Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
One thing defines your membership’s message: finding people that vote with their wallet and then finding continuing to find more people like them. Most importantly: get people to join you and getting it off the ground.
Don’t hold yourself back! You are more ready than you think. The curse of knowledge in the membership world makes us want to dump everything we’ve ever learned about out field into the memberships, while it’s happening. Sometimes, people make the mistake of thinking ‘okay, well I don’t have what in my mind is the perfect model already laid out. Then, people aren’t going to want to join it.’
The ‘lowdown’ on Jill Fox:
- Lives in Orange County, CA
- Owner of Fox Social Media
- Working to start membership site based on helping small business owners and solopreneurs learn simple marketing strategies to grow their businesses and increase sales.
- https://foxsocialmedia.com
Show Notes
How many businesses need social marketing right now? All of them!
There are a couple things about businesses like this when you transition into the membership model. You have to careful with what kind of content you’re including. (Zero in that content in to something that is evergreen). For instance, one problem is the constant changing of the platform you’re using. If facebook changes the way you set up a Facebook page, your content is no longer valid. You have to be very careful how much of that you focus on going forward.
Utilize a launch strategy. For Jill, we said her’s looks like this:
- Change your branding, get all that set.
- Focus the first month or two on trying to tighten up your message enough for a list. For Jill, the best lead magnet is walking people through how to set up or optimize their business Facebook page. Most people have access to this, most people want to come in at.
- The lead magnet is to a free trial, it is not necessarily to an opt-in. That opt-in would trigger your emails to follow-up.
- Reach out to people organically, reach out to people through YouTube, start building hype for your membership.
- Pick a day and open your site.
- Do a personal reach-out to those beta members. Let them put their money where their mouth is. Discount your launch to that beta group to get a few people in there.
Don’t dabble – set big goals. Use what we call Membership Math. Jill wanted to have $100K. However, we talked her into setting her sights on $250K. In Orange County, $100K pays for half her bills. We want her to not only be able to pay for everything with her membership site. We want her to make that full $200K, plus more. Of course, that doesn’t mean we want her to stop there! Membership Math is calculating how many members it will take to afford whatever you want. Jill only needs 163 members, of all the people on planet earth, to meet her goal.
Members are not going to pay you forever – and that’s okay. Back to where we said Jill only needs 163 people out of all the humans on earth. There is marketing, there is churn. But, that is a very small percentage of people. You will get more members!
Here’s our idea for Jill:
- Start a beta group with 20 people at $50 a month. Learn from them!
- As you’re doing some content marketing on the side of that, you’re building your audience, build that list up again.
- Do another beta round of about 20 people at $50/month.
- Have a goal for the next year to have 163 people at at least $97 per month. That is $250K/year.
Email marketing 101. The first thing you have to do is tell people who you are and what you do. You have to tell them all about you and your background. Indoctrinate them into what you’re doing. The second thing you want to do, at the same time, is deliver what you promised.
In Jill’s case, when her beta members sign up for her trial, they would get 2 emails:
- Telling everyone your story, what you do, why you’re the expert, here’s where they can connect with you.
- The second email gives them delivery on what they asked for. ‘Thanks for signing up for ____, it’s in the community. Click here and log in.’ Then, use what we call ‘wow bonuses.’ Which are unexpected bonuses to really rev people up. This will help to keep them as a member over the next 30 days. Over the next 30 days continue to send them more bonuses, tell them about this training. Or even, reach out to them to ask them more about themselves to get them to reply to you. Give them unexpected bonuses like courses that are not in the community, free 1-on-1 sessions, stuff like that!
Becoming a part of your members’ lives is what keeps them coming back month to month.
Leave a Reply