How to Price Your Membership Site

Looking to scale your coaching business?

Rather than coach clients one by one, you can coach dozens (or hundreds) with a membership site. A membership site is a great way to offer your expertise at scale to a larger group of clients. It’s a win-win: you can take on more clients, and more people can learn from you!

However, there’s one common mistake coaches make when launching their membership sites: they mess up the pricing.

From pricing too low to over-complicating the pricing, there are a slew of pricing mistakes you can make. In this guide, I’ll show you how to price your membership site correctly, and I’ll give you some of my best tips to set it up for success.

Why Coaches Should Create a Membership Site

If you’re already offering coaching services, is a membership site really worth adding to the mix?

Absolutely. 

Here are my favorite reasons to add a membership site to your coaching business:

Instead of trading time for money with 1-on-1 clients, a membership site lets you package your knowledge into an offer that can scale 24/7. Plus it allows you to build up recurring revenue which can smooth out the peaks and valleys that come with individual client work.

Membership Site Pricing Strategies to Follow

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:

I’m just getting started though. Keep these tips in mind as I walk you through the different membership site pricing models to copy.

Membership Site Pricing Models

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:

Let’s walk through these in more depth.

Monthly Subscription

Monthly subscriptions are popular, and for a good reason: they are easy to set up, and at the right price point, they can be easy to sell since they require less of a commitment on your prospective member’s side. 

Depending on your niche and the value you provide, you could offer a monthly subscription for anywhere from $19 - $97/month. Creating a seamless checkout process from your website can lead to a steady stream of new customers every month and grow your monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Annual Subscription

Monthly plans are great, but there’s always the risk someone drops off after a few months. By offering an annual plan, you can secure a year’s revenue upfront for each customer and renew each year. 

Annual plans are often offered at a discount (typically 1-2 months are “free”). To calculate the price for your annual plan, multiply your monthly rate by 10 or 11 and tweak it from there. Using the monthly price examples, this could end up being $190 - $997/year. Not bad if you can collect a few of those each month to complement your coaching business!

One-time Payment/ Lifetime Access

Lifetime access is a third option where new customers pay once and have access from then on. This can be useful for getting your first customers who may be wary of signing up for a recurring subscription. However, I wouldn’t recommend relying on this indefinitely as you’ll decrease your chances at building recurring revenue from new customers. And what does ‘lifetime’ really mean? It sounds great on the surface, but no one knows how long it will really last!

Feel free to test out different models, or combine them!

You could offer lifetime access to get your first 10 customers, then switch to a monthly plan for new customers. A common strategy is to provide a monthly and annual option, to allow your “super fans” to lock in a yearly subscription and get a discount. 

How to Determine The Value of Your Membership Site

I’ve used the word “value” a lot in this article. But what is value?

Value is one of those fuzzy words that can be hard to quantify (unless you can point to revenue generated for your clients), but there are guiding questions that can help you pinpoint it. If you are struggling to determine the value you provide, start by answering these questions:

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say you are a digital marketing specialist and you focus on social media. When working with clients, you have been able to triple their following and get them in front of potential customers within their first 3 months of working with you. 

That’s a lot of value! Even though you aren’t working directly with the customers in your membership site, they still benefit from your years of experience and the content you share. 

Remember that pricing isn't just about the volume of content, but the overall value that content delivers.

3 Tips to Set Your Membership Site Pricing Up for Success

If you’re still nervous at the thought of launching your new offer, here are a few tips to set your new site up for success:

Remember, you can always adjust and optimize your pricing over time. In fact, you should! 

You just need to start somewhere and adjust your pricing based on the feedback you get from customers.

5 Common Pricing Mistakes to Avoid When Launching a Membership Site

When it comes to offers, pricing is the most important thing to get right and the easiest thing to mess up. 

Even with all these tips, you might not get it right the first time. To improve your odds and speed up your path to success, avoid the following mistakes.

Don’t:

The biggest mistake is not starting at all because you're unsure about pricing. Start somewhere and avoid these pitfalls and new members will flood your site in no time. 

Can a Membership Site be Profitable?

Scaling your revenue through recurring subscriptions sounds great and all, but don’t forget you’ll need a steady stream of fresh content to keep that revenue coming through. 

Whether you offer group calls, courses, or digital products you will need to maintain a fresh stream of content each month. Otherwise, your members will begin to drop out. 

Creating that content though? That can be time-consuming, and expensive. The average course costs $2,000 - $5,000 to create, and that’s just the start. You’ll need more than one course to keep your membership site going, which will eat into your profit margin and quickly negate the scalable benefits that come with launching a membership site. 

Here’s a secret: PLR.

PLR (private label rights) allows you to purchase and brand white-label products that you can sell as your own. In minutes you could purchase a year’s worth of content to fill your membership site and wow new customers. Learn more about how to use PLR to build a membership site with my guide.

Build Your Membership Site with This Free Checklist

You may not be a pricing master yet, but you are well on your way to successfully launching your membership site and scaling your business. 

Pricing is hard, but by experimenting and gathering feedback from your audience you can get it right. You just need to take the first step by starting and launching your membership site to the world.

To help you, I created a handy checklist that will guide you through the steps you need to take to set up your new membership site.

 Click the button below to download my free checklist and build your membership site today!

Enjoy!