The Anti-Netflix Membership Site

Many moons ago in a land far, far, away, there was a girl who wanted to create a membership site for her business. She researched all the best options out there and found a platform that was expensive and hard to learn.

She did not let that stop her, though, and she persevered over several 12-hour days over the course of several months to create her new membership site, OnlineBizU. OBU was a forerunner in membership sites that had content geared to explaining the “how-to” for almost every avenue of small business marketing.

Over time, the site grew and grew and grew. The girl felt compelled to feed the site more and more and more, as, at the time, all membership sites contained a lot of content. The site was hungry and eagerly gobbled up all the content she fed it.

One day, the girl started getting messages from site members. While they appreciated the content, they found it all overwhelming and didn’t know where to begin once they joined. Instead of vowing to slog through the content, they just avoided logging into the site.

That frustrated the girl, as she saw this site as a labor of love of sharing everything she had learned about marketing over the years.

Again, the girl tried to be creative in her solutions, dividing the content into topical areas in an attempt to assuage the concerns of the members. She again spent many hours on the site, trying to fix the problem of too much content.

However, while trying to fix the problem of too much content, she was also feeding additional content to the site. In many ways, it had become the Netflix for marketing training -- and a monster whose hunger could never be sated.

One day, the girl awoke tired and dispirited. She was exhausted from?the endless appetite of the membership site and the effort it required to keep feeding it. The thrill was gone, as B.B. King would say, and she never ever wanted to run another membership site ever, ever again.

Finally, she found the courage to huff and puff and blow down the membership site, and she removed it all from the Internet, and peace reigned in her life once more.

However, several years later, she began to hear whispers of membership sites again. Although she didn’t miss the effort it took to run her site, she did miss the recurring monthly revenue (RMR) it brought to her business.

She let herself be lured by the whispers of RMR and fell prey to its charms. Again, she found herself buying different membership/course platforms on AppSumo or those recommended by colleagues and trying them out for a new membership site idea she had.

However, this time around, she knew that she didn’t want expensive site software, nor did she want to be saddled with the onerous task of constantly feeding the membership beast.

She played with various software and concepts over the last two years, but there was always something wrong with the solution she chose. Sometimes the software wasn’t easy to make work. Other times she was required to enter the same info multiple times to get the result that she wanted.

She became disillusioned and had just about decided that another membership site was just not in the cards for her.

Then, she read an email from Ryan Lee, one of the guys who had introduced her to membership sites on that day long, long, ago. Ryan proposed a new type of membership site, a micro-membership site, that delivered content but didn’t overwhelm the members.

How does this stripped-down micro-membership site model work? Well, it couldn’t be simpler. It involves getting a member to pay the monthly fee and adding them to an email list. Then, the content is delivered by email. Sometimes the content is a message in the email, while other times the email contains a link to downloadable audio, video, or PDF file.

Easy peasy. No membership software to pay for. No membership site to navigate, either for the members or the owner.

Newer members don’t get the previously released content that they didn’t pay for, and there is no content vault to have to maintain for all of the members. Sure, there are probably some tech support issues with some members not getting an email or two, but that’s just everyday life for an online business owner.

Yes, there is a concern that members would forward the email containing the paid content to 300 of their closest friends, but if someone is bound and determined to cheat the system, they’re going to find a way to do that regardless of the safeguards in place.?

The girl decided not to worry about what she couldn’t control.

Despite personally experiencing the ease of Ryan’s membership model, the girl still resisted the idea, telling herself that it just wouldn’t work for her.

Finally, one morning, the scales fell off of her eyes and she wondered why she was being so silly. The membership site built on email was a fantastic idea that solved many of the issues she was dreading.

The moral of the story: Don’t make your business life more complicated than it has to be. Sometimes the simplest solution is the most elegant and efficient.

Do you have an idea for monthly recurring revenue you’ve been mulling over? Let me know if I can help with a?Brainstorming with Donna ?session. Brainstorming about marketing is one of my favorite activities. If you have an idea but don't know what comes next or have several ideas and are not sure which deserves your attention or are just feeling stuck, let's talk. The price for a 30-minute session is just $49. After you pay and sign up for a time on my calendar, I'll ask you for some more info via an online form.