Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

A membership has many moving parts, lots of technical elements, and will take plenty of hard work to get started.But there is one element of running a membership site that is constant and, if you don’t have it, you won’t keep your membership alive.If you don’t have an audience, you won’t have a membership.So, if you’re just starting out and eager to get your membership going, it’ll pay dividends if you invest in finding and growing your audience now. This classic episode of The Membership Guys will show you how.Essential Learning Points:Why it’s important to build your audience before you release your productWhere the best places are to look for your potential audienceHow finding your audience will also help you fine-tune your membership content and marketing strategyWhere you can go to learn more about establishing and growing your audienceImportant Links & Mentions:How to Generate Email Leads for Your Membership SiteUsing Segmentation to Increase Leads and Member SalesHow To Use Content Marketing To Sell Your Online MembershipMarketing Tactics for Attracting New Members4 Ways to Discover What Your Audience REALLY Want from your Membership Key Quotes:“If you’re building a product, you need to have someone to sell it to!” “Passionate people find each other and they congregate around different places online.”“A lot of your initial audience building efforts are going to center around finding where your particular crowd are and hanging out with them.”“Don’t take it for granted that your existing audience will have an interest in what you’re doing with your membership.”

Setting boundaries is essential if you want your membership to be productive and positive for you – and your members.But how do you do it without cutting people off, coming across as aloof or inaccessible, and how can you ensure your members are having their questions answered whilst still respecting your boundaries.It’s certainly a balancing act, but it’s one you can perfect by putting into practice some of these tips and tricks. We’ve tested and refined these approaches over time with our own Membership Academy and our members have also found these approaches to be beneficial in their memberships too.Tune in to find out how we, and many other membership site owners, set healthy boundaries with our members that benefit everyone. Essential Learning Points:Why opening yourself up to more communication can actually reduce contact overwhelmSome of the best tools and tactics we’ve used to set healthy boundaries within our membershipWhy setting the right boundaries will benefit your members as much as youImportant Links & Mentions:Is Starting a Membership Website the Right Move for You?Recommended Tools & ResourcesHow to Add an Online Forum to your Membership WebsiteLive Membership Q&A with Mike and CallieMembership AcademyKey Quotes: “Your members will contact you and any successful membership site owner will respond when they do reach out. That’s not to say that you can’t set boundaries and that you can’t be the one to set the terms.” “When people know that they don’t have to try hard to reach you, that takes the urgency out of the equation.” “Nobody should be in a position where they send you a message and they have no idea of when to expect a response.” “Setting and managing expectations is good not just for you, but for your members too.”

Discover strategies to win back cancelled members and prevent member cancellations in your membership site. Learn about creating a compelling win-back sequence, key tactics for re-engagement, and essential email automations. Explore the importance of engaging with former members and showcasing program benefits to entice their return. Don't miss the five-email sequence strategy to highlight subscription benefits and upcoming topics.

Your blog and your website host all of the content used in your marketing – so how do you join the dots between your blog and your membership?There are plenty of ways membership site owners can do this, but many don’t because they’ve heard bad advice from marketing ‘gurus’ or they’re worried about sounding salesy.The good news is there are direct and indirect ways of linking from your blog to your membership – and all of them are good, easy ideas to implement!So, listen in to this episode to learn why it’s so important to build that path from your blog to your membership and how you can do it – with examples from ourselves and our members at Membership Academy.Essential Learning Points:Why it’s so essential that you use your blog as a promotional channel for your membershipDirect and indirect approaches you can use to drive traffic your membership from your blogWhy you need to discount one particular piece of advice that some internet marketers swear byImportant Links & Mentions:How To Use Content Marketing To Sell Your Online MembershipMembership AcademyHow to Decide Which Content Should Be Free vs PaidHow to Generate Email Leads for Your Membership SiteFacebook Remarketing Strategies for Membership Websites Key Quotes:“Your blog is a primary place to promote your membership.” “Often all someone needs to be ready to buy is awareness that you have a solution to their problem.”“We get so many people clicking through from the CTA on our thank you page and we have so many members inside our community whose sales significantly increased once they added that CTA to their thank you pages as well.”“You need to make sure, if you’re getting people subscribing to your email list, that you have an initial series of emails that sells your membership.”

Despite my protests over the years, I’m ready to admit that there are a few instances where it is a good idea to use a closed door membership model.Some of them are very niche, some of them require a few “ifs” and asterisks, but they are entirely valid and are all better suited to a closed door model.This episode is well worth checking out if you’re just starting out or if you’re trying new things with your membership. It could make a foundational difference to the way you run your membership!Essential Learning Points:What the difference is between closed door and evergreen membership modelsThe six situations that suit a closed door membership model bestThe one universal truth that applies to every membership modelImportant Links & Mentions:5 Reasons Why I Dislike the Closed Door Membership Launch StrategyWhy You Should Run a Beta Test for Your Membership SiteCreating an MVP to Test and Validate Your Membership IdeaLean Live Launch strategyPromoting Your Membership Site with an Affiliate Program Key Quotes: “If your model uses cohorts – a set intake of students and schedule – then the closed door model is essential.” “If you’ve been running your membership for a year or two and you know that there is a clearly-defined off-season period – where demand subsides and sales drop – then you might be better served by taking sales and marketing out of the equation for that period.”“Whether you choose an evergreen model or the closed door approach, keep in mind that you still need to show up for your existing members.”

Community is often the heart of membership sites but working out the best way to introduce it to your membership isn’t as easy it might seem.Often, we see debates around how to host membership communities that end up focusing on quantity of engagement, rather than quality.Quantity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not always what you’re actually aiming for.If you want to find the signal in the noise and determine the right community model for your membership site, you’re going to need to dig a little deeper into your purpose, your membership structure, and the goals your audience have.This episode of The Membership Guys podcast will help you do that digging!Essential Learning Points:What the Signal vs Noise ratio is in communities and why understanding the differentiation is importantWhy understanding your membership and its purpose is key to deciding the role your community should playWhat we have learned (and are still learning) about our own experiments with forums and Facebook groupsImportant Links & Mentions:Should I use a Forum or Facebook Group for my community?Do You REALLY Need to Add a Community to Your Membership?How to Add an Online Forum to your Membership WebsiteMembership Mastermind from The Membership GuysKey Quotes:“It is crucial to understand that activity and engagement are not the same thing.”“The importance of your signal to noise ratio will depend on how important community is to your membership.”“We’ve clearly defined the role of the forum and the Facebook group, and how the two connect. Because of that, we’re not experiencing any problems.” “The type of role that your community plays is entirely up to you and it’s going to be dependent on what you know will work best for your audience.”

Member retention is critical to the long-term success of your membership website.It costs 7-10 times more on average to win a new member than it does to hold on to an existing one; and if you’re losing more members than you bring in then your business won’t last long!In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, we’re giving you 21 quick tips for improvements you can make to your membership strategy in order to improve your member retention.

Every industry, topic and niche has its fair share of jargon.And memberships are no different.There’s already so much to juggle as a membership site owner, so the last thing you want to have to worry about is needing to wrap your head around all of the lingo!So to make it easier for you, we’ve rounded up the 9 key terms and phrases you need to know if you run a membership.

Facebook remarketing is one of the most exciting developments in online advertising in recent years. Now, instead of being limited to picking demographics and targeting options that we think relate to our target audience; we can actually leverage actual user behaviour to determine which ads they are shown.This enables us to show the right message to the right person at the right time, which dramatically improves the effectiveness of our Facebook ads.When it comes to membership sites, there are 6 key ways in which you can really leverage Facebook remarketing - and I'm sharing them all in this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast

Running a membership site is a juggling act. There’s a seemingly never-ending list of things to keep on top of; and with much of the focus revolving around things like producing content and marketing to bring in new members it’s easy to see why some of the basics get missed. However it’s often the relatively minor day to day activities that have the real impact on how successful a membership site is. In this episode I discuss 4 such activities you should make sure you’re doing each and every day in your membership