What the experts are not telling you about starting your own membership and making it work long term.
You are excited about starting a membership, filled with ideas about what you want to offer your members and excited about the potential for the recurring revenue stream you’re about to unlock in your business.
In this post, I will share the reality of memberships.
The points below are based on my own membership experiences, anecdotes from other leaders in the online business space, and my 15 years’ experience of mentoring online business owners – many of whom I have supported as they navigate through these challenges.
1️⃣- A tiny % of your audience will join.
If you don’t have a big enough audience already, the numbers won’t stack up.
Let’s say you decide your members will pay £35/month.
In the planning stage, you might imagine you’ll have 100 members, bringing you £3,500 every month in recurring revenue.
That’s not too shabby in exchange for creating new content and hosting live calls every month, is it?
But unless you have thousands in your audience, the reality might be that 5 people join in the first month.
Make sure you’ll still be excited to create that content and host those calls for £175/month.
2️⃣- You need to regularly add new members.
If you do not consistently grow your audience each month (which usually needs a decent budget for ads), you will struggle to replace members who leave.
You should expect a % of members to leave every month, so prepare yourself for numbers to dwindle.
3️⃣- Only a small % of members will show up or engage.
Let’s say you get a 10% turnout for live calls, slightly higher % consuming your membership content and low community engagement.
To be comfortable with this, you must:
➡️ Understand that showing up regularly in your membership is a low priority for them because their life is already busy.
➡️ Rewire your money programming
Otherwise you will resent the effort you are putting in for them when they aren’t reciprocating.
There is a good chance you were brought up with an ‘industrialised’ work ethic – meaning you are programmed to do work for your money.
When members are not showing up to calls or contributing to your community, you are not working for the money you are paid.
Many business owners who are starting a membership for the first time struggle with this subconscious belief.
They start adding more work for themselves in an attempt to force interaction so they can soothe their discomfort.
4️⃣- Your weekly/monthly commitment to create content will weigh heavy after a while.
The deliverables are likely the centre of your offer and you start off with lots of ideas.
For the first few months, you will be fired up and enjoying the creation process.
And then one day, often around the 6 month mark, your initial bank of ideas will dry up and your mind will be blank.
Especially if you are a Generator or Manifesting Generator in Human Design (70% of us are one or the other) and your members aren’t showing up.
Because you’ll be under pressure to initiate new ideas when you have nothing from them to respond to.
5️⃣ – Your members will justify your subscription fee at each renewal.
When your members are not showing up, their disconnection gives them the perfect reason to declutter your membership subscription.
It isn’t usually your fault when members leave but it’s you who ‘pays’ for it when your predicted revenue takes a hit.
Which leads us nicely to point 6… another very common issue in my experience.
6️⃣- You will be ‘abandoned’ every single month.
Churn (members leaving) is a natural feature of memberships.
But this ‘abandonment’ can be triggering.
If you experience an emotional response to the trigger, it can impact your ability to get up, show up and go again tomorrow.
(Especially if you’re emotion-driven, which half of the population is).
7️⃣- You need to give 2x as much energy to the community as you hope to receive back.
When you are emotion-driven, it means what you feel dictates your choices, actions and behaviours.
The heavy weight on your shoulders of a membership with low engagement and a commitment to create content consistently?
Vibe killer, right?
But as the leader of the membership (or free Facebook group), you have to bring the 10/10 energy to the room to fuel them with energy.
If you show up with ‘meh’ energy, theirs will be even lower = more disconnection.
For us emotion-driven folk, forcing ourselves to TURN IT UP when we aren’t feeling is exhausting!
Some online business owners are great at running memberships and leading their community.
Those who make their memberships work long term love the model and their passion for the membership community is what keeps members going and growing.
In my experience, most online business owners are not cut out for long-term success with a monthly membership model.
(Until they develop strategies to deal with the challenges above anyway.)
For most of us, a recurring monthly membership is not the passive income dream we believe it will be.
Want to know what IS the passive income dream for most of us?
Partnering with the leaders of the successful memberships you like, to promote them as an affiliate.
Authentic affiliate marketing is ESPECIALLY powerful for Generators and Manifesting Generators in Human Design (70% of the population) and emotion-driven people (50% of the population).
Generators and Manifesting Generators are wired to have their best ideas and inspiration and achieve their best results when they respond to ‘life’ – things they read, hear, watch, etc.
For instance, this post was inspired by a question about starting a membership that I read in a Facebook group.
Without me seeing that question, it would not have occurred to me to write this.
When I published the first draft on Facebook, lots of people interacted with the post.
Authentic affiliate marketing is responding to the seller’s offer, copy and marketing.
Because you have bought the product or service or are already paying for the membership or subscription, make use of it, and genuinely like it, talking about it with your friends, community and clients to promote the offer will feel natural.
When emotion-driven people genuinely enjoy and are excited about something, they buzz for it.
Authentic affiliate marketing is promoting the products and services you genuinely like and recommend.
That means, your genuine buzz about what you are promoting will inject itself into your marketing when you promote the offer and your energy will be magnetic to your audience – boosting your results.
When your people sign up through your link for the membership or subscription you already pay for, your access becomes free.
AND you’ll make extra on top, so you’ll receive that desired passive recurring revenue into your bank each month – with NONE of the membership management headaches!
Do you want to generate a headache-free passive income stream, without adding additional customers into your business?
Click here to learn more about authentic affiliate marketing and how I can help you get paid well for recommending aligned products, services and memberships / subscriptions you genuinely like.
Veronica Pullen
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