Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Membership websites are a value exchange.

As long as you keep delivering value to your members - in the form of content, resources and ongoing investment in your product - they'll keep giving value to you in the form of their continued subscription payments.

So what content can you actually include in your membership in order to ensure you keep up your side of the bargain?

When publishing content online - whether freely or inside a membership - there's always the chance that someone will copy or steal your hard work.

In truth the only way to guarantee that this won't happen is to not publish anything online.

However this doesn't mean you should just roll over if it happens to you.

In this episode I give my top tips for dealing with people stealing and copying your content, with specific examples of the process we use in our own business.

• The two main types of content theft that membership owners are susceptible to, and what you can do about them.
• Why the worst type of theft is the one where the offender likely doesn't realise that they're doing something wrong!
• What copyright theft actually means, and how to identify and gather evidence on more nuanced cases
• The process (and exact wording) that we use for approaching people who have ripped off our content

Reducing the price of your membership might sound like the last thing you'd ever want to do.

As time goes on and you add more content, the value of your membership increases - so surely you'd be considering putting your prices up, not down? Why would you want to go backwards?

However there are some situations where lowering your price might make total sense.

Maybe what you're offering has actually changed? Maybe you got your pricing wrong from the start? Maybe you started off very hands-on but now you want to remove yourself from the picture. These are just a few scenarios where a price decrease might be considered.

In this episode I discuss the implications of reducing your price and how to navigate the change in a way that doesn't cause problems with your existing members.

• Situations where you might need to consider reducing the price of your membership site
• Why it's more complicated than you might realise to reduce the price of existing subscriptions
• Our top tips for making pricing changes without losing your existing members
• An alternative to reducing your membership price that's a win-win for everyone

Whether you're teaching a specialist subject, or want to support others who share your interests; it's now easier than ever to reach a global audience and get paid for sharing your time, skills, experience and expertise.

Two of the best models for doing so are online courses and paid membership websites.

However with those terms often used loosely and interchangeably, it can be tricky figuring out which is best for you.

In this episode, we discuss the differences between courses and membership sites, and talk through the key factors to consider when choosing which to create.

We can spend months creating content, writing workbooks, pulling our hair out, and spending a small fortune on promoting a new membership site and then when we finally launch it… nobody joins.

We all dread this as membership owners; and when it happens, the panic sets in and we start scrambling to rearrange the website, add testimonials, and change prices.

This is all completely irrelevant stuff and won’t turn things around.

So what should you do if your new membership fails?

One of the best things about running a membership website is that we can market and position it in a way that we attract the sort of members that we most want to work with.

However no matter hard you try to get only the “right type” of people in your membership, you will inevitably experience problem members.

Sometimes it will be a personality clash, where certain members just rub you up the wrong way; however there will be instances where you need to deal with potentially toxic elements among your member base. So how do you deal with them?

I address that question and more on the latest episode of The Membership Guys Podcast.

• The questions you need to ask yourself before dealing a ‘problem’ member
• How to implement a two-tier “strike” based approach to dealing with issues
• When it’s the right time to kick out difficult members
• The process and steps to take when removing someone from your membership

Creating membership content can be one of the most time consuming parts of running a paid membership website.

If you’re billing people on a recurring basis, you need to deliver value on a recurring basis; and often delivering that value involves some form of content.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I discuss how to approach content strategy for your membership, and the steps to take in order to ensure your production process is streamlined so you’re not constantly grinding to put out new content.

• Two key mindset shifts to embrace that will change how you approach your membership content
• What content you should be creating, and how to deliver more while actually REDUCING your workload
• The steps you need to take before hiring someone to help you to produce content
• The one thing that will make a monumental difference to your content production process

Less than a month ago, Callie bought a book.

Unbeknownst to her, that simple act would be the start of the single worst buyer experience she's ever encountered, as she found herself subscribed to a membership she never signed up for, with no clear way out.

In the interests of seeing how far the rabbit hole of terrible business practices went, she decided to see it through...

Join us on this rather unusual episode of The Membership Guys Podcast as we take a step by step tour through how NOT to run a membership (or any other business, for that matter!)

• Why tricking people into joining your membership is a seriously dumb strategy! (And could land you in serious trouble)
• Ignoring support emails and deleting comments from your community will hurt your rep and cost you customers
• Trying to hold members hostage and making it impossible to cancel doesn't work
• Why seeing people who lack integrity and use bad practices motivate us to be better

Many people measure success according to vanity metrics.

How many followers you have rather than how much engagement you get; how much your turnover is rather than how much net profit you make; how many members you have rather than their average lifetime spend.

But is success as a membership site owner all about how many members you have?

Or is it about the money you make? Or the lifestyle your membership affords you?

I give my take in this week's episode of The Membership Guys Podcast...

• Are your goals ambitious enough? And if they're not, does that make you a bad entrepreneur?
• Why member numbers are meaningless when it comes to assessing the success of your membership
• Would you trade in a measure of personal happiness for a measure of increased profit?
• How small membership sites can actually be more attractive

If you’ve spent much time looking at online courses or membership sites and their associated plugins and software, then you are probably already familiar with the terms ‘drip feeding’ and ‘content dripping’.

Drip feeding is essentially time-releasing your content so that it isn’t all available to someone immediately after they sign up to your site. But unlike simply providing ongoing content (where new content is released into the general membership regularly), your content is released on a set schedule based, usually, on when the member signed up.

While this can be a great way to stagger content, prolong subscriptions and avoid 'hit and run' members; there are some downsides to consider.

In this episode, I discuss the pros and cons of drip-feeding your membership content.