How to grow a membership website on Kajabi
Learn the 3 Steps to Building a Profitable Membership Site
The Groundwork
The Goal of Membership Marketing
Before we go into detail about Membership Sites and the Membership Marketing Formula. Let’s do a quick review of the K-Commerce business growth system and see where Membership Sites fits into this system. You’ll remember from the Orientation class that there are 4 stages of marketing your K-commerce business.
Attention
The first stage is Attention. So the goal of the attention stage is to build an audience of loyal fans that will spread your message and buy your products.
The second stage is Subscription. In the subscription stage, the goal is to create a predictable system for acquiring leads and email subscribers so you can nurture them with content and offer them your products and services.
Acquisition
The third stage is Acquisition. In the acquisition stage, the goal is to convert the attention and leads you’ve acquired into customers. A great way to do this is by offering a chance for your leads to go deeper with you by joining your paid community in the form of a membership site.
Monetization
And the last stage is Monetization. In the monetization stage, you’ll create more products so you can increase revenue and grow your K-commerce business. If you already have launched an online course or two, then diversifying your revenue streams by launching a subscription product like a membership site is strategic as it can help you create scalable, recurring revenue.
Why a Profitable Membership is Critical to Your Business Success
Selling one-off courses can create a “feast or famine” type of online business where income is sporadic. With courses, you only make money when you launch your list or when new people join your list and go through your evergreen funnel.
If you already sell online courses, adding a membership site can be a strategic long-term play - not only for revenue growth but for stability and diversification in case your web traffic dries up or shifts considerably. The recurring revenue of a membership smooths out the peaks and valleys of your promotional calendar and gives you predictable revenue every month.
Also If you already have a system in place for getting fresh leads and you have built your sales copy chops so you can actually convert a prospect into a customer, then it’s much easier to make more money off of that existing customer than it is to go out and get another one from scratch. Studies have shown that existing customers are 16X more likely to buy something from you than non-customers. So many of your current course customers will likely want to join your membership.
The Membership Site Formula
Over the past 10 years, I’ve built 3 different multi-six-figure membership sites, in two niches, at 3 wildly different price points. During a decade of running memberships, I’ve learned that there is a formula to crafting a highly desirable and profitable membership.
The Right Components + The Right Success Path + The Right Promotional Strategy
= Success
There’s a bonus component: Commitment. To have a successful membership you have to be committed to it for the long haul. This is one of the big cons of memberships is that they take ongoing work AND enough time to become really profitable. But if you do it right your workload stays the same each month but as you add new members you increase your income significantly.
Here are some examples of successful Kajabi Heroes and their membership sites.
Outline Your Membership Components
The Three C's of Membership Sites
Most people think memberships are just one thing but there are actually three key components to a successful membership.
- Content
- Coaching
- Community
Most people leave out one of these components OR put too much emphasis on one over the other (usually content).
Content - What You Need to Deliver Every Month
The Never-ending Online Course.
Gives you a chance to dive into small topics with depth, but not have to create an entire course on the subject. (Ex: my tripwire funnel)
How much new core content each month?
I recommend one new piece of video content per month.
What format?
I deliver a 30-45 minute video masterclass to my members each month (typically a slide show presentation). I also include the PDF slides, audio download and a PDF worksheet to help my members apply what they learned in the training.
What topics?
Your content should always help move your members closer to the transformation your membership promises. Consider 4-5 content buckets within that goal. Example for my membership: Big topic - reaching six figures a year of income. 4 content buckets: “Getting Traffic” - “Product Creation” - “Marketing & Selling” - “Life & Business”
How in-depth?
As much or as little as you want. That’s the beauty - it doesn’t have to be an entire course. Just give them something new to consider and implement that month.
Coaching - Offering Direct Access to You
Live access to you brings tremendous value. This is a key differentiator between your membership and your course - even your free public content. They are getting direct live coaching from you. Specifically, this is a group coaching session where they can submit questions and answer them one at a time.
How often will you have them?
I offer one live 90 minute coaching call a month, but you can go live as often as you have margin.
What platform will you use? (Zoom, FB Live, YouTube Live, etc).
Always give people a chance to submit their questions ahead of time if they can’t attend live. Then answer those questions on the call in addition to the live questions, and post the replay in the community when you’re done.
BONUS: Have you or your assistant add in time stamps for each question.
Community - How to Facilitate Real Engagement
“People come for the content but they stay for the community” - Ryan Lee
Think of what kind of format you want to use for your community. (forum, FB group, Kajabi community).
What type of conversation topics will your community consist of?
Are there common topics of interest in your niche? For example, in my community, I have a “Kajabi” topic because so many of my students use Kajabi for their online business and have Kajabi specific technical questions. Always include (and remind people about) a “Share Your Wins” topic. Train your people to share wins big or small. This creates a pattern of members seeing other members get results, which motivates them to get results and share, and the pattern continues. It also gives you automatic testimonials to screengrab for your sales page and email promotions!
Community Manager
This person will welcome new people, start conversations, make sure everyone gets a response and put out any fires. Consider a super fan member and give them a lifetime membership for free. I’ve done this twice.
Challenges, Contests, and Giveaways
Another couple of C's you can add are Challenges and Contests (and giveaways). It depends on your membership and your niche, it might be cool to have some challenges (weekly, monthly) or run some contests from time to time.
Example - One of my own memberships called Recording Revolution VIP has a monthly original song recording challenge. Members are challenged to record and upload an original song (no matter how good it is) and then they are entered into a random drawing to win a $200 gift card to buy audio equipment.
You can also have members vote on their favorites and award the winners that way!
These challenges are completely optional. But something to consider is will you use them? Which ones and what are the specifics? If you can't think of one, no problem. You don't have to have one when you start or ever. But you can always sprinkle it in from time to time. One thing you can consider is even seasonal challenges that maybe revolve around something in your industry that happens at a certain time of year.
Your Monthly Checklist - Putting Them All Together
To make things easier for you as you roll out (or overhaul) your membership here is your monthly checklist. The big idea is simple: Plan to email something to your members each week. Here’s an example.
Week 1 - Deliver that month's new content
Week 2 - Email out a student highlight
Week 3 - Remind members about live coaching sessions
Week 4 - Highlight a conversation
Design Your Membership Success Path
The Number One Reason People Cancel Memberships
Memberships are great - assuming nobody cancels. But that’s obviously unrealistic. Still, one of our money-making dials as a membership owner is to reduce churn (the percentage of members who cancel each month). So let’s talk about that.
Do you know what the biggest insecurity of membership owners is? - not delivering enough value. If they have a soul then they want to make sure their members feel that it’s worth it to keep paying them each month so they do what only seems logical.
They stuff their memberships with TOO much content.
But here’s the crazy thing: The number one reason people cancel a membership is because of overwhelm. Think about why that is. They are paying for this membership, getting TONS of great content that they can’t consume because like you, they are busy. They feel guilty and know that it’s a waste. So they cancel!
Not because it’s bad content, it’s just too much!
The good news is that there is a solution. The Solution is the Success Path.
The Power of a Success Path
Learned this from Stu McLaren. Stu co-founded Wishlist Member, a membership plugin for Wordpress. He then learned from the thousands of customers (all of whom were membership site owners) what the key to a successful membership was. And do you know what he discovered? The Success Path.
A success path is a series of steps or stages that you create that help get your members from where they ARE to where they WANT TO BE in the area that your membership site covers. It takes the ultimate transformation of what your membership can help them achieve and breaks it down into steps so that your members see progress from Day 1.
A Typical Success Path has:
- 3-7 steps or stages, with names!
- Milestones for each stage
- Action steps to get to each new stage
- A description of what a member is thinking, feeling and doing at each stage
Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps as an example:
BABY STEP 1 - Save $1,000 for your starter emergency fund.
BABY STEP 2 - Pay off all debt (except the house) using the debt snowball.
BABY STEP 3 - Save 3–6 months of expenses in a fully funded emergency fund.
BABY STEP 4 - Invest 15% of your household income in retirement.
BABY STEP 5 - Save for your children’s college fund.
BABY STEP 6 - Pay off your home early.
BABY STEP 7 - Build wealth and give.
My Six Figure Coaching Community success path as an example:
Spark Stage - Earning less than $1k per month.
Description: You have an online business up and running but it’s generating less than $1k per month. You might be creating regular content and offering an online course or membership but you feel stuck. You think that there must be something broken in your sales funnel, copy, or strategy that is prohibiting you from reaching your income goals.
Milestones: You have a website up and running. You have an email list created. You have at least one digital product launched. You are creating regular content at least once a week.
Stage 2 - Push ($1-5k month)
Description: At this stage you are pushing your little income stream into an a legitimate business venture. You’re seeing more traffic, email opt-ins, and sales coming in. You are starting to get noticed in your niche and beginning to do collaborations. You’re feeling confident that this thing has potential and have either hit your “minimum monthly target” income or are close.
Milestones: You have at least two products launched. You’ve done at least one collaboration or guest post/video with someone in your niche who has a bigger audience than you. You have one good evergreen email sequence in place that’s converting between 0.5% and 1% of new subscribers.
Stage 3 - Scale ($5k-10k month)
Description: At this stage, things are really rolling. You’re feeling great that you make more than the median household income in the US but you know you have more potential! You’re getting strategic with your content strategy, thinking about improving your sales copy, and cooking up new product ideas that your audience can’t wait to buy. This stage is less about changing things and more about fine tuning, automating, and focusing. Seeing what works and doubling down on it!
Milestones: You have at least 3 products launched, including a membership of some kind. You have at least 4 scarcity driven promotions planned for the year (open/close a product, holiday sale, limited time bonus, etc). Your business only requires 30 hours of work per week or less.
Stage 4 - Freedom ($10k month and beyond)
Description: You are free. You have a passive income style online business generating at least $10k a month that allows you to work where, when, and how much you want to. You wake up every morning excited to get to share your passion and help impact people all over the world. You’re thinking about new products to build and content to share and ways to grow your brand and reach more people. You have financial stability and peace knowing that predictable revenue is always coming in.
Milestones: You have one ultra premium product that’s 10x the cost of your base product. Your business generates at least $10k a month in predictable revenue. This business requires 20 hours a week or less of work. You have at least one part time team member.
The beauty of this path is that people can self identify and have clear steps of measurable, unambiguous progress.
Create and Name Your Success Path Stages
It’s easiest to begin by creating the first and last stages.
Start with where most of your students find themselves (Stage 1) then map out what success would look like to them (the final Stage).
Stage 1 - If you were to poll your audience, where are the majority (80% or so) in their journey? This stage is the beginner stage and should feel relatable to most of your newer students.
Last stage - What is the dream? What is the ultimate goal for your students as it relates to your membership topic?
Then fill in the middle stages - having no fewer than 3 and no more than 7.
This takes a while to figure out not only how many stages you should have in between but how to break them down. You want each step to be doable - even if it takes a while. You don’t want it to be TOO big of a leap that they lose momentum and get stuck.
Write Out Your Descriptions for Each Stage
The description helps build empathy and connection with your members. The goal of a good description is to make them feel understood and known.
There are three questions you need to ask yourself to craft the right description for each stage.
- What is a person thinking during this stage?
- What are they feeling?
- What are they actively doing in that stage?
Remember an example of my first stage for my success path: “You have an online business up and running but it’s generating less than $1k per month. You might be creating regular content and offering an online course or membership but you feel stuck. You think that there must be something broken in your sales funnel, copy, or strategy that is prohibiting you from reaching your income goals.”
Identify the Key Milestones for Each Stage
Milestones are key.
Make sure they are unambiguous - meaning they can be answered with a yes or a no.
Your member either has achieved that milestone or she hasn’t.
Examples of milestones from my membership to know you’ve arrived at stage two the Push Stage: “You have at least two products launched. You’ve done at least one collaboration or guest post/video with someone in your niche who has a bigger audience than you. You have one good evergreen email sequence in place that’s converting between 0.5% and 1% of new subscribers.”
Here’s what’s amazing about having milestones for each stage. Your milestones for a stage become the action steps for the previous stage! This gives your members clear action steps to take and goals to shoot for to move forward in their journey.
I never had a success path in the early days and it was hard for my members to know if they were progressing and thus they weren’t sure if they should continue to pay. Having a success path has given me greater confidence as I coach my students because I can find out where they are and help them get to the next step.
Map Out Your Promotional Strategy
Pricing Your Membership
I’ve built and run 3 different membership sites all of which have done multiple six figures a year - and at three different price points. My first was $27 a month, my second was $60 a year ($5 a month), and the other is $97 a month.
Most membership sites are priced between $20-$50 per month.
However, you can go as low as $5 and as high as $100 or more per month. It all depends on what you offer and who you offer it to.
Offer two options: a monthly and an annual.
The annual should be the equivalent of 10 months at the monthly price. For example, if your membership is $25 a month, you should offer an annual option for $250 a year. The beauty of annual membership is you ensure the member pays for 10 months up front. This also creates more engaged members as they are committed for the long term.
You can even add an annual plan to your current members if monthly is all you have. When I first did this, I emailed my members and offered them a discount. The only option at the time was $27 a month. So I emailed them and the subject line went like this: Would you like to only pay $22/mo for your membership? I then offered to switch them to an annual plan. A whopping 25% of members wanted to switch!
What about free trials? While I’m not a huge fan, Free trials can be an effective way to get more people in the door who wouldn’t otherwise jump
A good conversion rate of free trial to paying member is 50%
I wouldn’t recommend starting with a free trial. Instead make the price reasonable and offer a 30-day money back guarantee.
Open vs Closed Membership
What’s the difference?
Open membership is one in which people can join any time they like. Much like an evergreen course, the membership is always available to join. A closed membership is one that only opens a few times a year, typically during a traditional launch. You can only sign up during that launch week.
Pros and Cons of each:
OPEN
Pros: you can have new people signing up all the time. Passive approach. Evergreen sales are amazing.
Cons: Not much urgency for people to join. No fear in canceling because they can always sign back up again next month. With new members joining all the time it gets harder to keep up with welcoming them and giving them a great first impression.
CLOSED
Pros: Creates urgency which increases sign-ups. Gives you more members, interactions, and testimonials. Creates exclusivity for the members.
Cons: As people churn (cancel) your income will drop until you re-open the doors for new members. You have to promote your membership regularly.
I’ve done both but I now lean to closed memberships.
The Step Up Method for Launching Your Membership
I have found that the best way to grow your membership site and keep engagement high is to not simply set a price and leave it open all the time. Instead, you need to have a step-up strategy.
The Step-Up Strategy
- Open and close 2-4 times per year
- Launch at a reduced price for “Founders”
- Eventually, increase to normal price
EXAMPLE: I launched my membership Graham’s Six Figure Coaching Community a few years ago at $47 a month. I called it my Early Bird Founders Rate. If people joined at that price and never canceled that would be their price for life. And I TOLD them this during the launch. The second time I opened the membership I raised the price to $67 a month and called it my Founders Rate. Finally, I’ve settled into the full price of $97 a month.
This works well because it incentives people to join a new community, which helps you get people inside to start conversations. Considering most people lurk in communities and don’t post, the more members you have the more engagement you’ll see in the community, which is critical to members feeling that they are a part of something active and exciting.
Just decide on your ideal final price and discount the initial launch.
The Waiting List Strategy
So if you decide to go the CLOSED membership route, what do you do with the sales page when the membership isn’t open for new members?
Utilize a waiting list on your website in between launches.
Offer some exclusive free content if they sign up for the waiting list. In essence, this becomes a lead magnet for you and creates a segment of your list that is warm since you know they are at least curious about your membership.
You can open the doors to the waiting list through a simple private email launch in between public launches.
Example of my membership Open in Jan and July. Private launch to the waitlist in April and Nov.
Conversion rates on waiting list launches are high. I’ve seen between 19% and 25% conversions on waiting lists!
Functionally this allows me to publicly only launch my membership twice a year, but on the back end, I get a small bump in revenue in between those launches giving me quarterly growth.
Four Keys to a Legit Membership Launch or Promo
Key 1
Pre-launch content (either 3 videos or a live webinar) the week before open cart.
Key 2
Scarcity. Mention the scarcity element (cart is closing) early and often in promotional emails.
Key 3
Social Proof. Screengrab early testimonials from new members and promote throughout your launch (the Amazon effect).
Key 4
Last Day Emails. Send three emails on the final day including two “courtesy” emails (Include email examples to give to customers).
If you do this right half of your sales will come on the last day.
Upsells and Cross Promotions
Maximize membership revenue by offering an upsell at checkout to one of your courses at a discounted price. Also, add an order bump featuring some downloadable workbooks or video case studies of a successful student including their repeatable playbook.
You can also run promotions to your flagship courses once or twice a year just to your members, again offering them a discount. For example, I’ll offer my Six Figure Community members a 48-hour coupon to take 25% off my course Automatic Income Academy as it’s solid foundational training that they should have.
Conversely, you can create automations for your course students to receive an email 30 days after joining a course offering them a mini launch to join your membership even though the doors are closed, and give them a bonus for joining.
Keep a private hidden version of the sales page available for these kinds of things.
Additional Resources
Help Center Articles:
How to Add and Edit Upsells and Downsells
Are Upsells and Order Bumps processed as one transaction?
What is the difference between an Upsell and Order Bump?
The Hard Truth About Memberships
As much as I love passive income - membership sites require effort. They require an ongoing commitment from you to the success of your students
The best way to ensure you stay engaged and committed is to schedule time for both the content and the community.
Try to pop into your community once a day Monday - Friday. At least 3 times a week.
Hire a community manager to stay engaged with your members and take care of any issues
Highlight student questions and wins via email broadcasts to remind people that you are in there and committed to their success
One thing my community manager suggested and we have implemented is a monthly “digest” email that includes the following: a short inspirational paragraph from me, some takeaways from that month’s masterclass, a highlighted conversation of the month from the community, three student wins to celebrate, and a preview of what new masterclass is dropping next month. We’ve found many members LOVE this, especially those who rarely log in but see all the emails we send.
Final Thoughts
Remember that a successful membership site is all about getting the formula right:
The Right Components + The Right Success Path + The Right Promotional Strategy + Your Commitment
= More money and student success than you can handle
But set realistic expectations:
- Memberships start small and build slowly
- People will cancel every month
- You will need new fresh leads
- You must be active in the community
- If launching your first membership - plan your pre-launch and launch weeks in the calendar and get to work.
If transitioning your existing membership into a healthier one, take the next step on getting the right content or success path in place before your next launch.
If you need ongoing support be sure to catch my weekly YouTube content and Graham Cochrane Show podcast.
Download your Membership Site Formula Checklist and begin taking action on building and marketing your profitable membership site!
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