44: Creating A Profitable Membership Program - #GrowYourLife

Hello, and welcome to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and on this podcast, I help you grow in your life and in your business because I believe that if you grow in your life, it impacts business. The reason to grow in business is to increase your income. You can do more. You can have more impact. It's not about, you know, here's our business box. Here's our lifebox about living a full life. And business is just one part of that. Another part of that is relationships and health and putting it all together in a way that works. And that's what this podcast is about. If you're not part of the grow your life community on Facebook, check it out. There's over a thousand people just like yourself that are growing in their life and their business by listening to these episodes, plugging into the videos that I do every single day on my Facebook and Instagram on unique topics to help people grow in their life and in their business. Listen, if there's a topic that you want me to talk about, leave it in the comments, post it in the group, and if you have any questions, listen. There's no dumb questions. In fact, the only dumb, dumb question is the one that goes unasked. The only kind of stupid thing to do is to not ask your question because we're afraid of maybe how we're going to be perceived or feeling embarrassed that we don't know enough about something. That's what that group is for, is for it to be a safe place for you to ask anything, anything as it relates to growing in your life, in your business and reaching your goals. There's people in there that can help you, that will answer for you. And you can also answer other people's questions in there. If you haven't checked out my course, Website Building Made Easy, it's on my website, Jeremiah krakowski.com this course is going to help you build a website that gets results in less than seven days. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can build a beautiful professional website that works and functions the way people expect. Listen, a lot of times I see people, they have the best product, the best service, the best marketing, the best videos, the best communication, the best copy, you name it. But when their website doesn't function or work in a consistent way with what's on the Internet, it loses them the potential of closing and finding customers. Because people are turned off before they ever even get a chance to hear what you have to offer. And so in this course, I walk you through, step by step, exactly what to do to build a website that gets results the first time. Check it out, it's on my website. Website Building made easyremiakrakowski.com on this episode, I want to talk to you about building and creating a success membership program. And I was not going to teach this until I had my own paid membership program myself. But I realized, you know, two things. One, this is one of the number one areas that I actually have people that I coach and consult as well as customers asking me how to do. And two, I have like six clients that I've built successful, profitable, multiple six and even seven figure membership programs for them. I still run their ads and help them set this up, help the customer service and all that. So what I wanted to do is really come and dive into what it takes. The first steps to building a successful and profitable membership program for you. Kind of the step by step model and blueprint for that. That way you can generate funds, generate resources for yourself. With that. One of the first things that people ask is well, how do you do that? How do you put it out there when you're building a membership site, write this down. Thinkific.com look, it's t H I N K I F I c dot com. What this is is it is a platform that allows you to upload content for courses, but it also lets you do member management for recurring online memberships. And so how does this work? Well, let's say that your membership involves a Zoom program and a Facebook group and some, some teaching. You would charge people's credit card through thinkific after you get that set up. It's very easy. The help documents on thinkific.com are very easy to follow. You know, a lot of people don't even get started because they don't know how to use thinkific. Well, they have the step by steps of how to use thinkification on their website for you. It's so easy that they walk you through it. It's literally the easiest platform to use. Once you do that, you set up a program with a price that you're going to bill people with. Maybe it's 9.97amonth or 97 per year. And it takes their credit card. And then what you do is you process that. You connect it with a page where they can request to either join a Facebook group they get access to and it's. That's it. That's literally the whole setup process of setting up a membership. There's literally nothing else more that you have to do. And a lot of people think that there's a lot more to it than that. But once you have some content, some material that can help people, and you have a focus and a topic that you want to teach people, and you can consistently show up, you can charge people money for that content in a membership. And what it is, is you give access to the membership through that back end. So how do you charge people for a Facebook group? Well, you create a course, quote, unquote, in the back end of thinkific and you would have a link to your Facebook group in there, meaning only the people who purchase your membership get the link to the Facebook group. And then when they request, you put a little questionnaire in there that says, you know, what email address did you use to sign up for this membership? And then you're able to correlate, it takes two seconds, their email address to the answer that they left in the Facebook group. And right there you're able to link that with who is a member. Now you're gonna have to do some manual customer service where you watch, you know, if they stop paying after a certain month, you'll remove them and you can pull reports each month to see that. You'll pull them up and remove people from the group. But that's the basics of how to run a paid group online. And so what would people pay you for? Well, this is where a lot of times people, if you have content consistently, you're putting content out there, maybe you have some courses, maybe there's a topic that people are asking you for. You can build this into a membership program in thinkific and deliver people coaching, group coaching. You hop on a zoom call once a month, twice a month, you can have these calls where people access this and you deliver this through the back end of a site like thinkific or and on a Facebook group and you connect that this way. And so it's very simple. You go to thinkific.com, you sign up for a site on Thinkific, make a new account. That's the first step. Okay. After you set that up, you create what's called a new course. And you could put a members welcome course. This is what I would do. This is the exact steps that I would do for somebody that all they want to do is very simply take people's credit cards for a paid Facebook group and then deliver content to people through that group and then be able to load it up into the members area of thinkific. So you would have a welcome here course in thinkific and in that course there would be. The very first lesson would be Join the Facebook group and it would have that link. And so then people would click there, you would give instructions, write it out, where they leave the email address that they signed up with. And it's all very simple that way. And then once you have that set up that structure now we can put it out there to people. Thinkific allows you to build beautiful landing pages to with buttons. It's just drag and drop. It's very simple. It's as easy to use as, it's not even like Microsoft Word. It's like setting up your Facebook page. You just drag the points and the buttons there, you type in some description in there and then people can register for your membership, you put it on your social media, you can run some ads to it and you can promote it to people. And this is where a lot of people, okay, now that I have my membership set up, how do I get customers? And this is really the key to this. How do we grow a membership to over 3,000 members? Well, a lot of times you have, you're going to have to use ads. In fact, I've not seen a successful membership site grow without ads. And you might be wondering, well, how much do I need to spend on those ads? 30% of of the revenue that comes in. Now that might sound like a lot to you, but if you're growing your membership up to thousand, two thousand, three thousand members, 30% really isn't that much. And the more members you get, the less you're going to need to spend. And it will start to generate revenue that way for you. You need to invest what comes in back into it and it circles back around. And so the average lifetime value of the customer that stays in a membership site, a minimum is generally they stand for about three to five. And if you're really good at cultivating culture in that membership, and I'm going to talk about that in a second, you can keep people in a membership site for up to even two to three to five years. The biggest thing that makes members drop off of a paid membership is if there's not a consistent stream and flow of content, meaning once they join that there's not a reason for them to stay. And you've probably been in memberships yourself where maybe it felt like it kind of fizzled out or it, it lost some of its flavor after a few. That happens with paid memberships when the person who's running it isn't consistent with that. And that's the only way that you get drop off. But if you stay consistent at serving those people that are in your membership site, it'll pay you dividends over and over and over again. And if you add up the value of, let's say you have a $10 or $20 a month membership, somebody stays for two years, that's $250 a person on average. You can probably bet that you can find new members to that membership for between 20 to $40 per member in ads and sometimes even break even on that. And so that's why I love to do a monthly program as well as a yearly. And this kind of offsets the cost to where you're initially. You're able to make about 70% profit on the first month of what your ad spend is and then it recurs over time and you're able to pour back in that portion of the revenue. Now, how do you come up with the content again? You're going to have to show up on a consistent basis. And this is why I tell people the way to start to know what content am I going to make for people? If you don't know what content you're going to make, you need to go back a little bit and start to make content for free on your social media. And a lot of people ask me this question, well, if I give away too much value on my social media, what's going to make people want to pay for my membership? And the answer to that is this is you can't really ever give away too much value. You actually cannot with free content. The more value you give away for free, the better your paid content looks, the more value your paid content has. And so you want to actually flip your mindset on this and be more open to giving away more of your high value content to people and start to directly notice what has an impact on people. You see, high value content has an impact based on where people are at and where your audience is. So for example, I'm going to give you an example on almost every single program that I've helped other people run or built or worked with with people, is that on social media it's a very baseline of people just getting past their fears, their worry, growing in confidence. And then once you maybe have a podcast or a low priced membership, that's where you can start to really start to show people kind of the step by step, some of the models. So for instance, with this episode, I'm giving you an overview of setting up a membership site and you can take this episode and create a successful membership site in the future. I'm going to have a Full course and training on doing this, where I walk people through all of those step by steps. But that doesn't devalue the course that I sell later. In fact, it shows even more so of the value that I'll be offering you in the future. And so, just as I'm doing here, right here with you on this podcast episode, that's what you need to start doing with people on your membership, on your content. One of the saddest things that I hear from people is I'm too afraid to give away too much value for free. And they, they're constantly struggling, wondering, what should I give away for free? Because that free fear of running out of content and worrying and not knowing if they can continue to make content that's going to help people keeps them stuck and stagnant. And so that's the first thing that I tell anybody that's creating a membership site. The number one thing that keeps customers is consistently showing up. And number two, the way that's going to draw people to your membership site is give away your highest value content for free. And if you want to know how to make content that works, that sells, that gets results, podcast episode number 33, creating content that sells, is on this podcast. Episode number six is about creating content and becoming an expert at video content. But episode number 33 is going to give you a blueprint to do this as well. There's an episode that I did on creating courses. One of the best ways to grow a membership that I know of is this is create some courses. Once you create about three to four courses for people, you can load them up into a paid membership and then charge monthly. And then people might be wondering, well, if I, if I'm charging a hundred dollars for my course, why would I give away my course for $20? The idea is again, the long game. And every single time that I've seen that people have done this where they've gone into the monthly membership model, the value, the revenue that they get from the consistent money that's coming in pays for things far beyond just the one off sale, because you're able to rely on that consistent revenue. And that's actually more valuable than having to work so hard for everything else. You sell it once and the money keeps coming in and it keeps growing that way. And then you're able to just feed into the membership. And so I always recommend that people build a membership site once they go from courses building some sort of, whether they're charging maybe $1,000 for lifetime access, that's another way that I've seen people do membership sites successfully is charging a thousand dollars for some sort of a membership site. And then what you can do is once you build a membership site, you can pour it into a few different buckets. You could have a higher level program. So let's say you have a thousand members in your membership site. You could probably get 100 to 150 people paying you anywhere from 2 to $5,000 for a high level coaching program to get more access to you. And this is the model that can help generate seven and eight figures for you on autopilot very simply and easily. Running Facebook ads, creating content, showing up just a few hours per week. When you plug people into a model like this, you will have consistent revenue that comes in. And I have a number of episodes where I talk about turning your idea into profit, creating profitable products, putting things out there. And so if you're somebody that is still dealing with the fear and worry about taking risk and putting your stuff out there, go back to some of those episodes. But if you're somebody that's ready to take it to the next level, you're ready to start making a membership site that gets results, that gets customers. Sign up for Thinkific.com, go to their website, check it out, they have a free trial that you can play around with. Create a, it's called a course, it's not called a membership. Create a course. And what you do is you're able to add content in there and under pricing you can set it to a monthly recurring payment. And that allows you to, once you charge people for that, deliver any amount of content to people, whether it's video content, audio, PDFs, workbooks, training, Facebook groups. Now let's say that you're doing a monthly training or a bimonthly training on Zoom. You can take the recordings of that that people are paying for monthly and load them up into the members area and give them access to the monthly archives as well as set some time aside for you to record courses. You're able to maybe record a course on a topic. And the idea is you get a feedback loop going on with the people that are on your social media and your membership to hear what people want to learn more from you about. The idea is for you to become an expert and an authority in your field, a trusted resource for people that they will come to when they're looking for help in that area. Maybe somebody's looking for help growing in, in their, in their health or their relationship, or maybe spiritual growth or maybe you know, business teaching, or maybe you could even use a membership site like this. Maybe you're charging for monthly packages where people get access to creative materials like, like graphics design needs or, or things like that. You can utilize all of this no matter what you're trying to deliver to people through Thinkific, very simply, very easily. Putting people into a Facebook group, there's even groups built into Thinkifications. I think a lot of times people over analyze and over come up with and over complicate the process of running a membership site. The biggest thing is this is you gotta consistently serve the customers, consistently deliver value. Now how do you get customers? You're consistently putting offers out there, you're consistently telling people about what you have to offer. And each month you have a unique reason for people to come in. Maybe they won't come in in January or February, but in March, maybe there's a topic or a piece of content that will get them in. And so the idea is you then keep producing a different topic of content each month in your membership that keeps drawing people to come into that. And once you set up the Facebook ads, once you get that going, you're able to set up the pixel. You're able to track who scrolls to the bottom of your landing page, who's clicking the add to cart button. And I have a Facebook ads course coming up very soon for you that you'll be able to plug into and know exactly how to create Facebook ad campaigns that work. I have a couple episodes on this podcast, episode number seven, where I talk about getting traffic free and paid methods. I have a blog post on you know, why your Facebook ads aren't working and how to create Facebook ads that work. When you start to run Facebook ads, you're able to use the lookalike audiences and the algorithm on Facebook to find your target and strategic customer. You're able to utilize the big data that Facebook has to get results and program it. You don't need to be a programmer. What I mean by programming it is just by the content that you make, just by using the simple pixel, which I show you how to set up in the website building made easy course. And it's very simple to set up in Thinkific as well. They have a little section there just to just to integrate right with Facebook to track who's visiting your landing page, who's in your membership, who's using the membership, and build audiences that way to create lookalikes that are similar to your visitors and your customers. And then you're able to use that Lookalike to direct people to that. Now, one of the best ways that I know that gets results, growing a membership is content on your social media that's related to what your membership is about, content that surrounds what your membership is about, that serves people. And then you're able to track the viewers of those videos and then you will start to make some offers and tell people you know who you are. And I use this model called who, what, why and how, who you are, what it is that you have to offer your membership, why they need to join it, what benefit they're going to get from joining the membership, and how. Go to my website and sign up. So for instance, hi, my name is Jeremiah Krakowski. This is what would my pitch be for a membership site. And you can copy this and use this as a template for your own. Hi, my name is Jared Mike Rakowski and I'm the creator of Such and such the grow your life membership. And in there we help people grow in their life, in their business by giving them a step by step formula to reach their goals, a model to build their business and get results with. There's coaching, there's group calls in there. Check the, click the link, check it out, Go to my website and sign up for this membership. I can't wait to see you in the Facebook group. And you can use that as a model to get people to sign up and then run retargeting ads to do that. One of the best ways as well that I know that gets people into membership sites is running, you know, maybe quarterly sales based on a holiday or something. You know, you have one enrollment rate and then you'll discount the enrollment to people at another rate. Let's say normally it's $97 a month. Maybe you can run a discounted rate for $47, get people in, say, listen, you have until this day to join and you'll get an influx of people that join your membership and you can start to do this and stack it over time. And this is the exact formula that I've used to help a number of people build memberships that have 2, 3, 4,000 members in them. As we've done this in less than 12 to 18 months, growing them up to that level, just simply setting up something through thinkific, running some Facebook ads, consistently delivering offers to people a couple times a month, letting them know about it. Retargeting, running some lookalike ads, letting people know about the, the offers that we have, letting them know about the content that's in the membership, really starting to communicate and build a relationship with people and make it more about an invitation that people get to join, that they get to join with you to, to learn, to grow, to reach their goals. The idea is you again have to keep in mind, what is the goal that I'm trying to accomplish with this membership site? What is my customer trying to accomplish? That's the mindset that you need to have, have empathy for your customer, what their goals are and what their needs are. The idea behind a membership site is this delivering so much value for a low monthly payment that people have no choice but to not quit. You want to deliver so much value that they would never even want to cancel. And when you do that consistently and show up on a consistent basis, you can generate revenue for yourself very easily. And then how do you find the customers? It's simple. The Facebook ads you utilize, the lookalike audiences you utilize, retargeting ads. Very simple to set up, very easy to get going for you, very easy to get working and getting results. You create some simple videos with your camera, some simple selfie style videos are what works best. And then just show up. Just start building that relationship with people to where they, they get to know you, to where you're serving their needs, to where you're helping them get a blueprint and a model. People just want to know that you can help them reach their goals. And maybe there might be competitors out there or people that are doing very similar to what you're doing, but there's a reason that people will come to you and not other people. The reason is this. You are the only you that's out there. You need to stop trying to be a copy or a knockoff of other people that are in the marketplace and stop trying to look like other people and walk and talk and act like other people. To get started, you're going to maybe use other teachers or influencers or membership programs as a, as a template for you. But the reason that people will engage with you is your unique individual, unlike anybody else, personality, authentic person of who you are. And that's why they will engage with you on a membership site. And then the value that they get from that and when you put this all together, it gets results. Now you might be saying, listen, I don't want to be a unique personality. Well, then you're going to work a lot harder to get results. And I've worked with a number of people that have said this and eventually you have to start to realize that, yeah, it's gonna cost you three to four to five times as much in ads. If you're not willing to get over the fear of putting yourself out there on video, if you're not willing to get past the worry of how you look or needing to do everything perfect. I know so many people that they give up the good and even the great things that are gonna get results for them because they're trying to do everything perfect. Perfection is not the key here. It's about being disciplined and consistent and focused and up on a consistent basis for your members. That is what generates results. That's what creates the revenue. That's what creates the funds and the resources that get results for you. That's why people will come back again and again and again and keep plugging into your content because you stay consistent with who you are. You're the same person every time that you show up to people, they know that they can trust you. You become a trusted resource to people for what they are looking for help for. And I know that you can do that. And there's a number of people that are listening to my podcast that are listening to this right now that. That you're at the edge. You're at the level. Maybe you've worked with somebody before, maybe you've helped other people build memberships, or maybe you've seen them in the past, but you're just like, I just don't know if this is for me. I just don't know if I can get that many customers. I want to say this. It starts with believing in your head that you can do that. It starts with the belief that what you have to offer to people has value. People will take an interest in it. You can help people and you can help them reach their goals. Listen, I know you. I know that you're not worried about the negative criticism that you get from people. I know that you're not worried about what people say. I know that you're not worried about looking bad or whatever that is yet. What's the reason that's keeping you stuck right where you are right now? Well, again, it could be because maybe you don't know exactly the process to do that. I gave it to you on this episode. There's a number of podcast episodes on my podcast that give you that. Maybe you're just not sure where to start. Maybe you're just not sure exactly how to set up the campaigns. Don't let not knowing how to do something keep you from starting. This is one of the worst things that I see happens with people, is they won't even get started towards their goal until they have all the pieces in order and then they've completely missed the boat on the time window to set that up and they're six to 12 months down the line to where they've wasted time and missed out on the opportunity that they were able to create and develop and do things with that time. If you know how to do something, if you know what you need to do, start to focus and start to do that. You don't need all the pieces together before getting started. You don't need everything lined up. You don't need to know how to. All of this is going to work out for you to start. And so I want to encourage you, if you're somebody that maybe is struggling with starting and just starting the process and getting the wheels turning, you need to start. You need to maybe ask yourself, why am I so afraid to start? Maybe you're over analyzing the details. Maybe you want to make sure that it's all done right. Start. That's how you do it right. Start putting yourself out there. Start putting yourself out there with content. Sign up for thinkific.com start with creating a simple Facebook group Start with creating a simple Facebook group where you deliver zoom calls to people. Make two to three short quick video courses where you record yourself and just teach a couple lessons to people and load that up in the members area and then put it out there. That's it. You know, I know a lot of people, they won't even do that because they're worried about doing it right. There's not really a way to do what I just told you wrong. So get started. And if you want me to help coach you and work with you to reach your goals, to help you, to consult you, to build a membership site, to build a business, to create courses, to get more customers, I can do that for you. Maybe you're not sure still what path to take, what choices to make, what to do next. Head on over to my website, Jeremiah Krakowski.com and click on coaching. Fill out the form and I want to talk with you. I want to go through your goals. Let's hop on the phone together and see where you're at, see where you're trying to go and see what we can do, what strategy and what plan we can make to help get you there. I believe in you and I know that you can do this. And this is a goal that you have. It's possible for you. I've seen it happen with so many people that have successfully done this and use this model to get results. So the question you gotta ask yourself is this is how long are you going to keep waiting until the right scenario and the right pieces all fit together for you? Are you going to wait until 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, 5 months down the road? Are you going to get started today and start moving towards your goals? I want to work with you and I want to talk with you about reaching those goals. Maybe you're not ready to start coaching with me on a full level. With paid coaching, you can always win a free 30 minute coaching call with me by leaving. Grow your life on my Instagram, go over to my Instagram, leave growyourlife in the comments and I pick one winner every single Sunday that can hop on a call with me, a free call. Where we will go through and strategize your goals, where we will go through and come up with a plan for you to reach the next level. This is a full coaching call. For those of you that are maybe ready to take it to the next level and start coaching with me. You can buy a package of three hours or buy one hour. I want to hop on the phone with you and talk about those goals. A free 30 minute call with you. Just leave your name and email on the forum on my website under coaching and let's talk. I believe in you and I know that you can reach your goals. And building a membership site is one of those goals for you. Creating revenue for you. Getting 500 1,000 members, that's actually not a lot. And every membership site that I've ever worked with, anybody to build has had at least a thousand members. I've not created one that has less than that. I can work with you and I can help you do that. That grow your life, everybody. And we'll talk soon.