Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In this episode we take a free consulting call from Tanya Bryant, a mother of three from Minnesota who said goodbye to corporate life 2.5 years ago.
Now working from home as a virtual assistant, she wants to develop a website she recently acquired to help fellow virtual assistants into her primary source of income and freedom business.
After re-branding and putting a lot of work into different products on her site, Tanya wants to use the membership model to take her site to the next level.
Listen in as we guide Tanya through the process of transforming her digital sales business into a successful and sustainable membership model.
Tanya asked some great questions along the way, and we end up covering A LOT of material, including practical tips on how to drive membership numbers through advertising and free content.
We also touch on where the real value lies in the membership model, how offering membership differs from selling individual products, and share our thoughts on selecting a price point, sharing content, and managing Facebook groups versus forums.
If you’re like Tanya and have a great idea for a membership model site but aren’t quite sure how to turn it into a sustainable business – this is one episode you DO NOT want to miss!
You will learn
- The advantages of the membership model over offering individual products.
- What type of free content to include on a membership site.
- How to use blog posts and other free content to drive membership sales.
- Tips for increasing membership through Facebook advertising.
- Strategies for retaining members over time.
- The pros and cons of maintaining a Facebook group versus a forum.
- Tips for setting your initial membership price point.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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 helping Tanya take her online business to the next level.
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.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; got a great episode for you today, we have a Flipped podcast where we bring on a member from our Flip Your Life community, and we give them a free consulting call, and we put that on the air so that everyone can learn from the answers to the questions asked. Today’s guest is Tanya Bryant; Tanya, welcome to the show.
TANYA: Thank you, great to be here.
SHANE: We are really excited that you are coming on today because we are going to be talking about membership websites, which is kind of the theme for this month. So it’s going to be an awesome call, it’s going to fit right in and we are going to learn more about how we can use the membership model to create a sustainable and growing income online.
JOCELYN: All right Tanya, so before we jump into all of our online business chat, let’s talk a little bit about you and your personal life; tell us about you and your family and what’s going on with you right now.
TANYA: Okay, sure, I live in Minnesota with my husband and three kids, I’ve been married for 15 years, and my kids are 12, 10 and 3. I have two daughters and a little son.
SHANE: That is a busy house right there.
TANYA: It is very busy and chaotic and just to give you a background, out of college, I was in Corporate Information Technology for quite a few years and after my son was born, that’s kind of when I really wanted out of that corporate life and that’s when I became a virtual assistant. I loved that and I still do that today.
SHANE: And what do you do in your duties as a virtual – like there’s so many different kinds of virtual assistants; is it like an executive assistant or –
TANYA: No, I’m a little more like the website technical back-end stuff, a lot of what you guys do; hooking up Lead Pages, Infusionsoft all that kind of stuff.
SHANE: Got it, okay.
TANYA: So, I’ve been doing that about two and a half years, and that was my ticket out of corporate which is awesome; so I do work from home full-time now, and then this past January, I had a colleague that was selling a website that helped other virtual assistants get their business going, and it was really interesting to me because I am always wanting to help people, love what they do and get out with a corporate scene and I jumped on this and I bought the site.
SHANE: And what is the domain name for that?
TANYA: It’s starva.com
SHANE: Starva.com
JOCELYN: That’s a great domain.
SHANE: Yeah, that’s a great domain name, very short, it’s awesome; so like basically now you want to teach other people how to create a freedom business like location independent, they can work online anywhere they are, and just be a virtual assistant for entrepreneurs and things like that.
TANYA: Exactly.
SHANE: That is a really cool – I’m always amazed at the way people can make money online because a lot of people, all of us are trying to create a freedom business, that’s the goal really. We can talk about passive income and all these things and this, that and the other but the goal is to have control of your schedule, control of your life, to be able to support yourself and to do it with the internet. So being a virtual assistant might be a great way for a lot of people out there to do that.
TANYA: Absolutely, and there are so many different virtual assistants like you mentioned earlier; so a lot of your skills in your corporate job can be turned into a virtual assistant business by helping online entrepreneurs. So, there’s a lot of opportunity.
JOCELYN: Yeah, absolutely. So take us through what happened from January to today; what did you start out with on the site and how did it sort of change into what you are doing now?
TANYA: Well, I completely re-branded the site, so that took a couple of months, kind of put my own spin on it, changed the colors, the whole theme, went through all the products, had to change out everything, change the e-covers, so everything’s been redone and there were –
SHANE: How many products are there? I was about to ask you that.
TANYA: There’s 21 products on there now –
JOCELYN: Whoa.
TANYA: And I add one monthly.
SHANE: Awesome, and these are being sold – these were sold individually or they are still being sold individually or –
TANYA: Yes, they are still being sold individually, and when I bought the site, there were ten people that were members and then about a month, well, it’s been about six weeks now, I did a webinar with the previous owner, we’re friends online, so she helped me with – she sent it out to her list and we ended up getting ten more people. So there’s about 20 people, 20 members, so I ended up getting ten more from that webinar.
SHANE: Okay, so right now, this is basically you were selling a website – just to generalize this, so you got this website, you’re selling 20-something products individually, but now there are – you’ve kind of dabbled in this membership model where you’ve got – okay, I have these people who were paying monthly before, did a webinar, got ten more people, so now you’ve got 20 people that are paying like a monthly membership; so what do they get with this monthly membership? Do they get access to all the videos, do they get it once a month, like what do they get like for being a member basically?
TANYA: They get one new product each month; it’s basically a new training, a new training kit on something that they can offer in their own virtual assistant business.
SHANE: Okay, and are they paying less than like if they had bought them individually?
TANYA: Yes, exactly. They are 27 dollars for the kit if you just buy them outright, but then if they are a member, they get them for 17 dollars a month. So that is what they pay monthly to be a member.
SHANE: Okay, so okay, let me ask you this, just one more question before we get into the actual your questions. So if I join for 17 dollars a month, do I immediately get access to all of the products or do I get one and then one more comes next? Is it dripped to me or do I get it all and then I just start getting new stuff too?
TANYA: I have like three bonuses right now that I offer, so they get three bonus kits and then each month they get a new one.
SHANE: All right, so basically there’s 21 things there, I’ll get the one I want, plus three, and then I get dripped the rest, over time, basically.
TANYA: Exactly.
SHANE: Interesting, awesome. Okay, so this is a great starting point, and this is actually one reason we wanted Tanya to come on; Tanya was in our forums asking some questions over at Flip Your Life, and we were getting ready to this big series on memberships and I was like oh my gosh, we’ve got to bring her on because these questions fit so perfect because you are in this, like, transition phase where you are kind of like, “Okay, I’ve got all these products individually but man, what if I could create a consistent income, a membership, people stay with me for a while” so you are kind of like, it’s like you are sitting on both ends of the fence right now, you know, what I mean?
TANYA: Exactly and I just kind of feel stuck; I feel in limbo a little bit and I just want to go in one direction or the other –
SHANE: Love it.
TANYA: Yes.
SHANE: Okay, well, let’s see if we can figure that out, okay? So let’s jump into your first question; what is the first question you have for us about this online business?
TANYA: Okay, well, the first question is, like I mentioned, I have 21 products out there now and so I’m wondering if you would recommend rolling all of the 21 products into the membership and stop selling them individually?
JOCELYN: Yes.
SHANE: The simple answer is 1000% yes.
JOCELYN: In a word, yes. I did this recently with elementarylibrarian.com, I had like 30-something products and honestly it’s just a big old mess because I had people who were buying just one grade level, I had people who were buying one or two grade levels, and I had people buying this product that product, I had products everywhere and I had – it’s just such a mess to try to figure out who purchased this, who purchased this, and it’s so much easier now that I have just the two products right now. I have a monthly membership and I have an annual membership, I put everything into those memberships and it’s all or nothing.
SHANE: Yeah, we’ve done that with all of our websites; Flipped Lifestyle use to have multiple training videos and things like that, we put everything in one membership. Yes, History Teachers has like, gosh, it was like 160 different products or something like that because I was selling each individual plan on what the topic was, same thing, put all in one place, it’s all or nothing, you are either in or out, you know, and you get all or you don’t get anything. So, there’s a lot of advantages to putting it all in one place. I would also say too, I think I would not drip the content if you do it this way, I would just create a training forum with all of that stuff in there because you know that people that want to join and are wanting to build a VA business. They are not going to be able to do everything at once. They are going to pick something like transcription, that might be the core of their business, but that might want to add something later –
JOCELYN: Or maybe I don’t need the one that you are sending this month, but I might need it next month.
SHANE: Right, yeah, I might not even want that thing that you are sending me. So not only would I take all of the products, put them in one place and sell it as this huge ridiculous membership value that they get to be inside of this area, but I wouldn’t even drip it. I would just let them have access to everything and then the real value that people are going to get out of this, it’s going to be very similar to Flipped Lifestyle and Flip Your Life, it is that community where you get to reach out to you, the leader, the person who’s done this for two and a half years to ask questions, you know, that aren’t necessarily related to the training, but it’s about building the business, growing the business, organizing the business, sustaining the business. And then they have this community of other people that they can talk to who are trying to kind of make a living this way. People will buy a membership for the content, they will stay for leadership and the community and that’s why people keep paying consistently every month.
JOCELYN: And I guess, my question to you would be, what has been your concern about doing this? Are you worried about people coming in and taking all of your things?
TANYA: Well, that’s one worry, but I think I’m over that. I mean, if it happens, it happens.
JOCELYN: Yeah, well, that’s what I was going to say, I mean, on Elementary Librarian, I have hundreds of members I have like 30-somethig members who have cancelled so far.
SHANE: Ever, out of like 700 people.
JOCELYN: And if one or two of them went in and took all of my stuff, whatever, that’s like the one percent. I’m not worried about the one percent, I’m worried about the 99%.
SHANE: Right, that is a huge fear that we hear from everybody and honestly, like if all the people that we know that do it this way, never once have I ever heard of that one becoming a problem.
TANYA: Okay, I’m not going to worry about that then. And I guess the other thing would be just losing sales; like, I’m so focused on the membership that I don’t get anyone on sales but –
SHANE: I see what you’re saying; yeah, what really happens though is the one-off sales, cannibalize your membership sales because would you rather have that person come in and get a 21-dollar product and never come back or would you rather have someone come in and join your 25-dollar a month membership and become a customer for the next two years? So it’s a long-term gain, the lifetime value of the customer paying 25 bucks a month for a year and a half as they build their virtual assistant business is hundreds upon hundreds of dollars instead of the one person who buys something that does it, fails and forgets because they had no support. And also too, this is something I think a lot of people miss on the membership model; you are not losing all those product, they don’t disappear and hide in the backend, you can go write a blog post about every product that you have right now, so that will be – how many products did you say there were?
TANYA: 21.
SHANE: Go write 21 blog posts, that detailed how amazing it is to be a virtual assistant that manages blogs, that manages WordPress, that does virtual assistant, that’s an executive assistant and you know, handles like travel and things like that for your – whatever the courses cover, and this – those are your 20-something ideas of you know, you can be a virtual assistant about. You write a blog post and then at the bottom you can say – that’s going to get found in search, then at the bottom you give a free checklist on how to do that plus, “Let me show you exactly how to set up your transcription business” and then they go to the membership sales page. So you can have 21 sales pages, all on 21 different topics, all about being a virtual assistant that point to this one community, this one product. So those individual sales now become monthly member sales and they become hugely valuable over time.
TANYA: Okay.
SHANE: Makes sense?
TANYA: Yeah, that makes perfect sense and like Jocelyn was saying, there are products everywhere, and there was a mess for her and I would agree like it takes me so long to set up a product –
SHANE: Oh yeah, now you can just add things into your training forum just like we do, and it’s all done. So I hope that cleared that up, what’s your second question?
TANYA: Well, kind of to go along with that, what do you put on the site then? I just feel like I would have nothing left if I am taking all the products off.
SHANE: Oh yeah, like we said, the blog posts that support those products basically.
JOCELYN: Right, well, you can still have content; like what I’ll do on the Elementary Librarian site is I make like seasonal content that I’ll make a little bit different for you, but like for instance in September is ‘Banned Books Week’ so I put together a page on the Elementary Librarian blog about banned books and I made a little Pinterest image so people can click into that and see all this free stuff, and then on that page, there will be an advertisement that says, “Hey, do you like this? Join my membership community.”
SHANE: Yeah, and like what we do too, for our Flipped Lifestyle content plan is basically like we support our paid content with our free content. Like this month is membership month is what we kind of think of it as in our brain, so like last month was email month or security month or whatever, so like we will have a podcast which is free content, that’s going out on our blog but then at the end of it, there’s always like some kind of course or something like for example, we have inside the – in Flip Your Life, we have the forum that we just set up to shows you how to make forums basically on your website –
TANYA: Yes.
SHANE: – that is something that is only available in our membership community but all the free content this month can kind of point to that. Like, at the end of this month, we have talked about memberships so we can show people how to do a membership. We did a whole series on emails where we have three or four podcasts on email marketing, we did a webinar on email marketing and now we have inside of our community we can put up a little forum that’s just like “Hey, come in, learn how to do your first autoresponder.” So that now becomes something that I can promote out on the site. So, just write about the products or –
JOCELYN: Or let your community give you questions, Google us questions – [Crosstalk] people type questions into Google all the time, so when people are asking questions in your community, write a blog post about that, or hire a content creator to write a blog post about that. And that’s how you bring people in like that.
SHANE: We’ve really started shifting to that because like your end there, we get like hundreds of questions like every day and so like what we have started doing is, I’ll consolidate it and say, “Hey ask about email marketing in this thread” and then we take all those questions and we make Q&A podcasts, we make – or we gear our content towards those questions so we are serving our members and getting some free content to point people into our member area. Does that make sense?
TANYA: Yes, that’s awesome.
SHANE: So just write about your products, that’s what you got to do. Write about the topics that they cover and that way, everyone of your – every blog posts leads to a part of your member area, which is a selling point.
TANYA: Okay, great. Okay, next question, I am working on adding a forum, because I know I have to do that, but I am wondering, I have a Facebook group right now that my members are a part of, would you recommend like making that more public and just getting anyone that wants to get in there in hopes that I can convert them to members?
JOCELYN: There are a lot of people out there doing that right now and they are very successful at it. I think it really just depends on your audience and what you are trying to accomplish with the forum or Facebook group. You know, for some people, I think it’s okay just to continue a Facebook group like for your paid members; if it’s not important to you to keep discussions threaded like they are in forums and they are really organized, if that is not super important to you, I don’t think it’s 100% necessary to have a forum. But if you do need those discussions to stay with the topics, something like we do in Flip Your Life, like I do in Elementary Librarian, if that is important and you need to keep those discussions together, then I would definitely go to the forum. I do see what you are saying about maybe having a free Facebook group –[Crosstalk]
SHANE: A free forum and a private forum basically.
TANYA: Yes, yeah.
SHANE: I think – here’s the line in the sand when you do that: accessibility must only be in your forum because if you are – you can have a Facebook group where people are talking and people maybe – you can direct people to your blog posts and stuff that lead them to your paid member area, but if you are allowing yourself to be 100% accessible out there and you are answering every question, why would anyone join your membership? So, I think accessibility, when you are leading a Facebook group is important; if it’s free, you don’t want to be super accessible in that and also too, you got three kids, and no job you know what I’m saying?
TANYA: Yes.
SHANE: So you are going to add a time suck whenever you add a Facebook group – here’s why we choose not to do a Facebook group; we don’t have – there is no Flipped Lifestyle Facebook group. Basically we said to ourselves, why would we build Facebook platforms when we can build our own? So now, all the conversation happens in Flip Your Life; like in our other websites, any questions that get asked about customer service, any questions that get asked about the topic happen in our forum, which now become searchable content for future members. That is not true on a Facebook group. Facebook group, whatever is talked about today, is going to disappear forever in the pits of Facebook eventually. It’s really hard to thread all that together, it’s really hard to keep up with it, people are going to ask the same questions over and over again, and you are not going to be able to just say, “Here, go to this thread”, you’re going to be able to say, “Oh, I got to answer that over and over again.” So, it is a good way to get a lot of people that are interested in your topic in one place, but you got to have a strategy to get them in the forum that they pay money for or it’s not going to be a business. Does that make sense?
TANYA: Yes, definitely. Yeah, I think I’ll hold off on that; like you said, time suck big time.
SHANE: Oh yes, and it’s so funny like Jill and Josh Stanton at Screw The Nine To Five, like our BFFs that we host our live event with, they have a really active, open Facebook group that’s free, that they use to generate leads for their membership sites, but, here’s the difference and I love them to death, but they don’t have kids, so they have more time and energy to be able to put into a Facebook group and a membership community that we don’t have. We just don’t have that much margin. So we choose not to do it because we can’t.
TANYA: Yes, okay.
SHANE: Sometimes, it’s just your situation, sometimes it’s just is it good for your niche; there’s a lot of variables but we lean towards no. Just focus on your forum.
TANYA: Okay, yeah, agreed, thank you. All right, next question, what are your best tips for growing a membership each month? I have a pretty small list, it’s about 360 and I don’t have a ton of time as you know.
JOCELYN: Yeah. Well we usually tell people that there are two ways to grow any kind of business: you can spend time or you can spend money. Spending money is going to get you there faster but it’s going to be more expensive obviously. Spending time is something that you just said you don’t have a lot of, so you can try to grow it organically, you can get out there on other people’s Facebook groups and you know, talk to people and try to provide value and get them to come and look at your stuff, or you can spend money to put your content out in front of the right people and get them to come in that way, which is the way that we recommend.
SHANE: Yeah, so you already have a list, you got a few people, you can go into Facebook and create some custom audiences maybe based off of your email list you’ve already got and try and find some similar people. You can go talk in about groups and forums about virtual assistants and being a virtual assistant in entrepreneurship, and you can just start targeting people that are liking things about being a virtual assistant or you know, maybe people who like Fiverr because there might be a lot of people out there trying to hustle on a side gig, that might want to be a virtual assistant, you’re going to have to do some research to figure it out, but why not? Since you’ve already got your VA business going, it would be just like someone had a nine to five job, why not just take any money that’s made in this business right now, because what did you say, you got 20-members right now?
TANYA: Yeah.
SHANE: Just take every penny from that and put it into Facebook ads right now and try to get more people to your free content, your opt-in and like, “Hey want to start a business from home, you can be a virtual assistant, all you need is a laptop. Here is my free –” whatever to get your first client or whatever and then just drive people to your free content. I think for you, the biggest thing that you are going to have to figure out is what are the skills because you got all these products, you need to get them into a free thing but then send them to a survey that says, which of these would you like to learn more about and then click to that sales page. A transcriptionist is not going to be the same thing as someone who –
JOCELYN: Installs plugins.
SHANE: – installs plugins, that’s going to be tough. So you got to get – you are going to have to use your funnel to collect some data to get people to get to the right place in your site, but your targeting can do that but just reinvest the money you are already making and let it compound. It’s not important to have that extra 300 dollars a month right now, extra, it’s more important that you put it right back into business and then you know, next month your list is 600 and then the next month it’s 1200 basically. So that’s going to get you the best results. I bet you could get your list at about 2000-3000 people, probably over two or three months pretty quick.
TANYA: Just using Facebook ads?
SHANE: Yeah, if you get your targeting right. Now, you’re going to – I got to tell everybody that’s listening, you are going to lose your first 400 dollars in Facebook ads campaign because you’ve got to figure out your targeting and you are going to have to experiment to get it right.
JOCELYN: And you are going to have zero return probably, but you are going to have probably a negligible return at first and so you can figure out which ads are working and then you reinvest into those ads.
SHANE: Right. So you might be paying five dollars in email the first couple of hundred bucks, but once you learn, the next series of 200 dollars, you might get them for three dollars apiece, and then you might get it down to one dollar apiece. It’s going to take you a couple of months to get it right but once you hit it, you can just hammer it. Makes sense?
TANYA: Yeah, and really it’s all going to go back to the memberships, so it does make it a lot simpler.
SHANE: Oh yeah, you’re going to have one funnel –
JOCELYN: And it makes life so much simpler not trying to go to all of those individual products, not trying to look at reports for all these individual products and offer customer service for all the individual product, it does make life a lot easier.
SHANE: It’s kind of like a merry-go-round, I got a great analogy Jocelyn, are you ready for this?
JOCELYN: I’m not sure.
SHANE: Here we go, this is a good one right here: so you get on a merry-go-round, not a merry-go-round, what’s it called, the thing in the middle of Disney World, the carousel, the big thing we get on every time we go to Disney World, all right, so there’s like six – you get on the carousel, you are spinning around – the center is the core, you are on the carousel, you are on this big machine that spins in a circle, so the center of that thing that is driving everything, that machine in the middle, that’s your membership area. But here’s the deal, Issac always wants to get on the dragon and Ana wants to get on the unicorn, I want to get on the tiger, Jocelyn wants to sit in the little bench, whatever –
JOCELYN: What? I so do not sit on the bench.
SHANE: You so do not sit on the bench, you usually are like the big eagle thing or whatever that is there, but like all of these little things, you are still riding the carousel but there’s a lot of different ways to get you on the carousel, you know what I mean? So, that’s kind of like the membership area; you are going to have like maybe 20-30 ads eventually that targets VAs for transcription, VAs for this, VA for that, you are going to start with one or two and learn it first but all those are different seats on the carousel and it’s all driving around that membership. So, it’s so much easier to have that membership and a bunch of different little places to sit on the carousel than it is to have this ride, and this ride, and this ride and the whole park.
TANYA: That’s a great analogy.
SHANE: That’s a great analogy, Tanya said so. All right, we probably have time for one more question.
TANYA: Okay, let’s see, let’s talk about pricing; I was thinking, should I get beta testers at this low price of 17 dollars a month just to try to get as much feedback as I can about the membership and what they need, or should I go ahead and increase the price for the membership now before I go ahead and add all the products into the membership?
SHANE: I think I would charge at least 29 dollars for this starting out in your first part but I would – don’t call them beta testers, what you do is you say, “This is 29 dollars but it’s going to be 59 dollars a month by this date –” or whatever, “39 dollars a month.” So, what you want to do is you want to sign up a bunch of people up below market value so that when you do raise their price, they are getting a discount. They got that deal locked in forever so they don’t want to quit because if they quit, they’ll have to come back in to 50 dollars a month later on, you know?
TANYA: Yeah.
SHANE: So, I don’t think I would call them beta testers, you’ve already got 20 people, get your forum set up, get them in that forum, seed some discussion, and then – prices, don’t make price hard, just pick one. It could be 19.29 whatever you want to start it, but just say, “It’s 19, it’s going to be 31 on this date, sign up before then.” You can email it to get some members in, raise your price, do the same thing, “It’s 39, in a month it’s going to be 49” and then you can just keep raising it until you find a good price point.
TANYA: Okay.
SHANE: Would you call them beta testers Jocelyn or just start the membership?
JOCELYN: I mean, you could, you could call them beta group, we’ve done that before –
SHANE: Yeah, we have.
JOCELYN: – with a couple of things that we have done, I think it’s a great way to do it and just be careful with your language; I’ve been talking to people about this recently, be sure not to say anything as “lifetime.”
SHANE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: Don’t use the words “lifetime access.” Don’t say that you are going to do monthly content because you may want to change that in the future. Say that you are going to offer “regularly scheduled content” and that way you can change the regular schedule.
SHANE: Yeah, don’t write checks that you can’t cash. You know what I’m saying?
TANYA: Yes.
SHANE: [Crosstalk] so you don’t have to, but don’t go out and tell people stuff that’s – like we did this in the beginning, and actually it was a disservice to our people, you know, we gave people lifetime access, but once they kind of got through that trial period, you know, they didn’t have any skin in the game, they weren’t taking advantage of the anymore. They just – it’s free for them, they don’t care, you know, “I can either show up or I can’t” and they are not getting value and they end up failing. Same thing with your clients with this Virtual Assistant business, you want them investing in their business because if they invest in their business, they will go out and work to succeed in their business, and also too you don’t want to open that trail of I can’t keep providing – I was wrong, I can’t do this for ever.
JOCELYN: And I think that your 17 dollars is a little bit low.
SHANE: I think it’s low too.
JOCELYN: You have to remember that even for us, a family of four, and you have a family of five, I mean, going through like McDonald’s, you are going to spend 30 dollars, so that’s a pretty negligible amount of money. So just increasing that price to like another ten dollars a month for your beta testers or your initial group there, I think that’s going to help you a lot. It’s going to increase your margin–
SHANE: And we are not saying – 29 dollars is a lot of money to some people, we are not saying [Crosstalk]
JOCELYN: No, I’m just saying like for the majority of or Americans it’s [Crosstalk] make or break kind of amount.
SHANE: But even more importantly for her avatar, these are people who are probably in corporate jobs and want out, so they are going to be making a little bit of money, and if I can pay 40-50 bucks a month to learn how to go work for myself, that’s a freaking deal. So, don’t undervalue – your membership is worth way more than the sum of its parts because you are in the membership. They are paying for you, and access for you, because you have the experience to do this plus training videos to get them started. So, I would really look at a higher price point to start it out with and it also too, those 20 members that you already got as 17, it’s going to lock them in forever because if they look out and go, “Oh that’s 39 dollars now, huh, I’m getting in for 17, I’m never leaving.”
JOCELYN: Yeah.
TANYA: Yeah, that’s very true. I’m hoping once I get the forum up and running, I’m going to be able to communicate with them a lot easier because Facebook really, I just I don’t like it.
SHANE: And it’s a time suck, that’s Jocelyn’s biggest thing that she hates Facebook.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I get on there to answer some things and then the next thing you know, like I am watching some kind of thing about whatever is on there that day.
SHANE: Some dog skateboarding or –
JOCELYN: Or the top ten things about body pump, I was reading that – [Crosstalk] like why am I doing that? I got on there an hour ago to do something, and then like an hour-and-a-half later, I had no idea what I was there to do to begin with.
SHANE: And then the members are the same way; the members are like – you’re not getting as much engagement. Once you get into the forum, they are there but once – they are not anywhere else though.
TANYA: Right.
SHANE: I mean, when you go to Facebook, you could lose them in five seconds.
TANYA: Yes, very true.
SHANE: Well, I think you have an amazing thing going, you are definitely off to the right foot, you got a good start, you’ve got members, you are rolling and once you get those systems in place, now it’s just about getting traffic into them so, good job.
TANYA: Great, thanks so much, this is super helpful.
JOCELYN: You’re welcome and I think like Shane said, you have a good thing going, if you can just make these few little tweaks and changes, I think this is really going to ramp it up for you. So we’re really looking forward to knowing how this goes for you and we hope that you’ll keep us all updated in the Flip Your Life group.
SHANE: Yeah, that’s your job now; you got to create an action plan from this call and go put it in the action forum so we can hold you accountable.
TANYA: Yeah, that’s awesome.
SHANE: So you got homework tonight, Miss Bryant.
TANYA: I need it, I need some accountability so this is perfect.
SHANE: Awesome, all right, thanks for coming on the show.
TANYA: Awesome, thanks you guys so much.
SHANE: All right guys, that was a great consulting call with Tanya; she did an awesome job switching her digital products sales business over to a membership site. We are really high on the membership model right now, we have had a lot of success and is going really well. We have seen a lot of our members switching to this model lately and they are doing very well as well. So if you want to learn more about the membership model and more about the online business, join us in our Flip Your Life community, you can find out more information about that at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and as always, thanks for listening. Get out there, take action and flip your life, we’ll see you then.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Mike says
If you are just starting call your original members “Charter” or “Star” members.
Julio and Tamra Rivera says
Hi ! I just discovered your site and I am amazed at all the great stuff that you do. All the lives that you help. Some of the stories made my eyes watery! Thank you , Thank you, Thank you!
Shane Sams says
Thanks Julio and Tamra!