230: Membership Sites - How to Gain and Retain Members with Mike Morrison

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Oh, hey, Alexa here. And you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks for making the show a part of your day today. I'm especially excited about this episode because Bjork is interviewing Mike Morrison from the Membership Guys and Membership Academy. As you can probably tell by the names of his businesses, Mike Spencer specializes in membership sites. In fact, Membership Academy is a membership site for. Wait for it, membership site owners. Kind of meta, but totally awesome. I'm a Membership Academy member and I actually attended the membership conference that Mike and his partner Kali held earlier this year in beautiful Newcastle, England. All this to say, Mike knows memberships, and he's here today to talk to you about not only how you can gain members and grow your membership site, but also how you can retain and support your current members. Mike is just such a cool guy. And even if you don't have a membership site, you'll still be able to apply his tips on segmented marketing, onboarding, and surveying to your own blog. So if you're ready, let's dive in.

Mike, welcome back to the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me back on the show. I'm honored to be a returning guest.

Yeah, there aren't many.

Sorry, I was going to say, it tells me I didn't mess up for.

First time around, right? You've checked the box. First time around, we said we gotta have him back on. It took us three years, but now it's happening. So if you want to check out that first episode, it's a little bit of a throwback. It's one of the OG Food Blogger Pro podcast episodes. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com 62. That'll be the first interview that we did. But for this interview, I thought it'd be good to touch base on maybe some of the basics, but also hear a little bit about what's been happening since then. Three years is not a lot of time, but with an Internet business, it's kind of like the equivalent of, I don't know, 15 years. You know, they say there's dog years. I feel like there's also Internet years. So if you look back at 2016 as it relates to your business, you can talk a little bit about what it is that you do, what your business is, and then how have things changed in the past three years since we've last connected?

Yeah, three years. It's. It's weird, right? Because like you said, it seems like it's no time at all, but it's also a lifetime ago. So as was the case back then, Our main business is we run a membership site about membership sites and at the core of it, that's not really changed. We are the membership guys. We eat, sleep, breathe the online membership world and we've continued doing so over the past few years. In terms of when we last spoke, I hadn't actually realized that was three years ago. So that was, that would have either been within our very first year of running Membership Academy or it would have kind of, we would have just ticked past that, that one year anniversary. So it's, it's a bit crazy to kind of be here because that first year we enjoyed, we enjoyed a lot of success within that year. We'd envisioned the transition away from the agency that we ran into running the membership full time, we'd envisioned that taking longer. So our big thing from that first year was the fact that it actually didn't. And we kind of got to a point where the membership became our main focus pretty quickly.

And that's one of the topics that I wanted to talk with you about, is this idea of starting and building. And I think there's the technical element and we covered some of that stuff in that first episode way back when. I'm guessing a lot of that has similar themes, but that has changed. You have a ton of resources around that from everything, from which plugin should I use, which platform is best. But then there's this, there's this area that's a little bit more intangible. It's not as concrete there. You can't have a table where you compare things and, and that's this idea of launching, growing and getting an audience. So when you look back at the success that you had and have continued to have as you've continued to build what you build, where did that come from? Why do you think you had this traction? Did you have an existing audience? Did you know how to market? Well, for somebody who's thinking of starting a membership site, what do they need to consider if they want to replicate that?

Yeah, so we didn't have much of an audience to begin with. We'd always be been, we run an agency and so our work came from local networking, it came from referrals, it came from collaborations at a, at a real small level. Because, you know, if you're running, if you're running an agency, you're, you're not dealing with a huge, huge number of clients compared to a membership where we've now got nearly 3,000 members. So the way in which we were marketing didn't really require too much in terms of audience building too much in terms of lead generation or visibility or even online marketing. You know, most of most of our clients came from the offline world, even though what we were then doing for them was building them their online membership. And that, that aspect there, the fact that actually we were specializing in online memberships, that kind of gives us the cheat codes in some way. Because as people who had experience in building and growing successful online memberships, then obviously that experience came in quite handy when we wanted to build and grow our own online membership. So when you say kind of, were we good at marketing? Yes, we're good at marketing. We've been in the world of online business for 20 years. And so that experience obviously enabled us, I think, to be able to accelerate our audience growth in a way that not everyone would be able to do. But, you know, we were starting when we decided to kind of plant the flag in the sand with the membership guys, brand podcast and the blog. We were starting from zero.

Yeah. So the interesting thing is, it's almost like you had previous exposure to other success stories, and you probably in some ways developed a little bit of a sixth sense. You started to understand, okay, these are the recurring themes. These are the things that we see people doing and the success that they have, and we can pull that out and apply that to what we're doing do. When you look back at it, is there one specific thing or maybe one or two specific things that you did in those early stages that were really helpful from a growth perspective in getting things off the ground?

Yeah, I think one of the main things as it related to our content strategy, as it related to how we engaged people on social inside our free Facebook group, which, from kind of a tactic point of view, was. Was a big, big part of it. The main, main underpinning thing was just becoming relentless problem solvers. So I think sometimes we see people getting a bit too wrapped up in, you know, I want to start a vlog, I want to start a podcast, I want to start a blog. And it needs to have this structure, and it's got to have these production values, and they forget what. They forget what the point of all this is. It's just to provide solutions to problems, answers to questions. And we, again, from the many projects that we've been involved in, you know, the ones that did best were the ones that provide the best solutions to problems. So when we were creating podcast episodes, the aim was for every individual episode to be the answer to a question that we knew our audience had, because we created a Free Facebook group where we got all those guys together and then we just listened and we asked and we had conversations and we identified. Okay, what problems these people have. Okay. Now we've got a huge ton of material that we can go where we can create content and also we can go deeper and create membership material as well. So that when the membership launched, there was an affinity between our free content and the paid content because it was all centered around this idea of just relentlessly solving problems.

Yeah, it's interesting if you. One of the things I like to do is draw analogies to real world brick and mortar businesses. Not real world, just physical businesses with online businesses. And I feel like the equivalent is if you were to open a hair salon, thinking about the structure of the site and how things are going to be arranged and what you're going to use, it's kind of like the equivalent of what chairs are you going to have, what is the lighting going to be, how far will they be spaced out? But if you nail all of that stuff and it's perfect and the experience is perfect and people walk in and then it's a terrible haircut, not much is going to happen and your business isn't going to grow, even though structurally everything is solid. On the opposite side of things, if you have the worst experience possible, but you are incredible at giving haircuts, there's potential for business growth. So it's almost like those structural things are a multiplier for the skill and the talent and the ability. And what you're saying is on the membership side of things, really what you're needing to do, what the mission is, what the goal is, is helping people solve problems. And you had talked about some specific ways that you were doing that. Essentially it's listening, but you have to have people that are talking to you in order to listen. And I'd be interested in knowing in those early stages, how did you get those people? Like, how did those people arrive at the Facebook group? How did you start to get people to listen to the podcast? What did that look like? Really early stage.

Yeah. So because we. Because we were specialists in what we did, we would. We'd always get those emails from people where they kind of say, okay, I'm not in a position to hire you, but can I just pick your brain? And then they'd send, you know, a 5,000 word long series of questions. Right. So we, we just got really good at saying no to any other options of engagement with people other than our Facebook group. So anytime someone asks us a question, on social, anytime they emailed us, we directed them into the Facebook group. That gave us a little bit of an initial momentum and you know, one domino fell and the next domino, then the next domino, then when we start putting the podcast out. The podcast, Podcast was huge for discoverability because we don't have to worry about getting that podcast in front of people. Apple just, Apple does that for you. So on the podcast, our calls to action was go and discuss this in the Facebook group. So we didn't have the membership at that point. The membership was still several months away. So rather than having a comment section on our website, there was a link to the Facebook group to continue conversation on the podcast. We would say to people, okay, so hopefully this has given you some food for thought. Would love to hear your, your input, your experiences. Head over to talk memberships.com that will redirect you through to our free Facebook group where you can join us and blah blah, blah, blah blah. And there, there again that, that buying a domain name, that was easy to say, easy to remember, easy for someone to punch in rather than facebook.com group 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, whatever. Again, that just made it easier to have that audio call to action and all these little kind of drips from all these different places just start to come together and you get that groundswell and then the group in and of itself becomes the attraction because there's more people in there, there's more other people there are recommending it to others, Facebook are recommending it and all that sort of stuff. And we threw, we threw a little bit of ad budget at promoting the group as well, but we're talking maybe a coup of hundred dollars.

This was initially to get some traction.

Yeah, just to get a little bit more, a little bit more traction. And then as we, as we moved further, so obviously through all that, we're getting some people on our email list and so on. And as we moved closer and closer, being ready to launch the membership, one of the big things we did to accelerate our audience growth, which in turn accelerated the growth of the Facebook group is we did a free 30 day challenge. So it's essentially one email per day with little bits of advice and action steps and what have you to create, like launch your membership within 30 days. And again we made it so that any discussion around that would happen inside the Facebook group and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, that's great. One of the things I love about that is you are directing people to a solution that is helpful to them, but it's also some type of capture. And an example of something that's not a very good capture is that first example where you said, hey, somebody emails me. And then they have a bunch of questions, you help them out. But then it's like, it's helpful to that person. But there's not any scale in the helpfulness. And with a Facebook group, you can help somebody, somebody else sees that, they get exposure to that, and you are then helping multiple people while also helping the individual. So it's a little bit of a strategic take on scale as it relates to serving your audience. So is that still an important part of kind of the way that people discover you and eventually join the site, the Facebook group?

It is. It's a big, big part. We're at about 13 and a half thousand members in that free Facebook group now. Myself and Callie cannot be in there as much as we were in the early days. However, we do still have a presence. We have our team in there. And actually now we've got such a body of work that. That we have a presence just by virtue of the fact that now if somebody asks a question, someone else in the group will kind of say, oh, Mike did a podcast on this, like, three years ago. Here's the link. Because all of that content is evergreen. Whereas in those first days, what we would do is someone would ask a question, I'd go away and record a podcast episode, and then I'd go back and say, hey, what a great question. Such a coincidence. We're just, yeah, so we kind of got to bootstrap it a little bit in that way. But it's a big, big part of the marketing strategy now, because what happens is a lot of those people who were initially inside our free Facebook group, they went on to become members, but they never left the free Facebook group. And so within that overlap, we get advocacy. So we literally never promote the Academy inside the Facebook group because we don't have to wear. Because if somebody kind of says, I've got my launch coming up, I need some ideas for what I can do, someone else will say, hey, are you an Academy member? Because they've got a whole. They've got this launch course, or they've got these email templates that really helped me out. And we know from experience that in a lot of cases, all it takes to get a sale is awareness. Not everyone needs to be nurtured and put through a whole funnel. And so those little mentions, those little, like those tiny little bites of the apple in terms of the academy coming up as, hey, you know if you don't have this solution, here's the solution that leads to a lot of people.

Sure, it's built in, it's built in testimonials. In a way, it's somebody that, who is an active member saying, this was helpful. For me, I learned this maybe referencing something they saw and asking the group.

Exactly.

Interesting to hear that.

Yeah, exactly. That, that social proof is gold. Because of course I'm going to go in there, I'm going to say, yeah, membership Academy is the best thing since sliced bread. Because if I didn't believe that, then what the hell am I, what the hell am I doing in business? Right. So nobody is impressed by me talking about how great my solution is, but if other people talk about it and it's clear that they're not incentivized to do so by anything other than a genuine belief that this is a great product and it's something that someone should use, then that's worth so much more than, than us just posting relentlessly about how awesome the Academy is.

Yeah. So you had mentioned you're at the point where almost 3,000 members, which is incredible. It's. To think over four years building something where you have extremely substantial amount of people that you are serving is awesome. So, number one, kudos. That's awesome.

Thank you.

Number two, I'd be interested to hear, not only on the growth side, but, but one of the things for those who are interested in creating a membership that they'll need to start to understand is this idea of churn. And it's a little bit different for people who are coming from the publishing world. A lot of people listening to this podcast think about how do I get more traffic, how do I get people to maybe sign up for my email list? But once you get into the product side or the membership side of things, you not only are thinking of acquisition, but you're thinking of retention. So can you talk about what CHURN is and some of the things that you've learned through the years as it relates to reducing CHURN and why that's so helpful?

Yeah, definitely. So Churn is, it's, it's basically the, the amount of members you lose. It's the percentage of members who drop off on a, on a month to month basis. And that's, it's, it's probably the most important metric for any subscription based company. Not just memberships, anything where you are depending on your customers paying you month after month, year after year. And it's going to happen. You know, if you're selling A book, if you're selling a dvd, if you're selling an event ticket. Those are transactions, those are one off sales and essentially the job's done, the product is delivered and the commercial relationship ends. When someone joins a membership, the commercial relationship is just beginning. You need to sustain their interest to such a level that they have no qualms with continuing to pay you. And when they decide not to pay you, that's where churn comes in. And, you know, I'd argue that retention is possibly even more important than acquisition. There's no good bringing people into the front door, but if they're just leaving immediately out of the back, you've got to hang on to those members. And I think people who are accustomed to selling one a product, that's what they screw up about memberships. They focus entirely on getting that initial sale and then they think that their work is done right. Getting that sale isn't the finish line, it's the starting pistol. You've got to get that first monthly payment, but how are you going to get the second one? How are you going to get the third one, the 36th one? So there's a bunch of things that you can do to get that right. First and foremost, it kind of starts the second someone joins, right? So you've got to get member onboarding correct. So member retention starts day one, minute one. The second someone joins your site, the clock is ticking. You need to ensure they get off to the right start and that they build the sort of habits that are going to keep them subscribed and paying long term. So get your onboarding right, number one. Number two, you've got to provide value. And this is possibly the biggest shift between a one off product and a membership. You want people to pay you on an ongoing basis, you've got to deliver value on an ongoing basis. That doesn't mean just throwing more content at people, it means you've got to show up, you've got to serve your community, you've got to solve their problems, you've got to help them get the results that they joined your site to achieve. You need to be there for the journey that they begin when they join your membership. Memberships are a value exchange. You don't provide that value, people will stop paying. Third thing is community. So it's a long established, well known saying that people will come for the content, but they'll stay for the community. That's definitely, definitely true of memberships. Having a community element like a discussion forum or a Facebook group gives your membership that stickability factor that will keep people hooked and subscribed long beyond the point at which they're finished with your content. You know, relationships that people form within communities, they are worth sticking around for. Right. And then finally you need to implement what's called a dunning process. So dunning is the word given to the process of handling failed subscription payments. A high percentage of churn is involuntary churn. Right. So it's not people leaving by choice. They've left because their card expired, their payments have failed and they just didn't get round to sorting it out. And then by the time that those issues have led to their subscription being canceled, they kind of think themselves, oh, okay. Well, it sucks that, you know, I'm no longer a member. I'll get round to rejoining one day and then, you know, it doesn't happen, or it's six months down the line and you've lost out on that person being part in your community for half of a year. So you need to ensure you have a robust and ideally automated way of dealing with involved return with failed payments, card changes and stuff like that.

So many favorites in terms of. My guess is that there's, you know, we use a tool called churnbuster for any of the recurring products we have. Is there a favorite that you have as it relates to membership sites or ones that you'd recommend?

Yeah, churnbuster. Churnbuster is fantastic. Some membership plugins have things like this built in. So member press, for example. It has elements of the dunning process built into it. So it'll automatically email people when their cards are subscribing. It gives people the ability to update their details and so on. But churnbusters, a fantastic service that takes things a little step further if you want to really get more hands on, literally with your dunning. There's a company called Gravy, so I believe it's Gravysolutions IO. I mean, real quick. Yeah, Gravysolutions IO. They will actually call your customers and kind of help them to get their cards updated or address any issues. So if you have an audience who are perhaps a little less tech savvy, or if you have a membership where it's high tickets, so it's actually a high cost membership where, you know, it's worth having a person on the phone, then those guys are great team as well.

That's awesome. So one of the things that I would imagine would exist for people who have an audience, I think a lot of the people that listen to this podcast in some way have audience or in their process of building it, as they reflect on building some sort of membership site or community, there'd be this question of what, like, what do I create that thing about? I'm guessing that there's a decent number of people who would sign up to learn how to build a membership site and also have a little bit of a question around what they should focus on or what they should be building their actual membership site on in terms of the focus area or the niche. Do you have any advice that you would give for people as they contemplate what they need to focus on and how specific they should be and what that area of focus is?

Again, it comes down to research, it comes down to talking to your audience, having conversations with them. And this people, people don't do that enough. They don't validate their idea. So, you know, you should, presumably if you already have a bit of an audience, you should be getting questions from these people. Like if you, if you haven't been getting people sending you emails or sending you tweets or, you know, asking you stuff, or, you know, if you're working with, you know, clients as a coach, as a service provider, again, you should be able to identify some common themes that are coming up that will give you an idea of the most globally experienced issues, problems, challenges, goals, dreams, all that sort of stuff that your audience have and that just start giving you an idea again about the viability of something like a membership site and also about some of the specific things that you would put in there. I think I always almost cringe when I have people kind of come and sort of say, hey, I want to start a membership site where, what niche should I focus on? Because that's the wrong way round. The niche or the niche, wherever you're from, should kind of come first. It should be within an area where you have knowledge, skills, experience and expertise.

You should have. Yeah, that should be clear to begin with.

Yeah, exactly. You know, you should be creating a membership site in response to demand, emerging demand, a need in the market as opposed to deciding, I want to start a membership site now, what should I like, what industry, what people like? It's not thing it up on philosophers and stuff to remember the exact quote, but there's a quote of kind of, oh, they go, my people, I better follow them and see where they want me to lead them. Or something like that.

Right, right, right, right.

I only know this, it's from an episode of the West Wing. You know, it's, it's Making sure you're doing things the right way around now you can, you, you don't have to have this huge established audience. And if you're starting with a lot of knowledge, a lot of skills that you want to leverage, but you, you just haven't really had cause in your business to do any audience building, what have you, then there's other places you can research, obviously. Look at what else is going on in the market. Are there other memberships, are there courses, are there events, Are there? An absence of solutions in a market is not a sign that this is a golden opportunity. It's probably a sign that this is arid land, that this is a dead space, that someone has tried and failed.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think that's a common misconception. When people think about a business opportunity, if they see something that already exists, that a lot of times says, oh, I shouldn't do it because somebody's already created a solution for it. What I hear you saying is a little bit of the opposite.

Yeah, absolutely. Because honestly, every unique idea has been had pretty much. There's like, obviously there's exceptions to it. Every idea for a membership site pretty much has been had. So if you can't find something, a membership, a course, a blog, a podcast, if there's nothing else out there, it means either there is not enough interest or there aren't enough pockets of passionate people in this world to have at any point elicited one of those people to say, hey, I love this thing so much, I'm going to start a podcast. Hey, maybe, you know, so many people need help in this space, I'm going to start a membership. If nobody has done that yet, unless you are, unless you are literally a brand new field. So, you know, unless you're starting up a membership about augmented reality, which isn't brand new, but certainly newer, then there's a good chance there's just not enough people out there interested or the people who are interested are not a buying audience. Because it doesn't matter. You can have the hungriest market, the hungriest audience in the world. You can have the best product in the world. But if those audience, that audience isn't compelled to pay for a solution to their problems. Yeah, then it doesn't matter. Right. So I. Oh, it's an extremely rare situation where an absolute absence of anything even resembling an alternative solution in the market. Existing is a sign that this is a ripe market. Yeah, it's extremely rare.

Sure, that makes sense. And I think it's important for people to hear that because the analogy that I use in brick and mortar is this idea of gas stations. And if you wanted to start a gas station and you looked around, you're like, ah, there's all these other gas stations. I shouldn't do it. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have a business where you are building gas stations that are profitable. Just means that you have to really understand that niche. You have to understand where to go, you have to understand the best corners. Same true for a certain niche or a certain type of business online. If something already exists in that, it doesn't mean that you can't create. It just means you have to really understand what you are doing, how you're serving people, and how you're going to go about building it. So I think that's a great concept that you bring up and I'm glad that you talked through that a little bit. So this is something that we haven't done before, but I'm going to give it a shot. It's called. I'm going to call it Top three. And what I would be interested in is I'm going to have three categories that I'd be interested to hear your top three examples or kind of quick stories as it relates to that category. So the first one is, I'd be interested to hear, in the past four years since you've been doing this personally, what are the top three things that you have done that actually didn't work? It was an initiative, it was a project. It was something that you guys were excited about. You thought maybe it'd help with marketing and then you decided to wind it down because it didn't accomplish what you wanted it to.

One would be we invested a lot of money into Facebook ads to cold audiences as an experiment. I'd always kind of felt that it wouldn't work quite as well for us just because we're so niche. And so anyone with an interest in memberships would. A cold audience would have come across us already. And yeah, we put a lot of money into that and it didn't go. We were hoping to be surprised. And we worked, you know, we worked with an outside like fantastic Facebook ads expert and Facebook ads to cold traffic was just rubbish. I would also. It's a funny one, this one, because I love doing it and it's certainly been effective in many ways, but purely as something that moves the needle in a big way, public speaking. So I've done a lot of speaking over my life of my career, but I really can't of start putting a lot more effort into it in kind of end of 2016, 2017, had the, had the good fortune to have spoken at a lot of very high profile events within the industry. And it's, it's good for a lot of things, but it, it doesn't move the needle. I genuinely do not believe that, that, that would be any different place if we had, if I hadn't, if I'd have just skipped out on those events.

Do you feel like one of the things that I've started to realize with conferences or in person events is it doesn't move the needle from a people who sign up or business growth perspective necessarily. But one of the things that I do find pretty consistent is that I'll almost always come away with like one or two really positive, significant connections, which is kind of this nebulous business impact thing. Have you found that to be true with conferences or even in that aspect? Do you feel like it's, you know, these people and you could have established those relationships, Relationships outside of it?

Kind of yes and no. And I think that's possibly the third, the third thing is putting dedicated effort into getting a seat at the table with big, with big names in, not in the membership industry, but in the online business industry. So again, that's something that kind of went in hand in hand with speaking at events like Social Media, Marketing World and stuff like that. A big thing we wanted to do was position ourselves via these conferences, via being, you know, speakers at some quite exclusive events, to be at the table with some of the biggest names in the online business space and about the relationships with them, which we did and you know, still very good friends with a lot of those guys. But I think when you're coming up, particularly in the online business space, sometimes you kind of think, you know, if I just get on this person's radar, if I just get on this person's podcast, then wow, what that could do for the business would be incredible. And it, it's, it's nothing.

Yeah.

Actually our audience don't care if I'm, you know, sitting in a hotel in Chris Ducker's hotel room drinking scotch with him and Pat Flynn. They do not care. It does nothing because it in no way connects to the way in which I serve them and the manner in which I solve their problems, because their problem isn't. Can you tell me a cool story about that time you drank scotch with Chris Ducker and Bob Platt? Do you know what I mean? So there's in terms of not so much in terms of us putting a lot of stock in that, but just in terms of what I think people tend to think. And I know this because I'll have people kind of say, yeah, I'm flying out to LA just so I can go and have coffee with Pat Flynn. As I'm sure like, Pat is a lovely guy and I'm sure you'll have a fun time, but man, you're expecting a lot to come out and in all likelihood it won't because he's just another guy with a business who.

Yep. Yeah. And for those who aren't familiar, Pat has a business called Smart Passive Income, focuses on niche sites as well as general success with online businesses. Has a great podcast. Yeah, he's been on podcast as well. I don't remember what episode it was, but we'll link to that in the show Notes.

Yeah, I think in terms of online business, social media is kind of up there as kind of the top four or five names in the space.

And then Chris Ducker, somebody who actually we connected with, we lived in Cebu City, Philippines for a year. So same spot where he was focused a long time on this idea of working with team members in the Philippines and outsourcing. And I think he's since moved back home to London. Is that right?

He is back, yes, he is back in the uk.

Okay. But another well known person in the online business world and also I think has a podcast and a membership site which I think you helped him build.

It was our last ever client. Yeah. Initially we'd said no because he came to us right after the data, which we said we're not taking on any more clients, but he twisted our arm. So he has the honor of being our final ever service client.

Great. I think that's helpful. I think it's helpful for people to hear somebody who has had success reflect on some of the things that didn't work and that you've intentionally said, hey, we're going to step back from these things. How about on the opposite side? Three things that you'd say, man, if I could only do these three things as it relates to growing a successful business, these are the three things that I would, that I would do.

Podcast, definitely. Podcast was a game changer for us. I think I said right in the beginning that we expected our transition from agency to membership to. To be a little more gradual, to be a little smoother. I have absolutely no doubt that the podcast was the main factor in accelerating that because one, it's phenomenal for discoverability Two, I think it enables you to create a connection with your audience in a way that you just can't do through blogging, but in a manner that doesn't involve as many moving parts and as much chance for you to just throw in the towel as creating videos. Right. Is that perfect in between? It's as intimate as it gets. You are in people's ears, you are in their pocket, on their trip, on their commute, in their cars, and I love it. So many of our initial members and still to this day cite the podcast as the place they found us and the reason they joined. Because you get to hear my voice, you get to get an insight into how I take. And if you don't like that, you're not going to, you know, so if you don't like this podcast, you're definitely not gonna like this two hour long course with me. Right, Right. So it's a good filtering option. So the podcast. Absolutely. It's, you know, we're up to like 230 episodes now and I still enjoy it. It kind of. It keeps me invested and engaged in the topic.

And with the podcast, how did you get people to initially discover that and follow along? Was it just the organic nature of the podcast app and people searching for it, discovering it, and then subscribing?

Yeah, it was mainly a mix of organic. I think organic was a predominant factor. And in fact, it was crazy because we, I think we'd for some, just by default considered ourselves a UK centric business because we're from the uk. But then so many people who were joining the membership when we opened the doors who found us through the podcast were from like Nordic countries. Like, there just seemed to be a huge clutch of people from that part of Europe. And we're like, wow, we must have, like hit the top of the charts just in that specific geographical area. And that really opened our eyes to the fact that, like, we wouldn't. There are pockets of our audience that we would not have reached with any other medium. And that was. That was organic. And then of course, as I mentioned before, we had the Facebook group where we did our whole kind of record and answer to a question as it comes up. And then, you know, the fact that someone had asked a question in the group and then we had that podcast episode that we went back with, just made it more likely people would listen to it. And so much of that discussion in the initial days was around the podcast episodes, but, yeah, most of it was organic. The. The discoverability via something like itunes is huge.

Yep. It's its own search engine. I think that's one of the things that's good to remind people of is there's not just Google, there's the podcast search engine, there's a Pinterest search engine, there's the YouTube search engine. All of these are different places where you can get discovered when you're creating content. So the podcast was really important. Would there be a number two and number three in that list?

Yeah, I would say number two again. One of the most effective things that we do is just regularly surveying our audience. So we conduct surveys of our wider audience, of our members. There's three core groups that where we're continuously just asking for feedback from people who've joined our membership, people who joined and left, and people who haven't joined. Because you want to know, why do people join, why do people leave and what's stopping people from joining? And so we're constantly seeking feedback from people who fall into those groups. Sometimes it's just that single question, like this part of our sequence, a single question. If someone's been on email list for a certain amount of time, what's the one thing stopping you from joining the membership? That helps us to identify holes, and it has done since the beginning, helps us identify gaps in our marketing strategy, gaps in our product, things that we weren't explaining too well that maybe we thought we'd nailed the messaging for. It's also given us language that we can use because, you know, by asking people about, like, if we're just going to regular surveys and we're asking people about their problems and all that, then we have that exact language that they use to express the issues they're having. And we can mirror that and we can model our messaging on that to actually get across the message that, you know, we. We get it, we understand it, we can empathize with that. So definitely that kind of, again, relentless pursuit of engagement and interaction and dialogue with our audience.

I think, though, one of the things that people often think about with an online business is that there's not the physical interaction or in person interaction, and it doesn't literally have to be in person, but the closer to high touch feedback that you can get, the better. And that looks like it could be a zoom call, it could be an actual audio call. But that's one of the recurring things that I hear you saying that I think is a really good reminder to people is you can get some sense from an email, you can get some sense from a comment, but you can't get enough color from those. When compared to an actual conversation with people where you hear them hesitating or hemming and hawing about a response or being really confident saying, this was the best. This is why I loved it. This was so helpful. So it's a recurring thing that I think is important to point out. So that'd be number two. Is there a number three that you'd point out?

Yeah, number three is segmentation. Segmentation was an absolute game changer for us. So, you know, you'll see so many times people have the website and they've got one opt in, right? So no matter, no matter what you're reading and no matter the context of why someone might be reading a particular article on your website, they'd have that one single lead generation tool, that bribe to get people on their email list. And we were the same. We had the ultimate membership planning toolkit.

The answer to all of your problems.

The answer to all of your problems. And that was our main thing. And we got a lot of people on our email list because it was useful. It had a planning guide, it had our plugin comparison chart, it had an invitation to our Facebook group, all that in one. And we did okay with it. It generated leads when we actually doubled down on segmentation. So we were already essentially clumping most of our content into three core buckets, planning, building, growing, when we actually took that segmentation further and we redesigned the homepage so it was literally where are you right now? Planning, building, growing. And then we created lead gen opt ins, individual ones for each of those segments that were followed up by email series that were appropriate to the context. If someone opts in for a planning guide, it means they haven't launched yet. So your email series content can be centered around the problems that people who haven't launched yet have. Similarly, if someone opts in for the growth lead magnet, then we don't need to talk to them about membership plugins. And so our follow up series and all that marketing activity tailored to those core segments, in doing that, our email signups literally doubled overnight. And that's a very hyperbolic statement, but they literally overnight doubled because they were more targeted. And our sales conversion, like our email list conversion, I think it was converting around about 3% and it went up to like 5 and a half percent which in terms of conversion rates for email lists, that's high.

Yeah. And so what you're saying is by targeting, speaking the language of the person who is at the, at a certain point in their journey, you're able to then say hey, we can solve this specific problem for you as opposed to you want to start a membership site, here's all the things you need to know versus like hey, you're really early stages. Here are some of the plugins you should look at for creating your site that is more helpful and therefore people are more engaged with the content, more likely to sign up. And so segmenting, depending on where somebody is in the journey, do you have an email tool that you like to do use for that? Is there, is there a solution that you've found to work best for segmenting?

Yeah, we're big, big fans of ActiveCampaign. It's, it enables you to use tags basically for whatever you want. So someone signs up to our email list, if they've opted in for the growth lead magnet, then we just tag them as opt in growth and then we use that tag to differentiate what we actually sent to them. So activecampaigns really, really powerful. But it's not as overpriced as the likes of infusionsoft. So you kind of get the, you get the cool automation and tagging stuff that infusionsoft can do without the huge price tag. And we've used that for five years or sells, four or five years or sells and for a number of years prior to that with clients as well. It's sure, it's great.

That's great. So the last category that I'd be interested to hear your top three and it can be kind of a quick recap. What are some success stories? I think people come out of a podcast like this excited, but it's also helpful to hear, hear some people who have done it and they've done it successfully. Would you be able to pinpoint people who are part of your community who have gone about building something and you can talk in generic terms as they haven't opted in to have their, have their story told publicly, but in generic terms, what are some success stories?

Yeah, so we've got, there's a fantastic long term member who's been around for a while in our community, guy called Mark Warner. He runs a membership called Teaching Packs. And this is a membership that was around a website that was around for about 10 years or so and it was, it was doing okay, but it was all just him. Like this business had been around for ages and, but it was just him and he had no spare time and he was burned out and he wasn't making as much money as he wanted to be because he was just constant grinding. And so I like to Mention Mark because it's a different kind of success, because he was already successful if looking at pure dollars.

Numbers, numbers.

But if you asked him how you feel today on any given day, he wouldn't tell you he was feeling success. So again, through working with us, through the material and the membership, supporting the community, he's been able to completely flip that. So he's got structure in his business, he's got team. He's brought on a whole bunch of people who are helping him out, developed his processes, streamlined his whole business and his mindset towards all of this. And he's just a different guy now. I think the first, his big thing for like, okay, this, this has totally changed everything, was actually being able to like take his family to Disneyland, which I think they had been a few times prior, and he. He had technically taken them, but he didn't. He sent them.

Yes. He was physically there, but not mentally.

Yeah. So I always, I always like mentioning Mark because it's kind of the atypical success story that people talk about. You also have people like, there's Jodie Clark from the Empowered Educator. She helps kind of early, like teachers in the early learning stage of education. And Jodi's a funny one because we met through another community years and years and years back and she knew what we did. And for probably about. She won't mind me saying this for a few years. I think she told me every reason under the sun why she hadn't yet started this membership. Like, there was always a delaying factor or an issue, this, that the other. And she joined our community. We'd helped her get ready to take that plunge. And it's just been a fantastic success for her. She's retired her husband, so her husband's been able to quit his job. They can both spend time with kids. They're kind of almost. I think they're looking at almost becoming like digital nomads and her memberships, you know, making more money than anything she's ever done before. And it's just growing from strength to strength to strength. And then one of my favorite success stories, a guy called Scott Devine, who is a bass guitarist. And he was playing. He was playing gigs and he was kind of playing in bands and doing a little bit of local teaching to students. Then he was diagnosed with a neurological condition called focal dystonia. I can't believe I've actually remember the name of that. Focal dystonia, which means that over time he's going to lose the sensation in his hands. It's a nervous thing and eventually he's not going to be able actually play guitar. You can't lose sensation in your fingers. That is literally what you need to play guitar. So this guy had zero experience of online business, like none whatsoever. But he muddled out how to set up a WordPress site with a little free theme and set up a YouTube channel. He started publishing little videos of him teaching bass guitar because I think he kind of thought, well, you know, maybe if I do this, I'll be able to get some more students for some one on one lessons and save up some money. But he started putting those videos on a blog and he stuck a little PayPal donations button up. And then kind of real quickly those donations were kind of racking up 2, $3,000 in donations every month. Just people saying thank you for how much awesome content he's putting on YouTube. So he knew he was onto something. That's when he kind of met us and we worked with him to launch scottspacelessons.com the membership there. And now they're doing $3 million a year. They've got about, I think about 35,000 active members now. They've had about 60 or 70,000 over the lifetime of their membership. And it's, it's a huge team. It's going from strength to strength and he's, you know, he's a local guy and a good friend and it's awesome seeing him enjoying that success. I could keep, I keep just listing totally.

Yes, yes, for sure. How for somebody like Scott, how long is that has, is that journey? Is that six years, seven years, 10 years from start to today.

I think he may have uploaded like his first YouTube video in 2013. The membership, I believe was 2014 maybe. Yeah, you're really testing my memory now. But yeah, I think, I think, think he's. So we've been, we've been around for four years. We work with him for two I think because we were embedded. So yeah, it's like five or six years now of SBL Academy. And it hit, it hit seven figures within a year.

Yeah, was awesome.

Yeah, I still remember we were, there was a delay with launching it. Me and Callie were in a hotel, not hotel, an airport. And basically ready to get on a plane for a little winter break to Berlin. And we were like literally so panicked last minute getting this website launched because a few things had kind of messed up with the content that's gotten literally pressing the button to make the sales page live and then two minutes later getting on a flight where obviously we had no Internet connection. And I've never been as riddled with anxiety because for all I knew, five minutes after I pressed go on the website, it crashed. So I think by the time we got off the plane, he took maybe about $30,000 in sales. I was like, wow, that's cool.

Yeah, it was a productive flight for you without knowing it. That's awesome. And I feel like a great note to wrap up on. Inspiring and encouraging and obviously if you start a membership site, you're not going to scale it to, you know, seven figures in a year. It's not the most common scenario, but it is really possible and we've seen it with building a membership site like Food Blogger Pro. We've seen other people do it within a specific niche that they're focusing on. But the thing that I feel like is important that you've said throughout is having this relentless desire to help people and solve problems, which is such a great through line for this episode. And you guys do a great job of that. So if somebody is interested in working with you to help them solve their problems as they think about building a membership site, you have a lot of solutions. You have a book, you have kind of a state of the industry report which recaps membership sites and was through interviews that you did with people. You have the site itself, you have the membership site. Where can people follow along? Where's the best place for people to start if they want to connect with you?

You best place head over to them, check out our free stuff. You'll see links off to our Facebook group and some of the free resources we have. And then if you feel that you want to dig a bit deeper, go a little further and start out on either start out on a new journey and creating a membership or get a little bit extra support and helping you take an existing one up to that next level. Then you can come and join us over at the Academy, which is membershipacademy.com awesome.

That's great, Mike. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me back on. I feel honored to have been a returning guest. We'll chat again in three years time, alright?

Hey, sounds good Mike.

Thanks.

And that's a wrap my friend. Thank you much so, so much for tuning into the podcast this week. If you have a membership site or maybe you're interested in starting one at some point, be sure to check out our show notes for this episode@foodbloggerpro.com 230 for links to Mike's free Facebook group, the membership site and more and if you like the show, we would love to hear about it. Reviews on Apple podcasts help the show so, so much and they just totally put a smile on our faces. We just love hearing what you think of the show. And last thing, if you're in the States, we want to w you a very happy Thanksgiving. This is just such an awesome and fulfilling time of year and we hope that you soak up every single second with your friends and families. So we'll see you in our next episode next Tuesday. And until then, make it a great week.

Sam.