Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Whether you’re at the start of your journey to running your own membership website or a seasoned pro, there are some universal truths of this world that we all need reminding of every now and again.

The Membership Guys and our podcast exist to make running a membership easier, more accessible, and less stressful. These 8 must-know facts are the cornerstone of running a happy, successful membership.

So, wherever you are in your membership site journey, these tips will either be revelatory moments or timely reminders of the core tenets of your chosen path.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why new and established membership site owners alike can benefit from these ideas
• The 8 truths of being a membership site owner – from compromise to cancellations
• Where you can go for more help, advice, and guidance

Important Links & Mentions:

• Key Things to Consider When Preparing Content for your Membership Launch
• How to Choose a Membership Plugin
• The Membership Academy
• Where to Find Reliable Tech Support for your Membership Site
• What Should Be Your Membership Refund Policy?

Key Quotes:

“If you’re not technically inclined, it’s very much worth investing in somebody to help you with that side.”

“You need to be in this for the long-haul.”

“When people join your membership, they have some degree of expectation that they’ll get access to you.”

Most memberships are based on the owner’s expertise and knowledge, so why would you start giving it away for free?

It may feel counter-intuitive, but content marketing has proven time and time again to be a hugely successful way of growing memberships.

The fear of free content is one of the most common topics in The Membership Academy, so I’ve brought together the three reasons why you really don’t need to worry about sharing free content and why, in fact, it is likely to help your membership grow.

If you want to face your fears and learn to embrace free content as part of your marketing strategy, this episode will do the job.

Essential Learning Points:

• Where the value of your membership truly lies
• How you are always in control of your content and how you share it
• Why human nature is going to stop most people from abusing your free content

Important Links & Mentions:

• The Membership Academy
• People Come For Content And Stay For Community
• Why Your Membership Website NEEDS More Than Just Content
• How to Decide Which Content Should Be Free vs Paid.

Key Quotes:

“Nobody joins a membership because you have the most stuff. They join memberships because they want solutions to their problems.”

“You can control the depth of your free content.”

“The best memberships offer so much more than what’s in their content library.”

Consistently producing valuable, relevant content for your membership is not easy work. If you’re feeling stuck for inspiration or ideas at the moment, I might be able to help!

In this episode, I go through 5 of the best ways you can find ideas and inspiration for your membership site.

They’re all different in their ways, but there is an overarching principle to them all – and that’s that we need to listen. Stepping back and taking the time to observe and reflect can really change things for the better.

So, take a break now – step back from what you’re doing and reflect on this episode of The Membership Guys podcast. Who knows what ideas you’ll end up with?

Essential Learning Points:

• Why listening is one of the most underrated skills and will reveal a lot to you
• How to maximize your email list to generate ideas and right wrongdoings
• What you can learn from other membership sites to create better content for your own

Important Links & Mentions:

• 11 Ways Membership Site Owners Can Leverage Social Media Groups
• 4 must-have email automation sequences for your membership site
• The Membership Academy
• Membership Mastermind from The Membership Guys

Key Quotes:

“Just listening, observing, and paying attention to the recurring questions and challenges people discuss is worth its weight in gold.”

“So often, as business owners, we overcomplicate things. We overstuff things. We keep selling beyond the sell. We try and pack in 5 or 6 objectives into a single email.”

“It’s really easy as a membership owner to become detached from the experience of being a member or student.”

When people want to learn something or make progress, they look for the experts. As a membership site owner, you want to make sure that means they’re looking for you.

In the competitive world of online membership sites, being good isn’t enough – you need to be able to prove it and show up as the expert wherever you can.

How do you do that?

Well, the very first step is to listen to this episode of The Membership Guys podcast! I go through 10 different ideas you can follow to make your authority as an expert in your field abundantly clear to your prospective members.

Essential Learning Points:

• Why you need to be clear on what you do before it’s clear to anyone else
• 10 ways you can become the go-to person in your industry, including: creating a signature product, leveraging social proof, and deciding the role you play
• Examples of these ideas in action, to prove how well these ideas work!

Important Links & Mentions:

• Why Membership Site Owners Need to Niche Down (And STAY Niched)
• Smart Passive Income
• Female Entrepreneur Association
• 12 Types of Content To Include In Your Membership Site
• Social Media Examiner
• Online Membership Industry Report
• The Membership Guys books
• Grant Baldwin on Growing Your Membership with Public Speaking
• Promoting Your Membership Site with an Affiliate Program

Key Quotes:

“You need to make sure that you’re taking steps to position yourself as the go-to person in your industry.”

“If you’re not clear on what your niche is or what your role is, what your message and mission are, then how are your audience supposed to know that you are the right person to help them?”

“The online world affords you so many opportunities to have a voice, a platform, to showcase your expertise.”

Have you ever dealt with a hit and run member? If you’re not sure what one is – lucky you! These are the members who sign up, download everything, and dash back out the door before your beautifully crafted welcome email has settled in their inbox.

Hit and run members abuse your trust and are generally bad apples. They’re rightly a concern for membership providers, but what can you do to stop them? And, are they even worth worrying about?

In this From the Vault episode, I share some of the best ways you can prevent hit and run members, dive into whether they’re a genuine concern for most membership providers, and why you can’t let your fears take your eyes off the prize.

Essential Learning Points:

• If someone wants to access your content and circumvent your membership badly enough, they will always find a way
• Why putting up a few simple barriers won’t cut it
• Four ways you can prevent hit and run members, which double up to add value to your genuine members
• Why you shouldn’t let one bad apple spoil the bunch – and why you should spend more time making your membership great, not protected

Important Links & Mentions:

• Membership Academy
• Should You “Drip Feed” Your Membership Content?
• Chris Ducker on Running Live Events to Grow Your Membership
• How to Use Live Video to Market Your Membership with Luria Petrucci
• 5 Ways Membership Site Owners Can Capitalize on Facebook Live
• 7 Types of Members That Every Membership Site Has
• 12 Types of Content To Include In Your Membership Site

Key quotes:

“If Hollywood movie studios haven't found a way of stopping people from getting their stuff for free, then what chance do you and I stand?”

“If you're just repeating content because you're worried that people can access everything – that, to me, isn't a good enough reason to delay the delivery of value to your members.”

“It would be absolutely crazy to prioritize locking people out over providing a positive member experience for the good portion of your membership base.”

Having a niche is good. Scratch that. It’s essential. Finding your niche, owning it, and staying there is one of the surest ways you will find success in running your membership.

If you want to niche down and dominate your market, there are three ways to do it – we reveal how in this episode of the podcast from our ‘From the Vault’ series!

Essential Learning Points:

• The advantages of being a specialist at something, rather than a generalist
• Three key areas you must analyze if you want to find your niche
• How a niche can strengthen what you’re selling, not weaken it
• How niching down can make running your membership easier for you and more valuable for your members

Key Quotes:

“Solving a specific problem is essential. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you can’t just blend in with the crowd. You need to have a speciality.”

“Fandom comes from resonance. But, it’s harder to connect and resonate with your audience when you’re trying to be all things to all people.”

Important Links & Mentions:

• Our Membership Mastermind Facebook group
• Membership Academy
• Behind the Membership and Member Machine
• Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans essay

Can you start a membership before you’ve grown your audience?

It might sound tricky, but there are some sure-fire ways you can get started. Whether you’re right at the start and haven’t told a single soul about your membership or you’re partway there with a small audience, there are ways you can grow your membership right now and get on the path to having a successful business.

Every successful membership has its own unique story of how it got member number one (and all the others after them!). These are five ways you can get to that stage.

• Validate that your audience exists – you need to have more than just a hunch, find proof that your audience is out there and that they want your solution
• Build, borrow, or buy an audience – there are three ways to grow your audience from scratch
• Sell a big-ticket product before your membership – give people a one-off product that requires less commitment but proves your value
• A soft launch is still a launch – don’t be afraid to start small and quietly
• Offering your membership for free isn’t a sin – but there are some important caveats to be aware of

Key Quotes:

“There’s a big difference between having your own audience and having a market. You don’t necessarily have your own portion of the market, but there needs to be a market actually there.”

“Having a small intimate coaching program is perfectly suited to having a smaller following and a smaller audience.”

• How to Generate Email Leads for Your Membership Site
• 12 Types of Content To Include In Your Membership Site
• How to Attract New Members by Running a Free Challenge
• Promoting Your Membership Site with an Affiliate Program
• Lead Generation Essentials for Membership Site Owners
• Creating an MVP to Test and Validate Your Membership Idea
• How to Use Upsells to Generate More Revenue from Your Membership Site
• The Membership Academy
• Facebook Pixel guide
• Google Ads guide

Pinterest, it’s for wedding planning and redecorating inspiration, right?

Or is it a platform with over 300 million users that some businesses are generating 200% ROI from?

Clearly, it’s time for a rethink on Pinterest!

That’s why I asked Cara Chace to join me on this episode of The Membership Guys podcast. Cara is one of the best in the business of Pinterest marketing – and she runs her own membership, so she’s even more clued up about how we membership site owners can get the most out of this underutilized platform!

If you want to know how to start marketing your membership on Pinterest, Cara is the only person you want to hear from. My conversation with Cara on this episode has given me so many ideas and lightbulb moments and I’m already starting to implement them on Pinterest. I’ve no doubt you’ll find it just as useful, so sit back and enjoy… Just remember to take notes!

Essential Learning Points:

• Who Cara is, what she does, and her expertise in Pinterest
• The basics of Pinterest
• What best practice on Pinterest looks like
• What you want to avoid doing on Pinterest
• How to advertise on Pinterest
• How to develop a Pinterest marketing strategy for your membership

Important Links & Mentions:

• Pinterest PowerUp
• Chace Digital
• Cara’s Pinterest
• Cara’s Instagram
• Cara’s Facebook
• Cara’s LinkedIn
• 9 Simple Membership Marketing Tactics That’ll Get You More Members
• How to Generate Email Leads for Your Membership Site
• How to Decide Which Content Should Be Free vs Paid

Key Quotes:

“The fundamental thing that you have to understand is that it is not social media. It is a visual search engine. It has much more in common with Google than it does Facebook or Twitter.”

“People go to Pinterest to get inspired, to learn, to solve a problem.”

“Pinterest boards are so important that Google indexes them!”

“It’s not about creating more content, it’s about creating more pins for the content you have.”

Some memberships need great video content. Others need a complex email campaign. Some need entirely unique elements.

All memberships need a website.

So how do you go about it? Do you hire in a professional or do you do it yourself?

It’s one of the biggest questions you can ask as you launch your membership, so I got together with two of the finest web designers I know to dive into the best approach for membership owners.

Martin and Lyndsay, owners of Jammy Digital and Make Your Mark Online, are web design experts and join me on this episode of The Membership Guys podcast to give some advice you might not be expecting…

Essential Learning Points:

• Why it’s often better to make your own website
• When it’s better to hire a professional
• How to hire the right web designer
• What the right web designer looks like
• Our own experiences where DIY websites helped our businesses grow and paying a designer would have hampered us

Important Links & Mentions:

• Jammy Digital
• Make Your Mark Online
• The Membership Academy – where you can access our membership site theme, Memberoni
• Why Membership Site Owners Need to Niche Down (And STAY Niched)
• Membership Mastermind from The Membership Guys (Facebook group)

Key Quotes:

“Unless you’re at a certain point financially and in terms of your understanding of your business, it’s not worth paying a web designer.”

“It’s rare that we find a web designer who charges a small amount and can do a good job.”

“Some people say they’ve taken 12 or 18 months trying to get their website done and it’s a complete waste of time, because they’ve not been bringing money in.”

“You don’t want to be investing cash unnecessarily without making it first.”

In today’s digital-driven society, it often feels like you can’t go far without bumping into a self-proclaimed social media ‘expert’. So, when you encounter someone who everyone else calls an expert, who speaks with a quiet assuredness and conspicuous lack of arrogance, it’s a refreshing surprise.

It’s my absolute pleasure and honor to have Gavin Bell on The Membership Guys podcast. Gavin is an award-winning entrepreneur, speaker, and one of the UK’s leading Facebook advertising consultants.

In this episode, Gavin and I discuss the most effective ways membership providers can use Facebook advertising, how to work out a sensible budget and achieve a healthy ROI, common mistakes and best practice, and so much more.

This episode is chock-full of amazing advice for entrepreneurs and membership providers – I can’t think of any other way you could get more valuable information on Facebook ads in this amount of time.

Essential Learning Points:

• The dos and don’ts of running Facebook ads for memberships
• Common mistakes in Facebook ads and best practice to follow
• How to calculate appropriate ad budgets based on the value of new members
• Why ads are only one part of a much bigger picture

Key Quotes from Gavin:

“Good advertising is getting harder, which means we need to work harder and better.”

“When it comes to running a proper Facebook ad campaign, as opposed to randomly boosting posts, we want to set it up in a way that is going to hopefully run forever.”

“If you have a website with an audience already, the first thing to do would be to create a retargeting ad. If you’re someone without an audience, your first step is to try and build an audience through ads.”

Important Links & Mentions:

• Gavin’s website
• Membership Academy
• 9 Simple Membership Marketing Tactics That’ll Get You More Members
• Should I offer a trial for my membership site?