Membership vs Standalone Courses Which One Wins

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett highlights how each model works for various kinds of entrepreneurs as he compares the benefits and drawbacks of membership sites against stand-alone online courses.

To maintain revenue, creators could have to rely on marketing campaigns, relaunches, or extras like community access and mentoring. A membership site, on the other hand, is more adaptable and sophisticated, frequently combining many courses with recurring advantages like private blogs, resource libraries, group coaching, or community access.

Although memberships enable ongoing value creation and support recurrent revenue, they also come with a higher workload and more regular content delivery requirements. Serial entrepreneurs that thrive on creating and overseeing a variety of offers would be more suited to this strategy. According to Harris, whether you want the concentration and simplicity of a single course or the scalability and continuous engagement of a membership site, success relies on your personal style and company strategy.

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and this is another solo episode, and today we’re gonna be discussing the pros and cons, the differences between membership sites and standalone courses. There’s a very important decision you need to make either in the beginning or as you’re getting started and figuring out how you’re gonna build an online education company.

As to which path you’re gonna take. Either I’m gonna build a membership site or a standalone course, or multiple standalone courses or potentially a hybrid model that is, I offer standalone courses and I offer memberships. So first, let’s talk about the difference and come to agreement on terms. So what is a standalone online course?

A standalone online course typically has a one-time payment. The student gets access to the training. Could be a series of videos, other resources, PDFs, maybe quizzes and assignments, perhaps get a certificate. Now it is possible to add recurring revenue to a standalone. Online course in a couple of ways.

One simple way, which isn’t real recurring revenue, is to actually add a payment plan. So if it’s expensive, let’s say it’s a $1,000 online course, you could have a price tag of $1,000 or four payments monthly for $250. That’s not necessarily a recurring revenue situation. It’s more of a payment plan. But you can add a recurring revenue to standalone online course by simply offering things like group coaching every month, or an online community so that they can cancel any time.

Say your goal is to still make $1,000 and you charge a hundred dollars a month for access to the course and the coaching and the community. Most people who join your program end up staying for approximately 10 months. So there you get your $1,000 as an example, through mostly really just a standalone online course that has that added benefit.

Now, what is a membership site? Memberships, the word is often used in many different ways, so I want to tell you how I think about it particularly at lifter LMS. And how membership sites can be different from online courses. So if you’re building an education company, you’re probably gonna have a courses aspect to your site.

But in a membership site, there’s probably gonna be a lot of other things going on outside of courses that people get access to by enrolling in your membership. So one way to think about a membership site. Is that it can grant access to an online course or multiple online courses or future online courses you have not even created yet, but plan on creating over time.

It can also include aspects, access to other parts of your website. Like private content that exists outside of courses. A simple example might be. A members only blog or newsletter or resource library of digital downloads. It could be parts of pages or expanded content beyond what’s freely available on your site.

With a tool like Lifter, LMS, you can control access. Outside of courses via memberships to other parts or pieces of your website or other benefits like access to a community calendar, which is, has access to coaching calls or community events and that sort of thing. So the most simple way to think about it is that a standalone course is just one course.

Usually those are sold for one-time payment. And a membership site is much more complex. It can be a bundle of courses and other benefits or access to other parts of your website. Now, a tool, a learning management system like Lifter, LMS is infinitely flexible. So however you want to do it, whether it’s a simple standalone online course.

Or a multi instructor online school with fancy membership benefits as well. Both are possible with lifter LMS. So just to get into the pros and cons, the benefits and drawbacks of either option, standalone online courses, if it’s particularly just access to the content, maybe a certification. There’s really no way to get.

Recurring revenue because it’s pretty straightforward. There’s a limited scope course. People go in, they take the course, they learn the knowledge, they create skills, maybe get a certificate, and they’re done.

That’s not really a recurring revenue situation. One of the benefits of a standalone online course is that it is a lot less work for the course creator.

So once you’ve created it. You’re done and it’s up there. But a drawback to that is you may have to do continuous marketing to get new people over and enrolling in your course. Now, there’s a lot of great education entrepreneurs out there that all they have ever done is they have one standalone online course and every year or every six months, they make it better and better.

They do a launch or a marketing launch of their course multiple times a year, and that’s the launch model and there’s nothing wrong with that. So one thing I’d like to highlight here is some of this depends on your personality. So in all my time as an entrepreneur and working with other entrepreneurs.

I found that there’s a spectrum, two ends to the spectrum of different kinds of entrepreneurs. One I call the focused entrepreneur and the other I call the serial entrepreneur. So a serial entrepreneur creates like many different businesses and many pro products or, they’re constantly creating and ideating and doing a lot of new things.

Now, there’s. Pros and cons to being a focused entrepreneur like I have my one thing, I’m actually more of a focused entrepreneur. I am super focused on lifter LMS. I’ve been doing it for over a decade. I am a focused entrepreneur, but a serial entrepreneur, would. Create many different software products and many other businesses and just have this portfolio, if you will, of businesses and neither is better or worse.

And a pro tip for you right here is it if a focused entrepreneur teams up with a serial entrepreneur and they have good chemistry and they can work together is really a beautiful thing. They’re just the different ways they see the world and operate when they’re in partnership. It is super powerful and unstoppable in that way.

So that’s just a pro tip. I know there’s a lot of like husband wife teams as an example, creating education companies or business partners and if one, if they’re different in that focused versus serial aspect. They can be really powerful. But a standalone online course is more of a focused approach.

But if you’re gonna be like, okay, I really want a membership site and I have ideas for 20 different courses and the coaching program and online community.

You can do. You’re more of a serial entrepreneur in that way, and that is very cool. But it is also a lot more work. Focus is more scattered, in my opinion. Success is less likely because focus is spread out. So it really depends on your approach and who you are and what your personality is.

The big benefit of a membership site is that you’re going to get multiple options for recurring revenue. You can keep adding new courses, you can add other resources to a digital library. You can keep creating a private blog, private newsletter. Keep delivering online coaching, keep developing your community.

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So the trade off between a standalone online course and a membership is the membership is a lot more work. The demand on you to create content and the surface area that you have to manage is a lot more with a membership site. Now I’m actually a big fan of what I call the hybrid model. So the most simple version of a hybrid model is to do a standalone online course and then just add a coaching or community aspect to it.

That allows you to get recurring revenue while also having a focus on one main course and a lifter LMS. You don’t even have to create a membership to do that. You can use. What we call access plans to, let’s say you have one plan that’s like just the course for $500 or another access plan in the pricing table that says you get the course plus these ongoing coaching and community benefits, and this plan costs a hundred dollars a month.

So you can literally offer both options. You’re opening up the world to recurring revenue. So that’s a very simple example of how to create a hybrid model. One of the ways to also do hybrid is to have a standalone course, but then also a membership that has way more stuff in it. So if you think about your Buyer’ss journey, let’s say.

Earlier in the journey, you have a $500 starter course that helps people get started and get going. That’s your standalone course, and it’s like your 1 0 1, like you have to start here. You have to start with the course to get oriented and really become a perfect fit for the membership, the 2 0 1, which is available later, so the.

The membership, then, let’s say it includes three advanced level courses. Also additional benefits like community or coaching as well. So in that way, if you look at your ideal learners journey, you’re asking them to, Hey, start here in the jv. Or the junior varsity, the level one, the freshmen using traditional university language.

And then if when you’re ready, you can jump into the bigger membership. Which is more exp, more expensive, more benefits and recurring there’s a recurring cost to that. So that’s a hybrid model. I’m also a big fan of free courses, so like free standalone courses. So maybe even before they’re ready to be a freshman or jv, you have a free course to get people ready to even be ready for the standalone course.

So free course, then standalone paid course, and then membership. And when it comes to offers, I like to only offer. Three, a maximum of three choices like that. ’cause once you get more complicated than that, you start to really confuse buyers. And there’s a saying that the confused mind doesn’t buy, which is very true.

So think about that and how you and how you construct your model. And just some examples of this, like KPC, who does. Slick Business is the name of her platform and she does active campaign and marketing automation training. And she’s very membership site focused. So I’m just pulling up KPCs website.

You can find that at slick business.co. And if I go to her active campaign academy. There’s basically two options. There is the Essential Academy, which is $97 per month at the time of this recording, and there’s the Advanced Academy. That’s $187 per month. And within this, she has training, she has office hours. She has community, she has, the entry level course for the first option, the Essential Academy. And then she has extra courses with, more information for the advanced people in the advanced Academy plan. And this is Kay is doing a classic. Membership site and that’s awesome. But Kay is going to have to deliver ongoing, office hours, what she does weekly, and continue to support her other member bonuses.

So that’s like a classic membership site. Kay’s done very well with her platform and she’s such a great. Example of building a membership site. But then if you think about a standalone course creator, we have people that have, let’s say they were a Udemy instructor and they had a course on this topic.

It sold for 50 bucks on you, Demi, and they want more ownership, power, control, and customizability over their course. I’m thinking of someone like Frank Kane who has made over $2 million in revenue with over 600,000 students in his standalone courses. So he does several standalone courses and Frank does a lot of education in the tech sector helping, engineers level up on certain things like how AWS, Amazon’s.

Platform works and so on. So that’s just a, another great example of a standalone membership, or sorry, a standalone online course, and Frank is a serial creator, so technology is constantly changing. So he’s creating new courses that help with a particular tech skill to help people get good jobs or do their job well.

That sort of thing. So that’s a example of a standalone online course and we talked about free courses. So one of lifter, LMS’s most popular course is a free course called the Official Quick Start Course for the lifter LMS community. That’s awesome. And that is free. It’s only about an hour of content and we’ve had something like 40,000 people enroll in that.

So it’s a very strong, like lead magnet and gets people ready for the software. Which technically is a membership, by the way, an annual recurring subscription unless you get a lifetime license. And the course, the free course gets people really ready for the ongoing. Membership to the software that learn how to use the tool, make sure it’s a good fit for them, and then it’ll also help them get started once they become a customer, to learn the essential 5% of the software so that they can launch their education company as quickly as possible.

So that’s an example of a standalone free course. So it’s really up to you which path. You choose to move forward with in terms of standalone courses versus memberships and you can just have a standalone course with no coaching and no community. One-time payment, lifetime access. These, this is the quote, least amount of work.

It’s still really hard to create like a great standalone online course, but when you commit to a membership site, you are committing to a much bigger ongoing commitment that’s gonna have a lot of demand on your time and your the need for you to create content. So if you’re gonna create. Recurring revenue, you have to create recurring value, which means you’re either going to have to continually be creating new courses and other content to drop into the membership or have ongoing benefits like office hours, group or private coaching, or a helpful, supportive online community.

So different ways to think about that. We also have a lot of continuing education or professional development creators using lifter LMS. So this is also a great niche. This is more like a standalone course approach. So if someone needs to get, let’s say, two hours of continuing EDU education credits to keep their license in the medical system or.

Some business niche or legal or real estate or whatever it is, they need to get their continuing education credits by taking standalone courses. Now you can introduce a membership using left or LMS where you get a bundle of courses so you can get all, say, 20 hours for the next year or two years for to keep your license and so on.

So there’s a lot of people doing. Hybrid approaches. But the main point is if you’re gonna do recurring revenue, you have to do, find a way to create recurring value. So I’d love to hear from you any questions or comments around the decision to do standalone courses or the membership site model.

I would encourage you just to do some soul searching. Really decide if you are a focused entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur. Serial creatorand again, neither one of these is better than the other is super powerful. If you know within the same education company you can combine. Both the focus and the the serial creator aspect.

It’s a dynamic duo, if you will. So that’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. I hope you’d enjoyed that. I wish you all the best with your standalone online courses and or membership site or hybrid model.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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