Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Great memberships are never truly finished.

That’s actually one of the best things about the membership site model. If you are writing a book, creating a course, programming your piece of software; then there’s a lot of pressure to have a polished completed end product.

But with a membership site, some of that pressure is off because people understand that they are boarding a moving train. That when they join a membership, it’s going to change, it’s going to evolve and that as members they could be a part of shaping it's future.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I look further into why embracing change is key to the long term success of your membership site, and give examples of how adapting over time has played a role in the progress of 6 and 7 figure memberships.

Member retention is key to the long term success of a membership website; however if you offer both monthly and annual billing people often end up so focused on keeping monthly subscribers that they take annual renewals for granted.

Or worse - they assume people joining on annual plans aren't likely to stick around beyond their first year, so they don't even try to retain them.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast we're focusing on how to handle annual renewals in order to increase the chance of members sticking around for years to come.

As founder of the Female Entrepreneur Association, Carrie Green credits investment in personal development and conditioning herself for success as the keys to having the right mindset to grow her membership to over 4,000 members.

In this interview, we discuss how FEA came to be and the challenges Carrie faced along the way; and we also dig deeper into the strategies Carrie uses to keep members happy and continue growing her membership.

Gamification is a technique that has gained huge popularity in enhancing user experiences and the effectiveness of e-learning within online courses and membership websites.

And as lifelong videogame geeks, it's right up our street!

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I hand over the reins to Callie, who talks more about what exactly gamification is and how you can use it in your membership site to increase member engagement.

In this episode, I discuss:

• An introduction to what gamification actually is and how it works in the real world
• The importance of taking measures to ensure people actually consume your content and participate
• Ways to use game theory to encourage behaviours that will ensure members stick around long term

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.

In this episode, I discuss:

• 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

When inspiration strikes and you come up with an idea for a membership website or some other product or service that you're convinced is a winner, all too often it's easy to get carried away in trying to make it a reality without every stopping to really examine whether your idea is actually as solid as you're convinced it is.

Before you invest countless hours and immeasurable quantities of blood, sweat and tears into your new project, it's highly worth taking the time to validate your big idea.

Here are my top tips for doing just that...

Are you worried that your membership website kind of sucks? Hopefully not.

I'm sure you’ve got plenty of happy members who are giving you great feedback and showing you that your hard work is actually making a positive change in their world.

But there are unfortunately a lot of membership sites out there that do - to be frank - completely suck.

So if you're someone who is running one of those websites, then in this episode I'm going to share some of the reasons why your membership sucks.

In this episode, I discuss:

• Six reasons why your membership website sucks
• How to turn things around and make your membership great again
• Core principles you need to remember if you want your membership site to be successful.
• Mistakes that even well-meaning membership owners typically make

Is the fact that someone continues subscribing to your membership really a sign of loyalty?

So much of our time as membership site owners is spent trying to attract new members, and worrying about those who cancel, that it's easy to take for granted the ones who continue paying us month after month.

We tend to assume that those members are happy, content and loyal; but quite often that couldn't be further from the truth.

In this slightly different episode of The Membership Guys Podcast I riff a little on the subject of member loyalty and how it's not as straightforward as you might think.

In this episode, I discuss:

• A story illustrating the nuances of member loyalty
• Why it's not important to make assumptions about our paying members
• Understanding the difference between inertia and loyalty
• How to determine whether a member is actually engaged with your site

Membership owners have a lot on their plates in the day to day running of their website.

There's more than enough to think about without piling onto your worries by concerning yourself with situations and things you perceive as problems, that you either have no control over or that you really shouldn't be occupying your time with.

In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I look at the 6 most common culprits when it comes to things which membership owners let trouble them, keep them up at night and weigh on their mind; and I'm going to share why they're really not a big deal and how to put them out of your thoughts.

In this episode, I discuss:

• The negative mindsets that membership site owners need to change
• What "huge problems" are truly irrelevant and what you need to STOP focusing on
• Why trying to follow what your competitors are doing is one of the dumbest things you could do
• What should you focus on in your membership rather than worrying about this sort of stuff?

There's no "one-size-fits-all" approach to marketing a membership website.

However there are a number of tactics and strategies that are proven to work well, or that take advantage of some of the unique elements that come with running a membership website.

In the concluding episode of a two-part podcast series, I discuss a variety of different marketing tips that you can use for your own membership in order to increase sales and have a steady stream of new members joining your site.

In this episode, I discuss:

• How to approach affiliate and influencer promotions to increase membership sales
• The importance of segmentation when it comes to making your marketing efforts more targeted and, as a result, more effective
• The part that our podcast plays in growing the Member Site Academy, and the approach you could model
• How a simple contest could accelerate your lead generation and membership sales