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Membership sites are the best online business choice for predictable and recurring income.
Listen in on today’s episode to learn how to build and grow your own!
Today we are talking about how to set up a membership site and the tools you need to know about so you can successfully make money online.
Exciting News!
Jeanette, a member of our FYL Community (and on FL55), messaged us recently sharing how she was making enough money with her WordPress membership site to quit her job!
We’ll cover all the tools you need to host your community.
A forum is one of the core pieces that really isn’t a complex plugin but gives you a lot of ability and flexibility to organize the conversations, resources and training your members will have access to.
With a forum on your website (not a Facebook page or group) the content is under your control not under the control of Facebook.
We’ll go over some ways to protect your forum, allow people to pay you and how to manage your forum threads and conversations.
Don’t promise new daily, weekly, or monthly content, simply say there will be Regularly Scheduled Content. (this is critical!)
Two critical factors for member retention are community and accessibility to the Expert (you). Although they might come for the education or information they’ll stay for the community and ability to get their questions answered.
You will learn
- Why you need a website for your membership
- The best tools for a membership site
- Why to Use a Forum Plugin
- Types of Forum Categories
- Way to Protect Your Forum
- Third Party Gateways for Payments
- Managing Your Forums
- Content Strategy
- Procedures for Handling Customer Service
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Flip Your Life Community
- Flipped Lifestyle Podcast 60
- Jeanette’s website algebra1teachers.com
- BB Press
- Paid Membership Pro
- Imember 360
- Paypal
- Stripe
- Authorize.net
- BB Press Notify
- Canned Responses
- James Schramko
- Screw the 9 -5
- Flip Your Nine to Five Live Event
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 Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you about how to set up a membership site to make money online.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s show; it’s special because I get to start it, yay!
SHANE: Jocelyn gets to start the show, that’s right. She usually doesn’t like to start the show, but we are trying to push her out of her comfort zone a little bit here today.
JOCELYN: Exactly. So, “Go introverts!” is all I can say. All right, today we are talking about membership sites and we started out last week by telling you why we originally did not like membership sites, and what changed our mind. So if you missed that episode, you can head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast60 and find out about why we are now so excited about membership sites.
SHANE: Sold out to the membership model; do we have anything that is not membership anymore?
JOCELYN: We do not.
SHANE: No, we don’t. We have totally eliminated the entire product like.
JOCELYN: If there is one thing you can say about us, it’s that we go all in.
SHANE: Or I go all in and I grab Jocelyn’s wrist as I am going off the cliff and pull her with me.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I make sure we have the parachute. So today, before we actually jump into the nuts and bolts of how you actually create a membership community, we are going to tell you about a special, amazing success story from our Flip Your Life community; we are really, really excited about this one, and this comes from Flip Your Life community member, Janette.
SHANE: And you might remember Janette from podcast – what podcast was that?
JOCELYN: 55.
SHANE: Podcast 55; she came on to the Flipped podcast, we helped her with her online business, she’s been a member of our community pretty much since the beginning, it’s been like four months now, and before she came into Flip Your Life, she had made a little money online here and there, she was selling her products at additional marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers or something like that, and but she wasn’t having a lot of success, it wasn’t consistent. She did a few things that we told her to do, one of those was start a membership site, which she did, she ended up over a two-month period, getting probably around 80 members and it really turned everything around for her. She made thousands and thousands of dollars, and then we got this message in our Flip Your Life success forums just the other day. Jocelyn, what did it say?
JOCELYN: “Oh my, I quit. I quit my job today. Scared but excited; thanks S&J and the entire Flip Your Life community for all your support.”
SHANE: And let me tell you something, that’s pretty awesome when you wake up and you see that one of your community members has quit their job.
JOCELYN: Like we were pretty pumped when we quit our job; so when people who are in our community quit their job, that is like magnification for us. It’s just like so cool for us to see that, you know, I’m not saying it’s because of us but maybe we had some small part in the success, and we are just so excited for Janette and all the people in our Flip Your Life community who are doing such an amazing things every single day.
SHANE: And it’s just awesome to know, that is our goal, to flip people’s lives and that is what we are talking about is just get people– you all are doing amazing things out there, all of you have amazing ideas, all of you have really, really good hustle and you are out there trying to make this happen, but sometimes you just need a little direction. Got to point you where you need to because we have been there, we’ve done that, we’ve seen a lot of things that work, we really studied the stuff inside and out, pretty much every minute of every day. We don’t talk about anything but online business. It’s actually kind of sad; this goes back to our no-man theory, like we are not whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears, we’re like, “What are you going to use for a lead magnet?”
JOCELYN: Or, “What do you think about this Facebook ad?”
SHANE: “What do you think about this Facebook add? Going smooth?” Pretty pathetic, really, but it’s amazing to see that we had a part in Janette’s family getting her home, and we want that for you too. So if you need any help in your online business, come over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, join our community. We really want to stress that Janette made this happen with not just our advice; she is a hard worker, she hustled and she took a lot of action. She inspired us to work harder in our own online business, just seeing her grab the bull by the horns and keep moving. So if you are not serious, if you are not really ready to go out and do what it takes to change your life, this probably isn’t for you. But if you are ready and you really want to make a difference in your family’s future and you really want to flip your life, go over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and become a part of an amazing community full of entrepreneurs that we lead every single day. We would love to help you get your online business on the right track and maybe flip your life and quit your job too.
JOCELYN: All right, so with that in mind, we hope that you will join our community, and we are going to tell you a little bit today, about how we created that community and the other communities and some of the businesses that we have.
SHANE: Creating a membership model only takes a few components. You can convert your business or you can start a membership or a subscription-based service right away, it’s actually pretty easy to do. Once you know the parts, you just have to choose what tools will actually make them all work together, and then you can really get going. You really just need people to pay you monthly for some kind of service. That service might be videos, it might be coaching, it might be a community, it might be access to you, but all you really need to set everything up is to do a few things. The very first thing that you are going to have to do, and this is a little bit different than the advice we have given in the past, is you are going to have to have a website to do this. To create digital products, you don’t really need a website; you just need sales pages and you need some way to get traffic to go to that sales page, and you need a button where people can click things and buy your digital product and download it. This is a little more complex; you are going to need some kind of a website, we use WordPress for our website and you are going to need a place to host this community because you are going to have to have people come to your website, log in, they are going to have to be redirected to the forums where all of your content, and your community is going to live, it’s going to exist, they are going to have to have a place, a home base that they can go to, online. Many of you probably already have a website or you are about to start a website, it’s really easy to start a website; all you have to do is go buy hosting, install WordPress, and start creating that. We actually do have like a 20-video course on WordPress in our Flip Your Life membership if you want some help doing that, but you are going to have to have some kind of home base for your membership to live. So this is not something that you are just going to be able to just kind of dabble in; if you decide you are going to have a membership and a recurring subscription model in your business, you are going to have to set this up first and create a foundation to build your membership on. But once you get WordPress set up, once you get your blog going, you are only going to have to add a few other things on top of that and you are going to have a membership rolling. We’ve had people start memberships in less than a week to just set everything up, get it going and get it for sale. It’s really not that complicated, but the website is the first place you are going to have to start.
JOCELYN: All right, once you have your website, the next thing that you need is some type of forum plugin. We use bbPress –
SHANE: And it’s free, it’s a free plugin, it’s very easy to use.
JOCELYN: Totally free and it’s very easy to set up. It’s probably the simplest way to start a membership community and some people out there, might not actually know what a forum is. Forums started probably back in the 1990s when the internet was first up and coming, and they are mostly text-based, they do have ways that you can incorporate pictures and things as well, but it’s just basically like threaded reply system. So you start a topic, and people can reply to that topic and it stays right there with it. A lot of people will say, “Well, why don’t I start a Facebook group or some kind of a social media group?”
SHANE: Don’t do that because – you don’t want to do that for a couple of reasons, number one, it’s impossible to manage content in a Facebook group. People are going to post things and you are going to lose them. If you create a forum on your website that is protected behind a membership area, people are going to be able to come in and not only be able to communicate and talk and ask questions and get answers, but that is going to become a searchable database of content that infinitely grows as your community members put it on to your website. So people are going to help you make your membership more valuable. Also too, it’s something you control; you want all of this conversation to be under your control. What if you created a paid membership community, and you get to join a super secret, private Facebook group and for like six months people join and talk, and then for some reason Facebook shuts your account down? We’ve seen it happen over and over again, it can happen – it’s basically like building your business on rented land. If someone comes and says “Get off my land” you have no choice. So you really want to use just an old-school, awesome – the tools to create forums now are very advanced, people can communicate very efficiently, very effectively, and it gives people a place away from Facebook, on your site, where they can come and interact with you. Jocelyn has a really good point that she makes about Facebook and how it’s a big time suck.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I don’t really like to use Facebook for membership communities; we have actually done this in the past before we switched over to the entire forum model, and what happens is you log on to check your Facebook group and before you know it, like two hours have passed and you’ve watched like seven cat videos or something.
SHANE: Right, and your members are going to do that, and they are not going to be actively engaged with your content ‘cause they are going to be so distracted by the little red number up on the top with all the notifications, and they are just going to leave you.
JOCELYN: And another reason that I like to use forums over the Facebook community or the Facebook group, is because a lot of times, for teachers, you can’t use Facebook from school. So if I have a community that has lots of lesson plans and resources for teachers and they are not able to log in during the day, that means that they have to do it on their time off or their time at home, which is the whole reason that I am selling these things to begin with.
SHANE: And also too, a lot of businesses do that; a lot of businesses will block social media networks to try to make their people more productive. It’s also easier to put all your training material, your videos with e-courses in because people can just access those videos within your forums and you don’t have to set up complicated software to, you know, manage your course and drip your content and all that. You can just put training videos in a forum post and people can search for it there. So, it’s also a great way to just distribute content.
JOCELYN: So in addition to your training courses or your content that you are going to put out there for your users, you also need a few other forums. You are going to have your training forum –
SHANE: Well, there’s like a forum and then a bunch of sub-forums basically. It’s not like you got to have more than one forum.
JOCELYN: Right, and it’s just like categories and sub-categories is basically the way that you can think about it. So the first category might be a general discussion, and this is where people can talk about whatever your subject is. So for me, it’s school librarians, so I tell people in my general discussion that they can discuss anything related to school libraries –
SHANE: Like a kid acting up or what else would they talk about, reading programs –
JOCELYN: They talk about all kinds of different things like reading incentives, they talk about how do you manage open house at school –
SHANE: Complaining about their principals being mean?
JOCELYN: Yeah, anything that’s related to school library; so I mean, I’m cool with that, and then the next thing is, like were just talking about like your training forum, this is where your content is going to live. So for me, I have two different editions for lesson plans; so I make those sub-forums, each one of those, I also have a book called 101 Library Centers, I make that a sub-forum, and I also have a lot of different sub-forums for other smaller lesson packs that we have created.
SHANE: Like Thanksgiving lesson packs, or Christmas lesson packs or whatever.
JOCELYN: And then I also have a forum where people can share resources with one another; so that’s a really cool thing about having a membership site and having that forum because that lives on there forever. People don’t have to go back and try to find it and it’s just easier to search.
SHANE: Also, on Flip Your Life, we have a lot of different training forums; we have a forum for managing your time and setting your goals, we have another sub-forum that’s set up for creating an e-book, we have another sub-form for WordPress, another sub-forum for creating forums, so we have all of our training sub-forums live in this training place. So people can just log in and click a button and go to the training videos, or like Jocelyn said, they can click a button and go back to the general forum. So it’s a lot easier for them to find content and have a conversation.
JOCELYN: And another forum that you might want to consider is a support or a technical service or customer service forum; that way people can ask their question about their membership and you can answer them right there, and then in the future, fewer people will ask the same questions because the answers are already recorded there.
SHANE: So basically the forums allow you to invest time and information; you can put things out there and they live there forever and you don’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over. If there is a question that gets repeated, you can just redirect them to another conversation or you can point them towards where all of your content is. So by using just a forum that’s like a message board that you log in and talk about fantasy football, or working out or health or fitness or anywhere else that you go and you talk to people online, you can create this same dynamic within your membership area. So the first thing you are going to need to start a memberships site is and create this recurring subscription model. The goal is to get a hundred people to pay you 50 bucks a month, every month, and you just keep those people coming in over and over again so that you have this forever customer. The first thing that you need is a website, the second thing you need is a forum on your website where people can talk and consume content, and the third thing you are going to need is a way to protect that forum and allow people to pay your for access. Now depending on the forum you pick, you don’t have to use bbPress, there’s hundreds of different types of forum software that you can have installed on your website. We know one plugin for sure that protects, that is called Paid Member Pro, I think Paid Memberships Pro might be what it’s called, we’ll add a link for that in the show notes over at Flipped Lifestyle.com, but you can use this to create basically an order form and people pay you. They go in, they log in, they give you the money to access the forum and then it automatically subscribes to your forums and they get that money deducted from their bank account each month. And that creates a pay wall or some kind of wall between the outside world and your free content; people have to have the username and password to log in to get into your actual forums. We use a little bit more complex software, we do use bbPress which is free and created by WordPress to start forums, but we actually protect ours with Infusion Soft and a plugin called iMember360. This is a pretty complex plugin that we are using for various reasons because we needed something to tie into Infusion Soft, which manages all of our customers and emails and things like that. So I wouldn’t recommend that for the beginner but we bring that up just to say there are many different ways to have the forums and to protect them. You are also going to need a way to take payments; you can use third party gateways like PayPal or Stripe or Authorize.net to take those payments, and then they will manage the actual recurring subscription for you. So when somebody comes in and pays their 50 dollars, they get in, as long as they don’t cancel next month, automatically on the same day, that same payment will be drawn out of their bank account and put into your bank account. So it’s something you don’t have to manage. Once you get it in place, it’s set it and forget it until they cancel, and usually they don’t. So you will be able to take those payments every single month and people will gain access to your content after they have made their payment.
JOCELYN: Some of this might sound a little bit complicated but just remember, you can always keep it simple as your starting out, just use bbPress forums and something like Paid Memberships Pro, just to protect that content.
SHANE: And we actually do have videos that show you how to do all this in Flip Your Life; so if you need some help with that, go over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can access those videos if you join our membership community. But try to keep it simple and you are going to come out way ahead; you can always upgrade later, the key is to get started as fast as possible.
JOCELYN: All right, so we’ve talked about how you need a website, you need a forum system, and you need a way to protect your forum and a way to allow people to pay you. So the next thing that we are going to discuss is, a way to manage your forums.
SHANE: Managing your forums is pretty easy; you can just go into the forum each day and you can just look at the new posts and you can reply to those or take care of any customer service issues that you need, but we actually like to thread all of ours together so that we don’t have to answer them sequentially or we don’t have to hunt around or we might miss someone’s questions in the forums. What we did was we basically just hooked everything up into Gmail. I’ve got it set up so our forums, every time someone makes a post or a reply, it shoots an email to Gmail, and we did that with a plugin. We just put that on there and it automatically emails us anything that is put in the bbPress forum over to me in one email inbox, and then we set up filters that take our posts out, like I don’t see Jocelyn’s posts and she doesn’t see mine –
JOCELYN: What are you trying to say?
SHANE: Yeah, I am trying to avoid you in the forums, you know what I mean? I see enough of you in the real life, you know what I mean? Let’s move on before I get in trouble. But basically what I do is in my Gmail, I just go through one email at a time and I see if I need to reply to something. If someone else in the forum has already answered it, I can actually see that in the email that sends me the content and if I see that five other people have replied and they got real solid answers, I just delete those and I don’t have to respond to that thread. But if I get to one where someone needs my help or calls on me specifically, I go in and I click a link and I answer the question and then I delete that email. So you’re going to need some way to organize that and I highly recommend using Gmail, because Gmail has some of the most powerful filters of any email program out there and it’s pretty much free. So you can have that – all you have to do is you have to redirect those forum posts – let me see what that plugin is called; the plugin that we use is called bbPress Notify and basically it just sends me an email any time anyone does anything in the forums. I don’t have to look around the forums and look around in it, I have everything in my inbox, every single post and reply, and I can quickly glance through them and I don’t have to go to every single thread. A lot of times, many people in your forums will answer questions for you if they know the answers, or maybe Jocelyn got to it first so I can see if that question has been answered and I don’t have to actually go into it myself. So that saves us a ton of time. So the fourth thing you got to have is a way to manage all of your forum posts and be able to keep up with all of the conversations going on inside your community.
JOCELYN: All right, so to start a membership site, you will need a website, a forum, a way to protect the forum and allow people to pay you, and a way to manage the forums. So the next thing we want to talk about is how you need a content plan or a content strategy, and this is really important because your members need to know what to expect out of your community and what kind of content they will be receiving, not only when they join but on an ongoing basis.
SHANE: It is important that you do keep delivering value and content. Any time you hear someone say, “Oh memberships are not any good, people quit” well the reason they quit is because people stop getting value. If you are constantly helping your members and you are constantly producing value, then people are going to stick around and a good way to do that is to produce additional content. Now it doesn’t have to be a lot of content.
JOCELYN: So for us at Flip Your Life, we have a member call once a month, we record that member call, and we put it into our forums so that’s extra content that our current members can have and our future members will have as long as they stay in the membership. People can tune into it live, they ask us questions, and it stays there forever, right there in the forum. But you do need to be careful with your language here; when you are doing a sales page, don’t promise anything as lifetime, don’t say that you have monthly content or weekly content – I always say that I have regularly scheduled content because that way you can change when that regular schedule is.
SHANE: Like for us getting hacked, oh my gosh, we weren’t producing any content for like three weeks because everything was down. So people could come back and say, “Well, you said this will be like this” and you just don’t want to make promises that you can’t keep.
JOCELYN: Not necessarily that you can’t keep, but maybe you want to change your content strategy in the future.
SHANE: Yeah, that’s true.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s important to not say, not get people an expectation that you are going to do that for sure. So just be careful with that kind of language when you are creating a sales page for your membership community.
SHANE: It’s also a good idea to like going back to digital products even as a side note, you should really never be saying that people have lifetime access to anything because the amount of money that you make then dwindles in the future forever. And if for some reason like you want to switch to some kind of membership or you want to switch to some other form or business, or you go out of business and you close down, then you have not made promises to give people access to something forever and then all of a sudden it goes away. So just be careful what you are actually promising to people. So we give our member call, people come in they can use those, future members get access to those calls so they can hear the answers to all these questions and they can see how they work, we also do a new training each month. Now this training actually is public; we do a public webinar, we do a training that’s pretty much related to the podcast that month. So last month we did email marketing; we did three or four podcasts on email marketing and then we had a really, really in-depth, detailed webinar on how to create an email autoresponder. We created templates where people could use them on their own emails, and that video that really intense discussion, was available live during that webinar to the public. We also use those webinars to sell more memberships because people could come in and access free content and they can get a little bit of a sample of what it’s like to be in our membership area. But after a 24-hour replay, that training goes away and it becomes member content only so only people who are actually in the membership can access all of the webinars that we have done in the past. We’ve done things on running webinars, we’ve done things on email, we’ve done webinars on online security, about being successful in an online business, we do a different training every single month. So this content bulks up over time where we have all this exclusive training videos in our training forums that nobody else has access to except for that one day when it was live just to give people a sample of what the forum was like. So basically that’s all the content that we do actually create; we have a member call and we create those webinars and that’s the membership community content, the new trainings that we put in every single month. But remember, it’s not just about the stuff. Memberships are about community and accessibility but remember, it’s not just about the stuff. A membership and a recurring subscription website is about community, it’s about accessibility, accessibility to you, the expert, that people need to talk to but also the accessibility to that community and to all of the old content that you have created in the past so that people can accomplish their goals. Don’t get caught up in, “Oh I’ve got to put a new training video every three days or this membership is going to fall apart.” The membership is about the people inside of wherever you are keeping those people. A good membership community is not about constantly giving them content, constantly dripping things out. A lot of content is going to be created just with the conversation and all of the discussion that is going in inside your membership community. So, create a good content schedule that you can accomplish, that is not stressful, that is serving your people, and then go in and be with the people, be accessible and that is why people will stay. All right, so to start a membership or a recurring subscription online business, you’re going to need a website, you’re going to need a forum like bbPress, you’re going to need away to protect your forum and allow people to pay you in an ongoing basis. You’re going to need a way to manage the forums, you’re going to need to have a good, not stressful content plan that you can keep up with to serve your people and keep that value coming, and finally the last component that you are going to need is a way to handle customer service.
JOCELYN: All right, creating the systems for customer service in your membership site can be a little bit time-consuming at the beginning, but it’s really important that you get this automation ready to go so that you know what happens when people cancel, what happens when their credit card expires or fails, we also know what happens if somebody loses their password, if they can’t log in, all these things are not very time-consuming in themselves but when you start adding them up over time, it can get a little bit overwhelming. So, it’s so important that from the very beginning that you get these procedures taken care of and you know how to handle them if you are going to hire a virtual assistant, which we highly recommend for these types of things –
SHANE: You do not need to be doing the customer service; that is not what you need to be doing.
JOCELYN: Well, from the beginning, I think it’s important that you know what happens and that you are able to handle it yourself but from there you need to develop procedures that will help you moving forward so that someone else can do these time-consuming tasks.
SHANE: And it’s actually – Jocelyn actually had a great procedure that she set up for one or our membership sites today, like this doesn’t have to be expensive. You can use Gmail to set up “canned” responses. That means, basically you type a block of text that you use every time someone asks you a question like how do I – I lost my password or how do I – or I cancelled my membership, how do I change my password or whatever it is, you create a procedure and you put that in what’s called a canned response in Gmail. Just Google ‘canned responses for Gmail and you’ll figure this out. But what happens is then you can set up a filter that triggers if anybody sees like a certain word. Like anybody that sends you the text ‘cancel’, like “I want to cancel my membership” or “Please cancel my membership”, you can set it up where Gmail will filter anything with the word ‘cancel’ in it and automatically send them a canned response that gives them the instructions on how to do that themselves, or how do I change my password, well, you can set it up where Google will filter it and say, if anyone types in the word ‘change my password’, automatically send them this canned response. Just stuff like that will eliminate tons of the work from you or the VA that you actually hire to do this. Any time anyone asks us to cancel, we actually have that forwarded on to a virtual assistant who goes on and takes care of that, but we have automated pretty much everything; if someone needs to change their credit card, change their password, all of that stuff has automated systems so that we can get ourselves out of the customer service game and into the helping our member game.
JOCELYN: Membership sites are definitely amazing, we are loving it, but there are a lot of moving parts so it’s really important that you have all of these things in place before you get started with your membership community.
SHANE: And really, that’s pretty much it guys; you pretty much need a membership, a plugin for the forum, a way to take payments, a way to protect your content, a plan of what you are going to offer every month and then you need to have some procedures in place. Just a good, solid, standard operating procedures on how you’re going to handle all these nitpicky issues like changing passwords or can’t login. And once you’ve got that in place, you can start a membership that is going to offer you consistent, stable, predictable, online income. If you have a thousand members, or you got a hundred members that are paying you 50 dollars a month, you know that you’ve got 5000 dollars a month. You don’t have to go out and put all this energy into advertising and sales; all you have to really do is take care of what you have. James Schramko, who runs superfastbusiness.com is an expert in memberships and he’s actually the person that showed us how to initially get this going. He’s got a great analogy that he uses, and it’s the difference between a farmer and a hunter. A hunter goes out and it’s really, really difficult and he’s got to go out and hunt and track and walk and hike and move, he’s got to find his prey and sometimes he comes back and he doesn’t even have anything to eat because he couldn’t find anything to club and drag back to the cave. But a farmer, a farmer plants seeds, low energy, he waters his crops and he grows his crops, and once the crops are there, he just has to keep serving them and keep watering the crops and keep planting a few new seeds here and there to grow the crops – to grow his field bigger but it’s much less energy. You want to be a farmer, you don’t wanna be a hunter. That analogy really shifted our mindset to what we were doing online. We were wasting a lot of time and putting a lot of energy trying to hunt the next sale down when all we had to really do was serve the customers that we already had and keep them growing. We just needed to be a farmer and not a hunter. So, if you are looking, if this whole online business thing seems really, really hard, really difficult and you just are always stressed out about where your next sale is going to come from, you might want to look at the membership and subscription model. It’s changed our lives, it’s changed our business, this has been the biggest transition, the biggest shift that we made since we decided to get into online business and quit our jobs, and I would do anything to go back three years ago and tell three year ago Shane and Jocelyn, “Hey, you’re going to do this online business thing, why not go ahead and start it as a membership model?” Because everything that we have done, we have changed. I like to look back at our six-figure months, the big, huge months, the 100,000, the 140,000 dollars a month; what if those had been recurring subscription model months? What if we had done this then made those big hits three years ago and we could have started building on top of that? It’s better every month to not start at zero; we never start at zero any more. We don’t have to get up every day and make a sale, because we’ve already got people, customers in our systems, we’re taking care of them, we are providing value and then that takes the stress off of us to go out and keep finding new customers. It’s amazing to be able to predict what we are going to make every month; our retention right now is over 90% of all of our websites, our stress is about 1000% less than it was to constantly try to make new sales. It’s amazing to be able to look ahead and plan – hey, we can hire somebody because we know we’re going to have this month much available in our budget, we are going to have this much money coming in, so we can easily go hire this person instead of “Whoa, can we hire this person? What if we don’t make any more money a month from now?” So it’s just a much better model to create – it’s like an actual business. It’s not just, go out there and hit the lottery on your next launch; we actually have something stable that we can depend on every single month.
JOCELYN: We like the membership model because not only does it allow us to make a living and do what we love every single day, but it allows us to help hundreds of people. We’re about to cross thousand members as far as all of our sites go, and we are really excited about that. It’s not just we sell people something and then they go on their way, we get to interact with them, and to help them, and to further this relationship on and it’s just much more fulfilling for me. So remember we’ve switched all of our sites to this, we now have hundreds of members on the teacher sites and we have several hundred in Flip Your Life and everything is going great. We have done this with zero outside help as far as like joint venture partnerships, so we don’t have any affiliates, we are doing it all on our own, most of it is organic growth, we are just starting to experiment with ads and so that’s another just very exciting thing that we are getting into right now, and we are going to be learning more about in the future, but this could be what you need for your online business.
SHANE: This is not something we talk about lately, we don’t make huge changes on our business; Jocelyn won’t let me make huge changes on our business.
JOCELYN: That’s right.
SHANE: She puts the brakes on it but – sometimes I want to – but this is something that we looked at really hard. We studied this for over a month before we took the plunge and really were like, “Let’s do it.” Then we went all in, we’ve done it three times now like Jocelyn said, and every time has been super successful because this model really does work. It has been a total eye-opener, it’s been so enlightening and so refreshing just to see this happen. So if you have ever tuned out the membership model or you don’t believe that you can actually create a recurring subscription, like Jocelyn said, we are about to have a thousand people a month over our websites, that are going to be paying us an amount of money, let’s say 50 to 100 dollars, every single month; that’s recurring. That’s not counting anything else we do like speaking or coaching or anything like that private, that’s just consistent revenue that we don’t have to launch every single time we want to do something new. Imagine that in your own business; if you could just find those 100 people to pay you 50 bucks a month, or 200 people to pay you 25 dollars a month, there’s a lot of people on the planet, could you do something? Provide that kind of value to a couple of hundred people to create a consistent, recurring, membership subscription-based income online? I think you could, I think everyone who is listening to this podcast needs to forget everything you have ever heard from all the gurus, and look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Can I do this? Is this something that can help me and take my business to the next level?” I think you are going to be really surprised with the answer and if you try this out, it’s going to be a pretty eye-opening and amazing thing for you in your life. All right guys, before we get out of here, we always want to share our can’t-miss moment; these are amazing experiences that we got to do, things that we might not have got to do if we didn’t start an online business and we have a really, really fun one for you today.
JOCELYN: All right, so last week, we headed out to New York City to meet our friends Josh and Jill Stanton of screwtheninetofive.com; they had become really good friends of ours over the last couple of years and we met up with them to celebrate Josh’s 30th birthday – can you say baby –
SHANE: Yeah, he’s the young end of the group, you know what I mean, but he was actually surprised too, Josh didn’t know this. We totally bamboozled him and met them as he got off the airplane [Crosstalk] big word for a Kentucky kid heading up over the big New York City. But it was totally like a surprise for him and to meet with them and to plan for our live event; he had no clue, we got a live event coming up here in a couple of weeks and we wanted to plan for that, so we surprised josh for his birthday and killed two birds with one stone. We also made it a business trip, total write off.
JOCELYN: That’s right. [Crosstalk]
SHANE: We got to go up to New York and have some fun with them and we planned our live event. We actually do have a couple of tickets left for the live event that will be in Tampa on October 10th and 11th. It’s going to be an absolutely amazing event –
JOCELYN: It is going to be an amazing time. This is actually the second time that we have done this life event and the first one was like unbelievable. And for me to say that, I’m not a very excitable person and it was amazing. So you need to be at this live event; if you are wanting to take your business to the next level and you are not sure what to do next, we want to help you. So, sign up for our live event, head on over to flipyourninetofivelive.com and see if there are tickets still available for you.
SHANE: I think we have two left at the recording of this, I’m not sure, I’m pretty sure there’s two left though, so hopefully those haven’t sold out, and you can grab a spot. It’s an amazing day of masterminds, we break down your online business, memberships to Screw You, that’s Jill and Josh’s community, and Flip Your Life all included with your ticket purchase, and there is also an amazing excursion on the second day where we take a large boat –
JOCELYN: A private yacht –
SHANE: A private yacht out on the ocean and we have all kinds of fun and it is just an absolute blast. So – what was the website again, flipyourninetofivelive.com and you can see if there are any tickets available for that.
JOCELYN: All right, and we are going to leave today, with today’s Bible verse, and it is from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 4, part of verse 12 and it says, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” and that just quickly reminds us of our membership communities and how much stronger we are together than alone.
SHANE: And if you need some help, head over to flipyourlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, we would love to help you too as a member of our Flip Your Life community. Until we talk to you guys again, here on the podcast, get out there, take action, don’t just listen, flip your life, we’ll see you then.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Jacqui says
What are your thoughts on starting a membership site before creating a digital product and not having an audience?
Shane Sams says
It’s all niche dependent. It can go either way. Having products first does help seed the membership.
Tim Topham says
Hi guys – only recently found your podcast as I’m a friend of Katie Wardrobe here in Australia and she told me all about you guys and how you got on at Tropical Thinktank!! Quick question: I’m developing my membership using bbpress + buddypress plugins and I’m not sure whether to setup site-wide bbPress forums or us the buddypress group forums. Looks like buddypress version allows more sharing, linking, sub-groups/communities, etc. but very keen on your views. Do you use buddypress with bbpress? Cheers guys – LOVE what you do 🙂 Tim.
Shane Sams says
Just bbpress, not buddypress. We keep it simple.
Tim Topham says
I’ve worked it out so don’t worry about the above. I’ve read that community forums are best as site-wide (bbPress) forums while you can leave “group” forums for smaller groups of interested people to chat about a certain topic.
On one other matter, what plugin are you using to allow attachments to be uploaded to your posts? I gather you put all your resources in there but it doesn’t look like bbPress does this out of the box.
Cheers guys!
Shane Sams says
GD BBpress tools will do the trick. We have videos in Flip Your Life.
Most of our trainings are videos, but that will let you add attachments and stuff.
We do our courses in the forums. Embed vids, type, attach. Simple, works, done.
Tim Topham says
Much appreciated – cheers Shane 🙂