Today we chat with Jill Stanton, co-founder of Screw The 9 to 5 online community. In this episode, Jill shares her personal and professional insights on how to cultivate your own online community, maintain a consistent retention rate, and make more money with membership programs.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:37 – Introduction.
• 05:17 – Tip # 1: Jill says that before throwing yourself all in and going all in on membership sites figure out if you actually want this business model for your business because having a membership site requires taking care of your members every month, watching retention, keeping an eye on your numbers and making sure you show up consistently. 
• 07:22 – According to Jill, when you are just starting out, you don’t know what business model you should go with because no one is talking about that. There is a lot of stuff online where people are just trying to sell their stuff so they tell you that this is the only way you need to do it but we must realize that one business model might not be the right fit for someone and another business model might be suitable for you.
• 8:28 – Tip # 2: Make sure you have the attention that allows people to actually join and hear about you, build a list and try to get some attention around your brand and ask them if this is something that they want. Jill initially had one of digital products and people objected saying that they can’t afford the products so she asked them if they would rather have something low priced with a monthly fee and everyone said yes so Jill and her husband went all in on it.  If you have are planning on a membership site you must realize that everyone does not like recurring payments so do some research and make sure that your audience is aligned with that kind of offer before going ahead with a membership site.
• 10:01 – Tip # 3: You should build and engage the membership because people may come for the stuff but they’ll always stay for the connection and the community. Many people think that memberships is all about releasing new content every month but that doesn’t have to be how you structure your membership site.   
• 11:10 – A huge thing that people need to realize if they are going to create a membership site is that you have to really get clear on the progression of your members i.e. where they are coming in at and where they want to get to, you need to be purposeful with your content and you must give them the necessary steps to accelerate their journey for them.
• 12:20 – You should get in the process of steadily and continuously growing because in order for a membership site to be profitable you need people in the community. Quite a few people do open and closed where the membership is only open for a week after that the door is closed and then they open the doors to the membership six months later.  Jill gives an analogy of the head of the octopus as your membership site and all the tentacles are the different pathways into someone joining the site. Jill has content rich, hyper specific sales funnels. Jill starts with a free blog post which has traffic driven to it  then the next step on that page is to opt in for a hyper relevant freebie and then they have a value driven one time offer this is where they make an offer to grab their course for a limited time at a discounted amount then from there you are invited to a webinar where they pitch Screw U and this is constantly running 24/7 so a new audience is constantly being built which every two weeks they run a webinar and get people into the membership.
• 18:11 – Jill says that if you want to roll with memberships, you have to be comfortable with the fact that a certain chunk of your members is going to leave each and every month. The number of members who leave each and every month is going to fluctuate from industry to industry and it’s around 20% in the online business space. This might sound like a lot but if you have a solid sales system, you can continue to replace those people.
• 20:26 – Jill is opening up a second tier two Screw U which will have more access to Jill’s team and a higher price point of $500 a month versus $69 a month and Jill feels it is something worth playing with and she feels it has a benefit of not just allowing your members to strive to hit the next level, but also to increase your own revenue. The beauty of membership sites is that it allows you the recurring model which is predictable so you can have an estimate of how much will make this month and based on your retention how much you will make the next month and that allows you to invest this much here and this much there.  So having that second tier offer that is a higher price point with a lower amount of people allows you to add the pushes of profit into your membership that allows you to scale even higher.
• 23:46 – Once you have a strong and consistent retention rate, it allows you to start to predict your revenues so that you can map out where you are going to invest and the people you are going to bring on but everyone doesn’t get retention right they think that they can just create a course or a new freebie or a piece of content each month and people will stay for that but it doesn’t always work out like that because people need to be seen, heard, acknowledged and you need to give them success paths.

Resources Mentioned:

• The five biggest retention strategies Josh and Jill have used to have a consistent 93% retention rate can be found at www.marketlikeanerd.com/retention.