How to create a membership site with Thinkific (Full Tutorial)

how to create a membership site with thinkific i'm gonna teach you everything that you need to do to create an amazing membership site and that's gonna take seven steps first what's a membership site types of membership sites how to create the membership site with thinkific step by step then how much do you charge for your membership site how do you keep members subscribed which is the hardest thing and the most important thing for your membership site to be successful what are the advantage of having a membership site versus selling courses one by one and finally an example of a successful membership site by famous author eckhart tolle so what is a membership site well very simple it's a site where you charge a recurring amount typically monthly to access your content and the recurring amount is called a subscription as simple as that second types of membership sites so the simplest one is where you create a course a single course and you charge a recurring fee for it now for your students to have an incentive to keep renewing their subscription you have to make sure that you keep updating this course regularly so the second option instead of one course is to have several courses in a bundle so the moment that they join they have access to not one course but five ten courses another option for a membership site is just to offer a community like a facebook group or you could provide access to a bunch of articles or guides or you could have a live sessions and live streams or live classes or access to a bunch of expert interviews now the most typical one and the one i'm going to show you how to do with thinkific is having a course bundle so a bunch of courses plus a community but a membership site is as good as the value that you provide so this will be the bare bones type of membership site but you could obviously add all the other elements and provide even more value for your subscribers now let me show you how to create a membership site with thinkific and i'm going to show you the two models one it's just a single course that you charge a subscription for that course and but you're going to keep updating that course regularly of course and the second option is to give your students access to a bundle of courses the moment that they start accessing your membership site to set up a membership for one of your courses just click on any of your courses then click on pricing and then you can change from one time payment to subscription slash membership now in order to be able to add a subscription or membership you have to make sure that you are on the pro plan which at this time is 79 a month if you pay annually or 99 a month if you pay monthly so once you're in the pro plan you'll be able to do this now you just click on the subscription or membership you set up your amount per month let's say 1999 and you select you pay every month and you have two other options whether you offer a free trial period like 10 days is a good amount of free trial period and then you can even set a custom first payment so maybe a discount for the first payments which could be instead of ten dollars five so you have either or you either select the free trial period or a discounted first payment and that's how simple it is to set up your membership site with a single course now let's do the same thing but with a bundle which is what i'm doing right now and which is the most typical way of offering a membership site so let's go out and you would go to memberships and bundles again this is only available if you are in the pro subscription for thinkific and you create a new bundle and you give it a name create bundle and for this to work you obviously need more than one course at least between five and ten courses so at course and you start selecting courses add add another course let's say just i'm gonna add three courses right now okay then you can go to settings landing page etc you can fill in all the details but the important thing is the pricing okay let's just click uh pricing and again you would go to subscription and membership and enter the values that you want to one you charge every month and you could have a free trial period of 10 days and then you click save and there you go you have your membership site up and running you can preview the bundle and this is exactly what people will see when they land on your landing page obviously you can add more detail and videos and testimonials to increase conversions and basically just launch your membership site people now click on the subscribe button enter the details and they charge a monthly fee now make sure that before you do this that you've connected your account to stripe and to do that you go to market and sell you go to integrations and you have two types of integrations stripe and paypal and the memberships work with stripe and once you connect to your account you'll be able to set up your subscriptions all right so that takes care of how you create a membership site on thinkific but what if you want to offer a community a facebook group or something like that you want to make sure the moment people subscribe to your membership site they get a notification with a link to that community and the way you do that on thinkific is you go to support your students notifications and then you have two type of notifications either for individual courses where you would go to course welcome email and then you would select the course that you made into a subscription type of course and then you click edit on that course and then you change that message or if you create a bundle which is what i would recommend just click on that bundle and then you can customize the welcome email they will get when they join your membership site and in that email you can give details about what they are going to get how much they're going to get charged after the free trial and of course a link to your community whether it's on discord facebook slack or whatever it is and then once you have that you click save and the moment that they join your membership site they will get that email and they can join your community how much should you charge this is the question of the year or of the month if you're charging monthly so how much should you charge for your membership site well it depends on three factors your authority your expertise are you trusted in your industry do you have a big audience the higher your authority the more you can charge then is the market is this a competitive market where there's a thousand people trying to do the same thing or a very unique niche market where there are not many competitors therefore you can charge more and third the value that you provide the more content that you provide for your subscription the more regular you update your content the more likely people will be able to stick around and the more you'll be able to charge now to give you a ballpark amount from my research you could charge about one dollar per month per each 10 hours of content that you offer right up front you can always keep adding content and you should be adding content on a regular basis and we're going to discuss that in a little bit but for example if you offer a hundred hours of content right the moment people subscribe that would be about ten dollars a month right now i have about two hundred dollars of content for my subscription membership site and i charge 19.99 so 20 a month to give you an idea if you have 10 courses that are 10 hours long each that will be equivalent to 100 hours of content and therefore you could charge easily 10 dollars a month but of course it depends on whether your content is nice you have a lot of authority and you update it on a regular basis and you have a strong community then you could charge even more so before you start considering starting a membership site make sure you have a lot of content in advance so people have a reason to start paying on a monthly basis how do you keep members subscribed this is the most important thing when you're creating a membership site people are paying on a recurring basis so if they don't find enough value eventually they're going to unsubscribe and this is called churn and churn is the death of all recurring models and membership sites and this is basically why people stick on netflix or any software as a service business is because they're getting that value on a recurring basis so it's up to you to give that value right to avoid churn so to avoid churn you can do several things you could offer about an hour of content a week and this is just a benchmark for you to understand that if you generate an hour of content a week which is completely doable and you could batch a lot of this content in advance i mean you could record eight hours of content in a week and then just release it over the next eight weeks so you will have content for a couple of months then you will be able to make sure that people have a reason to keep renewing their subscription because they know every week they will have some new content by the way all these recommendations come from who i think is the top guy when it comes down to membership sites his name is stu mclaren i'm not sponsored by him by any means but i did take his course on membership sites which is probably the best courses that you can take and if you type stu mclaren membership sites you'll be able to find out that he's helped thousands of people create successful membership sites and one of the first things he said is that yes in order to keep people around think about one hour of content a week obviously you should offer a community you could just offer a bundle of courses but nowadays it's very difficult to offer a community so you can provide extra support and the community itself can help existing members so the next thing you should do in order to keep people paying the subscription fee is make sure that they feel that their support the community in itself with all the other students can provide a lot of that support that's why it's great to have a very active community but to make sure that the community is engaged you have to make sure that you are on top of it answering questions and supporting people and making sure that people behave etc so in essence in order to keep people around you have to add value consistently regularly so for the same reason people are paying you a monthly fee you have to make sure that you're also providing value on a regular basis let's dig a bit deeper into each of these three items so offer one hour of content a week what could you offer what you could offer new courses new video tutorials maybe live zoom classes expert interviews more articles and guides and not everything has to be video per se it could have be articles audio any type of content that adds value to the community and any type of content that will help your students achieve whatever you promise they would achieve once they join your membership site you could also offer podcast episodes that are just specific to your members so like you could have a free podcast and then some of those special unique podcasts for members only could be offered inside your membership site as well second offering a community how do you do that well the most typical way is through facebook groups the problem with facebook is that although it's free there's a lot of noise it's a social media site so people could get distracted but it's the most difficult way of doing that you could have a slack channel i don't use slack but i've heard it's great because you could create channels for each of your modules on some of your courses so let's say that you're teaching how to create online courses one of the first thing you have to do is market research you could have a channel specific just for market research or maybe one for marketing or how to launch your course and one just to hang around and socialize right so that's the great thing about slack channel you can divide your community into specific topics and discord is also a very typical software for building communities it's more for gaming but you can use it for absolutely any kind of other community thinkific also offers a community feature for pro accounts so the advantage is that although it doesn't have as many features as established community software like facebook or slap or discord the great thing is that you don't have to use a second piece of software if you're already using thinkific because the issue with having a community separate to where you're selling your membership site is that when people unsubscribe now you're going to have to manually unsubscribe people from your community and if it's already in scientific the moment they start paying they don't have access to that community of course you could automate unsubscribing people from from a community using a tool like xavier but it's just more work another community software that i found recently i think is extremely powerful and it's open source meaning it's free it's called the score discourse.org and it's free because if you install it yourself on your server which means you have to have the ability to run your own software in your own server and know how to do that or being able to hire somebody to install it then it's extremely powerful it uses a lot of gamification and it's great to keep people engaged in your community and i've used it recently when i was learning how to create mobile apps without coding and the community there is a very very engaged and you continuously are getting rewards for contributing to the community and basically be a nice member that provides value on a regular basis so if you're using wordpress then there are many plugins that you can use as well like member press or s2member i'm familiar with s2member because i've been using it for over five years for a website i own in spain it does take quite a bit of development chops in order to be able to use it but it's worked really well for us as well and third in order to keep people around you need to support your community and to do that we're gonna have to answer questions on a regular basis you could offer one-on-one coaching or group coaching on top of your courses and content that you're providing on a regular basis as well issue group challenges to make sure that you build that community and everybody works together to a specific goal like let's say the november challenge where everybody has to build a course in four weeks or run for 10k a day for an entire month or something like that you could also award your top members to encourage people to keep being engaged and providing value of course to know who your top members are you need some kind of analytics so you need to track engagement and facebook allows you to do that through their engagement analytics and most community software there is a way for you to see who are the top contributors and then to those top contributors you could give them awards free merch or swag or bonuses or something to reward their contribution the last thing you're gonna have to do in order to keep a community healthy is to it's pruning it's basically getting rid of all the unpaid members or members that are not behaving and stuff like that so it's making sure that the spirit of the community it stays positive and everybody is as engaged as possible now let's compare membership sites versus single course sales so what most course instructors do and it's the simplest way to get started just to sell courses one by one obviously you start with one course and you start charging let's say a hundred dollars for that course but once you start having a lot of courses it may make sense for you to charge a recurring fee but let's say the advantages that disadvantage of each so membership sites if they're good if you have a strong community and you support it and you've done all the steps that i told you before you should be able to have higher revenue potential per student so if you were to look at the lifetime value of your average student it's going to be probably higher although you're charging less in advance than a just a single course traditionally so if you're charging 100 for a course and 20 dollars for your membership site in order to make the same amount of money that person will have to stay for five months but if your community is really good they may stick for one or two years and at the end of the day that single student on a good membership site ends up providing a lot more revenue for your business the second thing is that if you have a lot of content and a great community there's going to be a higher perceived value for your students because if you're charging a hundred dollars for a 10 hour course but you're charging 20 for one month of access to 10 courses or between 100 and 200 hours of content it's a bargain really right because they could try to consume as much of that content within a month which is going to be very unlikely but the motivation for them to join is going to be higher if they see that for a small amount they can access a large database of content so membership sites are great if you already have a lot of content and also the community becomes a very important asset that on a single course unless you have a community it's not going to happen and eventually even if you didn't have any courses the community in itself could be valuable enough for people to pay a monthly fee in order to access the community the main issue with membership sites is that they're gonna in general take more work to maintain because you have to create content on a regular basis like we said at least an hour of new content a week and second because you're gonna have to be on top of your community to make sure that is thriving and engaged if you're somebody that doesn't have the time and patience to keep creating content and supporting a community probably sticking to single core sales is the easiest path for you and to end i'm going to show you an example of a very successful membership site by famous author eckhart tolle and you see that what he offers for 20 a month is pretty much all the things that i mentioned that you should offer to have a successful membership site so first of all he offers a lot of content so an extensive archive of all acres essential teachings on presence awakening quieting the mind and more plus 200 hours you see that he makes an emphasis on the content that he already has that you're going to be able to access immediately the moment you start paying the monthly fee then on top of that he has live q and a sessions with him where you can ask him questions and engage directly and this is something members usually love then you have access to of course a facebook private community and on top of that a mobile app and there is really nice to offer bonuses like conversations between a card and a bunch of experts because basically these are expert interviews that offer a lot of value to your existing members and they want to stick around because they want to see who is going to be the next amazing person that echo interviews and another bonus you also get more meditations and practical tools for applying presence to your everyday life so as you can see this is what it's called in sales and value stacking you can see you're getting a lot of content for your 20 a month and on top of that he offers a free 10-day trial there's really no risk on you joining for free and getting access to that content and if you don't like the content then you cannot subscribe so i think this is the an example of what i would call a perfect membership site and that's it that's everything you need to know to create a successful membership site with thinkific click here to learn how to create courses from scratch in thinkific i'll cover everything from how to set up your online school all the way to publishing your first course on thinkific it's one of my most successful tutorials watched by thousands of people you'll learn everything that you need to know to get started with thinkific thanks for watching bye bye

Channel: GRUMO

Views: 6,432

Keywords: how to create a membership site with Thinkific, thinkific membership site, create a membership site, create a membership website with Thinkific

Id: cZPs3mTk9tY

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021