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Today we are celebrating the amazing success of one of our community members, Kathy Martin. In today’s show you’ll learn how Kathy grew her membership from 15 members to nearly 300 members, how she talked her spouse into getting on board with her online business dream, and Shane’s three prolific strategies for growing a membership site to 500 members and beyond.
What You’ll Learn:
- Memberships are not an overnight success. (3:30)
- Take people through the beta path. (5:35)
- What do you do when people around you are on the fast-track to success? (7:00)
- The reason to sell community and not courses. (9:45)
- How to grow into the next level of your membership. (18:50)
- What things you are doing now? (25:50)
- How To Utilize Your ‘Thank You’ pages (42:45)
Show Notes
Kathy Martin lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been a special education math teacher for 13 years. Kathy has a membership where she sells middle school math resources to middle school math teachers. She has been an online entrepreneur for the last 4 years! Kathy was actually on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast back in January of 2018. She had launched and had a few members. Back then it was a real struggle to get members.
Memberships are not an overnight success.
Kathy started in the summer of 2016 and spent from that summer to the end of the year building her membership. She wasn’t selling or anything like that. In 2017 she really started trying to do anything and everything – but nothing was really sticking. Then, she finally had someone believing in her and spend some money in her membership – which is exactly the positivity she needed! She realized if someone was willing to pay her $10 to get everything, she could get more people to too! Like we always say, if you can get 1 members you can get 100! Of all the billions of people in the world you can find people that need have a problem you can solve!
Kathy says her membership site was a “hot mess” in the beginning. She wasn’t happy with the way her site looked, she didn’t know who she was talking to. It took her a really long time to figure out what she wanted to write about and she wanted to target. It took her a while to figure out what her people needed. Yes, it took her a long time to figure out but she knows that is she would have started with 100 members in 2018 or 2019 – all of these members would have quit because she didn’t know what she was doing.
Take people through the beta path.
This is a great example of why we always take people through the beta path. Open it for 20 members – they are all going to quit. But you know what? you’re to learn. And then, you do it for 20 more people. Maybe half of them quit. Eventually when you get that third group in you’re like, “oh yeah, they all stayed this time for a month. We’re onto something here. Let’s keep hammering this nail.”
What do you do when people around you are on the fast-track to success?
We’ve known Kathy for a long time. She’s been to our lives events, met her in person, we love her journey so much that in 2019 at our Flip Your Life Live event we actually made her Member of the Year. The person of the Year in the Flip Your Life community is not the one that makes $1 million. It’s the person who won’t quit – the Kathy Martins! I’ll tell you what I’ve never seen somebody that won’t quit like Kathy Martin. While she was coming up through the community and she was building her business there were other people in her space that were succeeding. I would see other people in her space succeeding and I’ve always wondered what she thought when all of this was going down around her.
Kathy says there was a post in the community forums in our membership site when she first started from Jeanette Stein and she saved it on her phone – something she has never gotten. In the post she wrote her “road to 300.” Kathy began keeping track of every time she posted and just continued to follow her journey. Because, Jeanette was the reason Kathy started. Kathy listened our podcast because we were teachers and she is a teacher, too. One day I shared a post about going to the Royal Rumble and we just connected with her! (It’s funny how those small things we say can connect with members – you should try it)!
Kathy also connected with what Jeanette was saying because they were both math teachers. Kathy knew that if Jeanette was doing it then she could too. It didn’t matter to Kathy that Jeanette was succeeding and she wasn’t. The important thing was seeing that at least there was a road – things were possible. Jeanette and Kathy are two different people that do different things within that area so she knew that there was space for what she could bring to the table. She just needed to figure it out.
The reason to sell community and not courses.
The reason we sell community and not courses is because there is no way one single person can come in and reach every single person and niche. Seeing other people succeed, being able to ask what they did and how they did it – it tells you that you may be one step behind but you can pick it up and go. It’s why we emphasize being in the community so much in every single email and training that we send out. By seeing Jeanette’s “road to 300” Kathy is at 250 members herself now! The point I’m trying to make is that I worry about other people seeing competition but it’s not about competition – there’s plenty of room for everybody. It’s about getting into a community where you have examples and then collaborating with the right people to help you succeed and do so faster.
Kathy made an effort to be in Jeanette’s world, they have developed a friendship, Jeanette has coached her. Kathy reached out to Jeanette at the Flip Your Life Live event and the best part about the event for Kathy was getting to be around Jeanette. Then, at the second live event it was more, “when are we hanging out? When are we going to dinner?” They’ve built a relationship because of the Flip Your Life community.
Jocelyn and I learn just as much in the communities as everybody else does! When you really surround yourself with a group of people you know enough to be able to ask for help – you can’t do it all alone. This is why we don’t do courses. I feel sorry for anybody that does a course and thinks they will have a successful and fulfilling online business. They won’t because they are trying to do it all by themselves. And, the worst part is that the person that created that course will not talk to them.
How to grow into the next level of your membership.
Kathy has done an amazing job. She has built a community, she has over 250 members paying her every single month, she has an awesome amount of resources that she knows actually works now. She knows that people want it, can use it, and give them results. Kathy just left her job and she knows good things are coming. Her recurring income is predictable. Now that Kathy’s ready for that next shift in her membership site she wants to our help in knowing how to make it. She believes the strategies are great but they are everyone – not enough people talk about tactics.
The first mindset shift is throwing mud on the wall. Everybody starts with a desire and an idea. You won’t know what will work until you try it. You won’t know the one thing that will work until you try ten things. Consistency in trying things is what helps people find what works best. This is what Kathy did – she kept trying things until she figured out what worked and then it stacked! You eventually get to this place where you get people achieving the same goals you have in sight and wondering how they got there. The one mindset that I figured out was that all the people that I watched had one thing in common: they were prolific. That was the biggest mindset shift that I had that took us to the next level in our online businesses – the million dollar level.
A few years ago I began looking at things we were doing as I began wanting to grow. We were sending an email to our list every week, we were doing a podcast, connecting with people, going on interviews, we were doing all the right things. I finally realized it just wasn’t enough and i had to find a way to more prolific. When I looked at that word what it meant to me was “daily.” I had to ask myself if I was truly showing up every day, if I was really showing up strategically every day in a prolific way. Throwing the money on the wall got me here but it won’t get where I wanted to be at Russel Brunson or Pat Flynn’s level.
- “Am I prolifically thinking about what I’m doing – strategically every day?”
- “What is my month-long plan for my membership site?”
- “How can I make a plan for my promotions this month on my membership site?”
- “Do I have a plan of what podcasts I want to be on?” Not just hope that somebody is going to reach out and want me to be on their show.
- “What content am I going to make for my membership site?”
In 2015 I decided that I was going to be more prolific than anyone else at certain things, you can’t be prolific at everything. That’w then I started emailing my list daily. If they unsubscribed then good-bye but if they don’t they’ll buy from me. Then, I decided to be prolific in my relationships. I was going to choose the masterminds that I wanted to be in. I was either going to work or buy my way in. Of course we kept our consistency with everything else. If you want to reach 6-figures (which actually is not that big of a goal), you have to choose the ways that you are going to be prolific and pick a plan to what ways you are going to carry it out. Over the last 5 years I have averaged 1.8 emails per day. I set aside on hour on my calendar every day to craft an email!
You have to ask, “what is working best right now for my list, what is getting me the best results?”
What things you are doing now?
What works for one business will not always work for another. Figure out what’s working and see if you can springboard it into the next level. For Kathy, she has just hired her first person to work on Facebook ads strategist. That person is helping Kathy run ads that send people straight to an evergreen webinar that has converted very well in the past. In June, July, and August she is running 5-day challenges and back to school sales.
Kathy is really good at planning out quarterly and yearly goals – this is going to be a lot different this year. Starting at the second quarter of the year all of Kathy’s membership site plans went out the window. Since then her months have been more week to week working and planning. In March, Kathy because an online teacher as well and she to completely shift her business. She began thinking about what she needed in her own classroom because that in turn would be what teachers need. She started making things that she needed snd her business started to grow in March, April, and May exponentially!
This is why we tell people that you have to stay in the game. All the knowledge that Kathy built until that time of crisis allowed her to take the mud on the wall and only throwing the spoonful of mud she thinks will stick. This is also why we focus so heavily on consistency in the Flip your Life Blueprint. It’s about focusing on one step at a time until you get to the next level.
If Kathy would stop anything she’s doing and focus on these three things, she can go to that next level fast:
- The challenge strategy that he has that has been successful in the past. She needs to expand that. If she knows that challenges get her emails and sales. She should be doing at least two challenges a month. One challenge a quarter is consistent – two challenges a month are prolific. Can she automate or delegate some to this? Batch it out. At the very least she needs to do a challenge every month. If people don’t join your list they don’t join your membership.
- Use her evergreen webinar. She has does this webinar so many times live and knows it works – this evergreen webinar works. If you are going to drive traffic with ads to your evergreen webinar you have to tell yourself that you will use it to drive traffic to your webinar every single day of your life. The first thing on your “to-do” list every day says, “how do I get more people to seep into that evergreen webinar funnel?’ It has to consume your thoughts when it comes to your business. This is where Kathy’s tactical social posts and content that will draw people into the evergreen webinar.
- She really needs to get in-tune with what her audience is talking about. Kathy quickly pivoted and figured out how to grow her membership site during the COVID-19 pandemic. She knew what people needed and she was doing it in real time. She has to think about what her avatar needs every day. Think about what your avatar is going through right now. Kathy could focus on how to teach math in a post-coronavirus world. Her content needs to be more than just blog posts. She needs to have conversations and ask questions. She can use those questions and answer them through a Zoom call – then turn it into a blog post.
This is what Kathy’s path to 500 members looks like. She needs to stop looking at 300 because basically there. We want her to have 500 as her mark for the end of 2020 in her membership site!
‘Thank You’ pages.
Every ‘Thank You’ page is your next sales page. If I get you to opt-in, what’s the next thing I want you to do? Send people to the webinar. What does the webinar want you to do? Join my membership. Then what? member call. Everything to chained together!
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