How to choose and validate your membership idea

Welcome to the first edition of The Membership Lab Newsletter

This monthly newsletter will give practical tips and strategies to leverage your expertise, make a bigger impact, gain some time back and achieve financial stability.

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In this month’s newsletter we’re diving into adding a recurring revenue stream to your business with a membership program. And the first step is to determine what your membership is going to be about.

But first here is our tip:

“When looking at adding a new revenue stream to your business, the solution might be closer to home than you think.”

What do I mean by that?

When speaking of adding a new revenue stream to a business, it is very tempting to think that you need to go outside of what you’ve already been doing, that you need to tap into a new audience that doesn’t know you.

While it’s a strategy, it’s not the only one.

We often forget to stop and look at what already works in our business and how we can expand on that.

This month’s membership Training

How to choose and validate your membership idea

If you’ve been thinking about the membership model and are attracted by the recurring income aspect, you are going to love this article.

Many people really go about this the wrong way and start with the tech , or creating content, when in fact there is some ground work you need to do to pick and validate your idea.

I am going to outline for you the exact steps that you need to take to ensure that you get on the right track.

Step 1- Choosing your audience

The first step is to choose your audience. And there are really on 4 audiences you can serve.

Audience #1 - Your past clients

This audience is the easiest one because they already trust you. In fact you are probably leaving money on the table if you don’t have a recurring support offer for them after they have worked with you.

Think about it:

• ?they have already given you money and have established authority
• If you got them results, why would they go somewhere else if you can continue to support them?
• They are easy to talk to, you can call them, or send them an email and start the conversation.

This is the easiest audience to support because you’ve already done a lot of the work to build the relationship and the trust.

Audience #2 - Your list

This audience represents people that have some level of trust in you. They have probably signed up to one of your webinars or workshop, they might have signed up to one of your freebies, they are on your newsletter and they know you for what you do.

This audience can be a bit harder to engage with especially if you haven’t communicated with them in a while. But you should be able to segment that list and pick a specific segment that is active (they are opening your emails, they are clicking on links,..)

Audience #3 - Your Followers

This audience is usually much larger than the two previous ones and there is a bit more work involved to engage with them.

Audience #4 - Others

This is the case where you’re a business coach for example and you want to start a membership teaching painting. Nobody knows you even paint, let alone that you can teach that. So it’s a brand new audience that you’ll need to build and nurture.

This is the hardest audience to pick, it’s the same process as someone starting a business where nobody knows what you do.

So you have 4 different audiences you can tap into to create that membership and build that recurring income.

So what do you do now?

For each of this audiences ask yourself:

• Do I like them?
• Do I want to work with them?
• Do I believe I can help them?

-> Pick 1 or 2 from the 4 audiences and then let’s get to Step 2.

Step 2 - Find a Recurring problem you can solve for them

The next step is to identify a recurring problem that they have and that you know you can help them solve.?

It is critical that you don’t try to GUESS what they want but that you go out there and figure it out.?

There are different strategies to engage, based on the audience and the level of trust they have in you.

So what do you do now?

1. start reaching out to the 1 or 2 audiences you chose and figure out what they need help with, if that’s a recurring problem and if that’s something you are equipped to help.
2. When you see interest, start building an interest list of these people. That will give you a warm list to tap into and launch to when you’re ready to test the idea.

Once you have identified your audience and the recurring problem that you want to solve for theme, it's time to design you program!

Step 3 - Designing your recurring solution

Most people start with this step, thinking that they know what people want and not being really clear on who they really want to help. That leads to confusion, frustrations and many give up before the membership even sees the light of day.

Your program is essentially a recurring solution to a recurring problem.

It needs to have 3 important pieces that I call the CSA Model:

1. Content:? that’s your expertise, what they come to you for. That can be in the form or mini courses, workshops, private podcast, downloadables, videos,, a combination of these,..
2. Support: this is to ensure that they never stay stuck or overwhelmed. That can have many forms to: from a community element right inside your membership, a facebook group, a slack channel, a circle community, a contact form, a help line. Live Office hours,.. You get the idea.
3. Accountability: because let’s face it we all need it! Accountability is a piece of the membership that has been neglected for a long time. It’s coming to the surface more and more as we are noticing members need hand holding to stay accountable and committed.

For the right member, accountability will be the piece that gets them engaged, getting results and therefore stay months after months.

There is lots to talk about in the design of a membership program. There are many models, some are more community oriented, some are almost exclusively content.? The key is to build the membership and choose the model that fits your ideal member and that provides the solution they are looking for.

I hope you enjoyed this training.

If you’d like to get more clarity on what that could look like for your business, you can book a free focused chat with me here. I have worked with over 300 entrepreneurs 1 on 1 and I am sure i can get you some clarity on your membership idea:?https://themembershiplab.com/focused-chat

And remember..

GREAT NOW is better than PERFECT NEVER.

CLIENT SHOUT OUT

Here is a quick shoutout to 3 of my amazing clients for taking action, moving forward for launching their memberships.

Congratulations to:

?Jane Frankland for launching the Source. A membership designed to support women in Cybersecurity.? Jane did her first launch in jan and got over 100 members rather quickly. More about Jane: https://jane-frankland.com/

Gitanjali Treyvorrow-Seymour for launching The High Definition of You Online Portal. Gita is known as the Possibilist. Gita delivers impactful learning & development solutions and executive coaching designed to improve the quality of thinking, communication, engagement and subsequent performance of individuals.

More about Gita here: https://highdefinitionyou.com/

And Eloise Gagnon who successfully launched the Power Player Academy. Eloise is teaching Self-Confidence, Emotional Resilience, Effective Communication, Assertiveness, Decisiveness, and Empathy to powerful leaders through the Academy.

More about Eloise: https://eloisegagnon.com/ppa/

I hope that these inspire you to be curious and see if that could be the next thing for your business.

I hope you enjoyed this first edition of the Membership lab newsletter! Please let me know in the comments what you think and if there are any topics that you’d like me to cover!

With love,

Nathalie

PS: if you’d like our help with designing and/or building your membership platform, this is what we do, so send me a DM or book a call here and let’s talk.