Mastermind Series: How To Get Your Membership Started Today

Melissa: So I'm going to hop over to Kim, question: “I'm a color pencil artists. And just trying to figure out if there's a possibility to create a membership, I'm still not sure about creating the content to keep people as part of the membership. I don't have a large email list,  do I need to wait to do this later on? I just find it all confusing and I'm not sure if this is for me. My ultimate goal is to replace my husband's salary,

$80,000 by the time he retires in four to five years.”

 

All right. So Kim, did you want to hop on the mic and tell us a little bit more about, about what you're working on?

 

Kim:  Okay.  And by the way, I was a  thriving Christian artist and I didn't buy Instapost  then, but I bought it when I got home and it's been amazing.

 

Melissa: Oh, I'm so glad. I'm so glad you're enjoying it.

 

Kim: Awesome. Of all of the content that is going to do this money well spent.

 

Melissa: Oh, good, good, good. I'm so glad. I'm so glad you're enjoying it.

 

Kim: So that's another reason I get intimidated by all this, because content in there is so good. So I just, you know, I, I don't want to jump into anything too soon. I've been a colored pencil artist for like the last four and a half years just now in the last year of launch my art and my business as an, I mean, art as a business.

 

And so it's been slow going and I had planned to come home from thriving Christian artists to teach and COVID happened. Everything that was on the calendar was all of a sudden canceled. But it really stirred something within me.

 

And I'm just trying to figure out if this is really something to pursue or am I too soon in the game? That's my question.

 

Paul: So are you, are you looking to teach others your pencil art?

 

Kim: Yes.

 

Paul: So there's a good friend of ours, Debbie who's a Viola who's up in New York and she paints small,  I wouldn't say they're tiles per se, but they look like tiles  and what she did, s he just went on Facebook lives and just started painting and you'd be amazed how many people watch and follow just to see how the thing..

 

How many of us growing up watch one of like three or four people on PBS, you know, paint,  rarely soft spoken voices. You know, there's a happy mistakes, you know, there's just something soothing about that, that it just pulls people in. And then naturally these days, everybody's like, I wonder if I can do that? How can I do that?

 

And Debbie, it took her, you know, she was similar a year ago,  that she was hesitant on putting an offer out to get anybody to invest in it. And she finally did this past year and she has a member of a membership that's thriving right now because people are watching her create things. And they were like: “Oh, I want to do this also.”

 

And she, she was targeting specifically, I believe women  and caretakers,  more like for like therapeutic,  to kind of have like an escape, to go through. So it just something that I think all of us, you know, can justify and say like: “ah, I'm not ready or should..” and maybe get certain things in place first. And I always come back to like, you know, we had the, I have the iPhone 10, right? Well, if Apple waited until they had this technology, they would've never came out with the original iPhone. Now, if I put the original iPhone in any of your hands right now, you would laugh at me and say like, I'm not downgrading this thing. This is a piece of junk. Like, I don't want this. So a lot of times we get caught up in other people's version 10 thinking like that's what we have to go out the gate. And it's interesting because in the technology world, they call it an MVP, minimal viable product.

 

What's the least features like we know what we want to have in it. We know what we want it to be, but what's the minimum viable product that I can do to put out into the market to at least get it going. Because everything that we have in our lives is most likely not the original version of it. But I think we also pursue perfection and we allow that perfectionism internally to stop us.

 

You know, it's interesting. Like I call it the pebble.  We think like what's bottlenecking us and stopping us is like this big, huge wall. And a lot of times like you ever have a shopping cart, you can go through it. It actually like it hits a pebble. It'd be like, boom. And you're like, you get it.

 

And it's just this little tiny pebble that's stopping the inertia, this whole thing, moving in. But we treat in our own lives, we treat it like a huge wall. Like it's something we can't break through. And we bottleneck and we stop our process of this little thing. And a lot of times than it is that external for a lot of us,

 

We look at everybody else's, you know, externally. Cause I is interesting. Cause like we, Melissa and I do a live event, a mastermind event that we'd done the last five years. It's very intimate. Right. So we normally have about 25 to 30 people that come.

 

We could sit there and look at Mat’s set up, he's got the lights he's got, the stage has got the sound system. He's got a team going around, he's got a videographer going around. Like he's got the hype music, he's got a professional overlaid video that he did. And I can, we can get in our heads and get all caught up.

 

Like: “Oh my goodness, We can't do our little live event anymore because we don't have all the things that Matt has”

 

What we have as an intimate grassroots event that the people that show up love it. And they always talk about the transformation experience that they get. There's no light show. There's no big buffet. There's no like none of that stuff.

 

 So it's, it's up to all of us to be the best version we are right now and give that gift to our phones into the world.

 

Give that gift to the people that need what we have to give. And then along the way along the journey, how can we then make it version 2.0, what's the little tweaks that we can make it a little bit better next time.

 

Melissa: And I think one of the most powerful things is, is to build it as you like the same,  build it as you fly it. Because again, we talked about like messaging, this is something you, you already do like in person. So this is an opportunity for you to take your skill set and now transfer to a, you know, a membership teaching people online. But then you can get really a sense of like what people are wanting more of.

 

You can, you can survey them, you can ask them questions. And then that way you can truly build a membership that they want, that they're seeking for the things that they want. Because a lot of times too with this whole like perfectionism, it has to be like exactly, you know, this way. And we build this thing, but it's not even what, what they want.

 

So that's the beauty of it. And you could get, it started very simply very grassroots. It doesn't have to be a big investment of like, there's lots of tech and that's usually the other thing we see is tech holding people back and all the things keep it super simple, super streamlined and just give value and teach what you already teach.

 

And then, you know, get feedback from the people that you're bringing into your world. And that's going to help you create the membership and create what they actually want. And that's going to be much more upstanding membership for them. They're going to return over and over again. You're going to feel good because you're giving value.

 

So, don't let that, Oh, it has to look a certain way or, you know, you saw inside of Instapost, she loved every day how it was laid out, but I mean, Instapost didn’t to start off, you know, that way, you know, I hadn't, you know, there's, there's lots of little things that, that got it to that point. Same thing with this, like you can just start off, build it and get feedback and then slowly improve it too.

 

Paul: And even, like our high level membership with treatment hundred, it started off as a Facebook group.

 

We didn't have a sales page. We just had a card page. Like when we first launched it, it was a Facebook post that I made on my personal profile. There was no ad campaign. There was no retargeting. Like even though we do all that and we teach all that, it was just like Melissa and I had a conversation we wanted to put it in the market and she knows that I'm an action taker.

 

So she went to yoga that morning and I, no joke, like just my personal account. It was like: “Hey, this is what we're thinking about doing. If you were interested, hit me up privately we'll have a conversation.”  And then within a few days we sold out the initial 20 seats that we had. And all we had was a cart page.

 

We had, we just started off with a Facebook group. We had no platform.

 

Melissa: We didn't even, we didn't have anything recorded at all. We had no like core, I mean, just we had this, you know, the idea. But because you know, we'd build that like know and trust people trusted us and came on the journey with us.

 

Kim: Yeah.  Well, I'm working. right now on the like know and trust. And I mean, coming back from thriving, Christian artists  I realized connection is key to it all and working on that, but even what you were saying about,  the Facebook lives and everything just, I've just noticed in the last few months of even when I just, take a moment to film my process and what someone see, I get more hits off of that than anything.

 

Totally. So I was like, well, people do want to watch this and want to see and Everything. So, anyway, like I said, I am a perfectionist and that's my greatest enemy because I talked myself out of everything because I don't have all my ducks in a row.

 

Paul: And the cool thing though, is that when you're not perfect, the more people relate to you. It's just that when you are too polished and you are too perfected,  you seem like a robot and you'll seem like the people that are on TV, that they're just a disconnect, like they're too polished.  

 

And with Facebook lives, one trick that I can give, actually two different things for anybody that's like hesitant on doing Facebook lives if you kind of get locked up, grab a small photo of like your best friend and put their face right above your camera and just talk to them the entire time. Just talk to your best friend.

 

Because if you talk to your best friend that way, everybody's going to connect with you because no matter what you say, if you're looking at that camera talking to your best friend, you're not going to sound copywriting and I'm going to sound “salesy”. You're not going to cause your best friend would slap you in the face. The moment that you started doing all that, that babbling. Right?

 

And a lot of times what we do with people that we coach is we have them create a private Facebook group that nobody else is a member of just you and go in and do a couple tests Facebook lives right into the group. And then once you do a couple tests, just go live into where you really want to go because the human mind cannot tell the difference between what practice is and what real is.

 

So if you practice just like a professional athlete, before you go into the game, you'll be that much sharper right out the gate. And that'll just help you be more fluid. Cause you've already done it, a test run or two once or twice before you get in front of the real people.

 

Kim: Okay.

 

Melissa: And, and don't take for granted, like what you naturally do,

 

you know, share behind the scenes. If you're working on something, if you're creating, then just put the camera on and show the process because people like you were noticing, people watch that. They love to watch the process, explain what you're doing.

 

And that's how you, again, like you said, building that connection and trust over time. I mean, that's, we were watching Dublin when she was doing that and sharing behind the scenes, just people, they just love to watch. They love that creative process. So, just continue to do that. And that's gonna build that connection and build that audience of the right people that want to hear more about what you have to say.

 

Kim: Okay, Thank you. And that can be, you know, these things come on my head. I'm sorry. I think weird. I'm sorry. It could be as simple. Like I can't even make a pencil sharp in my life.

 

Like it could just be like, what's the technique on like having sharp pencils, it could why did you select this color or this brand of pencil? What are you actually drawing? What's the paper, the texture? These are things that I would be curious about. And it's things that you most likely take for granted.

 

You know, a lot of us focus in with, with Deb when we were chatting with her, just like focus on like one type of technique. You don't have to explain the whole process. Like this live today could be, let me just show you one method, like one like for you. So it could be shading, you know, it could, it just one methodology or one type of stroke, like one type of technique.

 

 And that is what that is about today is just that one technique. Because when you do it that way, then you have Facebook lives forever. B  ut when you tried to do all the things all the time, then you're afraid,

 

like what do I talk about next week? It's because you try to cover all the bases.

 

Kim: Okay. That’s a good step

 

Melissa: You're so welcome. You're so welcome. I'm excited. And I'm just keep us posted and I'm just, you know, it always it's that first step that's always the hardest, but just, you know, keep, keep moving forward with it and,  keep building that connection.  And don't get in your own way with it. I think that's, that's something that we all need to kind of check from time to time.