You Don't Need an Audience to Launch a Paid Membership

Do you need to have an audience to launch? The resounding answer is no, you do not. It certainly is great if you have an audience already, but what's more important than your audience is to have an ideal member. This is the person who needs or wants your community the most right now. Typically, This is somebody that follows a specific formula and it is a super easy one. It's actually one of the most obvious things in the world. But this is more important than having an audience or not having an audience, because if you don't have an audience, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can go find people based on this ideal member. Here's the formula: a human being plus a transition. Equals your ideal member. And bonus points for somebody who is in a transition where that transition is painful. And why is this? These are the people who will always be the most motivated to join something new and pay for it. Because when we are in a transition, we are highly motivated to navigate it successfully. And if we are in pain, we are highly motivated at nearly any price to get out of that painful dynamic. So human being plus transition, bonus points for pain, is your formula for building a successful digital business. And this is true for whether it's a paid membership, which I think is the easiest business to build today and certainly the most profitable. But it's also true for online courses, for challenges, for events. And if you are thinking about e-commerce or you already have a physical product that you're selling, taking full advantage of a person who is in a moment where they are seeking Because they're in a transition is one of the most impactful things that you can do. So especially if you are struggling today and you're like, wait a second, why isn't this working? Typically it's for a couple of reasons. You are struggling or not quite getting to that next level because you don't have a clear ideal member. Or number 2 is that you are not providing them with enough opportunity to meet other people on the same path. That is why a membership is so powerful, because when you connect people who are in a transition, especially when they're navigating pain, to each other, they can help each other in a way that you as the host can't. You just can't be in all of the conversations and help people in all of the ways as the hero of your business. That you can when you unlock relationships for other people as the host of your digital business. That is where the magic happens, and that is also where the profit happens because people pay for progress, especially people who are in transitions, and they pay attention to what they pay for. So you are so far ahead of the game. If you invest the time to figure out who is your ideal member and stay focused on them. And here at Mighty Networks, we have got some great guides and tools to help you think about what your ideal member's transition can be. Where do you want to focus? But a couple of really good places to start are how do you describe yourself? It's easier to find people who are like you than people who are not like you. The beautiful thing is that you can find people or start with people who are walking the same path that you have walked, and you can always then expand from there. But certainly, if you are starting from scratch with a paid membership or a course or a digital business, you want to start with people whose transition you get. So if the first one is, how do you describe yourself? What is your story and how do you tease out those moments to focus in on people who are like you, who have gone through similar transitions to the ones that you have gone through yourself. The second question is, who are the people that bring you the most energy? Who brings you joy? Who brings you a sense of purpose? The third question then is, of the people that you want to bring together, what are the most important or motivating transitions that they are in. And my favorite part of why an ideal member who is motivated, who is in a transition— because that's a shortcut for motivation— when they start to get results and they start to meet super cool people that become their friends, not just content that they're consuming, all of these things lead to an experience that they're going to want to talk about. Word of mouth has always been, continues to be, and will continue to be the most effective form of marketing or attracting new people into your aspiring digital business, or ideally a membership, a course, a challenge, or an event that you can possibly have. So do you need to have an audience to launch a paid membership or a course that has people meeting and building relationships with each other, a course that creates people magic? The resounding answer is no, you do not. Now, the next set of questions I get pretty much like clockwork are, great, Gina, this is fantastic, but what the heck are people going to do together? Don't I need to have a lot of content? Aren't they showing up for me? And don't I have to have people that are running this? Don't I have to be live streaming absolutely every day? Here's the beautiful thing about what we're going to start with today is through monthly themes, a weekly calendar, and daily polls and questions, you have everything you need to take those ideal members and help them get their best year ever. That's it. You don't need 100 hours of content. You don't need events every single day. You don't need programming 7 days a week because you've set up and designed your paid membership so people know why they're there to meet each other and how to do it and what they're supposed to be doing together. So monthly themes are there to get your members talking to each other, sharing Their stories, their experiences, their ideas, not advice. Advice shuts a conversation down and you want to focus in on encouraging your members to share their experiences and their stories. As members are contributing, the reason you want to have monthly themes is to also introduce novelty to your community. The same thing every week, the same thing every month can get a little stale. You want to introduce monthly themes that all ladder up to that big purpose. So that can be goals and goal setting. That can be how to manage your energy, how you overcome challenges, how you reframe away from feeling like a failure into a space where you are learning and staying curious and growing. These are all things that your members can absolutely talk about for a month. And in doing so, they're even motivated to talk about these things for a month. Then at the end of the month, you introduce a new theme and you've got a whole new set of things for people to be able to talk about. If you're creating a membership, you don't necessarily want to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's great for a course, but for a membership, you want a kind of monthly theme that someone can dive into. Whether they are brand new to the community or they are here in year 3. You can have monthly themes that you repeat. One of the things that we've seen time and time again is the conversation amongst whether it's entrepreneurs, creators, small business owners. There's some variation on how do you get members or how do you get customers that is incredibly valuable. And yes, you can actually have 2 themes in one month. Sometimes I've done it where I've had the sort of fun, positive, exciting, sexy theme like getting customers or getting followers or getting members or, or whatever that might be, and then the really boring, dry monthly theme of how do you handle paying taxes. And so you can do those things together and use that next month's theme to bring people back. So as you're getting to the end of one month, making a little bit of a bigger deal, putting some pageantry around introducing your next month's theme, all of those things become so much fun to do, so much more interesting, and set you up to be able to design this all in advance, let it run. You are set up for an extremely profitable paid membership or course because your members are going to take this and run with it. I'm Gina Bianchini. This is People Magic, and I will see you in the next episode. Woo!