Oct 15, 2020
Pivot Your Practice and BulletProof Your Future — Practitioners Beware — This is What You Will Be Told About The Benefits of Having a Membership Site
But the marketers who tell you this miss out a couple of important pieces of information……
Yes it is true that are countless membership sites on the Internet right now that come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours. In recent years, they have become even more popular due to their potential for generating a substantial recurring revenue stream for online business owners and if you haven’t caught on to the fact that recurring income is the holy grail, post-Covid, then you havent been paying quite enough attention!
So it is not surprising that you will be told the following.
Long-Term Success and Loyalty
You will never achieve long-term success without loyalty. The loyalty you receive from paying members effectively shows through their increasing engagement and their comments and buying new services when you make offers.
* This means you need to constantly give a lot of value with your content, spend time in communication with your members and consciously put in the effort to build the relationship and gain their trust and loyalty. This takes a lot of time, energy and effort.
Build Your Brand
Having a membership site is a truly great way to help others and that fits really well with the ethos we practitioners have. The services you’re offering with your membership site isn’t just a small part of your blog that you use for extra income. Instead, it is the living, breathing, reputable ‘brand of You’ and will be the place where you really show up and serve. This particular business model helps you make a name for yourself and increase your overall credibility as a practitioner.
* this means you have to have a very clear message, be ready to stand up and be authentic and transparent and be in it for the long haul because you can’t just disappear. It is a really serious professional commitment to the members.
Experience and Accountability
A membership site will provide you and your members with an endless learning opportunity. It forces you to stay on top of your game and continue to explore new ideas and ways to improve your value to these precious people. This not only allows for new market research but technical management techniques as well. Tech skills are an absolute Must Have these days.
* Notice that last bit! You cannot run a membership site without having some tech skills. Yes you can outsource to a degree but you have to have invested in learning enough of the tech to know what is possible and how that fits with what you want to achieve. This is a steep learning curve if you are not techie minded. It is perfectly possible to learn — but it takes time.
Launching a New Service Becomes Easier
The benefits you receive from your membership site doesn’t end with your current one. More often than not, you can come up with variations of your membership site’s broad subject to launch other offers and products that are loosely based on the same idea. It also allows you to introduce a higher-paying tier of your existing business. An added benefit is that you already have a loyal audience, which can help you hit the ground running with the newest offering.
* And this is the other important point that the guru marketers miss out. You need a loyal audience and if you dont have enough of a database of interested people to reach out to with your first offer there is NO point in trying to start a membership site! You need to focus first on building up the bank of people who are interested in your one to one service and your mini-course or workshops before you offer a membership to them. Memberships need numbers!
Staring and running a membership site takes a lot of work. The benefits that you receive from running a successful membership site are great and it is an excellent long term strategy for your recurring revenue — with these provisos…..
ONCE you have the numbers.
ONCE you have the basic tech knowledge you need.
ONCE you have a big bank of content and value ready to supply.
ONCE you have the time to devote to getting it set up, getting it launched and maintaining it thereafter.
If you are interested in setting up a membership site drop in on our Office Hours and bounce the ideas around — we would never put you off the idea but we would be able to suggest the roadmap you could use from wherever you are now to actually running that membership.
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This is a series for coaches and therapists who are passionate about their work and their clients but struggling to find a way to make things work post-Covid as clients melt away and money becomes an issue for most people.
This is a time when most of us are scared. Nothing is known or predictable and many of us are dithering about what to do. In fact, this indecision is paralysing us and that is something that will derail the success of any practice. Therapists and coaches who are successful are people who have learned to do two things.
One is be flexible enough to pivot their business to what will work now — and the other is to break through enough of the fear barriers to get productive again.
Need More Happiness, Freedom and Success? Join The Sage Academy Free Webinars…
If you want quick and easy steps to setting yourself up for a safe and happy future doing the work you love, join me in the Sage Academy’s free webinars. I usually give at least 5 tips for moving forward and implementing in ways that will move you onwards and upwards in all of the webinars. Each is about a certain angle on the issue of Pivoting and we pay particular attention to moving the practice online. People say that the webinars on their own have had an immediate effect on their mood and confidence to make the changes necessary to flourish in Covid and post-Covid times. Get off the hamster wheel and take some time for yourself with our webinars, learn and act, learn and act — that’s the way to start flourishing.
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“Just imagine if the next 5 years is like the last 5 years? How are you keeping yourself financially secure, happy and living your life of purpose by helping other people succeed?” Elizabeth and the team at Sage Academy specialise in helping you Get Your Coaching or Therapy Practice Back On Track. Sign up for the highly-acclaimed free challenges and webinars to find out how to Pivot that Practice to FutureProof Yourself.
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