How to Add a Membership Site to Your Coaching Business

Tired of trading time for money?

Or how about the fear that your biggest client could leave at a moment’s notice and put you in a tough spot to replace them? Your cash flow could plummet in an instant!

Coaching is a great way to monetize your expertise, but it’s labor-intensive. Delivering for your clients (and finding new ones) takes up hours each month, leaving you wondering if coaching full-time was the right call.

If this sounds familiar, I have an answer for you: launch a membership site. 

A membership site is a lighter-touch version of your coaching practice that you can offer at scale. This allows you to diversify your revenue, build passive income, and scale your expertise.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Read on as I show you how to add a membership site to your coaching offer.

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. This is a completely different offer than a standard one-on-one coaching engagement, though, so it’s important to get the positioning and messaging right. Otherwise, you risk confusing existing or potential clients. 

I’ll walk you through the steps to add a membership site offer to your coaching business in a minute.

Reasons Coaches Should Launch a Membership Site

There are tons of benefits you’ll get 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 a list of membership site models you can choose from.

Membership Site Models to Consider

Membership site models come in all shapes and sizes. Depending on your specific offering, niche, and audience here are the most common models to choose from:

See my guide to pricing your membership site for more information. Then, pick your model and move on to the next section for a step-by-step guide to launching a membership site for your coaching business.

Steps to Add a Membership Site to Your Coaching Business

Now that you know the basics, let’s walk through the exact steps to follow if you are going to add a membership site to your coaching offering. 

Define your membership offering

The first step is to define your offer. This will be the basic construction, topic, and price for your membership site so don’t rush this step. 

Take some time to consider:

Remember that your pricing should reflect the value provided, but you also need to consider what your target market is willing to pay. I recommend setting clear, measurable goals for your membership site, such as target member numbers or revenue projections, to guide your work.

Stumped and need some inspiration? Check out these great membership site examples to help you brainstorm.

Choose a platform

Selecting the right platform is crucial for the success of your membership site. It can literally make or break your site, so don’t rush this step either.

I created a complete guide to the eight best membership site platforms, but for a quick summary some of the top platforms I recommend are:

When choosing a platform, consider your technical skills, budget, and long-term plans. Most offer a free trial too, giving you some hands-on experience with the platform before you buy.

Plan your content

Next up, fill your site with content. 

If you already have coaching content and courses on hand then you have a big head start on filling your membership site with quality content for new customers. Consider setting up a content calendar to ensure that you have new content available for your customers throughout the year so they continue to get value from subscribing.

You might be thinking that this was supposed to save time, not create more work. I have a secret for you: use PLR to create content for your membership site. You can purchase PLR courses, quizzes, and workbooks to fill your membership site with a year’s worth of content without breaking a sweat (or the bank). 

Position the membership as a complementary offering

Let’s say you offer one-on-one coaching engagements for $1,000 per month. Wouldn’t a $100/month membership site offer confuse your existing and potential clients?

It can. That’s why you need to frame your membership site as an extension of your one-on-one services, not a replacement. This approach allows you to maintain the high-touch, personalized nature of your one-on-one work while offering a more scalable option for lower-priced customers.

Promote Your New Membership Site

Once you have your pricing model, website, and content set, it’s time to get the word out and promote your new membership site. 

You’re in luck, I created an ultimate guide to promoting a membership site (including 10 marketing channels to use). Here are a few of my favorite ways to promote a site:

Check out that guide for an in-depth breakdown of each channel.

Common Mistakes Coaches Make When Launching a Membership Site

Before you leave this post and launch, let me stop you for a minute. 

There are three common mistakes that coaches make when launching a membership site that you need to be aware of. They are:

Overcomplicating the offer

Many coaches, in their well-intentioned enthusiasm to provide value, try to include too much content or too many features in their initial membership offering. This can overwhelm you and your customers. 

Instead, it's better to start with a focused, high-quality core offering that addresses a specific need or problem for your target audience. You can always expand things to new topics or types of content later on, but the simplest is best when you start out.

Underestimating the time commitment

It’s easy to underestimate the time and effort required to run a successful membership site beyond the initial setup. Often, coaches focus so much on creating the initial content and launching the site that they forget to account for the ongoing upkeep after launching. 

While a membership site is much more passive than one-on-one coaching, it’s not completely “set and forget.” You’ll need a steady stream of new content to keep your audience engaged, which is where PLR content can come in handy!

Neglecting the community aspect

Remember also that you’re building a community, not just sharing content and hoping it makes an impact. 

Failing to cultivate your community can lead to churn (customers canceling) and members feeling isolated or demotivated. Actively encourage and facilitate member interactions, whether through discussion forums, live Q&A sessions, member spotlights, or collaborative projects. 

Unsure About Adding a Membership Site to Your Coaching Business? Meet Jane

I know what you’re thinking.

This sounds like a lot of work. It can be, but it’s also worth it. Just ask Jane, one of my customers and a successful membership site owner. 

Jane is an expert in a number of things, including WordPress, WooCommerce, website and blog design, and teaching online courses. She helps creative professionals and small business owners get noticed online and generate leads. Jane loves to teach, and her passion lies in helping business owners launch websites on WordPress. 

She realized that she could package material into a membership program to scale her business. While building out a course load on WordPress, website management, and SEO could take months of work, Jane breezed through thanks to the many PLR courses and resources in my shop.

Here’s what Jane had to say:

“Every course that I've bought so far has paid for itself almost instantly. And then I use the money that I get from everything that I am doing, that buys another course and I'm getting a little stash.”

All you need to do is start. Build the site, fill it with quality content (PLR content is the best way to do that quickly), and launch. 

Ready to Scale Your Coaching Business to Six Figures? Download the Free Membership Site Launch Checklist

If you’re stuck in a rut or feel like the client hamster wheel is too much, the best thing to do for your business may be to take a step back to look at the bigger picture. 

Sure, you can build a six-figure coaching business by working with clients one-on-one, but the best way to grow your business quickly is to offer a scalable way for your customers to benefit from your expertise. 

There’s no better way than a membership site. But as you can see, launching a membership site may be easier said than done. That’s why I created a handy checklist for launching a membership site that I want to give to you for free. 

Click the button below and fill out the form to download your checklist.

Enjoy!