Strategies For Improving Your Membership Sites

Whether you have a community that has just paid and is waiting for you to give value, or you are looking to service your wider community, this is an episode you will not want to miss. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. We're so excited to be able to have you. In this episode, we get to listen as Robert Scrobb interviews Micah Mitchell. Micah Mitchell is the founder of Memberium. Memberium is a membership site platform that works in conjunction with WordPress. It's up at this moment in time and the lessons you're going to learn from this, whether or not you want or have a membership site, are going to be absolutely essential. How do you take advantage of gamification? What are the key features for customer retention that you should be putting inside of your communities? How do you take care of your herd as best as possible while obtaining new members? This episode on the strategies for improving your membership site with Micah Mitchell is one to take notes on. So let's dive in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Membership sites have come a long way in recent years. No longer a password-protected website or time-released information, but today's membership sites can become a community, a place where your members can connect online to have conversations, get engaged, and really, you know, be an organization separate and apart to what you provide, contributing their own content, and when done right, even bringing on members to your membership. Hi, I'm Robert Scrobb, President of the Information Marketing Association and author of the official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing. Today's program is all about membership sites and how to use them to stop your members from quitting so you can generate stable monthly cash flow from continuity memberships. My guest today is Mika Mitchell, founder of Memberium, the go-to membership site plugin for WordPress. Mika has been the secret weapon behind the scenes for many of the biggest online marketers on the planet. He knows what happens behind the scenes, has seen what works and what doesn't, and has incorporated the best the best of all of that into the features of one membership platform called Memberium. It's a great pleasure having you today, Mika.

Thank you, Robert. I appreciate you having me on. And one thing real quick, I'm sorry, I should have mentioned before, but it's Mica. People call me Mika because they make fun of me, so it's cool if you want to.

Well, Mika, I will work hard not to make fun of you. At least in front of you. Maybe behind your back, it could be something else.

No, no, it's cool. They're all friends, so it's cool.

All right, well, thanks, Michael. So what is the power of membership sites in these info businesses today? I mean, what does it allow an information marketer to do that can't be done with normal digital downloads, printed newsletters, emails, and events?

So I think all of those things are kind of the beginning of the genesis of what now goes into a membership site, because people will take that same valuable information and they will put it online including even the events. They will either stream them or they will record them. But what it allows you to do unlike some of those things is it allows you to have kind of a storefront or an office or a home or a business space. You think most businesses that are brick and mortar, somebody can come in and interact and so forth. But with your online business, with your membership, if you are just sending things out, people are interacting with your stuff, but there is no kind of central place. And so membership is that. And there are so many advantages to that. As people are consuming your content, you can cross-sell, upsell. You can track what they are consuming, what they are not consuming to improve your content. It's just a whole other level. I used to do a lot of that stuff, so I come from that game and I understand it. And that's why I say there is still a place for all that. You can still mix a lot of that with the membership site, but the membership site becomes that central hub where you can get a lot of synergy going with them either upselling or you encouraging them to promote you and so forth. And doing all this while they are consuming your content. So instead of sending them out the free report that they read, kind of in their own environment. They come read or watch a video or whatever in your environment so you can influence them. So there's a lot you can do with it.

It is pretty interesting. So for years, we would create an information product and then sell it and then ship it out to a client. And we'd have no idea which clients are consuming it, which are looking at it every day over the next several weeks. Which looked at it for 2 days and then didn't open it again, and then maybe even the folks that set it aside for 3 weeks and then opened it, picked it up, and worked through it. And we instead were forced to communicating with everybody about the same message instead of being able to communicate with someone based on where they were. And what they were interested in. And I think that's really one of the interesting little features of membership sites today is all that tracking that's built into them that really allows you to be a lot smarter about how you're communicating with your members.

Oh, 100%. You can do some cool stuff, and we'll get into more of it later. But just like you're saying, being able to track and then react based on that on the marketing side, on the product improvement side. And it's all pretty much a given now. I mean, that's the cool thing is a few years ago when membership sites were still getting popular, they were still hard to do. They were becoming more popular, but the technology on the back end to say I want to track all this and I want to show the person progress, it was quite a bit of work. So that has come a long way which is exciting for anybody who wants to do that.

Now, have you seen that this makes any sort of difference in retention or upsells or ascension, being able to track and see how folks are interacting with the content? Does that make a difference for the marketer in terms of real money?

Oh yeah. Oh, so it's fascinating really because some of the things we found out in one of the main case studies, A friend of mine did all the digital marketer certifications and they use our software. And so my partner pokes his head in there all the time. He helps them with their stuff. And I poke my head in their app a little here and there to troubleshoot. But they are a good example where, yeah, they had information before, but now when they are selling these certification programs, aside from all the benefits that gives you, then being able to track consumption Basically, we found out some interesting things. Basically, the first login, you would be kind of surprised, the first login is a huge determining factor. Like so many people will buy a membership and not even get logged in. So there is this whole campaign basically now around just getting them to log in the first time, basically meaning, hey, we are going to follow up in every way possible to get you to log in until you do, so that we don't lose a customer just because they couldn't get in. And it sounds obvious, like okay, you want them to log in, but looking at the stats, the importance of that became obvious where it's like, oh wow, of those, obviously of those who do log in, the chance of them finishing is so much greater. And when you talk about the financial benefits, when you're tracking this consumption, then when you make upsells, you can make them appropriately. Because before, like you said, you had to talk to your whole list, everybody you sent the product to. But now you can say, Well, let's time the upsells so that only for people who get to module 3, that's usually when they are super excited, they've gotten a couple wins, let's put the upsell there. Because if we send the upsell to somebody who hasn't logged in for the first time, or who is stuck in module 1, or whatever, it's not going to work anyways. It might even make them upset. So you send different messaging to them, encouraging messaging and so forth. So when people come into these sites, we are with every module driving consumption as far as like, hey, come back to module 1, you know, hey, we miss you, Robert, and all those kinds of things until they finish module 1, and then it does the same for module 2 and so on. And, you know, proactively driving consumption to get them to finish the product is important because we learned at the end of the day that the likelihood of upselling somebody if they didn't finish it is, I can't remember exactly how many times smaller. Some people will buy everything. They won't finish one program and they will buy another. But for the most part, just by targeting the people who finish and just by doing a lot of work to get them to finish, the upsellability, it's kind of like you earn your right to sell them more stuff because you got them through your program versus spray and pray.

I like that. And it's fascinating because like what you were saying about that login, if you are not tracking that very first login, then you have no idea whether they're in or not. And like you said, I mean, it's such a— what I've— a lot of the clients that I work with, they— when somebody— they get so excited about a problem that they have. And of course, they're agitating, agitating, agitating that problem. And then they buy. And that's a big relief. And their excitement and interest in that problem suddenly starts to wane. And that may be fine and good that you got that initial purchase, but if you can then flip that back and get them excited about that problem again enough to get logged in, then now you've— that's as big of a deal as buying the first time. And it really determines whether or not you're going to get them as a long-term member or whether it's kind of a one-and-done one-night stand sort of thing as a customer. And you wouldn't ever send 25 emails to every member encouraging them to log in. But if you see that somebody has bought and never has, then sending them an email, sending them a packet, having somebody call them, All those may be totally warranted if in that situation you see that somebody has bought your program but still hasn't logged in the first time.

Yeah, exactly. You mentioned them as a long-term customer. It's also your brand, your perception out there, whether they are going to refer or not. And where things are more and more social, more people are online talking about you and so forth. It's a big deal.

So what are some of the key— what are the new membership site features that are driving retention today that maybe folks haven't heard about or don't really know about?

Yeah, so probably the biggest thing is like we were talking about, the ability for the site owner to track the user so they can improve their product. But it's also on the user side to track themselves. Some of you listening might have been in a site where there is a progress bar. Or you watch Netflix, right? And you can kind of see the progress bar of the video that you are on and stuff like that where now they are trying to make it better for the user. So when the user comes in and they go and they take a lesson and they leave and they come back, they know where to start again versus I log into this vault which sounded cool when I bought it because there was 100 videos, but now I'm just staring at a wall of 100 videos and I can't remember what I watched or didn't watch, and where to start and all this. So a lot of the new stuff in membership sites is, hey user, here is your progress with progress bars with green checkmarks next to the things you are doing. It is giving the user a quiz so that after they watch the content, people talk a lot about video tracking. I want to know when they have watched 50% of my video and so forth. And we found that to be in a membership site context a little less relevant just because what you want to know is did they understand it. So they might turn on the video, or they might fast-forward the video, or whatever, and trip that thing up without having understood the content. So instead what we do is we have quizzes.

Watch this video.

Take this quiz. It's a very short, simple quiz. You are not trying to bog down their experience. But it actually makes things better for them because they take the videos more seriously. They pay more attention which Why are they watching or spending time if they are not going to pay attention? So it makes it better for them. They take it more seriously. It makes it a little, I think, more real because what site owners are now doing is they are looking at who is completing which modules and who is passing and failing which quizzes. Because then you can actually see, okay, if the goal of this module is to teach them something and most people can't pass this quiz but they can pass all the other quizzes, this module screwed up. So it's not just are they watching it or what are they doing, but the pass and fail rate of quizzing is kind of an interesting thing to take into account with all of this. And on the high end of that, when we talk about quizzing people, people are now selling certification courses where instead of here's my giant program that helps you solve this problem, which is the way it used to work, right, $2,000 packages, CDs and DVDs and things, Now what's really being more successful that I'm seeing, and not that the other stuff still doesn't work, but people are selling certification training. So, you know, come get certified in whatever it happens to be. And it might not be appropriate for every industry, but what it kind of implies during the certification is that, hey, we take this course very seriously. At the end of the course, you can be certified, you can have a badge. There's a lot of benefits to that. For the end user to get certified versus just having taken a course, but also the positioning for you, the course owner. If you look at 2 courses, one is a regular course and one is a certification training course, most everybody is going to take the certification training course more seriously, probably place a higher value on it, and probably if they start it, get through more of the content. So I'm sorry to hop around a bit, Yeah, they call it e-learning is kind of the term for most of this, or a learning management system where it is no longer just, hey, you are buying content, here is your content, that's all. It is I have to develop a really nice experience for you to come in and enjoy the content, smaller, sharper, punchier videos, and all of that mixed in with a really cool nice site where you can follow your progress. It is easy to get in and out of. I don't know how else to say it except that the content itself is becoming commoditized. So it has a lot to do with the experience.

And also one of the other things that I think that the certification also implies is that there is an endpoint that— and this is one of the key things that I've been focused on with working with membership sites. I had a client who came just a few months ago and awesome membership site. It's one of the key benefits of his entire membership even though there was a printed magazine. The online membership site had 1,000+ videos and they were really well done with multiple cameras and great content. They were funny, interesting, and kind of what One of the comments though that I made is, you know, as good as this is, you promote this as a library and you've got things about all kinds of different aspects of what you teach. Nothing is really very well organized. It's, yeah, you have a library and it's extensive, but, you know, if you were going to, if you were sending your kid to college and they were in college involved going, driving, and parking in the parking lot, looking at the buildings that say biology or mathematics or English or business, and walking into one of those buildings and then looking at the labels on the doors of what's being taught, and then you go sit in that class, and when you're bored you get up and you go to a different class, would very much school get done? No. But that's how so many membership sites are organized is where there's all this content and you kind of click around and you find what you're kind of interested in, and you then go and you watch a little video, and if you're bored, then you go to some— well, they're not going to get engaged. They're not going to get through. So what college does and what you're suggesting with these certifications is you have an end goal of what you're going to be able to do at the end. You know, when I'm talking with a client, I kind of What is the superpower that they're going to end up with after they do this class? In your Ryan Dice Digital Marketer example, they've got certifications around, let's say, Facebook advertising. So after you get this certification, you're going to be certified in Facebook advertising. So you kind of have a sense that you're going to know everything you need to know in order to actually sell yourself as a service provider for that, do it for yourself in your own business. And you go through in a structured way the exact classes and the exact materials that you need in order to reach that end result. And it not only improves execution, but it also improves sales. Because people want to buy it because they see the endpoint and they can visualize themselves with that and what they might be able to do because of it. That they don't visualize because they have access to a library. And selling certifications is selling a solution to a problem, whereas selling a library is a lot like, sounds a lot like work. It's like, oh my, I'm gonna have to read and look and do things. I don't know that I wanna do that. But I guess kind of one of my main, Mika, one of my main thoughts is, it's a lot of work.— you used to be the, really kind of the approach of information marketers or online marketers was good enough is good enough. Let's just get it out there and start selling it. And we don't have to worry about all these details because only a percentage of the people will actually go through it anyway. Is there really an ROI for going through this much thought of creating these sorts of LMS and these curriculums?

Yeah, I think it's almost— right now it's a differentiating thing, but I think in a couple of years it's going to be like handing up, you know, it's going to be stakes to the game just to get in as you're going to have to have some of this experience built in. People will expect it. But right now I do think it makes a ton of sense. I mean, you spelled it out pretty well as far as the difference between a certification course and just a wall of stuff from a lot of perspectives. But to the end user, they are more likely to buy, but you can really support that because there is a concept, ROE, and it's return on education in this case that the LMS kind of industry uses. What it basically means is, as you were saying earlier, you used to buy a course and most people wouldn't open it, and even if they do, they don't do it, and even if they do it, it doesn't work, and all these kind of layers to get any sort of value out of what they bought, versus the concept of ROE is, okay, you come in, you're going to take some education, and in the digital marketer case, if you pass this Facebook course, you are now a Facebook marketing certified partner. Just the knowledge that they have and just like, "Oh, I can solve this problem." I can go now put that badge on my site where the end user who earns the badge or earns the certificate can differentiate themselves from their competitors. So you are selling them a value add of, "Yeah, come through my course. You are going to get this nifty badge on your page, and the next time somebody is shopping for whatever you do, they are going to pick you because you are certified and the other guy is not." the messaging in a way as they are doing this. And it doesn't work for every industry, but the return on education then becomes, oh yeah, I want to finish this course. I want to consume this content because I have to consume this content to get my badge or my certificate. And the badges and certificates, those are just different layers. So you can give out badges for all sorts of different things and then a certificate for completing the overall whatever training. And you can figure out how to do it, but that's the way most people do it. A variety of examples, we talked about Ryan Deiss with his Facebook marketing. We have a client who their stuff is all about kind of personal development and psychology, for example, a course on quitting smoking. So their people earn an ex-smoker badge. So you can apply it to almost anything. It doesn't have to necessarily have a business implication, but people love that, as you put it, there is an end in sight. There is a goal. There is a reason for doing it. And then in a lot of cases, a lot of business cases especially, certifying them or giving them a badge, that can, you know, from your end you can say, hey, this is a valuable thing. This is part of my value proposition because once you have this badge or certification, you're going to be more desirable than your competitors. Or in the job landscape, you know, you're going to be more desirable than all the other resumes because not only do you have an education, everyone's got that, you've done all this extracurricular, you know, certified in this and that. It's an evolving thing, but it's really cool. And yeah, I think it's worth doing now because the ROI— pretty soon you're going to have to do it or you may not exist.

Yeah, I think that's fascinating. And in terms of creating a certification, I know I've created at least 15, 18 of them with clients. And what I have found is if you— look, I mean, I have a Certified Association Executive, and there is an ANSI— there is a certification for certifications, which isn't particularly necessary, but if you decided you wanted an additional level of, quote, credibility. But I found that that's not really important as part of the certification you teach and show the members how to use the certification to get their own clients, and that you create marketing materials that help build the value in the certification that the certified can give to their potential customers, then you're good. Maybe that together with a directory of certified folks that where somebody can put in a zip code and find somebody in their area. And you've got a pretty nice little certification program. So it doesn't, just because we're using a word that has multiple syllables doesn't mean that it requires some fancy title or justification or name or anything to create it. It's merely providing a curriculum and giving out a certificate of completion that is, you know, it can even be a PDF certificate of completion, but it creates a culture about finishing.

Yeah, it does. As you said before, it's a total solution, and there's a lot that can be wrapped up into it. It's interesting too, because, you know, I'm thinking of people who might be listening a little bit, and just that We should be clear, this all starts with the supposition that yeah, you have to make a good product because if you're gonna drive people to finish it and drive them to talk about it and try to drive all this upside leverage, it's gotta be good. So it all works together, right?

Having folks complete inferior products only speeds up the rate at which they all know that you stink.

Yeah.

That's a good way to put it.

Kind of paraphrase an old Dan Kennedy story. But now, yeah, here with membership sites, I hear a lot about this gamification and having tokens and badges and things for completing different things. What does that mean? How does somebody build that into a site that helps improve retention and engagement? Maybe even ascension and upsells.

Okay, so a good story for you. It doesn't have to do with a business membership site, but my son does Khan Academy, which is a website that's kind of like a private school for kids.

Oh yeah, I've got kids, so I'm familiar as well.

Yeah, it's not a private thing. Sorry, I shouldn't say that. It's a free thing, but they just they just give information out, and it's really cool. So we homeschool our kids, right, and we put them on there. And my son, when he was 9, went and— I didn't tell him to do this. He was on there for math and science and a few things. And he went and learned Java programming, right? So he learned Java, and he can like draw these little things, and he can animate them, right? And he's 9, okay? And I didn't ask him to do this. And so I'm, watching him do this. And I was like, why did you do this? And he goes, oh, I wanted to earn the badge. And in Khan Academy, as they go through, there's all sorts of levels of gamification, and it's fascinating. If you guys want to go look at something, Khan Academy is amazing. But so when they finish a video, or when they answer some questions or whatever, there's all these little wins built in. And so when we talk about gamification, it's literally making it feel like a game. I watch a video, I get 10 points. What do the points mean? Who knows? They will have, usually they line up to some sort of prize. But just saying the concept is it's like, oh, I feel like I did something. I want to watch another video and get more points. And then there is another layer on top of that. I watched a whole group of videos, I get some sort of badge. And then they have all this other cool stuff in there where if you get 10 answers in a row that are correct, there is an extra badge. Or if you complete so many questions in a period of time, there's a speedy badge and all this. And so they've made it such a game that the kids are in there just learning all this stuff. We didn't ask them to learn. He went on to learn Java, JavaScript, some CSS, some HTML. And he's just doing it for the badges. And so I know he's a kid, but that's human nature. And what works for the kids is going to work for the adults as well, especially if they can— I'll say justify it by saying it's for business. But most people like that. And what's cool about it too is even for the people who don't, again, it does position what you are doing as more serious. So even if somebody doesn't care about the badge or won't admit they care about the badge, just having some sort of sense of I am here, I'm going there, here is my progress, I know when I got here because this thing popped up, is good for the experience.

I totally agree with you there. The other thing is, like, the Khan Academy, my kids are older than yours. My daughter is 20 at Florida State. My son is 17, now a senior in high school. So, you know, we've been Khan Academy folks for many, many years. And to your earlier point, the Khan Academy content was awesome even when it was a few videos posted on YouTube. And so the gamification simply builds on the addictiveness of the product and the system. And it's simple because I even see myself doing it too. And when you recognize that it works, then you don't have to be cynical about it. In fact, you could use it yourself. So I have a little app on my phone called Habit List. And Habit List has the things that I want to do every day. And one is, you know, write in my journal. The other is write my affirmations, meditate, stretch, exercise, take my vitamins. Reach out to one client prospect, do something nice for my wife, drink a green smoothie, eat healthy for the day. And, you know, each of those kind of have their own definitions that I understand, and the Habit app keeps track of how many times I've done these things. So, you know, I have done the exercise now for 45 straight days. I've exercised every single day, and And I don't, now I will not let myself go without exercising because I want to click that button in that app so that I can get the consecutive days. And I'm going to know and have to look at that, and I've built it up to 45, and I want to build it up to 100, and the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to do it every day. And that is gamification. I have taken these things that I want to accomplish in my life and gamified them in a way that helps keep me motivated. And that's what you're doing for your members, even the cynical jerk ones who pretend that they hate it, and some of them may. They may be too smart for it. But for the vast majority of your members, by helping them track their progress and acknowledging their progress towards a specific goal and maybe unlocking things or giving them benefits or giving them encouragement is so much more powerful than simply shipping them a product in a binder and letting them go through it on their own time. And whether they go through and listen to the CDs or not, whether they read it or not, doesn't make any bit of difference to you. But by putting these in, it helps it helps give them that stimulus to keep engaged and keep at it even when all these other things get in the way. I mean, I've had situations where I had to get in the car and drive from 6:30 in the morning till 10 o'clock at night, but by golly, I was up at 5:30 so that I could do a little workout before I got in the car. So things will come up that your members have to face, and these sorts of gamifications help them overcome all those other things so that they could get that carrot and keep progressing towards their real goals.

Yeah, I love it. It's so fun to talk to you because you've got like layers and layers and layers of this. So yeah, it's awesome.

So any— do you— with somebody— because I know you've been probably with your— with Memberium having those features, you probably talk to a whole lot of folks that that, oh man, my folks are attorneys, or my folks are tax accountants, or my folks are corporate CEOs. They don't care anything about the gamification. Do you have any thoughts, anything that you would say to somebody who thinks that their members would be cynical and hate this gamification idea?

I think there's definitely ways to do everything wrong, right? But there's ways to do things right, because if you think about these high-level people, and you know this, Robert, because you study all these other organizations, but they're part of a country club or they're part of a, you know, they do things for the same reason, right? So they want to be included or they want to be recognized. And so some of that might be just dressing it up, but what I would say too in a lot of business situations that's been super interesting lately is this concept of parent-child. So we right now, for example, we sell some training and we have some clients who are doing this. And it's not very big, but it's just starting. I think it's going to get big where you can have subaccounts. So you go out to the attorney or the CEO or whatever, and you don't sell them training, or you can include some training for them. You kind of slip it in there actually. But you say, hey, this is for your front desk person. "Or this is for your," you know, whatever. And you, the attorney, you know, you get to see your secretary go through this training and learn how to take inbound calls and make sure and collect information accurately and, you know, follow up and so forth. And you get the oversight of that. So there's, it's been interesting, and I've just thought about this some, but there's a flip side of this where the, you know, the person who may not want whatever it is, They do want it for their people. And with this parent-child stuff, they can go in and they can just add other users to their account. So you sell them a training that includes 3 other user accounts. And the reason you have to have the other user accounts versus a traditional membership site is keep in mind everyone is going through their own quizzing and tracking and so forth. So you don't want them tracking on top of each other or screwing up where each other is in that process. So yeah, you can have them separate, and then the admin can get, for example, their quiz results. So there is an element of it that you can sell them on, hey, this is really for your team. But I think also there's definitely an element of it where you can just dress it up, because they may not take badges and points and whatever if it looks like a video game, if it's kind of chintzy. But if it looks like their American Express points or their Gold Card or whatever, They're not totally against data symbols. It just has to be kind of done the right way.

Nice. That's very smart. And that little tip on selling them something for their employees to do is brilliant. Because in a traditional information product, I've bought all kinds of courses, and I'll hand it off to an employee, and the employee says they did it. And read it. I don't necessarily— I can't necessarily tell that they listened to the CDs unless I sit there and listen with them. But with a site, if there is a certification where they have got to answer a few questions, then I've got a much better understanding of whether or not they did it. I had a client that did this back in 2007 for the restaurant industry. And, you know, they sold this program to help grow and do restaurant marketing to restaurants.

But they—

the whole program wasn't at all for the business owner, the restaurant owner to do. They were instructed to hand it off to their best hostess and let their best hostess go through the training, complete the certification, and then implement it. And that the system would walk their hostess through doing it. And the thing killed. It was great because the restaurant owner never in a million years, a whole market of them weren't going to sit down and do training, and they knew they wouldn't, or they knew they would never implement it. But the idea of handing it off to their hostess to do it sounded like a great idea. And very often the hostess was more effective at implementing it than the business owner would have been. I love that idea. It's been a little tool in my toolbox for years. Let's back up a little bit and talk about getting new members. Certainly, while we want to hold on, we want to have all our members, and we want to have all these whiz-bang features that are addictive, we also need to put new members into the membership. For membership sites, for these types of systems, What sort of offers do you see folks using that really seem to be working well?

Yeah, so after trying all sorts of sales things myself, I know that most any sales tactic can work, and this is myself and for clients as well, but almost always the ones that do really well are ones where, you know, the product is obviously good and then the sales funnel has some type of, experience it before you buy it or have a look at it, because then obviously if what they experience is what they want and they buy it and everything, it's fantastic. And not only do you get a lot of them, but you keep them. And there are various levels of that. There is get the free thing. There is get the $1 thing. There are lots of different ways to do that. But yeah, I would say that has been the biggest thing is have a free module. Or have a free time period, or your first month is deeply discounted. And all of those of course work to the degree that the content is valuable, because they are going to come in, they are going to try that free stuff out, and they are either going to stay in and convert, or they are going to leave. And I think that was with the gamification with how much you can track what they are really consuming, what they are doing. Now that's a really much more concrete way to do things. Because I think before everybody probably wanted to do it that way, but you didn't really have the data as you were onboarding those trials. And so trials were always a risky venture of, okay, I know I'll probably get more people if I give it away for free, but are they just freeloaders? Are they going to stick around? What's going to happen? And yeah, so most of it has been, and I know for me, for example, right now on my site, I've got the first module is free, but the first module is, when I say first module, it is part of a bigger thing. So when they are done with it, they get that win, but they realize, oh, this win is just one of a few wins I could have that are all part of a whole bigger win. And so when I talk about giving them a trial, or letting them taste it, or try it, or whatever, it's about not just, hey, here is something and it's good, because there are lots of, Free reports and free videos, there's lots of good stuff. It doesn't get them to buy, but it's, hey, here's something that is good in and of itself, so you have a good experience and you feel happy you spent your time with me, but you can also in the process of going through that see that, wow, I'm missing all this other stuff, and here's how easy it is to get it, right? Here's how to buy it. So mostly, like I said, it is that trial where you're giving them a piece of something much bigger, but that piece itself has to work.

And what I found that is crucial with the trials is that that first video has to really help them understand the values of the community, and help them understand that how, what the potential is if they complete it. What the power, what the superpower is going to be and what special forces and things that they'll be able to accomplish after they've completed the entire program. And so while you are training, you also need to keep in mind that that first module needs to be written like a sales letter with kind of a problem, agitate, solution format where the solution is specific and is helpful, genuinely helpful, because if it's just another sales letter, then they're going to feel hoodwinked. But it's written in a way that helps them receive the value of the training versus just giving them a list of things to do, because that kind of more or less just overwhelms them. They're like, ah, well, I haven't even gotten this done yet. There's no reason for me to buy more that I'm not going to be able to do as well.

Yeah, I totally agree. It's got to be useful right up front, easy. And that's if the product is that way. Like you said, Khan Academy's content was good in the first place, and then they gamified it. And if they did charge for it, which we donate with like 10 or 20 bucks a month for it. So it's optional, right? They even give it away for free. But if they were charging for it, probably the easiest way to get people to buy Khan Academy would be, hey, have your kids come take a free lesson on Khan Academy versus the best sales letter you could write. I'm sure Pam Kennedy and a bunch of people, probably yourself included, could write good sales letters. But just saying, at the end of the day, if the product is good and you let them try it, it's going to, I'm searching for the right word, sorry, because it's, there are caveats like you're saying, it should be a sales letter still in a way even for current members because they need to know why they're going to do the rest of it, like be resold on it.

[Speaker:JAMES] What the free trial does is it helps overcome the threshold resistance where like if you're in a pool saying come get in, the water is great, there's a lot of resistance by that person standing on the deck to getting in the pool. But once they're in the pool, then they'll be there for the whole day. And that's essentially what you're trying to do with the free trial offer is make it easy to do that first leap and show them how much fun it is now that they're in the water. I have found though that that worked with— I still work with plenty of clients that have free trial offers and grow those businesses. I have found that the gift with purchase offers have been performing better in the longer term in terms of retention. So that when folks instead of joining for free, they have to pay. To get in. They seem to be better engaged. And so I'd be curious to trade numbers with you sometime and see what's going— try to track that, maybe even split test it on a couple of sites and see which ones perform better. Because I'm moving— more and more I'm moving away from the free trial offer. So it's interesting that you say still a go-to thing because it certainly is very well represented and a lot of folks use it. Now what are some of the biggest— what's the biggest mistake that you see when somebody is launching a new membership site either as an add-on to their existing information business or as a business unto itself?

So there's probably two big ones. The first biggest mistake is I think they try to do too much at once. They hear something like this where we talk about all the cool stuff, or they see some other speaker, presentation, or site that they want to model, or they think is a good idea out the gate. So on any new site, even on my own, having done this for a long time and being good at it, I was fully aware of all this stuff. I had done it for clients already a bunch of times. And when I made my own, I started the first version just the content, just the basics. And then I kind of layered on to where we do have badges, and points, and certificates now. But most people don't understand when they see these sites that that grew over time. That had to evolve. It didn't just pop up that way. And so the problem with it, and the reason I say that is so important, it's not just like save yourself some time. I've seen people I've seen people overbuild membership sites many times and then not be able to sell very much of them. And it's just the worst thing because you've committed to this whole thing. You've spent the time to do it and you are committed to supporting just a few people for very little money. So that's one of the biggest mistakes. And what I would recommend people do is there are a lot of simple steps. I mean, you can test whatever you want to make as a membership site. First is a free report. You can test it as a webinar or a series of webinars a free video series just to track consumption and whatnot. And then if you've got a lot of traction, go make a membership site. But a week or 2 or 3 to do those things is worth so much. I've had friends who were in masterminds with me who were clients of mine and all this who did this. They overbuilt sites. They couldn't sell them. They tried absolutely everything in the world. And it was just really sad. It's a lot of wasted time and energy and all that kind of stuff. Make sure whatever the subject matter is is solid. And as you go forward, like I said, if you do a webinar or webinar series or video series, you can later charge for it, but initially just give it out to see if people are interested. And if it passes all those checks, go ahead and invest in a membership site. But that is for sure the number one mistake, because what I would encourage you guys to do too, even if you are going to do a site, is make it simple. Make it as simple as possible. To get off the ground and learn as you go, a lot of people will just get stuck. It's so hard to do all these layers of technology if you are brand, brand new. They are not the worst things in the world, but if you are new, it seems like foreign language rocket science. I'd say the other one is how people deal with communities, how they launch communities, because what they will do is they will start out with this really full-featured community of, you know, there are forums and people can private message each other., and there is this webinar, and there are all these things going on, and it kind of dilutes each thing to where there are not very many people interacting in any one place, and it throws off the vibe where people think, well, this isn't very active. Maybe this sucks and I shouldn't be here. So one, making sure your community is kind of limited, having a focus. And two is when you launch it, understanding that you have to launch it mass. You can't do kind of a trickle like I'm going to pick up a few members a month to get going and have a community, or you shouldn't because it will be really boring in there. If you are just starting and you want to start with a community, I would start with a launch because then you can dump a bunch of people in there to get started. If you have already been going for a while, or maybe another alternative is start without a community, and then once you have a group of members, you know, add it so it can have some sort of mass. And when you do the community, this is the other thing, people typically will expect the community to kind of do its own thing. So for people to come in and post content and people to interact, and that's usually not the case. So I had a client who has— it's a stock trading business, but it's an older couple. And it was interesting to me when I came back after a little while, they had this super active community and they didn't have a lot of members. And I asked how they had gotten this done, because most communities I've seen and just not that active with even more members. And she said, oh, well, when my husband lost it, he just decided for the first 3 months he was going to do one thing in there a day. So he would make one little post, or one little video, or one little thing. And so he just knew to get the thing off the ground, he had to interact for 90 days. And after doing that, then he built up the critical mass, and people were used to talking, used to posting, used to going in there. So just, yeah, I mean, start small. And then also on the community side, either start small or just know that you have to have a bunch of people in there, and you yourself have to be active to get it off the ground.

So hopefully that's helpful. Yeah, no, that's really smart. Wow, Michael, thank you so much. Both of those can save a whole lot of hassle and aggravation. And probably the community idea, while it's critical and important to build a community within, and it can be a huge retention tool. Setting that up shouldn't be the first thing you do. Your advice even to deliver a few videos for free and generate some traffic and interest before you then try to create a paywall and sell those. And even when you do that, keep that simple and launch that before— well, while all those tools and bells and whistles will improve a business and make it grow, when you're just launching, keep it simple on yourself and grow into that as you have more folks coming on board. Yep, couldn't have said it better. Micah, thank you so much for taking your time today. This is certainly very, very helpful and insightful discussion, and I certainly enjoyed it.

Well, thank you. And yeah, I had a lot of fun, so I appreciate you having me on.

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