Jody Moore of the Better Than Happy Podcast Talks Membership Site Communities

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Jody Moore is a great example of how you really can change your life and others, through the membership model. The membership model allows more people access to Jody's life coaching, and allows her to help more people at the same time. More than 4,000 members, if we're getting technical. But, those members don't even know that she has that big of a following, because her membership, like ours, allows her the ability and freedom to devote her attention where she is needed most.

What You'll Learn:

1. Why you don't have to have a big launch. (5:10)
2. How to reach thousands of people. (9:35)
3. How your membership site can evolve as you do. (11:35)
4. How to deal with feeling the weight of leading your members. (14:40)
5. How to define your own success. (18:00)
6. You have to get A done before you can get B. (21:40)
7. There is no cap to your potential. (25:35)
8. What your sewing seasons and reaping seasons are. (34:42)
9. How to grow your community. (37:10)
10. How to picture the milestone you’re pursuing. (42:00)
11. How to be a leader - at all times! (44:20)

Show Notes

You don’t have to have a big launch.

A great way to start is exactly how Jody did! Go ahead and open up your site, lock people (beta members) into that introductory price.

Jody also uses a semi-launch strategy. Which means she opens and closes the doors at different prices each month. These are almost like ‘mini launches,’ that help her keep urgency for her membership site. This also helps by keeping her from being overwhelmed by a massive influx of people all at one time. This helps you assist and give your attention to those people that came in when you opened the flood gates this time, deal with that water. Then, next month you can do the same!

You can reach thousands of people.

Brick by brick your membership site will start scaling and getting wider. Then, you have thousands of people you can reach every day.

For Jody, her membership site has 4,000 members. How could she ever talk to that many people? It wouldn’t be possible to do that all at one time!

So, Jody uses:

• A coaching model as a tool to help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. She uses membership calls, classes, every month on a certain topic. She makes these calls to where her members can either join live or replay it later.

• Then, Jody utilizes live coaching calls or Q+As. She does this by bringing an a member through live call, coaches them, and everybody else gets to hear it. (This is very similar to our podcast interviews), This helps the members with the same issues all get their resolution at the same time!

Your membership site can evolve as you do!

1. Curated content
2. Community
3. Coaching

Those are the pillars of a successful membership site.

Like Jody, her membership site structure changed early on the beginning. For her, a community was not exactly best for her model. And, that’s okay!

This brings us to great point - forums or a Facebook group do not make up a community. A football game is a community event. You don’t have to talk to everybody there, you’re just watching the game.

You will constantly reinvent yourself and your membership as you both grow. There will be new ways to market yourself, you have to fall in love with the process and progress!

Feeling the weight of leading your members.

Try to make the membership site feel close and connected for your members.

Jody utilizes a couple of things:

1. She has other coaches trained like she is, to make sure every client gets the same amount of attention! This also frees up her time to lead the way she needs to.
2. She assesses how she can be more effective and get through to more people.
3. She shows up, lends a listening ear, but also tells the hard truth when she needs to.
4. She keeps herself emotionally separated. She wants her clients to know they themselves changed their life by taking her advice.

You have to remember that you’re in the business of opportunity. Leading a membership is in the business of giving as many people as possible opportunity.

You will get emotionally connected to your clients’ failures, successes, and that can be heavy.

Define your own success.

You can only base your success off of what you do. What looks like a member successfully following your teaching, may be different from what they do.

Sometimes when we work with people on our membership site, we tend to want to do hand-holding because again, it’s hard not to get emotionally invested in each step of their journeys. But, a lot of times when we let members have their own journeys, mistakes, and experiences, people become much more successful.

You don’t want to rob people of the joy of solving their own problem. You want to give people direction, not instruction.

Do not give out the step-by-step instruction. Give a strategy, allow your members to find their solution.

You have to get A done before you can get B.

We talk about this in our tagline, ‘all it takes it is 100 people to pay you 50 a month, to make $60,000 a year.’ The whole mission of the Flip Your Life community is to help you make an income, support your family. And, then, you can grow from there.

This really coincides with our decision to start the Membership Masters Podcast. This is for those people that now have 100 members and are ready to spread their wings and get that million dollar membership going!

Don’t ever look at those people and think, ‘oh, I can’t do that.’ Jody made a great point. There is no end point where you will decide that you will reach your ‘oh, now I’m going to be happy.’ It is fun to be in pursuit of our goals. But, it doesn’t come the way we think it’s going to. You have to feel complete during the journey. You have to recognize how far you’ve come, while you look ahead to your goals. If you can learn enjoy the journey, you don’t have to look to your left or right, about how fast someone else is going. Everyone’s ride is different, you just have to enjoy it! But, you do need to look at those people reaching major goals in their online memberships to just remind yourself, ‘hey, this is totally possible!’

There is no cap to your potential.

Growing up, most of us are told that you work your tail off through college, for a job that had a cap. For us, we hit a point where our floor, because of our memberships, was everybody else’s ceiling.

It took us a few years to get through that launch world where if you don’t get 1000 members or $100K when you launch, then you’re not a success.

But, through a membership, we have the mindset of giving ourself raises every day! Maybe get one more member every day, that will work, right?

That is how we developed our philosophy of:

• Consistent
• Relentless
• Prolific

If we can pick one thing that we do consistently, which for us is our podcast. We share the podcast every day and write the email to our list every day.

We relentlessly follow up with every possible person that slightly raises their hand up into the sky that says ‘I’m paying attention to you.’ Good things are going to happen, because I keep doing that over and over and over again. Then, it’s just a matter of what tools you’re using to keep that going, as everything continues growing.

There are sewing seasons and reaping seasons.

We saw a great example of this when COVID-19 shutdowns began.

We were watching our Governor make announcements that would put many people out of jobs. We looked at each other and knew our sales were going to be down over the next several months.

We had to think about how to balance both our need to keep up with churn, as well as continuing to help families that needed our help more than ever. So, we did the longest free-trial we’ve ever done. Which, put hundreds of people into the community quickly, as well as helped them make a reliable income at home.

Right now, we are not pushing anything as we are among protests across the country. We want everyone’s voices to be heard, so it would just be wrong of us to fill social media with anything else. So, we have shifted our focus to retention inside our of membership. We’ve been in our community, we’ve been improving our member area. We’ve been upgrading and updating several things. We’ve also done weekly calls, because our members really needed leadership.

So, being able to shift based on life or your energy level, what’s happening. Knowing your numbers are enough to say, ‘well, that many people are going to renew this month.’

There are sewing seasons and reaping seasons. This is a time to give, the membership model made it to where we can do this and give our fun attention when and where it is needed.

How to grow.

Somewhere along the line, we drew out this plan:

• At first you get attention.
• Attention becomes an audience.
• An audience subscribes.
• The subscribers turn into members.
• Members turn into a community, (advocates).
• Advocates become lifetime customers.

For Jody, her growth was mainly from being consistent. She recorded content for her podcast each week over the last 5 years. This means weeks when she gave birth, had holidays, had trips, a podcast still went live.

If you’re teaching good content, people want to share it. Because, they want to feel like they have something useful to share.

All it takes from a content standpoint, is doing one thing really, really well. Thank about:

• What does my audience need?
• This guest is really good for this.
• Building relationships.

Picture the milestone you’re pursuing.

Whether your milestone is money, followers, members, subscribers, whatever it is - how are you going to think and feel when you’re there?

Jody started very small with her podcast. She had her mom and a few friends. However, she saw the bigger picture of what her strides would land her, if she just kept going.

Be a leader - at all times!

This is has been a very relevant thing for us to remember right now, with the anti-racism movement, especially. We had many of our members asking how we planned to use our platform.

We have always encouraged conversation over commentary. That is why we chose to talk to our friend and fellow podcaster Talaat McNeely, with His and Her Money. We wanted to get together for both of our communities to talk about racial injustice, so they can see us leading a conversation, breaking barriers.

You don’t have to have all the answers, we’re all flawed. But, we can do everything in our power to lead during tough times, do what needs to be done and say what needs to be said. Sometimes, like in this case, this meant listening and that’s okay. The important thing is that we brought everyone together and that’s what our mission was from the start.

That what community is about. Open conversations, listening, educating, coming together, have those uncomfortable conversations for what is ultimately the greater good.

Just remember: you can help someone, you can help each other, we are all equal, we are all the same, and we can all do these amazing things if we get out there and make them happen.

Remember to subscribe and leave us a review to the Membership Masters Podcast here on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/membership-masters-podcast/id1519253634?i=1000481765838

You can also listen this week's full episode here on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/08sy38ExbmLtaZh6LtndKN?si=llnLjQphRom20v8R70OBWw