Paul (45:48):
You’re welcome. I’m glad to have come on.
Shane (45:51):
Wow. What an amazing conversation with Paul Clifford guys, I cannot tell you how hard Paul has worked. We have watched him from day one and his journey and to see him climb that hundred member mountain top is just absolutely amazing. And we would love to help you climb your mountain too. Like we believe that everybody can launch a membership and get a hundred people to pay them $50 a month, make $5,000 a month, $60,000 a year. If you get 200 members, you’ve got a six big your business. And we do that in a lot of ways. You can go over to the flip your life community at flippedlifestyle.com if you’re ready to start, build and grow your own membership.
Shane (46:31):
Or if you want to be like Paul and you really want to pour gas on the fire and you want to take it to the next level, head over to membershipmasters.com and we will help you market and promote your membership every single day. So if you’re brand new, head over to flippelifestyle.com if you’ve already got your membership out and you want to get and keep more members, the membership masters.com newsletter is where you need to be. Alright, before we go, we’re going to bring back a little segment that we have haven’t done in a while and I don’t know why we stopped doing this. Like, I guess the podcast kept getting fuller and fuller, but this is a segment that we call can’t miss moments and can’t miss moments for us are those things that we get to do because we have a membership site because we have an online business that we would not have been able to do when we had a nine to five where we were working full time when we were commuting and going in different directions like ships in the night.
Shane (47:26):
These are the things that we’ve gotten because of that. And I really want to bring this back because of the Covid-19 crisis, the Coronavirus pandemic. We like everybody else have been staying healthy at home and quarantining and social distancing. And our schools are all canceled and we’ve been a home with our kids now for almost like a month and a half. And that’s stressful.
Jocelyn (47:51): It’s just great.
Shane (47:51):
Yeah, it’s great let me tell ya, but like it’s different, but my I can’t miss moment right now is just kind of thankfulness that we are in total control of our lives, that we’re living that flip lifestyle. And even though everything has been disruptive and everything has been hard and everything has been different. We’ve been able to really control our time, change our schedule, have that flexibility to adjust to this in different ways that a lot of people aren’t able to do. Because they’re home for work or I have to still go to work and they don’t know where their kids are going to be.
Shane (48:24):
And it has just been a total blessing in a rural campus moment that we’ve been able to do that. I was talking to Pat Flame the other day, we were texting back and forth and I was like man, this is crazy, isn’t it? And he said yeah, but thank God we have an online business. And so that’s my I can’t miss moment and we’ve been able to spend a lot more time with our kids and control our schedule and have the flexibility and freedom that we would not have had in a nine to five.
Jocelyn (48:50):
And I think the thing that has been really impactful for me during this time is that we’ve also been able to serve our members better. We’ve done weekly member calls because we have been here and we haven’t had to run kids everywhere. So that has been a really positive part of being at home for me. And I would say that my I can’t miss moment is watching movies with the kids. We have watched several movies from my childhood, from the 1980s-
Shane (49:15):
Y’all been burning up that Disney plus, I mean, you’ve been burning up that Disney plus. It’s worth every penny.
Jocelyn (49:19):
We’ve watched Willy Wonka at the chocolate factory. And we watched a lot of eighties classics and it’s-
Shane (49:24):
Pocahontas. Anna Jo had never seen Pocahontas.
Jocelyn (49:28):
We’ve watched a lot of eighties classics and when I tell them what we’re going to watch, they’re like, I don’t want to, I won’t like that. But then I catch them watching it again like later. So it’s been fun just showing some of those to the kids.
Shane (49:42):
All right guys, that’s all the time that we have for this episode. But like all of our episodes, we want to close our show with a Bible verse. Jocelyn, I get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible and we are going to fall back to Paul’s verse from today. Paul was talking about the Bible verse. 1st Timothy chapter five, verse 18, where he says, “The worker is worthy of his wages.” And you are worthy of selling stuff online. You have God given talents and experiences that you could turn into products but inside of a membership and go out and make your entire living online to stop putting it off. Stop waiting for it. If we can help you in any way, let us know. And until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life.
Jocelyn (50:29): Bye.
Shane (50:44):
Yeah. There you go. And then push the table closer to it like to pin it up against that thing. That’s how you do it right there. If you’re a podcast or man, you make it work. All right. I’m going to count myself back in.
Jocelyn (50:59):
We’re about to get taken out.
Shane (51:08):
We’re going to get taken out by- this windscreen is going to kill us. Wait a second. All right. We’re going to have to take this down. Hold on.
Jocelyn (51:08): Yeah. This-
Shane (51:08):
We are about to get taken out.
Jocelyn (51:09):
This is like getting ready to crash into my head.
Shane (51:11):
Oh, we don’t want that.
Jocelyn (51:12):
No, that wouldn’t be the best.
Paul (51:15):
Yeah. I mean, if Shane was sitting on that side, he probably wouldn’t even noticed.
Jocelyn (51:21):
It keeps like flying in my face.
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