Jennifer Bradley Explains How Her Membership Site Became the Market Leader in Her Niche!
On today’s episode we have Flip Your Life Community alumni Jennifer Bradley. Jennifer is a speech-language pathologist who built an amazing online membership of over 1,000 members in the speech-language community.
On today’s show we go deep into why you should hire slow and fire fast so you can build an amazing team around your membership site. We’re going to talk about how you can completely remove yourself from the day-to-day operation of your membership business so that you can focus on higher-level tasks to really make it grow. We’re going to teach you exactly how to say ‘yes’ to big opportunities and ‘no’ to all of the other opportunities that come your way. Finally, at the end of today’s show we are going to do a live marketing coaching session where Jennifer and I develop an actual promotion live on the air. And, I teach Jennifer my trailer park tornado strategy for evaluating risk in your membership business.
Show Notes
Jennifer Bradley creates speech therapy materials. She originally started selling them on Teachers Pay Teachers. Then, she started listening to us and in 2017 she striated her membership!
Why is it better to not rely on a third-party marketplace? (6:00)
For Jennifer, her biggest fear about the third-party marketplace was not having any control over it. She had heard other podcasters warning about not having all your eggs in one basket and especially not all in a third-party place!
How do you get people to resonate with you? (10:45)
One of the biggest things for Jennifer to connect with people was getting past the mindset of not putting everything in a downloadable place in your membership. A lot of membership owners have a fear that people will just steal everything. This operated Jennifer from the people that only wanted to put out a couple things each month.
Another thing was pushing past failures all the time. And, being truly passionate about serving her members, not just focusing on how much money she’s making. As an entrepreneur there will be failures - a lot of them! You can’t quit too early!
Struggling with tech in your membership. (12:00)
When I think about Jennifer I think about how she is constantly trying to make user experience better for her members!
Struggling with tech is something that comes up more and more not just for my beginners but for my people at Membership Masters levels too - Jennifer knows all about it if anyone does! It’s a problem that we all have to get over if we’re going to grow million dollar memberships.
The hiring process. (19:00)
As Jennifer learned the hard way paying a lower amount to hire someone doesn’t always work out. They can seem perfect on paper but that doesn’t mean they are! Researching, shopping around, and more interviews are super important! Don’t jump in - take the time to vet everyone!
Slow down. Get clear on what you want. Get a bunch of candidates.
When do you cut your losses? (25:50)
Jennifer had to these moments when she realized if she didn’t cut certain ties she was going to lose members that she made promises to. The longer she waited the more money she would lose too!
You have to have a vision of what you want and how to keep moving forward toward that goal! Be able to say “no.”
Hitting those “this was a bad idea” moments. (43:00)
As an entrepreneur you’re going to be saying, “that was a bad idea,” to yourself - a lot. We all have that Jennifer realization of saying, “now that I’ve grown if I fail I fail really big now.” There is no room to fail as an entrepreneur which can certainly lead to self-doubt about every single decision you make and that’s okay, that’s normal! You will start to feel the responsibility of your members and your team too.
It’s all a part of the process. They never go away you trade your challenges for bigger challenges. You don’t have to handle things well, you just have to handle them!
Jennifer’s growth strategy. (50:00)
Here’s what Jennifer has done to grow her membership:
- She recently hired marketers to do her SEO for PInterest + Facebook ads.
- Making digital plans for tele-therapy.
- Working on her email list and gaining back people who have left over the years.
Here’s what we have come up with together:
- At $30 if Jennifer sells 1,000 long-term trials. If she kept 500 people of those 1,000 she would make $15,000. $15,000/month is nearly $200,000/year! Talk about massive percentile growth!
- Retention is everything here because she will need it while waiting for her investment to pay off. If retention drops at any point and she needs a back-up plan to get those 1,000 she say, “hey, you’ve been using this for 60 days now. I know you’re loving this. We were going to start you at $29/month in the new year. You know you’ll use it, I’ll go ahead and let you upgrade for $19/month right now.”
- Looking at our avatar here we know September is our hot month. September could be all about promotion. On the first day of fall that will be our close date. We hit back to our email list on the last day of September, we send an email offering a “last chance” on the offer from before. October would become all about engagement and getting people to show up from trainings. November would be Black Friday up-sells to both those people you are reaching out to on your email list and all your members. December would be closing up the year with fun retention stuff. January would be about a ton of reminders.
