January 9, 2023

Transcript: Ep #076 Small Tribe, Big Impact: Launching a Membership Site with a Tiny Audience

Hello and welcome to The OMG! Show, the podcast that helps course creators grow their business with profitable paid traffic funnels. My name is Oscar Garcia and my mission is to help you, the course creator, drive more traffic and convert more customers so that you can have a thriving and sustainable business.

Now, in today’s episode, we’re gonna ask the question of whether or not it makes sense to launch a membership even though you have a tiny audience, and by exploring this question, maybe we can have a better understanding of if we should even launch a membership, or how could it even increase our course sales.

After all, we need to understand what value is it that we can provide to our audience. We need to understand if our audience is even ready for a membership program. Most importantly, how would a membership fit into our overall business strategy?

Now, before we get into the meat and potatoes of this program, make sure to stay until the end of the podcast to discover how you can join a support group, of course creators that will give you the encouragement, accountability, and resources you need to succeed with your course from anywhere.

As a course creator, adding a type of membership program or, community feels like it has a lot of benefits, right? we’re talking about recurring revenue, and having a deeper engagement with your customers. ongoing learning opportunity for upselling, and cross-selling. in-person events, the opportunities are endless once you have, a community or some kind of membership program attached to your business.

But if we don’t have an audience that’s, essentially stopping a lot of us from taking that next step, taking that leap, right? And of course, that’s a valid, reasoning. After all, memberships require a lot of commitment. They require an engaged audience to be successful. it requires investment from the actual members.

And if you have a small audience, it may. Difficult to attract and retain those members, for your program, essentially affecting the quality and utility that those members are getting from your community. So essentially they’re asking themselves. Is this even worth it? And at the end of the day, we really don’t want to feel like we just wasted everybody’s time.

If we’re gonna be doing something, we wanna put something of value out there into the world, right? At least that’s what I believe. Now here’s the thing. Memberships do provide a ton of value, but our notoriously one of the hardest things to sell and grow online. However, that does not mean you need a large audience.

Would it be helpful? 100%. Okay? But even with a tiny audience, you can still make massive waves. Now, let me tell you a little story about the first time I launched a continuity program on mine own. Many of you who have listened to this show before know that my main business is Renegade Soccer Training.

And a few years ago we decided to come up with the idea of providing a membership program. Essentially it was going to provide, all access to all of our individual programs. And when I say that, just think of courses. So we had about 14 different courses at the time, and we figured, you know what?

We’ll create an all-access pass that would give a user access to all the different programs. We thought it made sense. We thought it lowered the barrier to entry. and we thought that, that in of itself would be, awesome value. We didn’t need to have a community or anything else attached to it.

It was just access to the content. Okay. And so at the time, we had, probably about a hundred thousand people on the email list. And when we launched it, we ended up getting, I don’t know, maybe 500 to 600 members at $49 bucks a month. So we were bringing in a good chunk of change, right? we were happy with that, but as time went on, we noticed that the churn was pretty high.

We noticed that we were, essentially flooded. our customer service inbox and that it really didn’t create what we wanted it to create. We thought this was gonna be an awesome opportunity for people to see all the other amazing, programs that we have, that they would fall in love with all the other different offerings that they would go to and, have that word-of-mouth experience.

But none of that happened. It was like a goose egg.

It didn’t create what we wanted, which was essentially a  catalyst that would take our business to the next level in terms of generating more sales, and more word of mouth. it really didn’t do any of that. So yeah, it brought in, a nice income stream, but, to this day, that program has already been shut down.

Instead, we have something else now. But what I want to tell you is that even though again, at the time it was a fairly large list, when we relaunched the community program, we did it completely different. we did the slow and steady approach, which is the approach that I recommend to you, and which is why I believe you, you don’t need a large audience to launch a successful membership.

In fact, it’s almost better if you have a tiny audience. Sure. From your perspective, it might seem like I, you can’t see it, right? it’s on the other side of the fence. But believe me when I tell you that, when it, when you’re starting from zero, it’s almost, so much better because you.

can essentially create it how you want. So let’s move on to figuring out how you can actually launch a successful membership with a tiny audience. [00:05:00] First and foremost, number one, what you need to do is figure out. What it is that you want to do. Okay. With your membership program, do you want to go ahead and create some sort of all access pass where they get access to all your stuff?

Or do you wanna have a continuity program that’s based around access,access to you, your network, your team? option one is content based. Option two is. member led and between the two, I’m going for option two, which is more so having a community that’s more about coaching, that’s more about the members helping, themselves out.

And the reason for that is because with. option one, the content approach, it becomes more of a commodity and it’s a lot easier to say no to that or to leave that kind of community. There’s no real connection. It’s just, content which, anyone can go and find content elsewhere. However, with option two, you get deep with individuals, you have real conversations.

People get attached. there’s much deeper meaning with that, which allows for a lot of opportunities. Yeah, for sure. the lifetime value of a customer is going to [00:06:00] go increase significantly by having that kind of membered led coaching community. so you know, your bottom line’s gonna be healthy, but at the same time, you’re just gonna know so much more about your market than you would’ve ever thought before because they’re telling you all of their problems, their troubles, and you have your own customers, your own team answering each other’s questions, and you’re just creating a really cool place for people to come out and vibe, hang out and do whatever it is that they wanna.

which is pretty cool. . All right, so figure out what you want to do. And a lot of that depends on pricing, right? Because most, low ticket, communities, it’s gonna be access to content. Whereas, some of the. coaching, what I would call member led communities. Those could be pretty high ticket.

there’s memberships for nine bucks a month, but then there’s also memberships for thousands of dollars depending on the market, right? So again, figure it out for yourself and your market, which way you want to go. My recommendation would be to go towards creating a community where you have your customers kind ofcoming in, chiming in, and making sure that everyone else is answering each other’s questions, getting advice [00:07:00] from each other, all that kind of good.

but how do you start there? step two is that you gotta get your OGs, . You gotta get your homies. the, your starting five, your starting 10, whatever you want to call it. You gotta get a close, group of people that are around you, that know who you are, what your expertise is. So maybe these are past clients, maybe these are friends or family, these are individuals.

will benefit from being a community that you want to provide. That you want to create. Okay? And you wanna put ’em inside of this place for free and just tell ’em straight up. You know, Hey, listen, this is what I’m trying to create. This is the vision. This is where I want to go. I’m inviting you because I think you’re great.

I think you can contribute. I think you can provide value. I think this will also help you with your efforts. And I want to know if you want to join me in this crusade, , in terms of building something amazing. And if it works, great. If it doesn’t, hey, at least we tried. But I wanna know if you’re down, okay?

And just let ’em know. And once you have those OGs [00:08:00] right, that’s gonna be essentially the kindling that’s gonna start this raging fire. Okay, you need those 10 people because from those 10 people, that’s what’s gonna really get your feet on the ground in terms of what kind of onboarding processes you need, what kind of welcome sequences you need, what kind of resources you need to create, the flow, the structure.

aside from that, you’re also gonna be able to determine, what limiting beliefs are within your kind of customer market, right? if your 10 OGs are talking, something in particular that they’re all struggling with. That right there is a great content piece that you can then leverage to then bring in more members, right?

For example, let’s say in my group, they say, or right now, they’re asking, how do I use ChatGPT for my course? Okay, perfect. Now I know that I can go and create like a free lead magnet. Hey, the five prompts you need to sell your course with ChatGPT, something like that. I can use that to then bring in more people into the.

So your OGs are where everything is gonna stem from how you deliver the, the kind of environment that you want to have to [00:09:00] essentially the content and the marketing material you need to bring in People. Don’t forget, ask for case studies and testimonials because the best way to sell a membership is through, member led testimonials and case studies, rather than you saying how awesome your community is.

Let your members speak on the behalf of your community. Okay. Once you get to your OGs, you need to have a. In, in place so that way you can continue to bring in more people, but you don’t wanna include everyone. You don’t want to have everybody you know, and their moms coming into their, into your community.

You want to have some sort of filtering process and place, which is again, why slow and steady wins the race. Okay. And again, you don’t need a large audience to do this with a tiny audience. it’s much more efficient. You know exactly who you’re looking for. You can go. That individual person let ’em know exactly how you can help them and make that offer to come into the community.

And slowly and surely, you start getting the right people in there. They start conversating, they start engaging. [00:10:00] It starts taking a life of its own. All right? And eventually you’re like, okay, this is great. Now I know who my people are. I know who I know where to find more of them. You want to have that application processed in place, but you always want to have that funnel that’s bringing in potential members because even if you have your OGs, there’s gonna be some drop off.

And this is churn. Every community program, every membership program, deals with churn, and you wanna make sure that churn for you, if you’re doing really well, is probably less than five. Maybe 2%, but we’ll say 5% in terms of churn. Okay. However, by implementing these steps, by figuring out what kind of membership program you want, by truly defining your OGs and having some sort of like application and funnel, in place that can filter in people, that’s how you could have eventually a nice community or, membership.

around your courses that’s able to provide you with some nice, stable, recurring revenue, and that way you avoid having a community that’s full of crickets, , and just there collecting dust, right? So [00:11:00] there you have it, even if you have a tiny audience, it’s totally possible to launch a membership program and have it be successful.

Now, as you spend the next week or so, mapping out your new membership program, if you want me or my community, of course creators to of give you feed. On union membership offer, then come on over and join us in the marketing in Mojitos community. Once you’re in, go ahead, share your idea and we’ll let you know if you’re on the right track or if there’s some things that you should tweak.

So if you’re into that, head on over to www.oscarmgarcia.com/beta or just click the links available on the show notes. Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. Look forward to seeing you on the next one.

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