I’ve just watched a short video of two people, Jeff and Marilyn, talking about making money running online memberships.
Jeff, who was hosting the interview, runs a membership program teaching people how to start and run their own profitable memberships where people pay a monthly fee to access specific content.
The woman being interviewed has a website and newsletter in the nutrition and herbalism niche. She sells a couple of eBooks from her website, but she wanted to take it to the next level and run a monthly membership.
She believes that what she shares with the world could help a lot of people and her vision is to have one million people in her membership.
One million sounds a lot, I want to say that it would be impossible, it is a HUUUUGE number, but with the internet being a global thing with over 5 billion daily users, it could be possible.
It does depend on what you offer.
Peloton has over 5.9 million members on its platform. 2.33 million of them subscribe to Peloton’s connected fitness membership (£24p/m here in the UK) of which 874,000 are digital-only subscribers.
Peloton offers a lot such as product discounts, training and shared activities.
But it goes to show that it is possible to have over a million subscribers online, however, you have got to be really driven and motivated to build a business up to that level.
Jeff mentioned another woman who runs a membership and her vision was to have 100,000 people paying her just $9 per month to access her content. That would give her a rather decent $900,000 (£718,326 ATOW) per month.
That’s probably more doable than having one million subscribers.
For most people though, having a membership with just a few hundred people would be more achievable and very beneficial.
Just 200 people paying £10 is £2,000 a month which I imagine for most people would be more than useful in life.
Even more so when you consider that a monthly membership does not have to require much content.
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During the interview, Jeff mentioned that he was a big fan of low service delivery which means not actually giving subscribers too much.
The reason he loves low service delivery is that it means you are not overwhelmed with work, and it also means low service consumption for paying members which means that they are not overwhelmed either.
Delivering too much content each month can actually put people off if they start to think that there is too much for them to study or take in.
With that in mind, Jeff suggests that you do just one 20-30 minute training session and perhaps a live Q&A session… per month.
Those two sessions, maybe delivered two weeks apart, will mean nothing more than an hour’s work tops for you. More than enough for the membership each month.
Could you spend at least one hour a month creating new content for a membership?
Obviously, there is more than just one hour’s work as you need to get people to join your membership. They won’t just appear and join once you set your membership live.
People need to be shown your products and services, and that means creating and publishing content online that directs people to them like road signs.
Each piece of content is a sign pointing back to your paid-for products.
Before you begin to fear that creating these online ‘road signs’ is going to be a lot of hard and time-consuming work, it doesn’t have to be.
Just like me, Jeff is a big fan of repurposing content.
In one example, he talked about the time he wrote a weekly article for a local newspaper when he worked as a counsellor.
As soon as the newspaper published his article on the Monday, on the following Wednesday he would go to a local radio station and do one three minute live session talking about the content from that article.
He would then record a further three minute session which was aired on the Friday.
People would often ask him if he got paid for the time he talked on the radio, his answer was ‘not directly’. The reason he was doing the short radio show was because it was free advertising.
How much would it have cost him to have six minutes of radio advertising a week?
By doing those short sessions, he was getting six minutes of free advertising each week where he and his knowledge were the main focus.
Basically, people were getting to know him. His name was being broadcast far and wide… well, to the local community that is.
The local community would then know who to go to when they needed specific services due to the fact he was becoming a local celebrity.
That twice weekly three minute slot on the radio was a powerful ‘road sign’.
In a previous article I talked about a really simple way of creating content, similar to Jeff’s radio slot, which would be ideal for creating ‘road signs’.
It doesn’t take up a lot of your time either. You could get quite a fair few of these ‘road signs’ made each week.
Plus… it is actually a very easy way to create the content for a membership.
It is also very cheap to do which is pretty good when you consider that it could earn you thousands of pounds in return.
Discover more here:
How To Create Profitable Content Quickly
Kind regards.
John Harrison
PS… This is perhaps one of the easiest methods of creating content that can help grow a profitable online business.
Plus, it can be a lot of fun to do too.
Here’s that link again: