Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Is your membership stressing you out?

When you first started your journey to being a membership owner, the chances are you didn’t picture sleepless nights and dreading going to work. In fact, you probably imagined finally getting to live the life you always wanted ­– so, where’s it all gone wrong?

Owning any business, including a membership, is going to come with stressors. That’s just a fact. But there are several things that could be happening in your membership that are making you unhappy, that you can do something about.

In this episode, we talk about the eight most common areas that cause stress for membership owners. We reveal how you can manage these and make running your membership as enjoyable and stress-free as you hoped it would be!

Essential Learning Points:

• How to adjust your expectations for your membership
• Why you should be focusing on the long game
• How to set manageable deadlines
• How to be realistic with your content strategy
• Which tasks you should be outsourcing to free up your time
• How to stay focused on your own progress
• Why setting boundaries is essential to managing stress
• How context can reframe your anxieties

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys
• Membership Academy
• 6 Tasks You Should Outsource To Make Your Membership More Manageable

Key Quotes:

“With memberships, you get to set the terms. You get to create a business of your own design that fits with your goals for your life.”

“You're not creating a finished product, you're starting a journey. You have the freedom and flexibility to adapt and evolve your membership over time.”

“Don't try and do everything yourself. You're not a superhero.”

Are you ready to launch a membership? Are you really ready?

If you’ve been toying with the idea of launching a membership for some time, you might be wondering if the timing is right. Many business gurus out there will tell you to jump in and “just start,” but hold on!

Memberships are a funny business. Launching your membership is all about timing it right. If you get it wrong, it’s much harder to change your mind or get out of it when you have paying members with high expectations. You need to do the groundwork first.

In this episode, we take you through the signs that now is the time to launch your membership. These are signs that your membership will get off to a great start, has a real audience, and won’t fizzle out over time.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why timing is so important when starting a membership
• The downsides of jumping into a membership before you’re ready
• Why you need to be clear on what you’re offering and who you’re serving
• How much time you need to dedicate at the beginning
• Why building your audience before launching a membership is the best move

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys
• Membership Academy
• Why Membership Site Owners Need to Niche Down (And STAY Niched)
• Membership Toolkit

Key Quotes:

“The most successful memberships are the ones that solve a specific problem and serve a specific audience.”

“The riches are in the niches when it comes to memberships.”

“It's not about having thousands of people on an email list before you can even contemplate starting a membership. It's far more important that your following is relevant than it is huge.”

In this one-off bonus episode to mark Mental Health Awareness Week, I'm opening up about my history of dealing with clinical depression.

To say this is not a typical episode of The Membership Guys Podcast would be an understatement...

There's nothing here about memberships, there are no tips, there is no advice. Just my story of mental health challenges which I'm sharing in the hopes of removing the stigma and normalising discussion around topics like depression.

If you choose to skip this and stick to the 'membership stuff' then that definitely does not make you a bad person!

However if you do listen then I hope sharing this frank, "warts and all" story of my personal fight with depression helps you to either better navigate your own challenges or to support others in your life who are struggling.

Please consider supporting others by donating to www.mind.org.uk or alternative mental health charities in your area if you can.

What’s the secret to marketing your membership? Spoiler: there isn’t just one secret! There are multiple different methods to try, but there are some universal truths to always bear in mind first.

In this episode, we share the 12 universal truths to membership marketing. There may not be some hidden secret that will guarantee you success, but these truths apply to all types of membership (and many other businesses as well.)

If you’re unsure of what marketing approach to take or whether you need to spend much time marketing at all, don’t miss this episode!

Essential Learning Points:

• The 12 universal truths that apply to all memberships
• Why there’s never a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing
• Why building trust should be a key part of your marketing
• The importance of marketing and why you can’t overlook it

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys
• Membership Academy
• Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans
• Bob Berg’s The Go-Giver book

Key Quotes:

“Think of your membership as a painkiller, not a vitamin. You want it to be a must-have, not a nice-to-have.”

“An average product that has great marketing will always beat a great product with average marketing.”

“What someone says about you is worth so much more than what you say about yourself.”

There’s a lot of advice out there about memberships, some of it good, some of it downright awful! If you’re not sure who to listen to or you’re worried you’ve made a mistake about starting a membership, don’t miss this episode.

In this episode, we break down the five top pieces of bad (and damaging) advice we’ve seen about running a membership.

We take you through competition in the membership world, whether you really need scarcity to sell and if memberships are as dead as people claim. *Spoiler* they’re not!

Essential Learning Points:

• How to recognize bad membership advice
• Why the membership model is NOT dying out
• Why healthy competition is good
• The problem with using scarcity to sell
• Why a closed-door membership does not mean less work

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys
• Membership Academy
• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
• Competing with Established Memberships in Your Market
• Are You Leaving Money On The Table in Your Membership Business?

Key Quotes:

“It’s fine to leave money on the table if it’s not a table you want to sit at.”

“If you’re building your business and basing your strategy on whatever’s in vogue this month, then that’s the wrong approach.”

“We shouldn’t be scared off by the existence of competition or worried that a market is too oversaturated. In fact, it’s more of a worry if there’s no competition.”

In this special one-off episode, we're asking you guys to help us shape the future direction of The Membership Guys Podcast by having your say on the topics you'd like us to hear more about.

To help you do this, we're testing out some incredibly nifty new tech from our podcast hosts Captivate that add interactive surveys to our show - so not only do you help us out, you also get a glimpse at some cool tech stuff too. Win-win!

Head over to https://www.themembershipguys.com/podcastsurvey to make your voice heard.

How can you launch a membership without any audience? The simple answer is you don’t have to. You need to put in the work to build that audience first.  

That’s exactly what we did, and in this episode, we share all the little details that went into building our audience BEFORE we launched the Membership Academy.

So, join me on a trip down memory lane. We’re talking about the early days of The Membership Guys and what we did six years ago to get where we are today.

We share detailed tips on content marketing, blogging, building your email list, and gaining interest before you even sign up your first member.

Essential Learning Points:

• It doesn’t take thousands of dollars to launch a membership
• You don’t need a huge email list to launch your membership
• What steps you can take to build interest in your membership
• The importance of a solid launch strategy
• Where The Membership Guys are today.

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys
• Membership Academy
• Member Machine book
• Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter
• Superfast Business
• Membership Toolkit

Key Quotes:

“Do what you can with what you have.”

“We hated having to turn people away and not being able to give them a suggestion of where to go.”

“450 people on an email list…you’re not going to brag to many people about that. It’s still fairly small…but it was big enough.”

How do you make your membership ‘stickier’? By that, we mean, how do you get members to stick around for your content?

The key is to give them something worth sticking around for. You might have great content on the horizon, but do you members know about it?

In this podcast episode, I share seven simple ways to let your members know about all the amazing things you have planned for future content.

Most of these are simple tweaks you can do today, such as posting on social media or emailing your members. We also share some less commonly known tactics to showcase upcoming valuable content.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why it’s so important to signpost future content
• How to use the ‘Pain of Disconnect’ or FOMO to keep your members interested
• Why an upcoming content list is a simple way to signpost future value
• The types of future content you should promote and how
• How to use future content to influence current content.

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Academy
• Digital Marketer
• The Memberoni theme
• AddEvent
• 7 Things to Consider When Choosing a Membership Site Theme
• 21 Quick Tips for Improving Member Retention

Key Quotes:

“Memberships are a value exchange.”

“The true value from a membership comes from the things the content enables, the results, the wins, the success stories.”

“You’re giving them a glimpse at a possible future that they could have, in terms of outcome, transformation, results, wins, if they actually apply the content that is being released.”

What should you do after you launch your membership?

Once the launch is all over and done with, what next? Do you just wait for more members to drop by? No, you’ve still got plenty of work to do to grow your membership business. In fact, the easy part is over!  

In this podcast episode, we share six things you need to do once you launch your membership to keep growing.

You’ll want to focus on member retention, follow up with non-buyers, and develop a solid marketing strategy. Listen in to hear my top tactics for making the most of your successful launch, so interest doesn’t just fizzle out.

Essential Learning Points:

• How your membership launch is probably the easiest marketing you’ll ever do
• Why the first 30 days of your new membership are the most important
• How to utilize your happy members for future marketing
• Why running a membership isn’t just about getting new members, it’s all about what happens after the sale

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Academy
• Google Analytics

Key Quotes:

“90% of success is all about what happens on the inside of a membership.”

“In the afterglow of your launch, those first 30 days or so, really keep an eye out for any posts, comments, and feedback that you can use from your community…and then turn that into marketing collateral.”

“You want those people that were on the fence during your launch and decided against joining to be kicking themselves for not signing up.”

Every superhero has an origin story…

And as we're celebrating a huge milestone of recording 300 episodes of The Membership Guys podcast, Callie and I decided to do something a little bit special and share ours.

In this episode we talk about things we’ve never talked about publicly before, giving you an insight into how The Membership Guys came to be and how we got to where we are today. 

Hopefully some of our story will resonate with you. 

Enjoy!  

Episode Summary:

• The story of how Callie and I met
• Our business journey, including bad partnerships, 20 hour work days, and of course… memberships
• Some personal struggles with depression, burnout and general health that we've never talked about before
• PLUS we discuss how Callie has never seen the movie Karate Kid (shock), how in a weird multiverse The Membership Guys may never have come to be and much more!