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Work Less, Earn More is the podcast that explores how to get the most out of every hour you work. Gillian Perkins brings more than a decade of experience as an entrepreneur and educator to help you design a business that's not only flexible and fulfilling, but highly profitable. She shares strategies that are working in her own business to save time and maximize profits. She also features interviews with successful business owners on how they’re achieving big things in their businesses with crazy-little time investment. Share Work Less, Earn More with an overworked entrepreneur you know who could use a change of pace!
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We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn't always the reality of being a business owner. I'm Gillian Perkins, and I'm on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it's supposed to be.
In every episode, I'll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work so that you can work less and earn more. Let's get to it.
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[0:36] To start a membership site, there are two things that basically everybody thinks you need. a big audience so that you have members, and a lot of content. Because you never want those members to get bored because then they'll cancel their membership and stop paying you. But when I started my membership site, I didn't have either of those things. And yet it was practically an overnight success. And when I say practically an overnight success, what I really mean it was an over week success. One week, I didn't have the membership site, wasn't making any money from it. A week later, I'd launched the membership site. I had 300 members and it was bringing in $10,000 even per month. And that's a stream of revenue, money I get in the bank every single month that I still have today, seven years later. So let's talk about how I did it because nothing has changed my life more than going from barely scraping by to having an extra $10,000 every single month.
[1:38] So first of all, the people. How many do you really need? Like how big does your audience really need to be to be able to successfully launch a membership site? Well, first you need to think about what it means to successfully launch a membership site. Like how many people do you need to have sign up to make this well worth your while? Because if you only have three people sign up, you're gonna have a problem. The problem will be that you've promised those three people that you're giving them new content month after month after month, and they're only paying you a hundred bucks a month or so. And that's going to be a big problem. In fact, you're probably going to have to shut down the membership because you can't afford to sell that much of your time for that low of a rate. It would completely handicap you, chain you down. It would be like a ball and chain on your leg that would tie you up so you couldn't spend your time working on any other projects or even just working to grow the membership to get more members.
[2:35] So you have to make sure that before you launch your membership, you do have a big enough audience that you're going to be able to get enough members to initially sign up. And how many members is that threshold? Well, only you can be the judge of that. And it is going to depend a little bit on how much content you're promising these people and the price of the membership that you're selling. So how much you're going to make from it per member. But I would recommend that you grow your audience to the point that you're confident you're going to be able to get at least about 30 members to sign up initially.
[3:09] 30 members at about $50 a month means that your membership site will be bringing in about $1,500 per month. And I'm pretty confident that if you do this right, your membership doesn't need to take you more than about five hours a week to run. Five hours a week, that's 20, 25 hours a month. And $1,500 for 20-25 hours of work seems like a pretty good rate to me.
[3:33] Now, of course, it would be way better if you could get a lot more than 30 members. And I think that that's totally possible. When I launched my membership site, I didn't have a big audience. I had a small growing audience. I had 300 people on my launch list for the membership site and a big chunk of those people bought plus a bunch of random people from the rest of my small audience. But at the end of my launch week, I was shocked at the number that had signed up. because not only was it way more than I was expecting, it was just a weird number. Exactly 300 people, the exact same number of people who had been on my launch list for the membership site, exactly 300 people signed up. 300 people at what was then $33 a month meant $10,000 in recurring revenue. So don't write your audience off just because it's small. You really can do a lot, even with a small audience.
[4:32] But going back to the question, how big does your audience need to be to be able to get at least 30 members to sign up? I'd recommend that you build your launch list to at least 300 people. Now, you could have an experience like mine where 300 people on your launch list ends up translating to 300 new members. But I wouldn't bank on that, especially if that's your entire audience. Now, if you do have an audience beyond that launch list, even if it's just a few thousand people on a couple of different platforms, you could get some pretty crazy results. But again, don't bank on it. Only expect about 10% of your launch list to sign up. So if you need 30 members, build a launch list of 300 before you launch your membership site. If you think you need 50 members, then build a launch list of 500 before you launch your membership site and so on.
[5:22] Now, the other huge thing you have to have to be able to launch a membership
[5:25] site is all the content that goes into it, the content that those members are actually paying for. So we'll talk about that in just a moment. But first, let me tell you about the sponsor of today's video. It's called Transcriptor, and it's a tool that makes managing your meetings so much easier. As an entrepreneur, you are probably taking a lot of meetings every week, and you probably know how much time it can take to record your meetings and then organize those recordings afterward and take notes during your meetings, etc, etc. Keeping your meeting straight can consume a lot of time. Well, that's exactly where Transcriptor comes in. So Transcriptor automatically records all your meetings and automatically transcribes them and summarizes your meeting transcriptions into simple notes that you can easily refer to later on. You can then easily share any of these assets with your team or with your clients after the meeting is over. One of my favorite Transcriptor features is called Talk to Your Meetings, and you can just ask Transcriptor questions about your past meetings to search through those meetings, and then Transcriptor will give you answers. It will help you to find things in past meetings or locate the meeting that you're looking for. You can even ask it really specific questions, like what decisions were made or who said what or what action steps were agreed upon.
[6:46] Transcriptor ensures that all of your meetings get recorded and organized and makes them searchable so that you can build a reliable database of your meetings as time goes on. If you're tired of spending hours taking notes and organizing your recordings after your meetings, then definitely check out Transcriptor. And if you sign up with your work email using the link in the description down below, then you will get 300 minutes of recording and transcription for free.
[7:12] All right, now let's get back to talking about how you can get a membership site launched in 2026. And now let's talk about the content problem, because a lot of people think that they need to build an entire content library before they can launch their membership site so that when members sign up, they are impressed with what they see and they want to stick around and they don't get bored or run out of content to consume. So they never have a reason to cancel. But the truth is that you do not need a huge library of content. In fact, having a big library of content can actually end up causing a problem. And the problem is that the members can feel overwhelmed. They can not know where to start. They can be distracted and they can struggle to get results. And you'll find that people will not stay members for nearly as long if they are not getting real results for that money that they're paying month after month.
[8:05] Honestly, this has been one of the biggest challenges that I have faced as my membership has continued to exist over the past seven years. We've kept adding new content to it as these years have gone on. When I first launched the membership site for those first couple of years, the content was really focused. It was essentially a curriculum that I was guiding the members through over the course of a year. But beyond a one-year scope, it didn't really make sense to keep like building on the end of the curriculum. So we started adding in more kind of like secondary resources, more bonus resources, more extra trainings and extra classes and extra courses. And there is so much incredible content inside Startup Society today, but we actually have a lower member retention rate than we used to when we first started when the content was actually not as good, but it was a lot more streamlined and focused.
[8:57] Now, of course, over the last few years, I've been working on solving this problem and making the content in my membership site streamlined again and making sure that the members know exactly where to start and what their next step should be at every stage of their membership. But when you're starting your membership, this won't be a problem that you're facing unless you make it a problem, unless you try to make a massive amount of content before launch. The truth is you only need to make enough content before you launch to keep your members happy for the first month. And then you can just add to it each month after that. We'll talk more about that in a minute though, because you actually don't need to add a whole lot of content every month or not even necessarily every month at all. But going back to how much content you need to have to launch again, one month's worth of content is great as long as you set the right expectations.
[9:47] Now, what I mean by that is if people sign up for your membership expecting a Netflix style library of content, and they come in and they find three modules of an online course, they're probably going to be kind of disappointed. It hasn't lived up to their expectations and they probably won't stick around. On the other hand, if you've set the right expectation, if you've laid it out for them, if they understand that they are going to be getting access to this program that is going to be being delivered over the next three, six months or even year, and that when they get started, they'll get instant access to the first three modules, plus a group coaching session with you every month or whatever else your membership is going to include, then they can come in and be beyond happy to get access to those first three modules that are more than enough to keep them busy for that first month of their membership. So it really all just comes down to setting the right expectations. And then, of course, making sure that the content itself is actually good quality and is helpful to the members.
[10:46] Now, the last main thing I want to talk about in today's video is how much more content you should plan to add to your membership site every week or every month, what that schedule should look like, how you can plan that all out, and how much time this is actually going to take you to run this membership site. But before I get into all that, I just want to say I do have a lot more thoughts about how to curate, how to plan the content in your membership site, how to decide what that content should be. So tomorrow, I'm going to be hosting an hour-long class over on Zoom where we're going to deep dive into that topic and even start to make some decisions to plan out your membership site if this is something that you are really serious about doing. So if you want to join me for that free one hour class. It's called From Zero Content to Paying Members. Just check the link in the description down below, or you can type it into your browser, gillianperkins.com/free-membership-class. Again, the class is totally free. It's an hour long, and we're going to get your membership content plan.
[11:52] Again, that class is totally free. It's going to be about an hour long. It's going to be tomorrow, which is Wednesday, March 25th at 9 a.m. Pacific, which is noon Eastern. And then I'll also be doing it again on Thursday, the 26th at 1 p.m. Pacific, which is 4 p.m. Eastern. So if you could join me for either of those times, either on Wednesday morning or Thursday afternoon, I would love to have you there and help you get your membership content all planned out.
[12:20] Okay, now the last thing we're going to talk about today is how much content you will need to be adding to your membership site each month, how long that's going to take you. Because I think one of the biggest reasons that people hesitate to start memberships is that they don't want to get on the content hamster wheel. They don't want to constantly be having to make new course after new course after new course, or constantly be working with their members, be hosting office hours multiple couple times every week or group coaching calls every single week or anything like that. But honestly, nobody's got time for that anyway.
[12:53] Your members will not want that much content from you. They are going to want just a couple valuable things from you each month. Maybe one workshop and a group coaching call. Maybe a community and a group coaching call. Maybe one mini course each month. When I first started my membership site, I did a mini course every month. Then I switched to just doing a one-hour workshop each month. And now today we have a huge library of content built up, like I was talking about earlier. Honestly, more content than we need in there. So there's plenty of educational material to keep the members quite occupied. And so the only new content that I create is I do once a month a group coaching call with the members. And then my team does a once a week, like masterminded co-working session with the members. So it's really quite minimal in terms of how much content we're creating today. But honestly, it always has been. Even at the height of it, I was making one mini course a month. So I would record literally five lessons each month. Each one would be like five, 10 minutes long. And I would just be walking the members through how to get the next like specific tangible result in their business. So each of those mini courses would take me about five hours to like plan and record. Then I would send it away to my video editor and we'd pop it onto the membership site. So it really was a very small time investment, especially considering that, again, the membership brought in and still brings in today about $10,000 a month.
[14:20] All right. Well, that is everything I have for you today. But I do hope that you decide to join me tomorrow morning for that one hour class on how to plan out all the content for your new membership site. Again, it's called From Zero Content to Paying Members. Free class at 9am tomorrow. And then again on Thursday at 1pm Pacific. So there's the link down in the description where you can go to sign up so that you can get that Zoom link. And I hope to see you there.
[14:50] [outro bumper]
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of work less earn more. Here's what I want you to do next. Take a screenshot of this episode you're listening to right now and share it out on your Instagram stories. And when you do, make sure you tag me at Gillian Z Perkins so I can see you're listening. Sharing on stories is going to help more people find this podcast so they too can learn how to build their business in a way that allows them to work less and earn more. And if you really love the show, head over to Apple Podcasts right now and leave Work Less, Earn More a review to give it a boost and help even more people find it. Okay, let's wrap this up. I'm Gillian Perkins, and until next week, stay focused and take action.
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