Launching a successful membership program.
Andrea is a long-time blogger and social media strategist.
While she knew what she was doing, like many of my clients, she struggled to connect the dots between her blog and a meaningful income. Read on to hear all about her story and learn what shifts she had to make to leverage her blog to launch her successful membership program!
1. How did you get started with entrepreneurship?
My journey into blogging was a little bit weird.
My husband and I adopted 10 years ago, and we started a blog on that when blogs were different than they are now. A music major, I majored in clarinet, and I worked as a music arranger for several years.
I accidently stumbled on managing social media from home.
Since I felt like doing something new, I began piecing together my marketing education and worked for a large company. That social media management/marketing business exploded. I ended up managing a team of 13 social media coordinators!
Still managing smaller businesses on the side, I then decided I wanted to branch off more on my own and be home with my kids more.
I started to build my own thing – a blog with tips and training for social media. It was all about “you don’t have to have a marketing degree. If I can figure it out, you can too.”
2. Where were you before the Monetization Acceleration Program?
Blogging kind of took a back seat in my life.
I really just decided in January to finally press GO. I had sold ebooks here and there, but it wasn’t an income I wanted and knew I could make. It’s really hard working on your own and not having someone to bounce ideas off of, or to guide you on what the right steps may be.
3. How did you end up choosing memberships as your niche?
I feel like the unique thing I bring to the table is creativity. I feel most in my element when I am brainstorming and being creative – coming up with weird ideas. That fits well with the membership.
What is a membership program?
A membership program is where buyers pay a monthly fee for access to content, resources or support.
While Andrea considered launching a course or social media services, what she really loves about social media involves empowering other small businesses.
The membership serves entrepreneurs by providing them with monthly templates, themes, and a social media content plan. Benefits for monthly membership programs include recurring revenue, and the ability to launch many times throughout the year without creating new offers.
Memberships can take time to scale, but are a fabulous way to stack your income and create predictable income.
My membership is a social media content membership program.
It comes with a very detailed daily prompt for every day of the month, a list of quotes and graphics that can be used as is or as templates, monthly hashtag research, live ideas, social media contests ideas depending on the business, so many other things!
Early on, at Alison’s prompting, I surveyed my list.
Overwhelmingly, they struggle with consistency and post content. So, I created my package around that, how to make it easy to be consistent. I know there are many social media packages on the market, but the difference with mine is I create the plans only weeks prior so that all the info is relevant and current.
How To Launch A Membership Program Online
Once Andrea decided that a membership was something her audience wanted, we then had to plan for her launch. So, how do you launch a membership program?
Luckily, Andrea already had an audience to leverage for her launch. However, if you’re ready to launch a membership and you have no existing email list or other audience, consider checking out my tips for monetizing a small audience.
Just like launching any program, before you launch your membership make sure you’re clear on:
-
- Whether your audience wants the offer
- Whether the audience needs your offer
- The transformation the membership will provide to buyers
- The price point
- Where and how you plan to promote the membership
- How you’ll create urgency for people to buy
4. What have you done after the program?
I relaunched, and added the package at the end of my welcome emails which Alison recommended which brought in a few sales! The automation couldn’t have made things easier. That’s how I’ve gotten the majority of sales so far.
I just got affiliate management software, so I’m really excited for that and having affiliates promoting my package. My traffic has exploded, it’s awesome now!
I just had my biggest month ever, in September which was $1K+. That was a great milestone for me. I was able to reach this through my membership program and a couple other products that I have.
Alison teaches a lot of how to stack your income and networking within Facebook Groups. Following her direction, I landed some other gigs which also helped stack the income.
How Does It Mean To Stack Your Income?
Stacking your income refers to creating multiple ways of earning money. The “stacking” refers to the fact that some of the methods of here are MANY ways of stacking your income in your life, and also within the same business.
For example, Awilla stacks her income by maintaining a part time, high paying nursing job while selling keto weight loss coaching to moms on the earning will grow naturally as your audience and visibility grows.
A client, Dave, stacks his income while creating passive income through a finance blog while selling SEO services on the side.
In Andrea’s example, she created her membership program to create stackable recurring monthly revenue, and also used her ability and skills to procure aide jobs helping people with social media.
5. What advice do you have for anyone just starting out?
First, really realize what your superpower is.
Find out what you’re best at and not what you think you should do. There were a few ideas I had that would have involved way too much of me, and I’m like an introvert’s introvert, so those products stressed me out! That wasn’t my lane, I felt good about my membership program and it really brought me peace. The clients who are more like me, will be attracted to me.
Second, you can piece everything together through the internet, but it’s so much more work.
Getting a coach was one of the best things for my business, because all of my ideas I wouldn’t bring to life. I didn’t have time in my family life to mess around with bad ideas, I needed to know what ideas were worth taking action on and that’s exactly what coaching provided.
If you guys wanted to check out Andrea’s membership, click here: Social Media & Coffee
If you are looking for a coach to do all the heavy lifting, let’s chat: AlisonReeves.Co/strategy-call
