Different Types of Memberships
Different business models demand energy in different places, from marketing to delivery.
Membership sites have been popular for years now and they aren't going away any time soon. They allow entrepreneurs like you to build community, share your skills, and even have the potential for passive income.
This isn't the first time I've talked about memberships on the podcast and I'm sure it won't be the last.
With more therapists looking to diversify with ease in the COVID age, I’m taking a look at a recurring revenue stream by diving deep into the pros and cons and different delivery methods of membership sites.
This episode covers:
The scalability factor
Different types of membership sites
How to keep making money through the peaks and valleys and
How on earth you can come up with original content.
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Full Show Notes (Transcript)…
Hey, Risers. Welcome to Episode 97 of Empathy Rising. We are getting so close to the hundredth episode, and I have something really excited planned for you guys, so stay tuned for that! It'll be happening in just a few weeks.
But we are going to be talking about the different types of membership sites today, which I cannot wait to dive into. We have a beach trip planned in the next couple of weeks. I cannot wait. It is our second time traveling since the pandemic. We're going to get a small Airbnb with a kitchen and everything like that, and just bring our own food, and it has access to a private beach. It will be spring break, but we picked more of an isolated beach, and we made sure that we don't have to go out to restaurants or anything like that.
So I'm looking forward to a change of scenery. I'm looking forward to getting out of the house a little bit, but doing so in the safest way that feels right for our family. Josh is fully vaccinated now because of his job with the army, so that's been a huge relief because he absolutely has, like, the most contact with anybody outside of our home.
I work from home. I never see anybody but my kids. So this is going to be a really special treat and I'm really looking forward to it. Like I said, today we are diving into the different types of membership sites. This is a question that I get all of the time. Membership sites are so popular.
But not every membership site looks the same, and not every membership site takes the same amount of time to run or facilitate or market. And so we're going to dive into all of those differences today.
Speaking of time, if having enough time to get your side hustle off the ground feels like the number one thing that is holding you back, the Side Hustle Schedule Mini-Course is officially live and you can head over to Marissalawton.com/schedule and grab it. It is a super affordable mini-course training that teaches you my five-step system to scheduling, to figuring out, "Where is the white space in your calendar?" So that you can start making progress on your side hustle.
But what I really love about this approach is that it doesn't start with your side hustle, right? It starts with your non-negotiables. It starts with your priorities and the things that are most important to you, your value system... and we make time for those things.
First, that way, when you start thinking about building an extra income stream, you're not worried about it a) taking over your life or b) infringing upon the things that matter to you.
So Side Hustle Schedule really is a value space schedule that helps you find the time and space for something new, without sacrificing these other things that are really important. So if time is something that's on your mind, make sure to grab that it's going to really help put in perspective, the hours in your day that you do have to start working on your side hustle.
And for many of you, that might be a membership. And that's what we're going to cover today. Yeah. As I just mentioned, membership sites, they're called a couple of different things. They're all the rage. We see these popping up in so many industries. We see them popping up in brick-and-mortar in-person industries, but we also see them popping up virtually as well.
Of course, most of us are interested in virtual programs, online income streams... but there are some examples that I'm going to share today that are also some brick-and-mortar memberships.
So super interesting to think about. I think membership sites are popular and all the rage, so to speak for a couple of different reasons. I think they work really well for people who have a lot of ideas.
A lot of times people sit down with me inside of Space Holder, or they sit down inside of the Side Hustle, and they're like, "I have so many ideas. I have two or three people that I want to help, or two or three problems that I want to solve." And they think they need to create different programs for each bucket.
Often, what they really need is a membership site, so membership sites have the most breadth. They have the most leeway, the most freedom. So to speak of all the types of online programs. And we're going to explore a lot of that today.
But another thing that is really popular from the business standpoint about memberships is recurring revenue rather than having a big launch in, April of the year and having an influx $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 coming in April, and then really not having any more revenue come in until your next launch in July or August or something like that.
Rather than having these peaks and valleys of income or a revenue, with a membership site, you get paid the same amount every month. So somebody is paying you maybe 50 bucks a month to be a part of your membership on a subscription automatic payment process. So it allows you as the business owner to have a steadier stream of revenue, to not have those peaks and valleys. And also it allows you to be able to predict your revenue better.
If I have ten people a month paying me 50 bucks or ten people paying me 50 bucks a month, I'm at 500 a month. If I have a hundred people paying me 50 bucks a month, I'm at 5,000 a month. So you can make revenue projections a lot easier as well as having that revenue coming in over time.
The other thing is really important about membership sites is they really are one of the most scalable offers. They're more scalable than a group program. They're more scalable, obviously, than one-on-one coaching. And by scalable, what I mean is you do the same amount of work as the membership site facilitator, or as the provider, so to speak. You do the same amount of work, but your revenue goes up indefinitely.
So you're doing the same amount of work at the $500 a month mark, with those ten members, as you are at the $5,000 a month mark, with those hundred members. Your output doesn't change. Your output stays the same, but your revenue potential, like I said, is indefinite. So membership sites really are very scalable.
The other thing is that they have a potential for passive income. So the other online income stream that is pretty much as scalable as a membership site is a course, and courses have passive income potential as well. Now, depending on the type of course you're running, it may be passive income and a passive business model.
Membership sites are not a passive business model, so to speak. We'll be exploring these different options. And there are some that have a more passive business model than others, meaning you don't really have to do any work. You have the income come in, and you've already done the work, and it's done one time, and the revenue just comes in and you're not really adding more to that.
Hold on. I want to start this whole thing over.
Another really cool and interesting point for membership sites is they have passive income potential. Now I want to make a really clear distinction here that we're not talking about a passive business model. You still show up and you still do the work for this membership site. You are still actively participating with your members, whether that is on coaching calls or other things that we'll talk more about later on.
So you're still showing up for these members, but a member can join at any time. It's not like a "closed, open, closed" cart. So one way to think about this is with a magazine subscription. You can start your magazine subscription on a Tuesday. You can start your magazine subscription on a Saturday. Like, it doesn't matter when you start paying.
Oprah Magazine, HGTV Magazine, Forbes Magazine... whatever you start paying their annual subscription fee, and then on a monthly basis, they deliver you a magazine, right? So the income potential is totally passive. However, those authors that are writing the articles, the photographers that are taking the pictures, they are still working to produce that magazine each month.
So it's not a passive business model, but it's absolutely a passive income. So that's how you can think about this. Your membership site can be on evergreen. People can be joining in the middle of the night every day. However, you are still showing up for your scheduled interactions with them.
Another reason that a lot of people like membership sites, is there is an accessible offer. A lot of times the coaching industry or the course industry, the online income industry gets a bad rap for only being affordable for the affluent, right? Like, coaching is for rich people, basically like one of the bad reps that it gets, but membership sites because of their nature are priced lower and much more affordably.
So if accessibility is something that is important to you to have in your business model, and it's also important for your ideal customers, a membership site may be a great option for you.
Okay. So that is a lot of the pros or the benefits of membership sites, but just there's always positives. I want to point out the cons because sometimes membership sites aren't always right for everybody. Even though they sound like the dream offer from a lot of these standpoints that I've been talking about, sometimes they're not the perfect fit.
One thing about membership sites is because they are lower price. They're 50 bucks a month. You heard me talk about in the numbers earlier, where with 10 members, you're not really making a ton of money from it, whereas when you get to a hundred members, all of a sudden it goes from like 500 to 5,000. And so that scalability factor is awesome.
However, in order to achieve scale, you need a big audience. You need a bigger audience to make your membership site worthwhile. If we contrast this to something like a group program, which might be priced at $5,000 instead of $50, you can make the same amount of money or more with many fewer sales, which comes from a smaller audience.
So what this means, basically, it boils down to memberships require a lot of marketing time and marketing effort. We'll start talking about the amount of time it takes to deliver them, which is lower than a lot of other offers.
But you trade that. You trade your delivery time for marketing time. So that's something to think about. If you enjoy the marketing piece, if you enjoy being visible, or if you enjoy content marketing, or if you enjoy relationship marketing, then membership sites can be great for you.
If you don't enjoy it, but you're still called to a membership site, you're going to be looking at either hiring out your marketing, or biting the bullet, grinning and bearing it. But if you are drawn to a membership site you are going to be leaning heavily, more heavily, into the marketing than you are on the delivering of your program. The only other thing that I want you guys to think about is retention.
So we've been playing around with these numbers of like ten members at 50 or a hundred members at 50, giving you 500 bucks a month or 5,000 bucks a month. Okay. But that's only true if you keep all ten members or if you keep or retain all 100 members. So if you start with a hundred members and you're at 5,000 a month, and then, over a course of a few months, you're down to 98.
And then all of a sudden, like maybe summertime comes and everybody wants to be outside or something like that, and you lose like 10 members in one month. All of a sudden you've lost $500 a month. So retention becomes one of your big keys. You're not only worried about scalability and getting people into the membership site.
You might get to a hundred members and be like, "This is good. I don't need anymore." So then rather than getting new members, your game switches to retaining all of those members, or as many as you can. There is a factor to think about with membership sites and that is called "churn." So churn is how many people leave versus how many new people come on.
A 3% turn rate is really good, meaning with a hundred members you're retaining 97 of them, and then you're adding three more. And then every time you add three more, you lose three more. Kind of, it always balances out. But some membership sites have 10% churn or even higher percent churn.
What brings your churn percent down is good marketing and good retention strategies. And those grow over time. You will get better at both of those over time. So just because you might have reached that number of ten members a month, 20, 30, 40, a hundred members a month, doesn't mean you're going to stay at that number, right?
I would say you will not stay at that number. The statistics will show that you won't stay at that number. So it's about finding the balance between keeping as many members as you can and adding the right number back that makes up for everyone that you lose.
So with all of these factors, there are some great parts to membership sites and there are some not-so-great parts of membership sites, always. It's a balance, always. It's about finding the best fit for you. I don't believe in, like, a perfect fit. I also think you have to jump in and see, and you might start with a membership site and you might hate it and then you'd take the content and you turn it into a course or you repurpose it into another type of offer. That's common, but you're not going to know that until you start.
So my advice around this is just start. If you're wondering more, if memberships are right for you, you can scroll back into the archives to episode number 37. So it's a ways back. And the title of the episode is literally "Our Membership Sites for You."
So we talk more about some of these things like churn. We talk more about some of these things like retention and marketing strategies and things like that. So you can get a clearer sight or a clearer idea if membership sites are right for you
But today I really want to dive into four different types of memberships. You might have already decided that this is right for you, and you just want to see which type feels like the good fit, or you might be lumping all membership sites together and be like, Oh, that's not for me. But listening to these four different types will maybe help you decide, Oh, I think a membership site in this style could actually be a fit for me.
Because I think one issue that I see is that people think that membership sites are popular, which they are. And they're just like, "Oh, this is what's selling right now. This is what's hot right now. This is what the market wants. I'm just going to slap one together and it's going to sell because it's they're in demand."
But there is forethought and strategy that goes into not only the marketing plan, the retention plan, but also into the design of the membership site itself. The functionality of the membership site itself. Because I think while membership sites are the most flexible offer type, they have the most breadth to them and they have the most ability for you to play and be creative.
If that's something that's important to you, one thing that I see a lot is that they can quickly go beyond their scope. They can just get out of control. I'm down here in the South. It's like the kudzu vine, right? It takes over everything they hear. It's not even native to here. It just grows on top of everything. That's what I see can happen to membership sometimes as they just really take off on their own and they get out of control.
So instead of, like, a well-curated... what comes to mind is a well-curated soup or stew that has like intentional flavors, because it has the right combination of ingredients in the right proportions. Membership sites that have gone crazy or wild, they turn into one of those recipes. That's everything in the kitchen sink. You can tell it's, like, all the ingredients were just about to go spoiled. And so you throw them in a pot and just try to make something with them.
That's what, like, a messy membership site ends up feeling like. So while there are a lot of pros and while there is that flexibility to them, we need to still be intentional about the formation and the design so that doesn't happen.
When you've isolated which membership type makes the best sense for you, it's going to be easier for you to deliver, right? You're curating the ingredients, you have preplanned what goes in the recipe. And so it's easier to create. It's also easier to plan.
Because, as we'll talk about in just a few minutes, like, some membership sites are done in perpetuity.
And so you're coming up with content on a regular basis, or you're coming up with education or teaching or training, whatever you're including. And so having the foundation and the design makes it easier to plan makes it easier to execute the membership site. It also makes it faster to deliver.
We're going to talk about how much time it takes to run a membership site, not including the marketing time. And when you are coming from a firm foundation, when you have the design in place and what you're doing, that time is going to be even faster to deliver. You're going to be able to trim the fat on that extra time. And then you will be more profitable. You will be making more money for less of your time.
I also think what's important to note is that memberships that are easily and clearly defined that are concisely defined, they sell better. People know what they're buying. People know what they're participating in.
Membership sites can be a really great draw where people are like, Oh yeah, that's affordable. I want that. That sounds totally good. But then they get in there and they're overwhelmed because it's "everything in the kitchen sink" type of atmosphere and then they leave. So it's bad for retention when they're not planned.
That also makes it easier for you to execute for you to deliver or fulfill on the promise, because you know what the design is, and so you can offer that. Not only does it sell better, you can fulfill it. And so all of that equals retention when you feel confident in delivering and when your customer feels confident in what they're getting, that's what's going to keep them around. That's what's going to make them stick and continue to pay that money to you every month.
Okay. So let's dive into a few options for structuring your membership site, so you can see which one feels like the right fit for you. These are four main categories. You will see crossover between these categories. And I think there are times where the crossover is appropriate and I'm going to point that out. But I think there are times where too much crossover, again, leads to the scope of the program.
Going beyond the scope, you probably know of several membership sites on the market. You may be a member of one or 12 of them. And when I start listing some off, you'll be like, Oh, I didn't even realize that was a membership site.
So sometimes putting out a little warning here, sometimes this is a... I was going to say, "do what I say, not what I do" situation, but that's not the words. Sometimes you're going to see things out there that are not the best practice. People are doing stuff, and it seems to be working.
It may be a selling. They may have a lot of members, but we don't know what the heck is going on behind the scenes. We don't know how many admins they're paying to, like, run it. We don't know if it's a mess and it's like a huge headache, we don't know how well it's functioning.
So if you're like, Oh, I see a membership site that's like a cross between this one and this one, that's very true. It happens. It can definitely be something that is a winner. It's a winner for the consumer. It's a winner for the person delivering it. It can also be a real headache. So what I guess I'm just trying to say is it's almost like knowing the rules before you can bend them or break them.
So I'm going to talk really in terms of kind of stricter rules, stricter definitions and then once your membership site is working within maybe the stricter rules, then you can start to bend them. But I really think it's important to have a scope for your membership site and to stay within that scope as you are starting to sell it.
The first type of membership site, I call it a coaching membership. Now, this is not like what they're called. This is just what I call them. So I call it a coaching membership and what a coaching membership is a combination of education and guidance. Now a coaching membership is one that has ongoing contributions.
So these are the ones that go on in perpetuity every month you create a piece of content, so it can be an educational training. And then throughout the month you guide your members in regard to that training. So when we talk about scope, the training that you offer in the beginning of the month sets the tone or sets the theme for all of the coaching that you provide through the rest of the month
That way you're not teaching on topic A, and then coaching on topic B, and then having another call on topic C, right? This is when it starts to just get way too big. So instead you pick one topic, you teach on it and you coach on it in the same month. The next topic starts in the next month.
A lot of people ask, "How do I keep coming up with content?
I can't imagine doing this for two years, three years, five years." But when you start to use this strategy where it's a tiny piece that sets the theme for the entire month, then you're like, Oh, okay. I can see how I was trying to fit too much into one month. And that's why I couldn't come up with other ideas instead it's each of those pieces is actually a different month.
And that starts to help people see, Oh, okay. I get it. It needs to be smaller. And then I can extend it out longer.
The other great thing about a member or a coaching membership is it can get as big as you want. It's the epitome of scalability, whether you have 10 members, a hundred members, a thousand members. There's no cap on a coaching membership.
Now, what I recommend for a coaching membership is to have a framework to keep these topics organized. So for instance I think three-part frameworks, and I think four-part frameworks work the best. I would not have more parts than that, because again, it gets confusing.
What this framework does is I almost see it functioning as like a triangle, if it's a three-part or a square, if it's a four-part, but it really is like putting a fence. You can run anywhere within that triangle or anywhere within that square, so long as you're staying inside the fence.
So for instance, to give you an example of what this looks like. The first one that comes to mind is Lisa. She went through Side Hustle a few rounds ago and she created a membership site for caregivers of people with dementia and other cognitive like Alzheimer's and things like that. And she had a three-part framework of mind, body, and soul. So there was a faith-based element to this membership site.
So mind had to do with what was happening for her. People's loved ones. Her customers loved ones, cognitively, like, what was going on in their mind, and some education around that. And body was, like, self-care and literally like taking care of yourself, your physical self, as you are being a caregiver for someone else.
And then soul had some of these faith elements to it. And so that was the three-part framework. So she could talk about anything that had to do with the mind, the body, or the soul.
I remember she created different devotionals and those were part of the soul category, but it wasn't like she gave them all the devotionals at one time. It was one single devotional in June. And then she went back to the mind category in July, and then back to the body category in August. And then it was time for soul again in September. And maybe it was another small devotional then. Not exactly sure how she worked through her framework.
So this can be slightly inaccurate, but I'm just giving you a picture. Another person who is in Side Hustle right now, she is creating a program for fellow clinicians to be more competent working with individuals on the autism spectrum. And so she came up with a three-part framework, which was competency, clinical skill, and connection. So, competency, she's working on things like research-based, evidence-based facts and things like that. And then clinical skill is more about the practice of the skill with the client, and then connection is external resources, making sure they're connected to their local autism community, as well as any national resources that will help them as a clinician.
So as long as she is teaching and coaching in on any topic relating to competence, any topic related to clinical skill, and any topic related to resources, connections, community connections, it's free game. So this is where that flexibility comes from. As long as you have a framework that's keeping you inside the fence, you can talk about anything you want.
Now the difference with a coaching membership site is. These topics are important. This education is important, but what people are really doing is paying to have access to you as the expert, and as the coach, they're paying to be able to pick your brain any time they want. And they're paying to be able to have access, to ask you questions and to get guidance from you anytime they want.
So, really, you're taking an expert position here. You are positioning yourself as an authority on a subject matter. And you are going to teach people about it. And you're also going to coach them on it within the same month. So what does this look like?
Let's say week one, you're doing a small training. You're you have a three-part framework and you're teaching from part a of that framework for this month. I would suggest that this training be 15 minutes. Super short.
We're not here, we're not, like, they're not in grad school, our customers, aren't here to get like a degree in our thing. They're here to get coached. They're here to be able to pick your brain, right? So you can have this training be super short, 15 minutes. It can be a slideshow. It could be an audio recording. Especially if your ideal customer is somebody who might be busy or not have a lot of time. Sometimes this could just be like a little mini-podcast that's inside the membership-like community.
So a super short training. 15 minutes. Remember, this training sets the theme or the tone for the entire month. So then on week two, you might host something like a Q&A call. So basically it's question-and-answer about the training that they watched or listened to the week before. So you're not coming up with new content for this call. You're not coming up with a new topic for this. You're using the basis that you set, the tone that you set in week one, you're saying, "Who has questions?" I would set an hour aside for this. So 15 minutes a week, one hour, week two.
For week three, you can have a hot seat call. A hot seat call is different than a Q&A call on a Q&A call. Whoever's there shows up and just it's: "Who has questions about the lesson from last week?" And they're just asking more general questions about whatever the topic was. A hot seat call is different. A hot seat call is a couple of people indicating that they want specific help on this topic.
So let's run with the autism example that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago. Let's say that we're in the clinical skill part of our framework. And we've taught a 15-minute lesson on a certain clinical skill that is really effective for clients on the spectrum.
Week two, we have our Q&A call who has questions about this clinical skill that it could like how it works, how it's effective, how you might be able to use it in your practice. Like, "Who has any general questions?" A hot seat call. You have two people who say, "I'm really interested in making this clinical skill a bigger part of my work. And I want to really dive into this and explore this." So hot seat calls I give an hour and a half. I do 15 minutes for kind of everybody to check in, quick wins, any kind of updates.
And then the two people who have a hot seat get 30 minutes and they get that deeper dive that coaching ability with you to really explore the topic of the month in relation to their business or their life or whatever. Two people get 30 minutes and then you do another 15 minutes for maybe rapid-fire questions or any follow-up feedback from anybody who is watching.
They might have some feedback for the person who is in the hot seat. So you can do that for 15 minutes. So your hot seat call ends up being an hour and a half, and that's week three.
Week four. I think what you can do is a closure week. So what I like to do for week four is another just 15 minutes that kind of summarizes what happened that month.
So you can say if you haven't gotten a chance already and make sure you go back to the training from this month, it covers this topic and the biggest takeaways are this and this. Now in week two, we had several questions about the topic and the most pressing question or the most common question we got was this and this. And you can go back and watch the replay of the coaching or of the Q&A call to see the answers for those questions.
Week three, we had a hot seat where, you know, Member X and Member Y really wanted to do a deep dive on topic, and you can make sure to see that in the recording of the hot seat, inside the membership room. What I want you to take away from this month is X, Y, and Z, right? And so that's your closure week and that's another 15 minutes.
So all in time between all four weeks, you've got, what is that? 15 minutes and 15 minutes is a half an hour. Add that to the hour and a half that's two hours. And so then you've got three hours all in delivery time.
You're at three hours now. Remember, that's not your marketing time. That's just your delivery time, but three hours for a month compared to... some of you see seven clients and spend seven hours a day. So the delivery time can be much smaller. Now the thing to think about is the community aspect. What is happening between the calls?
Now a lot of people join membership sites specifically for an access to a community. They want to be in a room with like-minded people, or they want to be in a room with people who are going through the same struggle or at a similar place in life with them. So you may want community to be a bigger part of your membership site.
This would require more time from you to facilitate the community. There are some things you can do around this. If you really like to be a community person, like if you'd like to link people together and join people together and have icebreakers and that kind of stuff, you can absolutely be the person that's doing that.
If that's not something that is appealing to you, you can hire that out. You can have a VA who is $25 an hour and you can have her spend three hours a week in your community. And so 75 bucks a week, and she, or he, does that for you. So you can absolutely do that.
Another option is that you can sponsor, give a scholarship to a couple of people who get access to the membership site for free, and exchange for getting the membership site for free. They act as the community engagement people. So that way it's more of a barter. You don't make money from them, but you're also not paying out for anybody to run the community. So there are things to think about here with is community important to your people. And if so, how do you want to be facilitating that?
So there are some pros to coaching membership sites. These are the membership sites that are great for the people who have tons of ideas or great for the people who are more prolific in that they can come up with a ton of topics all the time. You're creating a new piece of content each month that sets the tone and sets the theme for the month.
The other thing about coaching memberships is obviously they're the highest touch. They're the highest level of touch. You have over two hours where you are like directly interacting with your members. And then you're also providing them a lesson and providing them that like closure video or whatever it is.
So the benefit of the high touch is they can be the highest priced. I've been playing around this episode with this number of 50 bucks. But coaching memberships can be over a hundred dollars a month. Some of them I've even seen $200 a month. So if you're at $200 a month and then you've got 10 members, all of a sudden you're at $2000 a month.
So coaching memberships have an investment of your time, but they also have the highest return on that investment from a money standpoint. The other thing is they can get started super fast. You need one 15-minute lesson to start. That's all that you have to have prepared because you're going to be creating another 15-minute lesson next month.
So you need a 15 minute lesson and a Zoom account, and that's all that you need to get started. You don't have to worry about creating a bunch of content. You don't have to worry about having a bunch of software setup. All that you need is that lesson and that ability to have a coaching call. So there are some cons to a coaching membership site.
They are a heavier time investment to deliver right. Your three hours, and then, if it takes you time to put together a slide show that might put it up to three and a half, four hours. So that delivery time is higher for a coaching membership. So if the higher price point is less important to you and you want to be doing something with less delivery time, a coaching membership site might not be the right one.
They're also open-ended, right? They go on in perpetuity. So a lot of times, that feels like too big of a commitment for people. They don't want to commit to doing things forever. So in the online space, "forever" is a relative term. What I would at least commit to is two years. If you can picture yourself doing the same thing for two years, then a membership site might be a good fit for you or a coaching membership site.
Now, the next type of membership site is what I call a roadmap membership site. There are going to be some similarities to the coaching membership, but there are also a few differences. Roadmap membership is also a combination of education and guidance. You are teaching something and you are coaching them or guiding them through.
The biggest difference, however, is that rather than dropping micro lessons each month and then coaching based on that, you essentially create a course, and then you host the coaching calls around the course.
So let me explain that a little bit more. Whereas in a coaching membership site, you're dropping the tiny 15-minute pieces.
In a roadmap membership site, you may create, let's call it a six module course. And each module has, like, five lessons in it. So you actually have 30 lessons within the course. Now the difference here is rather than rotating through a framework and going topic A, topic B, topics C, topic A, topic B, topic C. The course itself goes in an order.
So you have, module one goes to the hang to module two, module three, module four, module five, module six. And within the modules, the lessons build on each other. So it is literally a roadmap: this first, this next.
Okay. Rather than creating new content every month, you dive into pieces of the course or pieces of the roadmap and you highlight them and you revisit the course over and over again. So for instance: It's this month, we're highlighting module three, lesson two, and we're going to spend time this month focusing right here on this lesson.
You can introduce new exercises for that lesson. You can try new angles for that lesson, but you're allowing the roadmap to be the guidance for the program rather than you creating a new lesson. So it's similar to the coaching membership site in the sense that the lesson that you pick sets the theme and the tone for the month and you coach based on that lesson, but rather than creating the lessons new each time you create one big course or one big roadmap, and then you pick pieces of that to highlight. So hopefully that makes sense.
Again, people are paying to pick your brain. People are paying for access to you. And so again, you are in an authority role inside of this membership site.
So the amount of time to deliver a roadmap membership site is very similar, right? Instead of teaching a new lesson, in week one, you're just reminding them of the lesson from the existing course. So instead of adding something new to your membership site room, you're saying, "This week, be sure to go back and rewatch or watch for the first time. If you haven't already this lesson, you can find it here
Week two, you do a Q&A call for an hour. Again, week three, similar, you can do a hot seat call for an hour and a half. And then I would also do your closure. We are your closure week on week four for 15 minutes. So that gets you back to that same three hours a month, not including the marketing time.
Remember, so three hours a month to deliver to your members, the membership site. You also need to think about community here. So, same questions. Are you going to be facilitating the community? Are you going to have other people facilitate the community? Are you going to be paying those people, or are they going to be doing it as a scholarship, or as a barter for access to the membership site? How do you want to go about the community?
Now, there are pros to a roadmap membership site because you don't have to come up with a new topic, if you're not as prolific, or coming up with new ideas is not as easy for you. Instead of coming up with something new on the fly each month, you're drawing from the roadmap or the course that you've already created.
You can still demand a higher price for this because the coaching piece is still there, but you're not coming up with the new topic on the fly. So it's not as high-priced as the coaching membership, which is just going... the library grows and grows, but it is a higher-priced version of a membership site because it still has a lot of access to you through the Q&A call and through the hot seat call.
Now, one of the drawbacks, potentially, for a roadmap membership site is you have much more upfront time investment because rather than only needing one 15-minute lesson to get started, you have to build out your entire course to get started. You can definitely drip it out.
You could have members join and get, not have instant access to the entire roadmap right away. They could get it in pieces, and then eventually, once it's all built-in there, new members can go back through and have it all available to them, but usually you're creating at least a module, if not two or the whole thing. So you have more upfront time investment before you can start letting members in versus the coaching membership where all you need is that first lesson for people to start coming into the membership site.
So sometimes another drawback to this type of membership site is that they can feel boxed in, or they can feel constricting because of the roadmap. If you're only teaching from the same course over and over again, if you're only teaching from the same roadmap over and over again, how are you keeping it fresh? How are you retaining members? If members have been with you for a while and they've seen the material already, how are you keeping them engaged, and why aren't they leaving if they've already seen it?
So you have to talk about the same thing in new and different ways. So that can sometimes feel like a drawback.
Now I just recently joined a membership site. That is one of these kinds of hybrids that I've been like alluding to. It is a roadmap membership site, so they have two different courses, right? Inside the membership community. One is for brand new beginners, which is where I would consider myself. And one is for people who are at a higher level, which I say, I probably would need that second course, then maybe a year.
So I logged in. I completed the roadmap course on my own in an evening. It was super short. And there is no guidance. There are no coaching calls. There are no Q&A calls or hot seat calls. What the person who facilitates this membership site does is once a month, she hops on and she does like a Facebook live inside of the community that relates to the roadmap, but gives a fresh take on it coming at it from a new angle.
So it's only the roadmap and the Facebook group, that's all that it is now. This membership site was $37 a month or three $70 for the year. I paid the annual price. So I got two months free by paying the annual price. But basically it's a roadmap membership site without any coaching or without any guidance. That's why it's a much lower price. It's under 50 bucks because it's very low-touch, but you can cut things out of your membership.
If you just want to introduce a training and do one call, you could do the training and the Q&A call and that's it. You could do the training and the hot seat call and that's it. You could do the training and the closure call. And that's it. I imagine you'd probably have to have some kind of facility like facilitate some community or something to be able to like for the closure to even make any sense, but you can definitely cut pieces out of this. It's less work to deliver, but this person has over a hundred thousand followers on Instagram.
And I have no idea what their like email list or anything like that is so they can really, I don't want to say, get away with, but the offer makes sense for them to have a $37 a month offer because I should go look at how many people are in the Facebook group alone. There's probably 2,000 members in the membership site.
So they don't need a high-touch offer because they have a very big audience, so they can play the volume game and the marketing game and enjoy a lower-touch offer. So those are things just to think about.
Now the next type of membership site that we can dive into is called a subscription membership site. And a subscription membership site is simply the delivery of an asset. The delivery of some thing on a monthly basis. So when I was talking about a magazine earlier, your magazine subscription, that's like the OG of subscriptions, right?
Not all of this is virtual. A lot of virtual or online income streams are just adapted or repurposed. Brick-and-mortar or, like, physical businesses that have just been adapted for the online space.
So in a subscription membership site, somebody pays you monthly and you give them something. It could be a membership site, or it could be a magazine. It could be a physical magazine. It could be an e-zine or an online magazine that people pay for. It can also be a subscription box. It could be physical products.
So things like Stitch Fix, where you get those clothes, right? You fill out a quiz and some stylist picks out clothes for you every month and mails them to you. That's a subscription box. BarkBox is one that's for dogs where people get, like, certain treats and toys new for their dog every month. And they're on this, like, monthly subscription. Netflix is a subscription site because you pay monthly and they deliver you assets. These are digital assets. They are TV shows.
Now Netflix started as sending you DVDs in the mail. They started as a subscription. Envelope instead of a subscription box. But they started as a physical product. Then they moved on to digital where they were showing other people's shows. They would show shows from USA or TNT or these other networks. Maybe they were in reruns or whatever. And they would put them on Netflix. Now Netflix has evolved again to creating their own content, creating their own shows. So this is an example of a subscription.
So for you, this could be like monthly worksheets. This could be templates. This could be scripts. So imagine there's you have a subscription membership site for other therapists and each month they get a new simple practice template. They get a marketing script: "What people? What to say when people ask, if you take their insurance and your private pay." It can be a new script, right? It could be a worksheet where it's maybe treatment planning, worksheets, or diagnostic worksheets or something like that.
So these would be assets that they get digitally every month. So you could also do this with, like, teaching. So it could be lessons that you create and you just teach them something new every month. But what a subscription does not have is the coaching element.
So you're not getting on calls with people anymore. You're not doing the Q&A call. You're not doing the hot seat call. You're not doing this closure week. You may have a community. You may not have a complete community. I'm trying to think of ones that I've seen. And not a business-to-business standpoint. Okay. One that I've seen that is business is social media templates.
So every month you get access, I think there are 30 pictures for you to use on social media. And then there are templates or scripts of what to say on social media. So they're like Madlibs style. So you drop in, your name of business, your product name or whatever, but they're created for you each month.
So each month it's almost done for you marketing. There's not a coaching, there are not any hot seat calls. There's that one does have a training. So it might be training you on Instagram for instance, or it might be training you on LinkedIn or whatever, and then you can then go use the pictures and the templates on LinkedIn, if that's what the lesson was for
Knitting patterns. I've also seen, like, monthly knitting patterns where you get a subscription to four new knitting patterns a month. That's all it is. It's just delivered to your inbox or whatever. And then you just pay for it.
Things to think about. Here are people are paying for a library or people are paying for collection no longer are they paying for access to you no longer. Are they paying to pick your brain? You, instead of positioned as an authority or an expert, you are positioned as a helper.
Or a library, right? So you can pick one week of the month and you can do a drop of products. You can do all four products in one week. You could do one product a month. You could do one product a week for four weeks.
You can really do the drops as often as you want and make them as big as you want. You're really only delivering the asset.
There's not teaching, there's not coaching. So your time is spent creating these new things, but not necessarily interacting with other people. So depending on how long this takes you, it could be a few minutes to create a new asset, or it could be a few hours to create a new asset. So your time is spent in developing the thing, not really talking to or holding space for, or interacting with other people. So the pro here is that subscriptions have the lowest time commitment or the potential for the lowest time commitment. If you're creating, two assets and each asset takes you ten minutes, 20 minutes, and you're done.
So it has the potential for the lowest time commitment. But the other thing that comes with that is it's the lowest price of all right. So if people are paying for three knitting patterns a month, they're not going to pay $300 for that. It's more like something that's definitely under 30 bucks sometimes even under 20 bucks, because all they're paying for is the asset, not the guidance, the level of touch with you. This indicates the higher the price, right? So the more interaction they have with the person, the higher the price step costs.
So the last type of membership that we're going to cover today is called a collaborative membership. Now, remember, I'm making these names up, so I call it a collaborative membership site. And the best way to think about this is to think about a yoga studio, most gyms or yoga studios.
Remember, in-person brick-and-mortar businesses are membership sites. Your gym membership. But when you think of a yoga studio or maybe some gyms are set up this way, if your gym has like a personal trainer or staff of personal trainers, but let's run with a yoga studio example where, it's Zen yoga, right? So they have a thing that they do: yoga, but Monique might teach the hot yoga and Sharon might teach prenatal yoga--and just making up names here--Latoya might teach high-intensity yoga and Kelly might teach yoga for beginners, right? So all four of those yoga teachers have a specialty of yoga. They are bringing something unique to the collaborative membership.
So collaborative membership sites have multiple creators, and they are providing services or education. It's all under, like, an umbrella, it's all yoga, but there's different types of yoga, right? Again, there's no end date here. And again, it can be as scalable as you want. You could have the same topics recurring, right? Like, hot yoga every Wednesday at nine.
So it's the same topic, and it's just recurring over and over again, where I could see this really translating to an online space, like almost like a meditation membership, where there might be some people who do guided meditation, there might be some people who do like transcendental meditation, there might be some people who do Shakara type meditations, but you could literally have "I go to my Shakara meditation with Amy at 3:00 PM on Friday." And it could be like a standing appointment that you do every Friday, or it could be a new topic every time.
There's so much potential for something like this, because there could be the trainings or the meetings that are recurring, but there could also be workshops. There could also be bigger offerings here. So these are like... sky's the limit with a collaborative membership site. So you might have multiple people operating from multiple frameworks. You could have the person who's doing hot yoga at Wednesday at nine, or, shocker, meditation Friday at three. That is the reoccurring thing.
But Amy could teach chakra, meditation. She could teach crystals and she could teach tarot cards. Just really running with this example. But she is The "woo" person on the team. And she operates from a "woo" framework. So as long as it's within crystals, chakras, or tarot cards, it's free game. She could teach anything she wants. She has her own framework, whereas like Monique, remember, she's more the practical one and she teaches from a framework of much more practical things, so she has free reign as long as she's within her framework. So it starts to get a lot bigger. And it starts to get expensive, but what's cool is your members can pick and choose what they attend.
They can have their standing appointments or they can just see, like, log in and see all the meetings that are happening that week. And then they can pick and choose whatever they want to do. It's really positioned as, like, a collective. A go-to place. The go-to place for yoga, the go-to place for meditation or whatever.
And then you have multiple offerings. Now, these multiple offerings could be multiple days a week. Latanya could be on Wednesday, Monique can be on Monday, Amy's on Friday, right? So they could each be doing something multiple times a week, or Monique can be week one, Latania can be week two, Amy can be week three. And I can't remember the other name. I said, like, Sharon or something like that. She can be week four, so you can condense it or you can spread it out, but you have multiple people contributing. So I think that is the thing that is really the pro here is multiple people.
Our marketing, multiple people are bringing in sales. It's like a business partnership, or if you've got four or five or six contributors, it's like a business six-tablet ship or whatever the heck that is when you have multiple people. So they're all splitting the marketing. They're all bringing in new sales. And you have multiple people splitting the time commitment.
So if each person's taking a week, then you're making a lot of money for not a lot of time investment. So that can be a pro.
Now, some of the cons are scheduling, right? How often are you going to have things? How are you going to schedule them? How are you going to maintain a schedule?
So that brings up organization as well. Obviously, this is one where the scope can get quite big, quite fast. So scheduling and organization are going to be a big deal. The other con thing that, like, could start out as a con, but I think it would turn to a pro eventually is splitting the profits, right?
So if you've got ten members paying 50 bucks a month and it's $500, but you're splitting it four ways, then you're making even less for that. However, because each person has the opportunity to bring in members. You're splitting the work. But you're also like magnetizing the attraction power. So I think you would overcome that quickly.
But you would be having a profit split in the beginning when you're not making as much revenue. Now if there's things that you like about a contributor strategy, but you don't necessarily want to start an entire membership site, like, an entire collaborative membership site, you can use some of this in your own membership. So, say where I think this fits the best is in a coaching membership. But you can bring in guest experts and they can do your 15-minute training for the month. If you want to, they can even do your 15-minute training, your Q&A call, your hot seat call, and your closure call.
They could do all of it for the month. And then you get to take an entire month off, but you're still getting paid. So I know people who bring in guest experts as often as every other month. And then you're working every other month, but you're still making the revenue. Now you don't have to pay this person.
A lot of people are, like, "What would I pay the guest expert?" You don't have to pay them instead. They're allowed to market themselves inside your membership. So they're compensated by getting exposure to your audience. And not only not, "Hey, this is what I do like on the side," but literally they are able to say, "Make sure you come over and check me out because I do this kind of stuff." And they're able to show their link or they're able to definitely promote themselves.
And I wouldn't say promote themselves heavily. They still need to be giving your audience value where your members value, but they definitely get to talk about their themselves and their business. So you want to be strategic who you invite into your membership site as a guest expert, that you want them to be complementary to you and your business, but you don't want them to be competitive to you and your business.
So in summary, we've covered coaching memberships, roadmap, memberships, subscription memberships, and collaborative memberships.
Each has their pros and cons. And each has their draws and their drawbacks. You can see that there's distinct elements or there's distinct types of memberships, but we do see crossover between them. And you can pick the elements that work best for you.
You can cut things out, you can utilize strategies from the others, but remember that membership sites have the propensity, have the potential to get a little wild, and get a little out of control. So when the more crossing or the more mixing of the types of membership sites, you do, the harder it is for you to keep them reigned in. So when they're not reigned in, it's hard for customers to know what they're buying, and it's harder for you to know what you're delivering.
So I think picking a main style is important and sticking with that is important, but then maybe tiptoeing into elements of the other ones, right? Knowing the rules before you can bend them and break them that way you feel like you're operating from a firm foundation, rather than trying to just cram everything together and make it work.
Yeah. If this was helpful for you, if you've been thinking about a membership site and now, you have a clearer idea of what you want to do, or if this opens your mind to membership sites, because you realize there are different ways to do them, you can definitely dive deeper into this concept by heading over and checking out my Transcend the Therapy Room Masterclass.
During this free training, you're going to explore the three essential angles of your online income stream, everything from level of touch, which we've covered a little bit here, but and also amount of marketing and sales, but knowing these offers or... hold on, let me start that part over.
So during this free training, you'll explore three essential angles of your online income stream. We're going to talk about things like touch, which we've touched on here. And you'll also talk about things like marketing and sales and how you want to interact with the people in your membership site. And knowing these answers are going to help you get really clear on which type of program is best for you.
The training is on demand. So you can watch it any time that works for you. All you need to do is head on over to Marissalawton.com/masterclass, and that's where you'll register. And then you'll be able to watch it straight from there.
So I hope this has been helpful for you guys, learning that there are different types of membership sites and that you can really customize them to make the most sense for you, and starting with a framework or starting with a foundation is going to help you get your membership site up and running so much faster.
All right. It's been a pleasure, guys. And until next time, keep on rising.
