Most people don’t even consider starting a membership site. They think they’re not “expert” enough. Or that “information wants to be free.” Or that “nobody would pay for this stuff.”

But a membership site can be a great business.

For one thing, it’s a subscription business. So you aren’t “starting over” every month when it comes to revenue. Instead, you can rely on recurring revenue from loyal customers. It can also be quite profitable, particularly if you’re selling a high-margin product like video training.

Today, we’re highlighting three interviews and a course from the Mixergy vault about how proven founders launched and grew their membership sites. And for the next three days, the full course is available to everyone, so check it out today!

1. Focus On Quality Over Quantity

Billy Murphy is the founder of Bluefirepoker.com, which lets members train with top online poker players.

Before he launched his site, he had hired a coach to learn how to make more money playing poker professionally. In his second month of playing poker full time, he made $17,000. So he knew that poker coaching worked, as long as a coach knew their stuff.

When he was thinking of sites to create, he realized that there were many sites that offered video training sessions from popular poker players. But to keep costs down, these sites only offered a few videos of popular players. Instead, they offered lots of videos of “other pros that nobody knew.” In other words, these sites used a quantity strategy.

In contrast, Billy focused on quality. He asked himself, “Why don’t I just put together a team of only players [that] people want to learn from?” As he put it, he wanted to fill “the quality niche.”

His strategy worked. He got five or six big names to offer training videos on his site. Then, with no advertising and only a few posts to popular poker forums, his site made $30,000 on its first day and finished out its launch week with over $100,000 in purchases.

Learn more about how Billy launched his membership site in his interview.

2. Create An “Incomplete Loop”


Stu McLaren is the founder of WishList Member, a plugin that allows you to charge recurring membership fees on your WordPress site.

In addition to selling his plugin, Stu created a membership community about membership sites. His retention rate is so high that he frequently gets asked to speak at conferences about it.

But how does he convince conference attendees to join his site, when he’s giving away content in his presentation?

Stu uses what he calls the “incomplete loop” technique.

For instance, he’s come up with 63 strategies that increase retention rates within a membership site. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to cover all 63 strategies in a short presentation.

So he gives “a free presentation where I outline 10 retention strategies, but I make it obvious that the 10 are part of a bigger subset of 63.” He does this by referring to (say) the third strategy as “number three of 63.”

After listening to that presentation about 10 retention strategies, wouldn’t you be curious what the other 53 are? As Stu says, “your mind naturally says, ‘Wait a minute. I have to fill those gaps.'”

Learn more about how Stu uses this technique (and a few others) in his interview.

3. Teach Bite-Size Chunks


James Ashenhurst is the founder of Master Organic Chemistry, an online resource for students of organic chemistry.

James got his start tutoring students in organic chemistry over Skype. He then created a $25 product, an ebook guide to the 80 to 90 “reagents” taught in organic chemistry classes.

James thought about creating another ebook guide to the “reactions” taught in these same classes. The only problem is that James realized that “If I was making an ebook of this, it would be 400 pages. It’s just insane to make an ebook that large.”

Instead, James decided to make a membership site that taught students about the 780 different possible reactions. This also broke up the material into bite-size chunks that wouldn’t overwhelm them.

Even though students pay a mere $10 a month for access, James says that around 25% of total revenues already comes from his membership site.

Learn more about James’ membership site strategies in his interview.

4. Listen Carefully


Daniel Himel is a cofounder of several successful membership sites, including Endurance Nation and Marathon Nation.

After launching Endurance Nation as a popular paid community for triathletes, Daniel took the lessons learned and started Marathon Nation for marathoners.

The site grew quickly, but Daniel noticed that “We were building lots of resources for beginning marathoners, and we had very few people even ask us a question about it.”

Daniel wanted to see exactly what kind of marathoners were interested in training, so he ran some incentivized surveys with a free iPod as a prize. The surprising result? “They were all intermediate people that wanted to get a lot faster,” Daniel says.

A quick pivot in focus and Marathon Nation just grew “really, really quick.”

Learn this and other proven tactics from Daniel in his Mixergy course.