Membership Masters Podcast Preview – Stu McLaren of Tribe on Membership Sites, Traffic, Conversion, and Retention

Summary: Stu McLaren is a legend in the membership space. He got his start in the membership game as a co-founder of Wishlist Member, one of the most widely used membership plug-ins for WordPress. For the last 12 years Stu has been working intimately with tens of thousands of authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, and business owners. All, to help them transform what they know, love, and do, and transform it into a recurring revenue. In today’s amazing podcast interview, Stu and I ‘geek out’ on memberships. We dive deep into the three areas Stu believes membership owners must focus on to succeed. We take a person by person, role by role look at Stu’s team, so you can learn what a high-level membership looks like. What You’ll Learn: * How content is free but curation is not. * All about the membership model. * How to go through your membership journey. * External and internal marketing. * Look at the fundamentals. * High energy vs. Steady Energy. * What does your team look like? * Everyone can start a membership site with their God-given talents and experiences. * Community 101. Content is free but curation is not. Curation is the step-by-step the blueprint. It’s grabbing your audience’s hand and shining the light on the path for them. Which, is exactly what a membership community offers people! Like Stu said, people are not paying for information, they are paying for clarity. They want to know what the next step is. They don’t want to think about figuring things out for themselves, they want to be told what the next step is to get there easier and faster. The membership model. We kind of stumbled upon the membership model ourselves. When we launched our first products they were lesson plans. We did it the hard way living launch to launch and spending all our energy on making new sales each month. We were like, ‘hey, I’ll make lesson plans for August if you’ll buy them.’ Then we met James Schramko. And he said, ‘show me what you’re doing.’ Sits there and he says, ‘that’s a membership, silly.’ Then it just dawned on us like, yeah it is! We just needed to get people to pay the first time, then they’ll keep paying the next month. That year, our church launched ‘The Next Steps Station.’ Which was like a barn-like structure by the door. So you couldn’t get out of the building unless you walked by it. It was sort of like the Thank You page, you can’t go forward until you go by it. It was basically saying your next step is to meet someone, then join a small group, then a class. This goes for both what our church was doing and what our membership needed to become. Your membership is a journey. Your goal as a membership owner is to figure out where they are and what their next step is. Once you do that your members are not going to leave. Stu does this through he calls ‘Success Path.’ Which is basically accessing where members are when they come in and where they want to be in the end game. As he said people don’t go from not knowing how to paint to becoming the next Picasso overnight. It is a journey. If you help them focus on the next step they’ll make progress. External and internal marketing. Marketing does not stop when someone is in the membership. When we first got into the membership model we looked our retention position like a customer support role. If the last thing they did was a course in the membership check in and make sure they watch one that coorelates with it. If you can do that, the extends lifetime value. That has to be a part of your membership even if you d...

Membership Masters Podcast Preview – Stu McLaren of Tribe on Membership Sites, Traffic, Conversion, and Retention

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