Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

It's an exciting time for us here at The Membership Guys as we unveil a fresh new update for our brand, and also announce that Member Site Academy is now Membership Academy!

While on the surface it may not seem like a major change, there's a lot more involved than meets the eye...

In this episode I give a bit of backstory about why these changes mean so much, and walk you through the process we used to update our brand identity.

• Why changing Member Site Academy to Membership Academy is such a big deal for us
• The $10 secret behind The Membership Guys brand...
• Why your logo is one of the least important elements of your businesses brand
• Our top takeaways for anyone going through a brand refresh

Membership site owners wear a lot of hats and juggle a lot of tasks on a day to day basis.

With so many moving parts, and so many plates to keep spinning, anything that we can do to streamline our workload and become a little more efficient is a big win.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I talk about 4 specific things we do within our business to make us far more productive in running our membership

• The one small change to our video creation process that cut production time in half
• The specific way we involve our team members in our regular live calls that seriously lightens the workload for us
• How batch creating several months worth of content at one time is far more efficient than doing it on the fly
• The importance of documenting processes for any task you repeat more than once per month

Are you trying to be all things to all people with your content?

The truth is, the more broad your content is, the less compelling, relevant and effective it's likely to be for the individual reader.

By trying to cater to everyone, you end up catering to no-one.

This is where segmentation can be a gamechanger.

By identifying 3-5 key segments within your audience, and tailoring not only your content but also your lead generation strategy, your sales funnel and your email marketing to those segments; you can move the needle right across all the important KPI's in your business.

More traffic, more leads and ultimately more membership sales.

• Why trying to help everyone with your content results in you actually helping nobody!
• The 3 main options for segmenting your audience, and how they apply to memberships
• How to apply segmentation to not only your membership site, but also your content and sales funnels
• Examples of how we use segmentation in our own business, and the dramatic results it's had

Are you delivering an exceptional member experience?

Your membership could have the best content in the world, but if your member experience isn't up to scratch then people just aren't going to engage.

They're less likely to log in, less likely to consume your content or participate in your community, and ultimately less likely to stick around long term.

Much of crafting a remarkable member experience comes down to finding ways of making your members feel extra special, and in this episode I highlight 6 simple ways to do just that.

• Don't underestimate the importance of personally welcoming new members to your site
• How making a deliberate effort to loop other members into conversations can be hugely empowering
• Why you need to be attentive to your power users and reach out to people who are slipping away
• How using your platform to showcase members and celebrate their successes is a major win-win

Attracting the right people to your membership is essential for the growth of your business.

Not all members are created equal - the best ones will consume your content, positively engage with your community and actually use what they're paying for.

These are the members who will stick around for the long term.

But how do you tailor your marketing to ensure you're attracting more of the right type of member?

• Why trying to get sales at any cost is a dumb mistake we see too many people making
• The qualities and characteristics of members who are more likely to stay subscribed long term
• The gulf in difference between a member who is interested in your topic, and one who is committed to it
• Steps you can take to better identify your ideal members, and adapt your marketing to appeal to those people

We regularly get asked for our recommendations on the top tools for membership website owners.

The truth is that there’s no such thing as the “perfect” membership site setup that will work for everyone – it all depends on what it is you want to achieve with your membership site, what features and functionality you need it to have, which email and payment software you’re using and a whole bunch of other details that determine which membership tools are the best fit for you.

In this episode, we talk about the tools we use for our own membership website – Member Site Academy – as well as the reasons why we chose those particular options.

• Which membership plugin and other software we're using to power Member Site Academy
• Why you don't need to use the exact same setup that we use (or anyone else is using)
• Changes we're considering making to our tech stack and frustrations we have
• What WordPress theme do we use for our websites?

This week we're doing something a little different on The Membership Guys Podcast!

You may or may not know that we actually have another show called 'Behind The Membership', which is hosted by the one and only Callie Willows

Behind The Membership features hype-free, no-fluff, frank conversations with real membership site owners just like you about the highs, lows and day to day realities of running a paid membership business.

These are real people, real stories, real memberships.

We're gearing up for our THIRD SEASON, which will be kicking off on June 13th; but to whet your appetite we've gone back into the archives from past seasons and picked out one of our favourites to share on The Membership Guys Podcast.

This episode features Scott Devine from Scott's Bass Lessons

Scott was actually a client of ours for many years, the very last client we stopped working with in fact. And we saw his site go from free YouTube videos and a PayPal donate button to a seven figure membership site in the 5 years that we worked with him.

Scott's Bass Lessons has been running for 8 years now and has attracted over 50,000 members in that time. It's also gone from one-man bad to having a full faculty of world class bass educators. So there's a lot to pack into this episode!

Memberships can be challenging products to sell, as often they're made up of so many different things that it's hard to get specific in your marketing.

One way to counteract that is with the "Splinter" strategy.

This is where you take one piece of content from your membership and you make it available to buy as a standalone product. But you market it in such a way that makes joining your membership a preferable option to purchasing just that one thing.

In this episode I dig deeper into how the "Splinter" strategy works for memberships and talk about how you can start testing it within your own business.

• Why one of the best things about memberships also makes them challenging to sell
• What the 'splinter' strategy is and how it applies to membership websites
• How 'anchoring' is used to make joining your membership a total no-brainer
• Simple ways to test and validate whether the splinter strategy will work for you

It's easy to get carried away in those early days of planning and building a membership site.

So many people get overexcited by their idea and a little too swept up in the process that they skip the first few fundamental steps.

Most importantly: idea validation and research.

And then when they launch their membership and it doesn't quite go to plan, they're left scratching their heads wondering where it all went wrong.

In this episode, I highlight the 7 most important things that you need to validate BEFORE moving forward with your membership idea.

• The important of solving problems for your members, and how to know which problems people will actually pay for a solution to.
• Why identifying a gap in the market is over-rated, and doesn't always mean there's an opportunity for you.
• How having the perfect product and a 'hungry' market is not enough. There's an important third ingredient...
• Why you need to seriously question your own long term objectives for your membership

We're celebrating a huge milestone for The Membership Guys Podcast as we hit our 200th episode!

To mark the occasion, we thought we’d do something a little special...

So both Callie and I opened the floor up to you, and invited our members and wider audience to ask us absolutely anything you wanted - about anything!

We’ve picked the best questions and answered them together in this special 200th episode. Enjoy!

• How we handle working together, and our top tips for running a business with your spouse
• If we could go back in time, what would we do differently with our membership?
• What were those early days like for us? What challenges did we have? Did we have any doubts or fears?
• PLUS we discuss everything from community engagement to videogames, movies to content strategy and more!