How to Up-Level Your Membership While Protecting Your Time – Season 2 | Mastermind Series

Melissa: All right, so let's go to Kim. Question: are there any help's available for running a membership in a Facebook group? All right, Kim, do you want to..?

Kim: Hi, really just trying to build like, know and trust right now at this point and everything. And so it's just a public group, but wanting to launch a membership here in the next few weeks and all. I'm bogged down in the technology, part of all this, it drives me crazy. I'm trying to figure out how to load content onto a Facebook group, how to organize those kinds of things, just trying to figure out all of the logistics of actually doing this. And it's kinda like I'm all over the place trying to figure out how to do all of this.

So I'm just wondering if there's any central location for running a membership from Facebook. If there's some, anybody knows of a helps spot for me. 

Melissa: Good question. 

Paul: Anybody have any input? Heather

Heather: I'm not good at it by any means, but for me, I get overloaded with all this stuff and I'm a visual person, so lots and lots of many post-it notes to start off with and just start putting it on the wall, you know, almost like a brain dump. And then as you come up with other things that you've got to do, put them up there and then step back from it, take some deep breaths or chill, let it hang out there for a while and then reorganize it into something that looks a little bit more logical.

You know, you can even put arrows on other post-it notes and kind of put them into order. That's all I got. 

Melissa: I love that. I love that too, especially because it's so visual Cause then you can actually see it and move things around, especially if you're taking someone through a sequence too. So 

Paul: Heather.

Heather: Kim. I have the community component of my membership in Facebook. I actually host my membership on member vault. I will tell you that none of my members go into member vault ever. They joined my landing page, directed them to member vault and collected the payment through Stripe and the contents there, because I believe in having the content hosted somewhere other than Facebook, who could arbitrarily shut me down any day on a whim.

But my people go to Facebook to consume the content that I deliver to them. And I just organize it through the units tab. So you just have to make sure that your group is set up as a social learning group. And one of the things that I, that I deliver is , we call them podcasts snacks.

I listen to podcasts and I'll take like five actionable steps away. 

Kim: Hmm. 

Heather: And share it like in an infographic, it's like one of the most popular things in my membership for some reason. And I literally have like all of them in one unit, you know? It's a lot simpler than you would think.

I don't know if that's helpful.

Paul: Okay. Does anybody else have any input? 

Molly: Yeah. I just have a question, actually, if you have a Facebook membership I thought it went against Facebook's terms to sell a membership. And that was the only thing you were offering on Facebook. Like don't you have to have content somewhere else, or am I getting that confused?

Paul: Anybody wants to speak to that?

Kim: That used to be part of the terms, but it's not in there right now. At the time that was part of the terms. Facebook was doing their own like beta, Facebook subscription thing, which turned out to not be advantageous for anybody who tried it. And it was only advantageous for Facebook.

Heather: And so that language isn't there right now, they could change it at any minute, which is another reason, again, that I host everything outside of Facebook and the Facebook group is just a benefit of membership. And I also post the content there just to make access easier. And that's how I frame it.

Molly: Okay. That makes sense. Thank you. 

Kim: So is it recommended then to not just have our content posted, I mean, in the Facebook group, I mean, I'm trying to keep costs down minimal at this point. 

Heather: So member vault is free up to a hundred users. Okay. And that's one of the reasons that I love it. If you're somebody who's just starting out and you don't have revenue stability to pay for an all-in platform, all in platforms are great, but we're not all ready for them.

You know? So that would be my suggestion, like, just until you're ready from a revenue standpoint for one of the all-in-one platforms. 

Kim: Okay. Thank you. 

Paul: Yeah. When we started "Inner Circle" back in January, 2019, we started off with a Facebook group.

We had no sales page. It was just a simple Facebook posts. We just put it out to our friends list like, Hey, this is something we're thinking about doing. If you're interested, hit us up. And we jumped on a zoom call and because there's a higher level membership right out the gate. So we just had a little bit more personal touch there.

And then initially outside of the zoom calls, like we didn't have anything in a membership platform initially. We already had several memberships of hundreds and hundreds of people at a time, one platforms, but for this particular offer, we were just like down and dirty. We're just going to put it out and we're just going to go with it.

So you do have the ability you could do uh, you know, this is not ideal long-term. For all of us. I recommend like your long-term strategy is always redundancy. So for us even . Like right now, we have like our membership platform of choice right now is Kartra, but we also have our video assets in Vimeo, as well as in Searchie.

Because while they're all great companies, we don't want to be captive to any of them, things in Dropbox drop and stuff in Dropbox. So we always put our assets in a backup space because we've been in scenarios where the well-supported platform like business just like disappears overnight years ago, you know, it's like, everybody's like, no, it's a great, wonderful place.

And it's like, okay. And then like there's small businesses also. And sometimes they mismanaged money and you think they're really strong. And then all of a sudden all your eggs are somewhere, but not in your basket. So we, yeah, we do use Dropbox a lot. I forgot about that. Like, we'll, we'll put anything that we put up somewhere else.

We'll, we'll have a backup version of it in a space where if we, if something hits the fan, we can go and recreate somewhere. 

So you can use a Facebook group initially. The organization has Heather already references that you can, that you can make it a different type of group. And one of them is called social learning.

I think that's what it is right there. The social learning. And when you do that, that opens up a section that's called units that all sudden there's a tab there. Now units is just a way to organize posts is the best way I can explain it because if you start putting content in the main feed, what happens is whatever's the newest post shows up at the top.

And that could have been a post from six months ago. You know? So it's like, it's not the lesson I want people to see today. So you can then direct people to click on the unit section and what'll happen is you can organize there. 

So you'll have main sections initially, and you can give it a headline and everything, but then what you do is once you have those main sections, You will first create your content as a post, like you'll create normal posts and then you'll assign it a, you know, those specific sections.

And then once it's all in there, you can reorganize it. Like you can pull things up and down, reorder things. And if you mess up, you just unassign it and go back and do it again, maybe because they don't allow you to change the headline very easily. But that's just like version 1.0. 

Now what I would do for any of us though, cause we can perpetually forever be in that state like, oh, we don't have enough money to do blank.

I would ahead of time create milestones to say, you know what? This is what I'm offering my price point at. And when I hit 10 members or when I hit 20 members, then I am going to do blank. 

That way you're giving yourself permission in advance that you need to uplevel. It'd be better for you and it will be better for your members.

So as an example, initially, by using square and by you doing that, it's a good solution, but what happens, you have to be involved. So you have now a support element that you, because you're saving money in the, a couple of steps. 

Now, your, your time resource cause your financial resources and being impacted, but your time resources were right now because of being on Kartra as an example, and this could be click funnels.

This could be Kajabi. It could be MemberMouse, it could be Membarium. Like there's so many different things that are out there in the world, a member of all and everything , because it's connected in the PayPal or Stripe and because of how it talks. Like, if somebody goes to join right now, like we didn't have to be involved.

They're automatically getting an email to join the Facebook group. They're already getting another email with their login credentials to the platform. I don't have to touch any of that stuff. Like, they're just like, oh, straight payment just came over. We just made some money. Cool. You know, and then you can also control the outboarding of that.

Like if you wanted to make it easy for people to cancel, you don't actually have to be involved either if you don't want to. Right. So just, just understand is that we have different resources and there's always a give and take. You're either putting the sweat equity in, or you're putting a financial amount into that.

And when you're holding back on the financial side, then that just, and a lot of us do that initially, but then you need to give yourself permit because otherwise you're never going to afford it. Cause you're always gonna be like, ah, cause we will spend to the amount of money that we make a lot of us.

Right? So you need to create milestones to say, okay, when I get to five members or 10 members or 20 members, I am going to stop doing this myself and give myself permission to get this. 

Kim: Okay. 

Paul: Cause then you'll start investing in things. Instead of looking at it as a cost, it's an investment you might be back at breaking even again, but at least you don't have to answer emails in the middle of the night to cancel somebody or to add somebody to a Facebook group or, you know, like these things are now automated because you did invest in that.

It's allowing you to have a better quality of life. 

Kim: Yeah. 

Paul: But congratulations for taking this big step though. That that's so awesome. Cause we all started with the first stage and the first step, which none of us cheat through that. And just by you taking this risk in doing these things, it's creating a new set of problems that you didn't have in your past life, but it's also gonna create a new set of opportunities for you too.

So I'm excited for you. 

Kim: Thank you so much.