Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Do you want to launch a membership, or have you launched already and now found that there are big, established competitors in your market?

Don’t panic. Your competitors may have a massive library of content, years and years of experience under their belt, or thousands of members, but don’t let that intimidate you.

Your size, your uniqueness, and your ability to zig when your competitors zag, gives you an edge – if you know how to take advantage of it.

In this episode, I share many tips on how to differentiate yourself from the competitors. From zeroing in on your specialty and niche to emphasizing your personal brand and offering a personalized service, these tips will help you get a share of that membership pie.

Essential Learning Points:

1.   How understanding ‘why you exist’ can help you differentiate from your competitors

2.   Why specializing and niching down on your topic and who you serve can help your positioning

3.   The benefits of focusing on your personal side, embracing your underdog nature, and striving for quality

4.   Why you should avoid getting wrapped up in competitor numbers and look for opportunities

5.   What to avoid doing when dealing with competitors

Important Links & Mentions:

• Bob Burg, “The Go Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea”
• The Membership Academy
• The Membership Mastermind Facebook Group
• The Membership Guys’ Twitter
• Mike’s Instagram
• Callie’s Instagram

Key Quotes:

“If you can offer something that caters to a specific segment of your audience, then you are going to stand out and beat your competition every single time.”

“Don’t be intimidated by that established competitor with a library of content. It’s all about what value and what results you can deliver.”

“Don’t obsess about the fact your competitor has more members than you or that they have cornered a percentage of the market because, in all honesty, you only need a small percentage of the marketplace to succeed.” 

Are you finding Instagram a frustrating platform to promote your membership?

Instagram is the one social channel where it is hard to add links to promote your content. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. As well as just using it as a content outlet to promote your blog, podcast, or video content, there are multiple ways Stories can be used to promote your membership business.

In this episode, we share 7 ways you can make the most out of Instagram Stories. From creating native content to utilising interactive Stories badges. We have lots of suggestions about how you can use Stories to showcase your social side and promote your business at the same time.

Essential Learning Points:

• How to creatively use Instagram Stories to promote your membership
• Ways to use native content on Stories to engage your members
• The benefits of using Stories to show behind the scenes content
• How you can use Stories to share social proof and brag about yourself
• The benefits of features like the Stories countdown and question badges to promote your content and engage your audience

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Academy
• The Membership Mastermind Facebook Group
• The Membership Guys’ Twitter
• Mike’s Instagram
• Callie’s Instagram

Key Quotes:

“Instagram Stories has a lot of potential. But, you will have to be more creative to take advantage of it.”

“You can use Stories to brag about your members and to showcase them. By shining, a spotlight on your member’s successes will show a different dimension to your business.”

“Stories are great for getting existing members excited about what’s coming up and building connections, but also for enticing new members.”

Did your membership achieve its goals this year? If it did, congratulations! If not, could your approach to goal setting have improved your chances?

As the year draws to a close, there's no better time to take stock of how far you've come. Reviewing the last 12 months is a great way to appreciate your achievements and the first steps to planning for your membership's future.

Goal setting is a vital part of setting your membership up for success. But it can be challenging knowing what goals to set for your membership and, once you've figured those out, even harder to know the right way to achieve them.

In this episode, we're sharing a practical goal-setting process that will help you determine where you want your membership to go and reveal how to get you there.

Essential Learning Points:

• How the CO-STAR process can help you set and achieve goals
• Practical goal setting examples and actionable steps
• Why your goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound)
• The optimum time period for a planning and review cycle

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Academy
• The Membership Mastermind Facebook Group
• The Membership Guys’ Twitter
• Mike’s Instagram
• Callie’s Instagram

Key Quotes:

“Any time you're setting goals, any time you're planning, you need to take stock. You almost need to audit what's going on right now.”

“You need to be able to measure the goals that you're setting in order to determine if you're on track.”

“You have to consider your priorities and the relevance of what you're spending your time on, and what you're prioritizing within your plan.”

Just like that, another year is over...

And what a year 2020 has been!

Rather than dwell on what could only be described as an insane 12 months, let’s end the year on a high and think about what we’ve all achieved. 

It has certainly been a big year for Callie and I.

We’ve: 

• Grown our team with two full-time hires - Kathryn, our Head of Digital Content and Tom, our Graphic Designer.  
• Launched some amazing new features in Membership Academy including our Game Plans and Member Huddles, and…
• Created another year’s worth of The Membership Guys weekly podcast and season 4 of Callie’s Behind The Membership podcast. 

It’s been a lot of fun! 

We hope it’s been a successful and productive year for you and your membership. 

With only a few days left of 2020, it’s time for our traditional end of year recap show.

Listen for our top 10 most popular episodes of The Membership Guys podcasts in 2020. 

Thank you so much for your continued support of the show this year - I really appreciate each and every one of you. 

Here’s to an awesome 2021. 

• Using Facebook Ads to Promote Your Membership With Gavin Bell
• 8 Things You Need to Know Before Starting a Membership Site  
• 9 Simple Marketing Tactics That’ll Get You More Members
• Using Pinterest to Market Your Membership With Cara Chace 
• Should You Allow Competitors to Join Your Membership?
• 7 Things to do Before You Publish Your Next Piece of Content
• Why Signal vs Noise Ratio is Key to Membership Community Engagement 
• Should You Build Your Website Yourself or Hire Help - With Martin and Lyndsay from Jammy Digital
• Celebrating the 5th Anniversary of Membership Academy 
• How to Use Content Marketing to Sell Your Online Membership

• 10 Most Popular Episodes of The Membership Guys Podcast 2019
• 10 Most Popular Episodes of The Membership Guys Podcast in 2018
• 10 Most Popular Episodes of The Membership Guys Podcast in 2017
• 10 Most Popular Episodes of The Membership Guys Podcast in 2016

How are you planning to run your membership over the festive season?

As a membership site owner, you have the freedom to choose how you run your membership all year round. However, the holidays present unique opportunities for producing content, running promotions, and taking the time to sit back and relax.

In this episode, I tell you the six things you can start doing now to plan for the holiday season. From what seasonal content to plan, to when to start thinking about next year, these six things will help you figure out how your membership can effectively navigate the festivities.

Essential Learning Points:

• Which content types are perfect for the festive season
• How to run a seasonal promotion
• Why taking a break is essential to your membership’s success
• How to prepare your members for your reduced availability
• What to reflect on and how it can shape your membership’s future
• How to start planning for the year ahead

Key Quotes:

“The holidays are a great time to run a promotional campaign, whether it's a discount, whether it's a promotion where you offer some bonuses, some sort of event marketing, like a summit or a challenge.”

“Even if you've got to force yourself to take some time off, know that time away is actually an extremely important investment in your business.”

“If you haven't hit your goals, or things haven't gone the way you want, that's business. That's life. A lot of the time, these goals are arbitrary, they’re guesses, they’re best estimates. So, don't dwell. Make a deliberate effort to focus on the positives from your year.”

How do people view your brand?

Businesses don’t achieve brand loyalty because they’ve picked a great color scheme for their website. You earn brand loyalty by aligning and effectively communicating your principles and purpose.

You probably already know your membership’s values, vision, and mission, but does your audience? These key elements play a big part in how people view and interpret your brand. Your brand is far more than just your logo.

In this episode, I break down what elements make up a brand and how you can use them to set up your brand for success. 

Essential Learning Points:

• What a brand actually is (and what it isn’t)
• Why your brand’s principles are important
• How to position your brand correctly

Important Links & Mentions:

• Simon Sinek’s book, Start with Why
• Membership Academy Courses
• Subscribe to the Membership Academy
• The Membership Mastermind Facebook Group

Key Quotes:

 “People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”

 “Imagine your brand as a person and think about what its personality would be like – what it would be like to hang out with them, what it would do, what it would be into, how it would talk, how it would sound.”

 “Your purpose, your mission, your vision, and your values: getting clear on those will inform everything else you do. This is the heart of what your business and what your brand is all about.”

Does your WordPress membership site have sufficient security measures in place?

Many membership site owners live in fear of their website being attacked, and for good reason...

If someone manages to hack into your Wordpress website, install something nasty or delete or steal your data, it could cripple your membership business.

That's why it's so important to be extra vigilant and make sure you take adequate steps to keep your site secure...

In this episode, I'm sharing my top tips for keeping your membership site secure and advising which plugins and services you can use to help.

Essential Learning Points:

• Whether or not WordPress is an insecure platform to build your site on
• Why it's crucial that your membership site has security measures in place
• The eight top tips to proactively safeguard your membership site
• What you can do if the worst happens and your site is hacked

Important Links & Mentions:

• ManageWP
• Sucuri
• Wordfence
• WP Engine
• Liquid Web
• BackupBuddy
• WP Fix It
• FixRunner

Key Quotes:

“The fact that WordPress powers 455 million sites definitely makes it more of a target. The counterbalance to that is that there's also a lot of people involved in keeping it secure and responding extremely quickly to any issues.”

“If you need to give admin access temporarily to your web designer, or maybe someone from tech support at your plugin company, make sure you remove their account after they no longer need it. It's not about not trusting those people, it's about there being an additional potential account that someone could get into.” 

Are you considering increasing the price your existing members are paying?

When you first launched your membership, you might have offered your initial members an amazing deal to entice them to join. However, it’s now a few years later and your membership has evolved. You’ve added lots of new content, your community’s grown, and your membership is much more valuable.

You’ve increased the price for new members, and now you’re questioning the fee that your initial members are paying – and thinking about raising the cost of their subscriptions.

In this episode, I explain why this is a short-sighted approach and highlight why you shouldn’t increase membership prices for your long-term members.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why you might be considering raising costs for existing members
• Three reasons why you shouldn’t put existing member prices up
• The one situation where you can increase existing member prices

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Guys Facebook Group
• Membership Academy

Key Quotes:

“People who invest in a tech company when they're still working out of their dad's garage, they deserve the return. They deserve to be in that stronger position, years down the line, than investors who waited until they could back a winning horse.”

“Remember just how important those earlier members are to your long-term journey.”

“It doesn't matter that your membership has increased in value because you would not be in the position to grow your membership to where it is now if not for those initial members.”

Are you celebrating the milestones in your membership business?

If not, you should be!

Whether it's an anniversary or hitting an important goal, it's worth making an effort to mark those significant achievements.

In this episode, I share my top tips for celebrating your membership milestones in style...

Turning your membership idea into a reality can take a lot of time and, often, a lot of money.

As such you might be trying to find a way to raise funds earlier in the process.

Some membership owners do this with a pre-sale.

A pre-sale works like this: you have a great idea for a membership, so you test its viability by taking it to your audience to see if they are willing to invest in your concept (even though it doesn't exist yet!).

If they are, then you can generate seed money to help finance the development of your membership.

However, before pre-selling your membership idea, it's important to know the pros and cons...

Essential Learning Points:

• How a pre-sale works, and how it relates to terms like "seed launch" or "founder launch"
• What the three main benefits to a promoting a pre-sale are
• Three big drawbacks to a pre-sale that you need to consider
• Our preferred alternative launch strategy with better chances of success

Important Links & Mentions:

• Pros and Cons of Offering Lifetime Memberships
• Creating an MVP to Test and Validate Your Membership Idea
• The Lean Live Launch Strategy
• The Membership Guys Facebook Group
• Membership Academy

Key Quotes:

“The vast majority of ideas don't go any further than just thoughts in a brain or scribbles on a page. This kind of pre-sell, having money change hands, makes you more committed.”

“If you don't get a good response to a seed launch, that doesn't tell you anything. That isn't a sign that your membership is not going to be successful.”