Membership Geeks Podcast with Mike Morrison

Are you in an industry where there may be a demand for group access to your membership? Whether it's partners in the same business, employees in a single company, or even just an entrepreneur wanting their assistant, web designer or some other member of their team to access your site - it's not uncommon to receive requests to provide shared access. In this episode I discuss the 3 ways you can faci...

Cancellations suck. There's no denying it. Obviously a member ending their subscription is pretty much the worst case scenario. By nature of the business model it's pretty much the last thing we want to happen, right? So why would you make it easier for members to leave by giving them the ability to cancel their membership themselves without you being involved or having a chance to talk them round...

Live calls are a great way of delivering value to your members without a lot of the headaches and added effort that goes into creating many other forms of member content. Webinars, live Q&A's, member coaching calls - this sort of content is ideally suited to most types of memberships. In today's podcast episode, I dive deeper into how to get the most out of live member content and give my top tips...

Offering a trial is a great way of moving people off the fence and encouraging them to give your membership a try. However should that trial be free, or should it involve a nominal charge? In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I cover the pros and cons of each option, and dive deeper into the benefits and considerations of offering a trial for your membership. Episode Summary: How offeri...

The launch of a new membership site can be a nerve-wracking time, and adding to that anxiety is the question of whether you have enough content to open your doors. Is there a set amount of content that a membership site needs to have before you release it to the public? What content should you be creating and how do you know when to say “when”? In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast I tack...

If a membership site launches with no audience to notice, has it truly launched? In this episode we answer the much asked question of whether it's possible - or advisable - to launch a membership site when you do not have an audience. I also discuss why audience building is particularly important for membership website owners, as well as my top tips for how you can get started on building an audie...

It's very easy to fall into bad habits as a membership site owner when it comes to over-working and putting too much pressure on yourself. This often leads to burnout, which in turn adversely affects your membership site. In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I give my tips on how you can avoid burning out when running a membership site. Episode Summary Why over-burdening yourself is not...

Conference season is upon us! For some that means cramming into a drab hall in a hotel out in the middle of nowhere, listening to long-in-the-tooth experts drone on for hours on end. For others, it's a chance to take time away, fly to somewhere sunny and fill your brain in between running up a huge bar bill on company expenses. Whichever end of the scale you land on; conferences represent plenty o...

When it comes to membership sites, you’ll often find that people will come for the content, but they’ll  stay  for the community. An active community is the glue which holds a successful membership together. It’s where your members will form relationships, where they’ll receive and give support, where they’ll build connections and even make friends. It’s things like that which will keep people sub...

Have you ever thought about writing a book? Perhaps you already have? Being a published author can be a huge feather in the cap for anyone running a membership site - particularly one which is based around a personal brand, where you're the expert or thought leader. Chris Ducker knows just how powerful writing a book can be for membership owners. His first best-selling book Virtual Freedom played...

Your membership content comprises a large part of the ongoing value your site offers. But how do you keep momentum going once the ideas and inspiration for what content to create start to run dry? In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I discuss a few effective ways to generate a continuous stream of awesome ideas for fresh membership content. Episode Summary: Ways to "crowdsource" conten...

The most successful memberships are those that cater to a specific niche. Having a niche makes your offering more targeted, which increases the likelihood of someone identifying with the problem your membership solves. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you can’t just blend in with the crowd. You need to have a specialty. But how do you figure out your niche? And what happens once you’ve bec...

If you're trying to make more money from your membership business there are two ways you can go. One is to try to increase revenue from your existing membership site - and the other is to look at opportunities for offering additional products and services to your customers. In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I explore the 7 main options worth exploring - along with the 3 avenues you a...

Far too often, creating content gets confused with delivering value. Membership owners find themselves on a treadmill of grinding out epic course after epic course because they're convinced it's the only way to keep their members happy and - ultimately - keep them subscribed. It's not as simple as that. Memberships aren't a competition to see who can give members the most "stuff" - it goes deeper...

Membership pricing is an inexact science. It's natural to wonder whether you've found the sweet spot in terms of what you should be charging your members. However we've seen an increasing amount of people taking completely the wrong approach due to not really being able to wrap their head around the membership model, and as a result making some poor decisions when it comes to setting their members...

In those early stages of running a membership, your priorities are pretty clear. Most of the time you're mainly going to be focused on getting enough new members to pay the bills, and making sure you're doing enough keep them happy. But what happens once you find yourself on solid footing with the basics? What comes next? Once you're over that initial hump, it's not all plain sailing! Truly scalin...

Anyone who has followed us for a while will probably know that we tend to put more effort into talking people out of starting a membership than we do to trying to convince people they should start one. Simple reason is that there are countless snake oil salesman out there portraying memberships as something they're not. We try to save people from that. In fact we kicked off last year with a show a...

And just like that, another year is almost over! How was your 2017? In what's becoming a bit of a tradition, I'm wrapping the year up by taking a look back at some of the fantastic episodes of The Membership Guys Podcast, counting down the top 10 most downloaded episodes of 2017. Thanks to each and every one of you for your continued support of the show - here's to even more membership awesomeness...

When it comes to marketing your membership, not everything is about finding that killer sales funnel or running huge promotions. More often than not, membership success comes from maintaining a consistent baseline of day to day activity – it’s about doing the “little and often” things that keep you top of mind for your audience. This episode of The Membership Guys Podcast digs into the strategy we...

Your membership won't be right for everyone, and there are countless random reasons why someone may decide not to join. However in our experience of working with hundreds of memberships, we often see the same 5 objections coming up time after time. In this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast, I reveal the 5 most common objections people have to joining memberships - and more importantly what yo...

Much of what we do as membership site owners involves experimentation. Regardless of what some people may try to tell you, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy or magic formula for membership success; you have to test and figure out what works for you. We recently pulled back the curtain inside Member Site Academy to share our own experiments and tests with our members as part of the new 'Member...

I'm going to let you in on a little secret... Everyone - even us - makes mistakes with their membership website. In fact it's often from those mistakes that we learn the most important lessons about what works and what doesn't for our own particular product. Most "membership mistakes" are harmless and go by unnoticed; but there are some whoppers that can do real damage to the potential success of...

Social media marketing has changed dramatically over the past few years. From the rise of live video, to the huge drop-off in organic reach for Facebook pages. New platforms launching and disappearing seemingly overnight. It can be hard for the busy membership owner to keep up. Mike Stelzner is a man with his finger on the pulse of social media marketing. As founder of Social Media Examiner and th...

When charging a monthly payment for access to your membership site, member engagement is key. It’s not enough to have static content that never changes, as once that’s been consumed by your members they’ll have very little reason to stick around . Many membership site owners set out with the intention of continuously adding new courses and premium content to their site; however this typically prov...

We often talk about how crucial community is to long term membership success. In many memberships, even though members join for the content it's actually the community that they stick around for. However that's not always the case, and in this episode of The Membership Guys Podcast I dig into ways in which adding a community to your membership may not be all it's cracked up to be. In this episode...