090: The Membership Economy Changed Our Lives!

Today’s guest on The Shane Sams Show is Robbie Baxter, author of The Membership Economy–a book which predicted the rise of subscription services like Netflix and was literally our membership bible for growing our first membership site into a million dollar membership!

Jocelyn and I went to a conference in the Philippines, hosted by Chris Ducker, called Tropical Think Tank. We went just to get around other entrepreneurs and see what they were doing. We were sitting at a table with James Schramko and I started telling him about what were selling, that it was going well, but that it was also very high-energy. He flat out told us it was a membership, all we needed to do was sell it once and have people pay you forever. He told us to read The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter on our way home.

So, of course, I read the whole thing on our way back to the Philippines. And, read it all in one sitting. I knew when we closed the book that we had to do what this book said, as soon as possible.

And, then in June of 2015, as soon as we got home, we implemented the membership model into each and every one of our four businesses.

Within 30 days of opening our membership, we had over 1,000 members, paying an average of $49 to $99 a month, and it’s been that way ever since. Now, we’ve helped over 3,000 people do the same thing in the last 5 years.

All of that literally came from us reading The Membership Economy by Robbie Kellman Baxter.

In today’s episode we dive deep into when and where you should use free trials, pricing your membership, and we discuss her new book, The Forever Transaction. We are going to talk about all things memberships with the person who literally wrote the book on the membership model.

In today’s episode you’ll learn:

What the Membership Economy is all about

The difference in headline benefits and engagement benefits

Why the free trial can help or hurt you

Why friction is key to attracting quality members

The Forever Transaction

How to evolve your offerings

How to engage and retain your members

If you need help starting, building, and growing an online business, check out all of the support and resources for entrepreneurs at https://www.ShaneSams.com and https://www.FlippedLifestyle.com!

Follow Shane on twitter @shane_sams.