Ready for a scalable side hustle?

Enter: Membership sites.

By starting a membership site, you can leverage your expertise to increase your potential for income …

… without doing more work based on the people who buy in.

It really does open up a door of opportunity—a way of increasing your income by using the skills you already have.

If you like the sounds of that, it’s time to learn more about what it means to start a membership site—including what you’ll want to know before you jump in with both feet.

Tune into this podcast episode to find out more

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Show Notes:

Hey, Risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. Today we're diving into our second-to-last online income stream category and we're gonna explore membership sites and help you see if that might be the right fit for you.

The one-on-one nature of coaching is what really brings around the transformation of results, whereas the information delivery, the self-study delivery of courses brings about the transformation of mastery. Group programs, because there are so many unique and diverse points of view in one group, bring about the transformation of growth.

This idea is similar for membership sites, but it's not exactly the same, and the reason for that is because membership sites are not closed ended, so they're not time-bound like a three-month coaching package might be, or a 10-module course or an eight-week group program.

Instead, membership sites provide support, education, and community. They're combining the same three things, but they're done in perpetuity. Looks different for every membership site. It might be something like a monthly training with a monthly group coaching call.

You might also have a monthly Q&A call, or if you work the way I like to work, you might have a monthly coworking call where you guys get down to the brass tax and do the thing together. That's gonna go back again to your work style and how you like to work.

This also is gonna be the equivalent of what works for your ideal customer. So we have to know, are they looking for more support or are they looking for more accountability? What are they looking for? And we would wanna build that into our deliverables.

This can be freaky for a lot of people who are considering a membership site because all of a sudden they feel like they're obligated or committed to creating content for the rest of their lives.

But this feeds into a giant lie that's floating around about membership sites and I wanna take the chance to refute this lie right here, and that's the fact that a lot of people are saying or believe that the idea that more content inside a membership site is better.

That the value comes from more training and more lessons, and "oh, and then I'm also gonna do a brand new course every quarter" or whatever that is, and actually, that can't be further from the truth.

Because the truth is that too much content is what kills a membership site. So members might join or be initially attracted to the idea of more content, but the second they get overwhelmed or the second they feel like they're falling behind, that's when they leave the membership site.

Because the truth is there are two main selling features of a membership site that have nothing to do with how much information is inside, and those two things are 1) Access to an expert at a lower price than one-on-one coaching.

So when people look at a membership site, they say, "Oh, I get to hang out with them—I get to pick their brain. I get to ask them questions at any time. I get to be on calls with them frequently, on a regular basis that's cool".

And the other thing that they look at is access to a community. So depending on your ideal customer's situation, they might really crave being around people who are in a similar headspace, a similar heart space, going through a similar circumstance, whatever that might be.

The two selling features of a membership site are not the content inside it. Instead, it's the access to the expert or the host, and it's the access to the community. That is where the value comes from in a membership site, not from the content.

The value comes from your customers being able to work with you and ask you questions, and also with the ability to relate with others who are in a similar situation. That's what you would be selling.

You're not gonna sell the fact that there's new trainings and new courses. You're selling the fact that they get to work with a coach at an affordable rate and that they get to be surrounded by others in a similar situation.

The other thing that is fascinating about membership sites is that you don't always have to be the person creating that monthly training. You can bring in a guest expert who is in a related field or might have an auxiliary interest to your ideal customer.

If your membership site focuses on something like wellness and you are coming from maybe a mindfulness kind of act-based place, and that's what you're presenting inside of your membership site, you could have a yoga teacher come in and do a monthly training for your audience, for your members.

You could have an intuitive eating specialist come in and do training for them because it's all related to wellness. That person could do just the training and you could still do the calls, or that person could do the training and the calls, and you could take a whole month off and still get paid.

The benefit for the guest expert is that they get exposure to a brand new audience. They get to provide value to a brand-new audience. They get to be demonstrative to a brand-new audience and so they have the potential of bringing clients and customers to their business.

Then, as I said, you get to take the whole month off. Okay, so going back to the idea of a curriculum with a coaching package, with a course, and with a group program, that curriculum can all be the same. The only thing that differs there is the delivery.

Now, with a membership site, you're not really working on a curriculum. Because there's no lesson one, lesson two, or lesson three. What I encourage people to think about when they're creating a membership site is instead to think of a framework or a series of categories.

For instance, one of the students inside Side Hustle is working on a membership site, and the framework for her membership site is a three-part framework, and the categories are becoming, belonging, and being.

What this framework allows her to do is to conceptualize her trainings and conceptualize the different concepts or topics that she'll be talking about inside the membership site and she can just rotate. Every three months she's rotating between becoming, belonging, and being.

So long as the trainings fit inside those categories, they are within that framework and they're helping the members move toward the ultimate result or that ultimate growth. But they don't have to necessarily be in order because it's not closed ended.

You're not necessarily worrying about: Does step one come before step two, then become before step three like you would be in a course.

A three-part or a four-part framework allows you to make sure that you're always touching on the same bases and you're always within the scope of what you wanna be teaching but allows you to keep brainstorming and keep coming up with new ideas and keep coming up with new trainings so long as they fit within the confines of that framework.

I hope that makes sense. I wanna go ahead and compare and contrast membership sites with some of the other online income streams that we've talked about so far because I mentioned that group programs are a happy medium between one-on-one coaching and courses.

As far as things like how much you can charge, how much support is required, how scalable, and how much time they require from you. In that same vein, membership sites split the difference again, but this time we're splitting the difference between group programs and courses.

They offer much more support than a traditional course but you're serving a way bigger group at a way higher level than a group program. Where we said courses were hands-off and group programs are hands-on, membership sites are hands-on or hands-off, however you wanna look at that.

Membership sites are just as scalable as courses, which is cool because you do the same amount of work whether you have 10, 100, or 1000 members but the two big differences are that you are still getting on live calls with the members and the membership site doesn't end after five modules or 10 modules.

The big shift is that there's no ending. Then when we compare them on the other hand to group programs, they are less hands-on. You're still doing calls, but the calls are monthly instead of weekly, or if you have a lesson, a Q&A call, and a hot-seat coaching call, then you might be doing three things a month instead of once a week.

It's a little bit less hands-on. Then the other thing is you're not keeping the groups small or intimate. You don't have to limit the amount of people in a group or that buy your group program, but you have to limit the number of people that are in your cohorts because that's what's gonna give that intimate, depth work.

In a membership site, you don't have to limit the number of people who are on a call. If you've got a hundred members who are invited to the call because you're doing breakouts and you're doing hot seats and you're doing different things on the calls, which allows for hundreds of members to be watching.

You've gotta think, most people are gonna watch replays anyway. They're not necessarily going to be watching live and that's what a membership site allows them to do. They can watch things on their own time just like they could on a course, but if they do come live, then they can have access to you. Also, there's the community aspect of the membership site.

Many people do this on a Facebook group, but there are other platforms like Kajabi that allow you to have everything off of Facebook. But the community aspect of being able to tag you and directly talk with you at any time allows them to maybe not have to come to the calls live and they watch the recordings, and then if they have questions, they can then immediately tag you because they've paid you they expect a response immediately.

In that sense, membership sites pull together the best parts of courses and the best parts of coaching. They're scalable. They allow the members to go through the content on their own time and watch call recordings on their own time.

That part comes from the course world and then yet they get to interact with you and they get to know that they are supported and they have other people in it with them and that kind of comes from the group program world.

Another thing about membership sites is they are a great way for you to connect with your ideal customers and to watch them continue to grow over time. This is best for the ideal customer whose journey requires months or years.

In fact, inside the Facebook group, someone was talking about a course idea they had for helping highschooler’s transition to college. This was one of the reasons that I piped up and said "this might be a membership site" is because she could get the customers joining in their sophomore or junior year of high school and she could continue to support them all the way through to their sophomore or junior year of college.

It's something that can be done over a span of time that might be a better fit for a membership site. A similar customer that I worked with who is a student inside of Side Hustle, she had a membership site designed for women who were divorcing.

That membership site could serve women who are filing for divorce, and whose divorces are just newly settled. People who are still in the process of fighting for custody and all of that, and then even after they were single, it could cover loving yourself as a single woman.

Then it could cover going on your first few dates after the divorce, and it could go all the way through if that woman decides to get remarried or not.

There are lots of ways to support her over maybe even a five or 10-year time span. If the problem is not time bound, let's figure out if we can serve it with an online offer that is not time-bound. I hope that is starting to spark something for you.

This is where I wanna point out that you can see how these nuances make a big difference in the sense of transformation that comes from the program. What comes from a membership site is not the mastery that comes from a closed/ended course or even the growth that comes from diverse points of view over a few weeks, even though that's definitely part of it.

Instead, the transformation that comes from a membership site is much more of a slow burn or a deep change. It happens as members gather strength and confidence and determination from each other and from you.

They reach their goals or they transform or they grow by being connected to other people in a similar situation, but not over eight weeks, over eight months, over three years okay, so that's the difference.

Now I wanna jump into a few of the pros of membership sites and the biggest one is that membership sites are community-based. Some of our trainings, social workers, and things like that have more of a community bent to our education and our skills than other therapists.

But I think all therapists excel here, so you can lean into your skills as a connector and you can make sure that every member is finding camaraderie with each other, that every member is moving toward a common goal.

You can make sure that there are tons of resources and tons of paths for your members to take and it's just a great way to form a community, and you've heard me talk on this series about the loneliness epidemic and why people are investing in programs where there are other people involved and a membership site is the epitome of that.

People will join membership sites and not even watch any of the lessons and not come to any of the calls and just be in that paid community of people who are like them. The other thing to think about is that membership sites are accessible.

We're not talking about a $200 course, and we're not talking about a $1,000 group program or a $4,000 one-on-one coaching package. We're talking about sometimes the price of a co-pay.

A membership site, they're usually typically priced under a hundred dollars, and that's because that person is paying monthly. They're paying that 50 bucks a month to you. They're paying that 25 bucks a month to you. They're really accessible.

They're accessible to that kid who just is a freshman in, they're accessible to that woman who is newly divorced. Price is not a determinant here. That's also why membership sites sell at a higher rate than the one to three percent of course conversions.

We're gonna get to that a little bit later in the episode but if you are someone who is feeling like, and not necessarily in a money mindset way, but just in a way of "I don't wanna charge over a thousand dollars", membership sites might be a good fit for you because you could charge 50 bucks a month.

Then membership sites are perpetual like we've talked about, and that can be a pro. We'll explore the con side of it, but it can be a pro because you're not cutting off that person who wants more. Somebody might go through a group program and after eight weeks be like, "man, I felt like I just started to scratch the surface".

A membership site allows them to keep going, keep growing, keep developing, keep striving, whatever that is and there's no cutoff date. Then again, membership sites are about that connection.

In the community, they never have to feel alone. Is your ideal customer lonely? They might really benefit from a membership site. If you didn't pick up on this earlier, membership sites can be a lifestyle change.

You do the same amount of work whether you have 10 members or 1000 members, and so that means that when you're showing up, three times a month for 10 members, it feels like a lot of work.

But when you're showing up three times a month for 1000 members, it feels like no work at all, and you're making a really great income. Membership sites can be a huge lifestyle change, but I wanna continue on that point that I just made and I wanna flip it to the cons.

Hey, risers. We are all here listening today because we're craving that lighter lifestyle that's possible when we repurpose and repackage our clinical skills into an online income stream. But none of us is alone when we've realized we have 25-plus ideas floating around in our head and zero clue how to take the first step.

The truth is there are a lot of different types of programs we can offer online, and each one will help us scale beyond one-on-one clients so we can start claiming a bit more time and financial freedom. Every online income stream has subtle nuances that make it different than other revenue sources.

Each income stream requires something a little bit different from you and it's wise to take a look at things like your work style, your values, and your business goals before you decide which type of program you want to offer.

Whether you're thinking about adding coaching, a digital course, or even a retreat, gaining some insight into which type of program is best for you will make it so much easier to get started and that's why I made a really fun quiz.

In 10 pinpoint questions, you'll take a look at things like the work that lights you up outside of the therapy room and how comfortable you are with marketing and visibility, and at the end, you'll see which type of online income stream is right for you so you can move forward with the clarity and confidence to make it happen.

Just head on over to marissalawton.com/quiz to take the first step in building the business and the lifestyle that you crave.

One of the cons of membership sites is that there is a strain at the beginning where it feels like, "is this work that I'm doing worth it?" and the reason for that is because of the low price, high volume that comes from membership sites.

The dynamic is they're affordable and accessible for the consumer, 25 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month, but when you only have 10 members, that's only $250 a month or maybe $500 a month and the extra work of creating a training every month and then showing up for calls for that, few of members can feel like it's not worth it, but there is a tipping point and you just have to stay with it.

Because once you're at 250 members, 500 members, all of a sudden you're at 2,500 a month and 500 or 5,000 a month. Imagine if you got to a thousand members or whatever that is, and all of a sudden it's "Oh, you want me to create a slideshow and I'm gonna make $10,000 a month for it?"

There is a tipping point here, but in the beginning, it can feel like a bit of a con because it's a strain. There's even sometimes resentment I hear from new membership site creators because of this strain of the fact that "I'm doing all this work and I'm only getting $250 for it" but if you stick with it and you continue to grow your membership site, you will have that tipping point.

Now, the way to avoid that strain is to wait until you have a big audience to launch to so that instead of starting with 10 members, you start right away with 100 members but that can be seen as a con as well because it takes time to get to that big audience, and it takes effort to get to that big audience.

Unlike something like one-on-one coaching, less of a barrier to entry where you can start taking one-on-one coaching clients tomorrow if you wanted to membership sites are either gonna be very little money in the beginning if you grow slowly, or they're gonna require a big audience to start off with a bang.

Then the other big con that comes with membership sites is community maintenance. While you might only be showing up three hours a month to deliver a new training and on a Q&A call and on a coaching call, all of the rest of your time is gonna be spent in that community.

It's like a Facebook group on steroids again, because people have paid you and they expect a different level of response from you because it's a paid community. That part, I think, is the most overwhelming for membership site creators is having to show up in the community and if your community isn't engaged yet if you only have those 10 members, it's up to you to get that community engaged.

Some of you that might really be your skillset, you might love that piece. Again, I would say a membership site is probably for you, but if you don't love that piece as much, what you can do is hire a community manager.

Often membership site owners make a hirer really quickly, and even if it's a VA that you bring on for five hours a week just to be all, their whole job is only in that community group to boost engagement and to get the conversations going that's something that often happens rather quickly.

Okay, so I want you to make sure that you are taking a look at the community maintenance that can come from a membership site. Is that something you wanna do? If it's not necessarily something that you wanna do, then is it something that you can hire someone else to do? Or do you just grin and bear it for a while? Like I said, these are things I want you to really look at.

Let's talk about the expected profit and this actually should probably be up in the pros is the fact that membership sites are really one of the only income streams that you can have recurring revenue.

Now, if you take payment plans on your coaching packages or payment plans on your courses, or payment plans on your group programs like I do, you can achieve a sense of recurring revenue.

Now, what do I mean by that? Knowing what comes in every month. Okay, so I've structured Side Hustle. There are people who choose to pay me in full, but I actually prefer it not to be paid in full because I prefer the monthly recurring revenue of knowing exactly what's coming in every month.

Membership sites are structured for that, so if you have 10 members at $25, you know that you have $250 coming in a month and that can be a real pro for people instead of when you launch your course and you make $20,000 on this launch, and then you have nothing coming in until you launch again.

Or if you have an evergreen funnel set up where you're paying for ads, your ads could be like rocking and rolling for three months straight, and then all of a sudden in month four they tank and you don't know why. Then your revenue tanks in month four too.

Membership sites are really the only income stream that is inherently, from the beginning, set up for recurring revenue for you to know exactly what you're making every month.

That probably should have been mentioned up in the pros, but when we get to expected profit when we're talking about this recurring revenue you know what your expenses can be every month because you know what's coming in every month so it's nice to have that balance.

As far as what you can make, again, it's going to depend on your ideal customer and what you wanna charge but membership sites are typically under 100 dollars. Now, where this changes is where your membership site falls in your online business.

For most of us, we are looking at just an online revenue stream, an online income stream, not necessarily turning this into an online business. If that's the case, then you're gonna want this priced under a hundred dollars.

The reason for that is because it makes it more of a no-brainer purchase for the customer, "Oh, this is only 30 bucks a month. I'm totally gonna join. I pay 15 bucks a month to Netflix, so, of course, I'm gonna join this membership site".

If you are thinking more long-term and more strategically in thinking about building an online business, we talk about something called the Ascension model. You might have an initial offer, you might have a membership site act as some sort of continuing support.

An example of this is you might have a self-study course where somebody masters a skill or a process, and then off of the backend, you might sell a membership site that says, "Hey, now that you know how to bill insurance, you've mastered the process of billing insurance you can join our community where we are learning about how to build an insurance-based practice. There are so many resources out there for private pay practices. Why don't you come into our membership site that's all about an insurance-based practice?"

Off the back end of another program, you can often charge more for a membership site, so you might be able to charge $150 or $200 a month for a membership site that is more of a continued support type of thing.

This is just planting seeds in your brain for later. For some of you, that's not gonna apply because you're not looking for something that involved, but for those of you who are thinking of online business, come see me cuz we can totally do this.

But if it's your online income stream and it's just something that's supplemental to your practice, then what we would think about is it being priced under 100 dollars. I'm just gonna split that difference and say 50.

If you have $50 a month coming in for every member, then you can really start to see what your expected profit is going to be. Now remember, this is low price, high volume, so 50 bucks for 10 members is only $500 a month, 50 bucks for a thousand members, that's $50,000 a month.

Holy crap, you're doing the same amount of work for $500 or $50,000. When we take a look at the expenses with this, it's gonna be very similar to some of the others that we've talked about.

You're gonna wanna have a course hosting platform so that you have all of those new lessons for the month and a place for all of your call recordings to go. Now, a lot of you might have the question "Why can't I just do this all in a Facebook group? I can do Facebook lives in there, I can make sure that I organize it all by lesson" and all of that stuff.

And you're right in the sense that Facebook is heading that way. That's why they released social learning groups that you can organize things by topic and organize things by lesson. You can upload PDFs and all of that.

The unfortunate thing, for now, is that it's against Facebook's terms of service for you to charge for a Facebook group. There are a few people who are in a beta test that I know are testing out paid groups.

Unfortunately, they say that the technology kind of sucks and that they would choose a third-party platform anyway, even if they were allowed to charge for their Facebook group. We cannot house everything on Facebook.

We need to have some sort of third-party platform that might be Teachable, it might be Kajabi. That might be any of these others that you've heard me mention on the series.

One thing about a place like Kajabi is that they are designed to have the course content and they also have their own community within the platform. Their own mini Facebook group within the platform, which is nice cuz it's all in one place instead of having your course content and your call recordings and things like that on a teachable and then having everybody else gather on Facebook.

The thing you need to think about though is even though that sounds appealing, how likely is your ideal customer to use it? If your ideal customer is always on Facebook anyway, it's probably a better idea to just keep your community on Facebook.

I'll attest to this, I joined a membership site a couple of years ago and they had their own app and their own location, and for me, I never used the dang thing because every time I pick up my phone, the first thing I do is go to Facebook. That's just my natural tendency.

I was never going to this separate app for this membership site, and it just felt like a big waste of money to me. But your ideal customer might be craving a place off of Facebook, and they might really enjoy that. So that's why it's so important to know your ideal customer.

Your income is limitless. As you've heard me mention numbers as high as $50,000 a month. I literally know somebody who is 25 years old and her membership site brings in $65,000 a month. I know it's insane. It's insane.

Your income is limitless and then your costs can be kept quite low with a free Facebook group and 100 dollars a month to Teachable or something like that. The profit margin of a membership site can be insane.

We know some of the pros and cons of a membership site. We know how much money we can feasibly expect to make on something like this. We understand who is a better fit and what kind of transformation comes from a membership site for some of the other things.

How do we get this thing off the ground? How do we start marketing it and how do we start selling? Because membership sites are low price, high volume, you need a big audience, or you need a lot of people to join your membership site at once.

The best way to have your initial launch is something that is going to bring you hundreds of leads at once and that is something like a summit. A summit is marketing, but it actually is more of a PR event because you are bringing together lots of people from different areas and they're all promoting to their respective audiences.

Each one of them is pulling an audience for a common event for a common goal. That's what makes it more of a public relations event, and that is what is gonna help you get more people, more leads at one time, and a bigger audience.

They are a lot of work. I've done two of them now and I've participated in six or seven others. There is a lot of work, but I call this a big shovel strategy, and it's something that is, like I said, gonna get you in front of hundreds of people at one time.

If not, sometimes my summits have brought in 2000 people, if you launch a membership site to an audience of a thousand people, you can expect 50 members right off the bat from an audience of that.

Then 50 times 50, we're looking at a really great monthly payment coming in. What summits allow you to do is to get in front of a large group and to form a community, because everybody who has signed up for that summit is there for the same reason, which sounds an awful lot like a membership site.

If you can have your launch mechanism align with the delivery of your offer, people are much more likely to buy. The other way that a summit mimics a membership site is there are other presenters at the summit. It's you as the host, you as the expert, you in the authority role, but you're also curating other people.

Just like when you bring a guest expert into your membership and the same thing happens. It's a big group. The participants or the people who have signed up for the summit are interacting with you, but they're interacting with you at a high level, not necessarily a deep, intimate level, like at a group program like they would in a challenge.

If you remember back to the last episode I said, challenges are great for launching group programs because their nature is similar. This is the same thing: Summits are great for launching membership sites because the nature is similar. Think about that and how they relate to each other.

Because if they've already enjoyed working with you in this way in a free capacity, they're much more likely to pay for the same thing that's very similar to the way they've already enjoyed working with you. It just makes sense.

For that initial launch, for that initial way to bypass that strain of only serving 10 or 12 members, can you get in front of a lot of leads, hundreds of leads at one time, and have the potential for tens of multiple tens of members to join at one time? The best way to do that is a summit.

Now what else is great about a membership site is that it can be sold passive or evergreen. Think about when you subscribe to a magazine and your subscription starts in July. The magazine doesn't send you all the issues from January to June.

You just start in July. That makes sense for members who can join at any time of the month or any time of the year and if you're teaching in that framework. You have your curriculum set up as a framework, doesn't have to go in order, it's just categories that make sense for the person who buys.

Then it doesn't matter what month they join, because they're always gonna be working within the same framework. They're always gonna be learning on the same topics that are relevant to them, so it doesn't matter when they join.

Membership sites lend themselves well to being sold passively, to being sold evergreen. A member can join at any time and then you can always have a live launch once or twice a year. If you wanna have an infusion of the tens or multiples of tens of people at a time, you can have another live launch.

If you're thinking about a membership site, here is the plan that I would suggest. I would suggest your initial launch via summit. Get in your first 50 members or whatever that is from your summit, then quickly set up an evergreen funnel that you can have paid ads running to or not.

You could have it be an organic evergreen funnel so that you're capturing one or two members joining every month after that, and then plan a live launch six months or even maybe nine months after your summit and get in another 25 members by the end of the year, you could feasibly have your first a hundred members.

A hundred members, $50 a month, $5,000. You could just repeat that. Have another summit or another PR event next year, another live launch six months after that have it set up. You could quickly get to a thousand members or more.

That would be my suggestion if you are thinking of launching a membership site. There you have it for a kind of initial debrief of membership sites. There's tons more that we could say here, but I wanted to give you a clear picture of where they fell on the online income spectrum.

Membership sites sometimes get a bad rap and are labeled as work-intensive, and if you only have a few members, they definitely can feel that way. But if you keep your content to a minimum, if you rely on some guest experts and you sell the support and the community aspects, you can keep that much more manageable.

But they will be cumbersome until you get enough members in. So you need that big audience. You need that way to get in front of multiple hundreds of leads at one time.

I hope this episode was valuable in helping you decide if a membership site might be the right fit for you. Thanks, guys. I appreciate your time and until we talk again, keep on rising.