Today I am sharing how I got to where I am today and who my mentor is. Today’s podcast is an interview that I did in February with my mentor, Stu McLaren, who I know you are going to love learning from.
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This is for you if you’re thinking about growing your audience and creating recurring revenue in your business.
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Membership Site Secrets With My Mentor, Stu McLaren
Stu is the founder of Wishlist Member, a software that turns WordPress blogs into memberships sites. Not only has Stu sold over 60,000 licenses of his software to entrepreneurs around the globe, but he also has led multiple 7 figure online membership businesses.
Personally, Stu has impacted my business probably more than he knows because I have been using his wishlist member software since like 2012. Then in 2016, I took his course TRIBE which single-handedly turned our business around and helped us grow our membership sites from 100 members to 500 members in just six months.
Some Questions We Discuss in This Week’s Podcast:
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How does someone know if a membership site is right for them?
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How does someone start then to grow that audience without wasting time?
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How do you go about building up your expertise?
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How do you build a relationship?
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What was the turning point for you with making money?
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How do you set yourself apart from others?
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What is one thing our listeners can do to grow their business? One action that they can take today.
Here are some of the tips from Stu:
Q: How does someone know if a membership site is right for them?
A: Well, there’s a few key indicators, like what I look for is like, is there an ongoing need? So you know, is there an ongoing problem or an ongoing need? So if people are looking to solve something on a regular basis, that is a really good sign. So here’s an example. Trisha Callahan runs a membership site that provides meal plans every single month. Now, the reason this is a great membership site is because she’s solving an ongoing need, which is busy families who don’t have time to prepare healthy meals.
Download my membership site guide, The 6 Secrets to Building a Successful Membership Site.
Q: How does someone start then to grow that audience without wasting time?
A: There are two ways to be able to generate a lot of traction. One way is to carve out a specific niche. But in the beginning, on the front end, the more specific you can be in how you help people, the more traction you will get. Be specific.
Q: How do you go about building up your expertise?
A: You start talking about that particular problem or challenge and you start sharing solutions for that problem or challenge. You want to become known as the person who has solutions for that problem. The other way that I love to do this is I love sharing stories. So even in our conversation here, everybody listening, listen to how many stories I have shared already and how many I probably will in the next few minutes.
But the point of the matter is that people connect with real stories. And so that is a great way to share your expertise by sharing what others are doing and sharing stories of how they are solving that particular problem. Sometimes it could be people that you’re working with, but in the beginning, even if you don’t have a big client base, it doesn’t have to be people you’re working with. But what you’re doing is you are establishing your expertise because you are becoming known as the person who was speaking about and solving that particular problem.
Q: How do you build a relationship?
A: One of the things that I love to do when it comes to building relationship is creating content around the things that you believe in, like your values and your philosophies and the things that you stand for. Because when you do that, people connect not only in your brain, but they connect from the heart too. And this, when people connect here at the heart level, it opens them up in ways that we can’t even begin to describe. Like it’s all happens on a subconscious level, but they, they feel connected when you can give voice to the things that they’re thinking and feeling, they’ll just think to themselves, I love her. I am totally connected to her. I can totally relate to her. I know that’s what your audience is with you. And it’s the same for anybody who begins thinking about that.
Q: What was the turning point for you with making money?
A: What if I make a whole lot more money and I allocate a whole lot more to the causes that I’m passionate about? Imagine the impact I could have then. And that’s when it was like this whole guilt about making money was just lifted from my shoulders because I realized the more money I make, the more impact I can have. And from that day forward, I love making money. Making money is an amazing thing. It’s an honorable thing because what you do with that money is totally up to you. And you can certainly keep it for yourself and buy stuff you want. But there’s also an opportunity to be able to give it to the people and causes that you’re most passionate about. And so I share that story in a video and that video like took off because people who were also dealing with money guilt totally could connect to that on a heart level.
Q: How do you set yourself apart from others?
A: The key thing I always hear is there’s so many people out there already doing what I want to do. Well, no one has your story. No one has those things that have happened to you that you can share. And those stories are everywhere. Oftentimes somebody will ask, where do I get ideas for content like that? Sometimes the best ideas will come from when you got your feathers ruffled for some reason.
Stu, there’s so many more questions that I can ask you. But what I want to share with our audience today is that you’ve put together an amazing guide that goes over more detail, like what your pricing model should be for your membership, how your content strategy, even like the types of membership site and models. And so I want to share that link. I don’t know if you have anything more to say about that guy, but I’ll give them the link for that. You can download the guide HERE.
Q: What is one thing our listeners can do to grow their business? One action that they can take today.
Okay, here’s what I would do. I would take a step back and I would look at who you are trying to serve and ultimately at the end of the day, what result are your clients or customers trying to achieve? Because one of the things that is a core belief here in our company and I know you’ve heard me talk about it a million times but it is this concept called the circle of awesomeness. And basically I see it as so fundamental. I’m going to explain it. It starts with after you make a sale, the number one focus is to help your clients or customers get a result. Because if they’ve got a result, then you have great story and that’s when you share that story, you generate more sales.
But the bottom line is this…if you’re not clear on the result that you’re trying to help your clients or customers get and you don’t have a deep rooted commitment on how you can help those clients or customers get that result, then there’s a problem. So the best thing that you can do is get clear on the result and you can start helping people get that result. And if you’re in a position where you’ve already helped people get a result, then what I would do is go back and start collecting the stories of those people because the stories are your best marketing asset.
