This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How can you start a successful membership site? How can you create and sustain a successful membership site? Let's say, how can you get a situation where people are paying you each month for content or access to some kind of service? This way you have recurring income, most likely some of it is passive, maybe all of it is passive or at least a good portion of it. It's a wonderful place to be in, but of course it's not easy to get there.
So how do you do it? How can you choose the right platform, set your pricing appropriately, select the best types of content to keep your members engaged, depending on what the membership site is of course. Let's see if we can cover at least some of this in a quick episode. Today's question comes from Lena in Phoenix. She is thinking about making a membership site.
She thinks it might be a good idea. So how can we get her on a fast track plan and perhaps inspire somebody else out there as well? This is episode 2,835. I'm excited to keep making the podcast for you every day. Let's hear the question from Lena and my answer after this quick shout out to our sponsor.
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Hello, Chris, this is Lena from Phoenix, Arizona. I'm thinking about creating a membership site to offer exclusive content to my audience. What are the essential steps for doing this and how can I ensure it retains members over time? Any recommendations for platforms, pricing strategies and marketing tips would be great. Also, what types of content or perks are most effective in keeping members engaged?
- All right, Lena, making a membership site can be a fantastic way to offer some value to your audience and create that elusive recurring revenue. I know lots of people have done it. Membership sites can also, if you build them the right way, they can be very sellable, meaning that you can create this asset and sell it to somebody else who's interested in buying a business. So I've known some people who've done that multiple times and just done very well with it. Now, of course, it's not simple, it's not easy.
So let's talk about what are the ways to actually set it up and keep your members engaged over time. So first of all, what is the topic? What is the niche? What are you making? Everything kind of stems from that.
Before we talk about what's the best platform, what is the reason why this membership site exists? And that should be something you're passionate about, you're skilled in, and it has a dedicated audience willing to pay. So I talk a lot about that in other episodes and in the "Side Hustle" book. Focusing on that should be first and foremost, but then, okay, you do need a platform. And these days, there are so many platforms you can use to build a membership site, Teachable, MemberPress, Kajabi, Patreon even has an option for this, and probably some others as well.
I don't think that is too difficult, you just wanna kind of pick one. So I would spend an hour, no more than an hour, doing some research about the best platform, making a decision and moving on. If for some reason you hate it, you can try a different one later, it's not usually that difficult. Set up your payment integration to make sure that's working. Most platforms support PayPal and Stripe, it's not that complicated again.
And then once you've got the membership site up and running, once you've run a promotion, maybe it's a limited time offer, maybe the initial group of members pays a lower price, then you wanna start focusing on how do I continue to give them content that they want or provide a solid, reliable service, whatever that niche is, whatever that topic is, how can I listen to feedback, respond to it, and so on. So there's a lot of work to be done on that side, but basically you want to continuously provide value. And if you do that, then people will stay, or at least a lot of them. Some people will always come and go, that's fine, but you want to reduce the churn. We're actually gonna talk about reducing churn in subscriptions tomorrow in another related question.
So more on that soon. Let's see, what else did Lina ask? She asked something about pricing strategies. Well, you want to find the optimal price, you want to find the maximum price that people are willing to pay, not too low, not too high. You can experiment with that.
You can change the price over time. You can offer different prices to different people, nothing wrong with that. Big companies do that all the time. And really all these things are, it's just kind of a series of iteration and experimentation. So if you continue to do that, that's where you're gonna see success.
Most likely you're not gonna have everything right with the first round, but if you continue to iterate and experiment, that's where the value comes. And as I said, this can be a great option for lots of people. So wishing you the best with it. Listeners, let me know what's going on with you, how we can be helpful as we make the final episodes of this year. This was episode 2,835.
But of course, more is on the way. I'm happy to help however I can, sidehustleschool.com. We'll continue to feature listener updates throughout the year as they launch and grow their projects. Thank you so much for tuning in today. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
