If you’re just starting out with blogging, you may be wondering if you could ever possibly create a successful membership site.
A-List Blogging member Carol Tice went from not knowing a thing about blogging, technology or membership communities, to earning a significant income from her blog and membership site.
It didn’t happen overnight of course, but rather as a step by step process of trial, error and learning. Let’s follow her journey.
(If you’d like to hear Carol’s story in her own words, check out her video interview, or take a look at her blog, Make A Living Writing, and her membership site, The Freelance Writer’s Den.)
Carol started blogging late in 2008. As a seasoned freelance writer, she’d gone looking for blogs where she could learn more and connect with other writers. And she wasn’t happy with what she found. To her frustration, she discovered posts where other freelancers described earning $10 to $15 for entire articles.
Although she didn’t know the first thing about blogging, Carol started “Make A Living Writing” and began to offer advice to other writers on how to find higher paying gigs. Her initial idea was to eventually write an ebook and supplement her income with that. Meanwhile, she posted intermittently on her blog.
A year or so later Carol realized her blog wasn’t really growing. She decided to “get serious about it” and began blogging on a regular schedule, twice a week, so her readers would know when to expect new content.
Soon she realized that if she was ever going to earn money from her blog, she needed to learn more about her audience. She began writing ‘poll posts’ where she asked readers a question about their biggest obstacles and invited them to reply in the comments section. For example, she asked, “What is the biggest obstacle keeping you from earning more as a freelance writer?” or “What is the one thing you need to learn about?”
“I learned so much from those posts, and it really changed what I was writing.”
Most importantly, she learned that other writers were dealing with different obstacles and issues than she had thought, and they faced fears and problems that she didn’t. She also discovered that there was income potential in the knowledge she had to share.
She credits A-List Blogging for propelling her forward on the path from newbie to pro. Once a member she learned to clean up her blog design (it didn’t matter that it was geared to writers – she learned that design still matters.)
“You can make a lot of mistakes – but if you have something valuable to offer, you will still find enough of an audience that you can earn a real income. Because I did every blessed thing wrong.”
While implementing the blogging tips learned at A-List, Blogging, Carol’s subscriber count grew from around 300 to 1,000.
After a failed ebook, Carol tried her hand at creating an income through paid webinars. She offered her first one-hour webinar with a co-presenter and charged participants $36.
“I highly recommend partnering,” she says. “When you’re a small blog you cross-pollinate those two. You get another small blogger and suddenly you have more of a real audience to sell to.”
Partnering offers the additional advantage of pooling knowledge about technology and strategies. It helps with the learning curve climb.
For her next webinar, Carol raised the price to $47 – and to her surprise that one sold even better. This was a lesson in ‘perceived value’, and she began to conduct frequent price experiments with her various offers. She realized she could make more money by asking her readers how much they were willing to pay for an offering.
Yet, her webinars demanded that significant time be spent on marketing. Carol realized she’d prefer to spend much more time teaching and much less time marketing.
“That’s when I started thinking about a doing a membership community.”
Having participated in communities such as A-List Blogging, and observed sites like Lynda.com, Carol knew she loved the ‘all-you-can-eat’ concept: the idea of delivering huge amounts of content and value for a low price – without suffering a loss of profit.
Yet, Carol had no idea how she would physically go about creating her own membership site. She calls herself a ‘technological idiot’.
Then in the spring of 2011, a little more than two years since she started blogging, she attended a blogging conference in Chicago where a revelation struck her:
“It’s time to stop musing about creating a community and create it right now! In 90 days, I want to launch it. The technology’s never going to get easier for me. I just have to figure it out. I have to hire people to help.”
And that’s what she did. Upon her return, she hired designers, web masters and enlisted the help of fellow A-Listers to help her through the learning curve and get her membership site launched. It took a little longer than her ambitious deadline of 60 days – but by the end of July, her site was launched.
Tice had only about 1,000 subscribers when she launched – a relatively small list – but she used SurveyMonkey to ask them how much they’d be willing to pay for membership of such a site, what they would want to see happen there, how often they’d prefer events to be held, and more. Then she shaped her membership community based on that feedback.
“The big problem when you launch a community is that it has to be a party right away,” says Carol.
So she preloaded her site with clients who had already been mentored one-on-one by her. All these people were awarded lifetime free membership. Then she offered everyone who’d filled out her survey a lower per-month membership rate. It was a limited-time offer, but the lower rate would last as long as they stayed members.
Between these two offers she managed to fill her community with about 100 people. It was the magic number.
The Freelance Writing Den features a weekly event of some kind, usually with an expert but sometimes just with Carol or her partner. They offer theme topics regularly and members can ask questions before the weekly presentation.
This is a great strategy, says Carol, because you avoid that awkward moment of silence after asking, “Do you have any questions?” Preloaded questions stimulate those listening to ask more questions.
Before someone suggested that she close the doors to the Freelance Writing Den, Carol got a steady stream of maybe one or two new members per day.
After closing down access for one month, 60 people were clamoring to join on the first day she reopened. “At the administrative end, it was also a huge thrill,” she says. All the administrative tasks could be taken care of at once with this new system.
Originally Carol had dreamed of reaching 500 members, in perhaps a few years. “We hit that mark just before the first year ended. It honestly blew my mind and I highly recommend having wait lists for everything you do,” she says.
Now Carol has waiting lists for all her premium courses. When she opens the course, or the membership site doors, she has minimal marketing to do.
Carol believes there’s a triad of primal needs that people are looking to fill. Anything you create to help people, including a membership site, must meet at least one of these.
The three needs are: to earn more money, to save more money, or to feel happier, more productive, more thrilled to be alive. Carol focuses on helping writers make more money. If you can meet all three needs you are doing even better.
A membership site is much more technically complex and costly than a blog. Carol compares it to opening a retail store. Like a brick and mortar store, a membership community is a business that will have significant costs and many technical demands that you can’t execute on your own.
For example, most memberships sites require at least four different types of software that must interact with each other.
Although Carol initially launched without it, her affiliate program is now a feature she is most proud of. “You have to let people share the success,” she says. Once people participate in your site and see the value, it’s important to give them the opportunity to make their own membership free by referring new members. It’s win/win.
Additionally, forum moderators receive free membership. “The magical thing is that when you create a membership community, you create something of value to other people, but it really costs you nothing to do that,” she says.
People are paying for access to you and your expertise. You are like their guru. Therefore, a membership site may not be the right business model for people who are aspiring to a 4-hour work week.
Although she relies on, and pays, other experts to teach and create information for her site, Carol makes herself readily available to answer questions and she spends quite a bit of time preparing content for the site.
“This is like a huge coach-athon, where 500 people are being coached by me and my partner and all the other experts.”
Although it may not be a ticket to spending most of your week on the beach, a membership site can provide you a rewarding way to earn an income while helping others.
You can watch Carol’s interview in the video below.
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Author: A-List Team