Transcription
Which is better for your online business, a membership site or a Facebook group? Can they be the same thing? How different are they? Can you use them in the same way? Should they be free or paid? We're going to discuss all of this in today's episode. Hang tight.
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Welcome to episode 74 of the Graham Cochran Show, where I'm here to help you build your own business, work less, and live and give more to the things and people you care about. I'm your host, Graham Cochran. Thanks for hanging out with me today.
Good question today, and this one actually came from a YouTube comment from one of my viewers named John. And he literally asked, "Why would a membership site be better than a Facebook group?" Okay, this was a response to a video I did a while back when I was talking about the benefits of membership sites versus online courses and vice versa. So last week, we talked about membership sites, and I shared with you the three biggest mistakes I made with my first membership site. Even though we made money, I still made some major mistakes that I have since changed in how I approach my second and third membership site. So if you missed that, check out episode 73. If you're listening to the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or just look at the videos here on YouTube, it was last week.
So, in keeping with the membership theme, I want to break down his question and really unpack it. The bigger question behind it, which is membership site versus Facebook group, because they seem very similar on the surface, and people use them both for their online businesses, but they use them in different ways, and they can be used in different ways. So I'm going to sort of go through some pros and cons and give you my thoughts and share with you what I think is going to work best for you to ultimately grow your online business.
Now, got to understand that you can use a Facebook group as a front-end tool or a back-end tool for your business. So we got to clarify that from the get-go. Facebook, right? You have your Facebook pages, whether personal, then you have your brand business pages. But Facebook groups, which have been around for quite some time and have become very, very important to Facebook in the last couple of years. In fact, Zuckerberg made a big push a year or two ago saying that Zuckerberg, being Mark, of course, the founder of Facebook, made a big push to say that Facebook groups is going to be where they're going to emphasize their algorithm, their advertising. They want to use Facebook to be less divisive and bring people together. So there's a group for every topic you can imagine. Find people like you, jump in the conversations, talk all day long. Please stay on Facebook so we can advertise to you more and still make billions of dollars. So Facebook groups are their push now.
From a front-end perspective to your business, meaning what non-customers see and interact with, versus behind the paywall, the back end, what customers see and interact with, a Facebook group can be great. So it can be a strategy to create a free but private Facebook group. It could be public, but private ones give you a lot more control over the group of people and allow you to really serve them better as you let people in on a case-by-case basis. It can be a great front-end tool for you to engage with your audience, build trust, build credibility, answer questions, be a moderator of a small group of people. Could be a few hundred people. And then from that, you can, with that credibility and trust you've built, pitch your products, invite them into your paid coaching, things like that. My brother and sister-in-law both do this. They both have their own free Facebook groups that they are loving on, serving people well, and then from there, they're able to hire paid clients, one-on-one clients, or pitch their courses and products. So just so you know, a free Facebook group, even though it's private, can be a great front-end tool for your business. But that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is recurring revenue when you have a product that you sell that is a community type product.
So John's question is in relation to me talking about membership sites, and he sees that as, "Oh, there's this community, they're paying to be a part of it. Can't I just do this on a Facebook group?" So let me start by saying something real quick and explaining what a membership site is in the way that it's meant to be for your business, and then we'll compare Facebook group as a membership site or some other tools for your membership site.
A membership site, in a quick nutshell, is different than an online course in that it's not static. An online course is one-time information. You go through it, just like you take a class in college. You take a semester of basket weaving 101 or music theory 201 or whatever it is. You have curriculum. You come in knowing little or nothing, you come out knowing a lot more and having mastery. There's a beginning, there's an end, and there's a goal with that course to get you from here to there. Online courses, in a nutshell, great products, huge part of your online business, if not the core of your online business. Why? Because you build them once, you can automate them, put them in an evergreen email funnel, and let it rip. I make a lot of money doing just that.
Membership sites, very different. They require ongoing work, but you sell it once. People pay you month after month after month to continue to have access to the existing community and the content, all these different things. And you can make more long-term revenue, more recurring, stable revenue from this because you get members in, and if you keep them happy, they'll stay around for years and continue to pay you a premium for access. Think Netflix, think Disney Plus, right? You want as many recurring memberships as possible so that your monthly bill, or your revenue, I should say, goes up. So they play together nicely, and both are important to your online business being successful.
Now, what makes a good membership site? Well, at its basic, there are three components that every good membership site, for the most part, let's just say 98%, are made up of. Are you ready? It's very easy. There's even alliteration. They're all C's. I could be a Baptist preacher if this were a sermon, right?
Number one is content. So regular, new, fresh content. Generally speaking, good membership sites have new content every single month.
Then there's coaching. So coaching is the second C. And what that means is more direct access to you, live Q&A calls, things like that, where you can interact with them and answer their questions. They have access to you as a coach, okay, in a much more direct capacity than leaving a comment below a YouTube video like this and hoping that the content creator responds, right? If you're a paying customer to this private membership site, you're going to get much better coaching from that person.
So content, coaching, and community. There's the third C, right? I wish I made this up because it would sound really slick, but it's just the way memberships are. They just all happen to be C's: content, coaching, and community. So community is a huge, huge part. And if you caught last week's episode, I talked about one of the biggest mistakes I made was not including a community element to my first membership site. In the initial months, we had content and we had coaching, but we didn't have a community, and I learned that that was a big mistake. I've heard it said by Ryan Lee and other people smarter than me that people join your membership for the content, what they hope to learn and the benefits that they get, but they stay for the community. And I mentioned that before.
Community is important. This is the other members interacting with you, if you remember. So this is not you necessarily, the community builder, interacting, although you should and you can. But this is really the members talking to each other, okay? This would be like if Netflix had like a Slack channel, which would be insane. It'd be like a private Facebook group for Netflix subscribers. You could just like talk to each other while you're binging Netflix. "What are you watching? What do you like? Have anybody watch this?" Like that's actually a really good idea. If that already exists and I don't know about it, then tell me because someone needs to tell Netflix. That would be super dope. But that's different than the content itself, right? That's not the content that you're consuming. That's not even the coaching, the live Q&A calls with you, the community builder. It is the members talking to each other. This is very sticky. This is what makes your membership site sticky if you cultivate a good community, if you're targeting the right type of people, and if you can get them to interact. And if you get enough members, because statistically, not everyone's going to interact in a community. And so the bigger the number of members you have, the higher that small percentage of people who are going to be active grows. And that makes your community seem more active because, guess what? It is. And a more active community breeds a more active community, and it's a perpetual self-fulfilling prophecy. So you need people to talk to make that membership sticky.
So a membership site, at its by its definition, is way more than just a Facebook group. A Facebook group primarily is just the community component. There's still the content and the coaching that you need to have a successful membership site that's going to keep people paying you every single month. Does that make sense?
So you can have a membership site that includes a Facebook group. Totally can do that. They pay you, they join your membership site. That's a paywall on your website, or you use Kajabi. I'll talk about that in a minute. And they join, they get the content, they get the live coaching from you, but you have a private Facebook group that they all get added to when they join, and that's where they can interact with each other and talk. So certainly, you can use a tool like a Facebook group and only give access to people who are a regular paying member of your membership site, as opposed to how I mentioned at the beginning, where you use a Facebook group as a front-end tool that anybody can join for free and then you hope to sell them stuff later on. The back end. Facebook groups can be a great tool for the community portion of the three portions of your membership site.
Now, that being said, you can use a Facebook group to be your entire membership. What this would mean is you'd have to fit all three components into your Facebook group. So if somebody joins your membership, you'd have to have some way to collect payment. And once they've paid, once they're in your private Facebook group that you give them access to, it's already a community. So it already has that component. You could go live inside of that Facebook group to do Facebook Lives, and that would be your coaching aspect. You could do this monthly, you could do this weekly, whatever you want to do. That would be the coaching aspect. Very easy to do. And then you could add content. It could be written, or you'd have to then link to private YouTube videos, or unlisted YouTube videos, I should say. Link to unlisted YouTube videos where you're uploading the video content. But then again, it's unlisted, so technically anybody could share the link outside of the Facebook group. But you could still link to it. You could upload natively to Facebook's now that I think of it. You might be able to do that right inside of your Facebook group. So that might be a better option as well, if you can keep it private. But then that could be shared outside. So you have to just look at the parameters. I haven't been on Facebook in months because I'm literally taking a year off of social media. So I can't remember offhand what the permissions are on native Facebook videos that you upload. So you'd have to look into that. So maybe you could upload natively into your group and put permissions that it can't be shared outside of the group. That would be better than the YouTube option. But that's still an option. Or you could link directly to PDFs or things like that that you have on your server somewhere that you can share with your community. So you'd want a way to be able to upload videos or share videos for the content, do Facebook Lives for the coaching, and then the community's built in. So that is totally possible to do this inside of a Facebook group.
One of my buddies is a cycling coach. So he was was a pro cycling, pro cycle, pro bike rider. Bro, I'm like, seriously not even awake today. I've been watching too much Tour de France, which has been on, by the way, lately. And, uh, anyway, got cycling on the brain. But he was a pro bike rider, blew out his knee, went into the coaching, sort of coaching cyclists one-on-one, and then he got smart, wanted to scale that. So he did online coaching, and then he built a Facebook group membership site. So people pay him, they have access to a private membership site where he has community, and he uploads cycling plans and nutrition plans and coaching plans and interacts with his members there. He does it all on Facebook. So you totally can pull this off.
But let's talk about some of the downsides of that. There's a few questions that come up to me when I think about if you host your entire membership on Facebook. First, how are you going to accept recurring payment? Facebook isn't going to collect money for you, right? So how are you going to accept payment? Unless Facebook's doing that now, and if they are, let me know in a comment below if you're watching on YouTube. Typically, you're going to have to somehow have some other tool like PayPal. You have to set up a recurring payment option, or Stripe, or something like that. So you're going to have to have some other tool to send people to a sales page. You're still going to have to have a sales page somewhere on your website that when they want to buy, they sign up and they get access, or they typed in their credit card, and so it's set up to auto-bill them every month. Then you're going to have to have some built-in notification from PayPal or Stripe, whatever, to email you the moment that somebody signs up so that then you can go give them access to the community, right? Or you're going to have to have an auto-email sent to them that says, "Hey, you just signed up. What I need you to do is email me and request access to the Facebook group." Either way, you have to set that up to make sure you can accept recurring payment and coordinate getting them access into the Facebook group because you have to give them permission manually.
Number two question that comes up is, how are you going to keep up with members who cancel their payment? So somebody, because people cancel, that's called churn. So let's say, you know, you've got 100 members, and this month 10 of them cancel for whatever reason, money's short, they're no longer interested in the community, whatever. If they cancel, can they cancel on their own? B, if they have to contact you to cancel, you can go cancel their membership, but then you're going to also have to go get them out of the Facebook group. So a lot of times what happens is these memberships that use Facebook as the community element, whether it's entirely on Facebook or they just use Facebook for just the community portion, if they cancel the membership on their own, you have to then go check the cancels versus the active members in the community every single week to make sure that anyone who's canceled and is no longer paying no longer has access to the community, otherwise they'd be able to stay in for free. So you have to handle that.
And then two, what if, and this is a sticking point for me, what if half the people that would love to join your membership don't have a Facebook account, or no longer use Facebook, or like me, are taking a year off of Facebook? If your entire membership is built on Facebook, well, then you can't sell to me. It's a turn-off to me. I would like to give you my money, I would like the content, I would like the coaching, I'd like the community, but I'm not on Facebook. Then what? And that's true not only for if your entire membership is built on Facebook, but if just the community portion of your membership is built on Facebook. So these are some major cons to me. Not that it can't be done, but some major cons.
What do I think is better? Well, I'm going to tell you, I think Kajabi is better. There's other platforms that can do this. If you have a WordPress website, you can use something called Wishlist Member. My wife uses this. I wish she could use Kajabi, but she didn't sell information products. She has a custom community that's built into a WordPress site to offer image downloads. It's just very complex. The only way for her to pull it off was a custom site build. So she has to do it in WordPress, and so she's using a WordPress plugin called Wishlist Member to turn her membership, excuse me, her WordPress site into a membership. I can tell you from the back end, even though it works and she's running a really profitable multi-six-figure business off of it, it is a pain in the butt. But for normal people doing information products or a typical membership site where you're sharing content and coaching community, Kajabi, please, for the love, use Kajabi. It is so much simpler to do this.
If you don't have Kajabi, you should get a free trial and you should use my link because it's double the length of their free trial. It's 28 days instead of 14 days. And if you sign up with my link, you're going to get access to the 28-day challenge videos, which will teach you a bunch of bonus content on how to make your first thousand dollars in those 28 days while you're free trialing it. It's awesome. And if you sign up for Kajabi after the 28 days are over, the free trial part of your payment goes back to support me and my channel and this podcast, which is super cool. Cost you nothing extra. Your price is literally the same if you use my link or use their website. So if you want to support me and you want to check out Kajabi, check it out by clicking the link below if you're watching on YouTube, or just going to grahamcochran.com/kajabi. You might as well sign up for 28 days. You could even launch your membership site in those 28 days and be making money in the first month while you built it all for free, which is pretty cool. So grahamcochran.com/kajabi.
Here's how it works in Kajabi. You're able to build a product that, when they, A, you can build the sales page, you can build your whole website for that matter, and you can be the sales page for your membership. And you can have multiple price points. You can have multi, you can have an annual option, you can have a monthly option, you can do free trial if you want, whatever you want. You can add upsells after they join your membership site, whatever you want to do, all inside of Kajabi. You can have the emails all automatically done inside of Kajabi, both to sell to your list, to host your list, to onboard new members after they join, get them emails once every day to like welcome them, super awesome stuff, all inside of Kajabi. It collects payment for you. It, when they cancel, it automatically locks them out of the membership so you never have to do that. And all of your content can be uploaded for free inside of your Kajabi product. You can link to free YouTube Lives that are private streams for your live coaching, or if you use Zoom, you can link to your Zoom calls, to your live coaching, whatever you want to do. And then you can also have a Kajabi community, which is basically they took a Facebook group and built it natively into Kajabi. So when people join your membership, they get access to this community as well as a private free community that can link to the content. It's all integrated into their login. They log into one place, and there's the content, there's the coaching, and there's the community. It's mobile-friendly, it's beautiful, it's streamlined. There's no distraction. They can't access anything else other than your community when they're in, so they're really focused, they're locked in. They can share videos, they can share photos, they can share thoughts. You can have topics of conversation. They can comment, they can like, they can heart things. It's super easy.
Is it as robust as a Kajabi? Excuse me, is it as robust as a Facebook group? No. Facebook is a really slick piece of software that's been around for a long, long time with some of the best developers on planet Earth, and it's meant to be lightning fast, and it's meant to do exactly what it does. The Kajabi community is a much more basic Facebook group. But as someone who runs a membership site completely on Kajabi using just the Kajabi community, it totally works great. It totally works great. The there's few cons, and the pros highly outweigh the cons in my opinion.
So the beauty of running your membership site on a platform like Kajabi is it's all integrated. Also, if you sell anything else on Kajabi, like your online courses, it's all integrated in your email marketing. Because then it's easy to tag people who have access to the community. You can send out a broadcast email, "Anybody who has access to your community can get this upsell offer." Or people who have been a member for 60 days on a monthly plan, you can have an auto-tag sent to auto-email them at 60 days saying, "If you're really enjoying the community, I'd love to give it to you at a discount. How do you get the discount? By switching to an annual plan." If you join the annual plan to pay for a year in advance, you get two months free. So it's like you're getting a monthly rate that's even cheaper. And you could have that all automated. It's all tied into your membership. You don't have to log in and give them access or take away access. It's a lot more tightly integrated, is the best way I can say.
So I gotta say, a platform like Kajabi is a much better option to run a legit membership site. It's not that it can't be done inside of a Facebook group. It's not that it can't be done half Kajabi, half Facebook group. I'm just saying that it is a lot slicker, a lot easier on you, and the user experience is a lot better for your end user if you do it all inside of Kajabi. And again, if you haven't tried Kajabi, try it out for free using my affiliate link. Just go to grahamcochran.com/kajabi. Again, full disclosure, it is an affiliate link. But what you get is double the free trial using my link, bonus training videos using my link that you don't get anywhere else. And if you do stick around and become a paying customer of Kajabi, part of your monthly payment goes back to support me and my channel at no cost to you. So if you're even thinking about Kajabi, and if I've ever helped you out in any way, shape, or form, it's a really cool way to show me some love and give me some support. So check out that link below if you're watching on YouTube. But again, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, just navigate over to grahamcochran.com/kajabi. You might as well sign up for 28 days. You could even launch your membership site in those 28 days and be making money in the first month while you built it all for free, which is pretty cool. So grahamcochran.com/kajabi.
Here's how it works in Kajabi. You're able to build a product that, when they, A, you can build the sales page, you can build your whole website for that matter, and you can be the sales page for your membership. And you can have multiple price points. You can have multi, you can have an annual option, you can have a monthly option, you can do free trial if you want, whatever you want. You can add upsells after they join your membership site, whatever you want to do, all inside of Kajabi. You can have the emails all automatically done inside of Kajabi, both to sell to your list, to host your list, to onboard new members after they join, get them emails once every day to like welcome them, super awesome stuff, all inside of Kajabi. It collects payment for you. It, when they cancel, it automatically locks them out of the membership so you never have to do that. And all of your content can be uploaded for free inside of your Kajabi product. You can link to free YouTube Lives that are private streams for your live coaching, or if you use Zoom, you can link to your Zoom calls, to your live coaching, whatever you want to do. And then you can also have a Kajabi community, which is basically they took a Facebook group and built it natively into Kajabi. So when people join your membership, they get access to this community as well as a private free community that can link to the content. It's all integrated into their login. They log into one place, and there's the content, there's the coaching, and there's the community. It's mobile-friendly, it's beautiful, it's streamlined. There's no distraction. They can't access anything else other than your community when they're in, so they're really focused, they're locked in. They can share videos, they can share photos, they can share thoughts. You can have topics of conversation. They can comment, they can like, they can heart things. It's super easy.
Is it as robust as a Kajabi? Excuse me, is it as robust as a Facebook group? No. Facebook is a really slick piece of software that's been around for a long, long time with some of the best developers on planet Earth, and it's meant to be lightning fast, and it's meant to do exactly what it does. The Kajabi community is a much more basic Facebook group. But as someone who runs a membership site completely on Kajabi using just the Kajabi community, it totally works great. It totally works great. The there's few cons, and the pros highly outweigh the cons in my opinion.
So the beauty of running your membership site on a platform like Kajabi is it's all integrated. Also, if you sell anything else on Kajabi, like your online courses, it's all integrated in your email marketing. Because then it's easy to tag people who have access to the community. You can send out a broadcast email, "Anybody who has access to your community can get this upsell offer." Or people who have been a member for 60 days on a monthly plan, you can have an auto-tag sent to auto-email them at 60 days saying, "If you're really enjoying the community, I'd love to give it to you at a discount. How do you get the discount? By switching to an annual plan." If you join the annual plan to pay for a year in advance, you get two months free. So it's like you're getting a monthly rate that's even cheaper. And you could have that all automated. It's all tied into your membership. You don't have to log in and give them access or take away access. It's a lot more tightly integrated, is the best way I can say.
So I gotta say, a platform like Kajabi is a much better option to run a legit membership site. It's not that it can't be done inside of a Facebook group. It's not that it can't be done half Kajabi, half Facebook group. I'm just saying that it is a lot slicker, a lot easier on you, and the user experience is a lot better for your end user if you do it all inside of Kajabi. And again, if you haven't tried Kajabi, try it out for free using my affiliate link. Just go to grahamcochran.com/kajabi. Again, full disclosure, it is an affiliate link. But what you get is double the free trial using my link, bonus training videos using my link that you don't get anywhere else. And if you do stick around and become a paying customer of Kajabi, part of your monthly payment goes back to support me and my channel at no cost to you. So if you're even thinking about Kajabi, and if I've ever helped you out in any way, shape, or form, it's a really cool way to show me some love and give me some support. So check out that link below if you're watching on YouTube. But again, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, just navigate over to grahamcochran.com/kajabi.
I hope that answers your question and sort of where I land. I think a Facebook group can be a great tool. If anything, I would almost rather use a Facebook group as a front-end free community to sell products to than a back-end community. A true membership site, I think, is a better product for your business, and ultimately, that was the question: what's better for your online business? I think a traditional, full-blown membership site, instead of inside of a program like Kajabi, is better for you making money long-term than a free private Facebook group or even a hybrid. I really think it's going to work better for you. But that's again, that's just coming from the position of what's going to grow your bank account, what's going to grow your customer base. That's the way to go.
I want to give you something to help you think about membership sites. If this is all this talk the last couple of weeks has been exciting for you about how I think I really need to launch a membership site, or if you have one, or you have a Facebook group and you haven't really transitioned into a paid community, or you're looking to scale it, I've got a membership site formula that I use. It's a four-step formula, and I've turned it into a checklist. This is some content that I've taught my members inside of one of my membership sites, my six-figure coaching community. But I've taken out some of this content, put it into a PDF for you to give you a step-by-step checklist that helps you launch your membership site if you're brand new, or fix or enhance or sort of spruce up your current membership site if you already have one to make it more profitable. I also share pricing and launch recommendations inside of this guide, and I share with you my number one retention strategy. Retention meaning how do you keep members in your membership site longer? That's the easiest way to make money is keep them from canceling. It's not just new members in, it's keeping your current members in. That's going to make you money in the long term.
I want to give this to you absolutely free. Just go to grahamcochran.com/membershipsite, all one word. grahamcochran.com/membershipsite to get that free four-step membership site formula checklist. It's really going to help you out. It's a ton of really high-level content that'll really, really help you out. I just pulled it right out for you from my membership to give it to you in PDF form for free because I think it's going to help you out. And I'm going to link to it below if you're watching on YouTube. But again, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, just navigate over to grahamcochran.com/membershipsite. Grab that download and enjoy. It's my gift to you.
And I'll leave you with a question: Do you have a membership site? Yes or no? Let me know in a comment below. And if no, what was the biggest takeaway from this conversation today? What are you going to do differently when you launch a membership site, or will you consider launching one? I'd love to know in a comment below if you're watching on YouTube. And if you are watching on YouTube, shoot me a like and a subscribe if these videos have been helpful to you as well. Always means a ton.
That's it for today, my friend. Stay healthy, stay safe. I'll see you on another episode real soon.
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