130: How to Grow Your Membership Using Affiliate Marketing With Kelly McCausey

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Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Destiny Kopp, and I help business owners increase the revenue with digital products and evergreen sales funnels. In this podcast, we go deep into product and marketing strategies for digital product creators. We cover everything from digital product creation, how to market and sell your digital products, and just as important, how to find your ideal customer. Let's jump right into our show.

And my special guest today is Kelly McCasney. McKelly is a business coach and she owns several different businesses and I'm not going to go into all of them. We're going to let Kelly kind of give you the background there. But I am so super excited to chat with her. She has been doing business online since 2002, doing Internet radio since 2003, and then jumped into podcasting when it was invented in 2004. And she has a wealth of knowledge and I know you're going to enjoy the conversation. Today we're going to be talking about content marketing and all of the businesses that she has, including, including the memberships that she's been running for years. So if you want to learn a little bit more about that, let's jump in. And Kelly, thank you so much for joining me. I am so excited to chat with you, especially somebody who's been in the Internet business for so long. I know you're going to have a wealth of knowledge to share with us today.

Destiny, I'm glad to be chatting with you.

So why don't you, Kelly, just jump right in and tell the audience a little bit more about you and all the businesses that you have have.

Sure. So my brand is Love People make money, which is all about content marketing and community building. I always say you're my people if you want to publish content you're proud of for people you love. And, and I don't know anybody who can't say yes to that. So I talk content marketing. I talk about building a list, affiliate marketing, creating courses, running memberships. Gosh, the whole gamut. I'm blogging and podcasting there. I'm. I have a mastermind membership there. I do private coaching. And then under the umbrella of content marketing and community building, I do have a side business that I partner with my friend Samantha Angel. We run two done for you content brands. You might be familiar with the phrase P O R Private label rights. We have white label, perks.com and dailyfaithplr.com where we create content for business, self development and Bible based faith. And then another, I own momwebs.com, a hosting company that's been around since 2004. Well, everything, everything relates to content, your content online and.

Right. I mean, because content is so critical for us to get our message out in the world and to build that community, which I know is what you, what you focus on. So let's talk about this because you and I chatted a little bit before we started recording here and I know that you have a membership or multiple memberships that you have launched and managed over the years. And a lot of people who are listening that podcast, this podcast here, they either have online courses or, or membership or they want to. Now, I know that, you know, you could talk about the benefits of membership and we can definitely go into that. But I'd love to know more about your membership, why you actually created it, and how you have grown it over the years.

Well, I'd love to talk about my very first membership way back in 2004. So, so much happened in my business. Back in 2003, I launched my Internet radio show is Work at Home Moms Talk Radio. And the following summer the podcasting was invented. And that blew everything up for me. But that same summer, my friend Alice Seba, who had sponsored been sponsoring my Internet radio show, asked me if I would like to join her in creating a membership. She was running a busy, thriving free forum on her website. Back then it was Internet based moms.com and she's like, Internet based moms and wham, Chalk radio. Like, we're reaching these moms. Like, let's start a membership. Let's create a private forum that people will pay to have access to and we'll provide them with monthly training. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes, that sounds exciting. But you know, the feedback. When we started to talk about what we were going to be doing, the feedback was scary. So many people said, you're all nuts. Work at home. Moms are frugal. They will never pay for training. There's way too much free stuff out there. There are way too many free forums. You have a free forum yourself. Why would anybody pay you to. To be part of a membership? That would have scared me, but Alice was just dead set. Nope, nope. I believe this can work. And by golly, it did. We launched that summer of 2004. Our membership at that time was just $25 a month. It blew up. It was extremely successful. By the end of the year, I was making thousands of dollars from a membership. And this is blowing my mind because I'm a poor, broke, single mom and it's like once you've created a membership, the work you're doing for one person is basically the same work you're doing for a hundred people. Like, you create the content, you put it out there. Sure, the more people in a forum, the more chatty it was, the more time that was invested in that. But we were already engaging on forums and enjoying that. So if you've ever been told your audience won't pay for that, there's too much free stuff out there, please just let that go. Tell people, thank you for your input. I'm gonna do it anyways. I'm so glad we did because that membership completely changed my life. That was Mom Masterminds that we launched in 2004. Now, memberships are an interesting beast. From this perspective now of being 18 years later, I do, I do not run my Masterminds anymore. In 2011, my son was grown and out of the house and I felt like I was no longer a work at home mom. And I started, I, I ended up going through a rebrand and in that process, Mom Masterminds became solo masterminds. Along in, in the years between, Alice moved on to pursue different brands herself and I ended up running the membership myself. The interesting thing about memberships is that they're not forever. I don't, I don't personally know of any memberships that have been forever, but my mastermind slash solo Masterminds ran from 2004 all the way up to 2018 was when I officially let it go. The social media had exploded. The way that people were spending their time online was less form based. There's a lot that contributed to the decision, but memberships aren't forever. And that's okay. It's really okay. It was a hell of a beautiful run to have a membership as long as I did, but I've gone on to offer a variety of other memberships since then in different forms and under different brands. So do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, let's talk about that. Because one of the questions I had for you as you were going through that, I was thinking, you know, well, she started that a long time ago. You know, people's perception may have, may be that that was easier to start something back then than it is now because the market's so saturated. So what is a membership that you may have started a little bit more recently? And tell us about how that evolved. Why did you start it? How did you actually find members? How did you get it up and running?

Yeah, so first I'll share an example from my main business. Like I said, I closed down the membership in 2018 and I thought that's it. I probably won't run memberships anymore. I started to focus on private coaching and coaching programs, which are like little mini memberships where people sign up to coach with you for a year at a time. I ended up relaunching a membership, a Mastermind membership, in conjunction with an annual challenge that I do. I do the Stretch Yourself Challenge in September each year. We're just focused on helping people do content marketing. There's a variety of content marketing challenges that you can choose from and complete and earn points and win prizes. And at the end of that challenge, I always invite you to join my Mastermind membership, which is just a weekly call. I provide no training. I include no resources. I don't create new resources. I give them access to to my courses, but I don't create anything new. I don't promise them anything new. I promise them me. I will be in my Zoom room every week for you. And because they've just spent a month with me accomplishing a lot, a lot of people then say yes to joining the Mastermind membership. So that's my personal membership that I offer at let people make money. That door is always open. New people can come in at any time, but they usually I usually gain new members in conjunction with events. The the Stretch Yourself Challenge In February, I do a content refresh challenge and those are always real nice on ramps for my memberships. But there's also looking over at my Done for you content brands, White Label perks and Daily Faith plr. We offer memberships there. So we're creating Done for you content. We're releasing new products multiple times every month. People can buy them a la carte. And as soon as we achieved a predictable publication schedule, it was a natural next step for us to offer a membership model where let's say if you are buying the products a la carte, you're spending like 38 to $50 a month as a member. We offer a membership. We just rolled out the the Faith Journaling Club membership at daily faith. At 15amonth, it would cost about $35 a month to buy the products a la carte. They get everything for $15 a month as a member. And we onboarded a really nice starting cohort of members in November. Launching a membership requires some effort, some commitment and an affiliate program. That's my, that's my stand. If you want to offer a membership and you don't want to offer an affiliate program. You better have a damn fine plan for reaching lots and lots of people all by your lonesome. But I have always had an affiliate program for any business that I run. And so memberships are extremely attractive to affiliates because they're going to earn a recurring commission for every member that they send my way. So when we launched and, and we said, hey, we're going to do this Faith Club, Faith Journaling Club. We've got a publication schedule that's reliable. We know that, we know that we can have these new products and available every single month on time. So here's our membership model. Affiliates. If you would like to share this with your people, you're going to earn 50% of the membership month after month for as long as they're members. And members stick really nice in these low cost memberships. So we had a lot of great partnership and helping us to launch it.

And I agree with you, affiliates I think are a must when you're launching a membership. But how did you find your affiliates?

Well, they, oh gosh, that's a really good question. And I don't want, there's, there's the jerk answer. Which, what. Which is I just looked at my own community. That's a jerk answer. I've been in business for 20 years, so I've got a community of people who teach content marketers. So it's, it's relatively easy for me to go out there and tap affiliates. So let's shake off the jerk answer and, and talk about like if you're starting from scratchy scratch, which a lot.

Of people are that, that are listening to the, to this for sure.

Yeah, you're gonna, you, you're going to, you're going to do a lot of research. You're going to find out who your contemporaries are, which is the, the nice word for competitor. You're going to find out who your competitors are, who reaches your target market already research who they are. I make a list of people who I think of as reaching my desired audience. That's my first point of research is just make a great big list of people and then I look for signs that they are active as affiliates already because not everyone is. There are, there are actually people out there who don't affiliate market. They're not interested. I don't know why, it confuses me, but I look for, I look for my contemporaries. I look for signs that they are active in affiliate marketing. I subscribe to their mailing lists, I read their blogs, I, I read their social streams and I just look for affiliate activity. Once I identify those contemporaries who are active affiliates, I'm going to reach out to them personally and invite them to explore my resources. I want to give them free access to it. I want to, I want to be upfront. I want to say, hey, Destiny, I see that you reach my audience and you are an active affiliate. I have an affiliate program. I would love to have you on board. I would love to support you in any way I can. What would you like to see? I'll give you anything. Want to see my products? I'll give all of them to you. You want to see my course? I'll give you access. You want to come to one of my calls? You're in like, sister, please. What do you need to decide whether or not you want to promote me as an affiliate? Just make this the specific invitation. Don't, don't fool around with people. Like, just go, go straight to the request. Affiliates respect that. Like, I'm an active affiliate. 30, 35% of my annual income comes from affiliate marketing. So I like it when people with affiliate programs contact me. I want to know if there's more money that I could make out there.

And I agree with you, Kelly. I would say, and I do a lot of affiliate marketing myself and the products that people give me access to is so much easier for me to promote them when I've been in there and maybe use them myself or tested them out myself. Then I've tried doing affiliate marketing for products that I haven't used and I just don't feel like I can promote them as well because I just don't use them myself. So I like what the tip that you gave us in terms of going out and finding affiliates, but also kind of bringing them into your world or giving them access to what you're offering so they can actually speak to it personally.

Yeah. But I should say before you start knocking on doors, make sure that you have good affiliate information on your website. If you click on the affiliates link on the bottom of say, white label perks, for example, it says right up top, the affiliate program pays 50% commission on all product sales and memberships and then 30% on the vault slash lifetime offer. So that's the most important information up top. How much money can I make? And then down further, there's more information about like, what kind, what tool do I use to manage my affiliate program? What's you want to tell them about your cookie and how long you pay commissions and do you have a second tier program? There's. You want to Provide good, clear, non complicated information about your affiliate program so that affiliates can get a feel for whether or not they can work with your program. And then the other thing that's really important is providing good affiliate tools. So for our products, our affiliate page lists the products with the most recent releases first and it shows their affiliate link and a graphic that they can take and use really easily. The more tools that you provide to your affiliates, the easier you make it for them to grab and go if they want to give you a try. So have that page ready, get some feedback on it and just make it neat and clean and easy for people to sign up for your affiliate program before you go knock in. Because if, if you come knocking on some affiliate's door and they go peek and they can't find any information, they might not even reply to you.

I think that's some good tips. And you know, for me and what I've done with my affiliate programs, I have a landing page that they go to and it does include everything that you mentioned, the system that we're using to track affiliate revenue, how long the cookie is, and also giving them access to, to like the Google Drive where you have your canva templates or your email swipe files or your social media captions that they can just copy and paste and easily modify for their business and brand. So I love the tips that you gave us there.

So one more tip for affiliate building.

Yeah.

So our Daily Faith PLR brand, we do not have a lot of contemporaries. There are not a lot of done for you Christian content out there. And so we have struggled to find affiliates. My, my trick for finding affiliates there was to have an event. We created a summit slash giveaway and invited people to partner with us. And news spreads about something like that. People share it with other people. And we ended up with with, you know, nine speakers and 20 some bundle partners who want to reach our audience. Hello. Ding, ding, ding. They're my affiliates.

That, that was genius. I have to say. That was absolutely genius.

Rather than me finding them, they found me. So provide an opportunity.

And that is such a great tip for people out there. They're like, I don't know who to go to contact. That's one way to do it. I love that, I love that. So let's switch gears just a little bit more because we only have a few more minutes and let's talk about content marketing. So you have all of these businesses and I know that you've been building your business for a while, but I'm sure that even in the past few years, you have some tips and tricks for us related to content marketing because it has changed, you know, recently. So talk a little bit about what you're doing in terms of content marketing and marketing the brands and businesses that you have.

Yeah, the so for love people make money. I am still blogging and podcasting. I am. What's worked for me beautifully over the last couple of years has been collaboration. I. I became a licensed foster mom, and the last year of my life has been absolutely bonkers. So focus for me to sit down and focus on creating a blog post, I have a hard time just unscrambling my thoughts, but I can go open up a collaboration and say, rather than write a blog post myself about a topic, I can go out to my community and say, hey, what do you have to say about this topic? And, you know, get six, seven, eight people contribute their ideas, and then I put those together into a collaborative post published on my website. Have it, have a graphic made that makes everybody look fantastic. Publish that, email it to my community, share it on social media, send, send links to all of the collaborators. They do the same. It's. It's con content marketing. It's collaboration. It's easy. It feels easy. So looking for lots of collaboration and then another form of collaboration, I've done some really fun ask me anything content prompts. So I asked my community, you know, ask me anything about mindset, and they shot me questions and I recorded short video answers and turned those into blog posts. And then a little while later, I did a content creation, ask me anything. And man, the questions that came in were so crazy fun to respond to. Like, one person, you know, said, you know, I'm, I've made my offer, but I'm not getting sales. Should I rethink? Like, that was the funnest thing to respond to. I make a video, I publish that as a blog post. I've got content on my website. I love collaborating. I think the days of going off into our hidey hole, thinking up ideas, developing them, writing them out, and then sending them out in hopes that they resonate, I think those days are gone. We've got to create content in tune with our audience. We've got to be interacting with our audience. The more time I spend with my community, the better my content is. So involve them.

And Kelly, what I love about what you just said is that would be so easy to take. Not only do the video, the blog, but also that's perfect content for social media, whether it's a Reels, a TikTok video carousel post. It is absolutely perfect for that.

Yeah, yeah. And man, you. And again, there's a little bit of. I feel like a jerk saying that because if you don't have an audience to ask them to send you questions, you know, you might feel like, well, I, I can't leverage that idea. And you, it's true if there's no one to ask to ask you something, but they're find someone to borrow someone else's audience. But listen, do not go into someone else's Facebook group and ask what's your biggest problem? And blah, blah, blah. Nobody freaking likes to respond to that stuff. That's lazy. It's lazy and is rude to the, to the person who runs the group, in my opinion. But you can still hang out in their communities and notice the questions that are being asked. You can develop your own list of questions from observing other people's communities interactions. Just do it with integrity, please.

I, I think, I think I. That's a great tip and I certainly agree with you. Now I don't go on Facebook groups myself generally as a general rule, but I'm sure that that happens. Kelly, before we hang up here today, do you have any last minute tips for our audience here?

Trust your creative urges, trust your instincts, trust your curiosity. I. The world needs you and your unique perspectives. The world does not need a magpie. The world doesn't need you to be acting like somebody else. The world needs you, your stories. Even if that means just sharing really honestly where you're at. You know, when I got started with work at Home Moms Talk radio, I was not an expert. I was just a curious enthusiast. And I went out and I asked people dumb questions until I knew how to ask smart questions. And that built a community around me that changed my life. So just be yourself and have fun.

And I think you gave me some quotes for Instagram there, so thank you for that. And can you let the audience know where they can find you?

Lpamm.com is my home base.

And I will make sure, Kelly, that that link is in the show notes so everybody has it. And I'm sure there, if they go there, they'll have a free gift so they can join your community and learn from you.

Awesome, Destiny. Thank you. I enjoyed talking with you.

Thanks so much, Kelly. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you love the show, we'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and show us some love there. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.