Member'd Minds #1 - Courses to Membership

Hi,

Welcome to the 1st edition of Member’d Minds.

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside.

1% better - Is your course ready to be converted into a membership?

A Member’d Mind - Let’s look at how Anna Nassery’s The Creative Collective has leaned in on what they can offer best.

Before we get into it, I’d love to know a little bit about you.

1% better

If you’re a coach/course creator, are there aspects of what you do and offer, that you don’t 100% like?

• Are you eager to provide your students with more, but not sure about the best approach?

• Does the time you spend with your students seem insufficient?

• Do you feel overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility, believing that you alone must address all your students' challenges?

• On a personal note, would it be nicer to have a more steady, predictable, and recurring income?

I mean, the list of things I’ve heard my own clients complain about when it comes to having a course is a lot longer than this.

If you’re committed to helping people with the knowledge that you know best, creating courses or coaching programs is not your only option.

You can take everything you’ve already created

and turn it into a membership community.

And here is where you should start:

There are 4 pillars of what a membership community offers:

1. Help

2. Action

3. Learning

4. Connection

If you can look at what you already offer and score it based on these 4 parameters, you can identify how exactly to turn your course/coaching program into a membership.

If you have an online course, you’re probably doing really well on the ‘learning’ aspect. And if you have a good online course, you also probably score well on helping your students take action.

So, go through your current offer and firstly think about how you’d rate the ways in which you offer support and help to your students.

• Are there easy ways in which your students are able to ask you and other teachers questions?

• Are you helping them through the different challenges they’d face on this journey and at different times?

And most importantly, how are you offering connection to your students?

• How easy do you think it is for your students to get to know each other? How many opportunities do they have? What’s the agenda?

By creating features within your course such as:

• Regular office hours or a space for Q&A.

• Accountability buddies and creating sub-groups based on common interests.

you’re setting up your product to be more than just a course or coaching. You’re on your way to create a membership community.

A Member’d Mind

Anna Nassery describes her membership, The Creative Collective as,

Often, when people set out to build memberships, they end up building an inactive Slack channel instead.

They create a place where people can meet each other and don’t do anything more. That leads to a silent and often dead discussion board where the latest post was a question a member asked 2 months ago that is still unanswered.

Going into 2024, we need to think bigger when it comes to creating a membership community. And the way to do that is to hone in on what you, as the one creating it can do best.

Here is what The Creative Collective offers its members,

• She knows that leveraging referrals works so she’s offering it to her own members.

• She has a great team in her agency, so why not leverage their expertise as well for her members?

• She’s a brand builder herself so who better than to help members build their brands?

These are over and above the core offering of all membership communities which is to help members connect with each other.

If there’s any part of you that wants your membership community to be unique, you have to get really clear on what you do best and then figure out how that can be valuable for others.

If you’d like my thoughts on what you do best, reply to this with a link to your social media and I’d love to let you know.

Until then,