Membership sites can be a fantastic way to generate more income for your coaching business… or can they?
There’s a bit more to creating a profitable membership site than pressing the “publish” button and hoping for the best. You need to pick the right pricing strategy and optimize your content strategically to make sure you’re generating a profit each month. Otherwise, it could actually end up costing your business more money than you make!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In this post, I’ll show you how to set your membership site up for success and ensure it is profitable the moment you launch.
What is a Membership Site?
Imagine if you combined the coaching content and courses you offer with a recurring subscription model that brings in money every month.
That’s a membership site.
A membership site is a website that offers exclusive content, products, services, or experiences to its members. The beauty of it? You charge for access.
Membership sites come in all shapes and sizes, but they are usually built around a specific niche/interest and provide value to their members through regularly updated content and services. I’ll show you pricing strategies later on along with a few tips to ensure it's profitable.
The Benefits of a Membership Site for Coaches
There are tons of benefits coaches can reap from launching a membership site, but if I had to pick just a few here are my favorites:
If you’re already sold on launching your membership site, read on for tips to set it up for success and make it as profitable as possible.
What are the Keys to a Successful Membership Site?
It’s basic arithmetic: the more you can charge for your membership site the bigger your profit will be.
The best way to charge a higher amount (other than asking for more) is to amp up the quality of your site and set it apart from the rest. Here are three tips to make your membership site truly shine:
These are just a few tips to set your membership site up for success. Next, I’ll show you pricing strategies you can use to help maximize your profits.
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Want a handy checklist for all the steps for how to create a membership site?
How to Price a Membership Site
Before launching your membership site, you need to have a clear, easy-to-understand pricing strategy - and that’s going to require a bit more than picking a number out of a hat and hoping for the best.
Pricing is part art and part science. It takes practice and experience to get it right. But the following tips will set your site up for success:
Check out my complete guide to pricing your membership site for more tips and best practices. The price you set is obviously a big piece of how profitable your site is, but there are other ways you can maximize your profits by optimizing your audience and costs - I’ll show you how to do that next.
3 Ways to Make Your Membership Site Profitable
You know how to stand out from the crowd and how to price your membership site, now here are three quick tips to making it as profitable as possible:
Build Your Audience Before You Launch
Membership sites can make money, but they require a bit of upfront investment to get started.
You need to:
And I’m just getting started.
Between the platform and a few courses, your initial investment could be a few thousand dollars or more which means you’ll have a bit of work to do to break even so you aren’t costing your business money.
That means having customers up front rather than chasing after them to play catch-up.
The easiest way to set your membership site up for success is to have an audience you launch it to. Having an audience of people who already know, like, and trust you makes it infinitely easier to build up your customer base early on and begin generating a profit. Check out my guide to building an audience for an online course for tips.
Set up Recurring Payments
Avoid the “feast and famine” of coaching and client work by turning your membership site into a source of consistent income for your business.
Yes, some successful membership sites get by with one-time payments. But to maximize your chance of a profit I recommend going with recurring payments. Whether you charge monthly, quarterly, or yearly, this will give you a source of income that can build up over time.
Streamline Your Content Creation with PLR
Creating content for your membership site will be one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) drivers of costs. To keep your members active and eager to stay subscribed, you’ll need a steady stream of fresh content to engage them.
A single course can cost up to $2,000 to create (or more), so if you want to launch a new course every other month you could be looking at upwards of $10,000 per year just to keep your members engaged. You can cut that spend by 90% by purchasing ready-to-sell PLR courses.
PLR (Private Label Rights) is a license for content that allows you to purchase and resell under your name and brand (similar to white label). You can purchase a dozen or so courses and quickly customize and rebrand them - giving you a year’s worth of content with little more than a weekend’s worth of work.
Don’t let time or costs hold you back from launching a membership site that propels your coaching business to multiple six figures!
Scale Your Coaching Income with a Membership Site Today
Want to get off to a fast start with your membership site?
Speed up your path to profitability by filling it with high-quality content in a snap thanks to PLR.
PLR (private label rights) content is content that you can rebrand and sell as your own.
When you purchase a license to any of our ready-to-go course kits, you get the rights to edit it any way you want (or leave it as-is) and add your own name and branding.
Click the button below to download my free checklist for creating a membership site with PLR and save 30% on your first order from my shop. Launch your next membership site like lightning and watch your revenue soar!
Enjoy!