Most people think that selling memberships online will be the key to unlocking the kind of lifestyle that they want, and that's very understandable.
At Podia, we've seen many people build community memberships as a solid revenue stream. Of creators who sell membership communities, the average revenue from those memberships is $674/month, with top community builders bringing in over $1M per year. And because the revenue is recurring, once you've sold the membership, it's money in the bank every month, right?
Well, kind of.
Selling memberships online is a really hard business to build, and none of the guides that you find by searching how to build a membership will tell you that.
But with over 15,000 people building online businesses on Podia, we see a lot of data about what works and what doesn't.
In this article, we'll look at:
- The challenges of building a membership program online
- How to think about memberships as part of a bigger picture to get to the outcome that you want
- A practical step-by-step guide to building a business that gets you money while you sleep
By the end of this article, you'll have all the tools and frameworks you need to build a truly great business with regular monthly income that’s actually sustainable for the long haul.
(If you’re looking for a place to build your membership, Podia has membership and community features, as well as tools to build your course, digital downloads, coaching offers, website, and email. Start your 30-day free trial today.)
All that glitters is not gold: the challenges of building a membership site
A business that makes money while you sleep is every entrepreneur's dream. When creators and business owners start thinking about how to get there, they often land on membership sites and paid communities.
Maybe you've felt the same pull. You have a lot of content to share with the world, and people seem to like it. So it feels like it should be easy to turn that into people paying you every month for bonus content, tutorials, access to special live events, and more.
Perhaps you've even said those fateful words to yourself:
"I've got 10,000 followers on Instagram. If only 1% of those pay for my membership, I'll be rolling in dough."
But there are three major challenges that almost everyone who tries to build an online membership comes across very quickly:
- To keep people around month after month, your membership always has to feel valuable. This means you need to make and stick to a plan for what content you’ll share.
- Creating content for your membership takes a lot of time and energy, more than people expect.
- And it can be really hard to find new members to join.
The first hurdle is where most people fall down: you have to create a value proposition that's compelling enough for a stranger on the internet to go from liking your free content to paying you every month, and then you have to deliver on that promise.
This often means making things like:
- Exclusive tutorials and content
- Access to invite-only webinars or other events
- Behind-the-scenes content from your business
- Group or 1:1 coaching sessions for people on higher tiers
- Member-only podcast
But all that work actually leads us to the second problem: once you have your plan in place, it still takes a lot of time to create all the exclusive content that's behind your paywall so people get the value you promised them.
And since you’re spending time on creating resources and content for your paying members, it’s natural that you’d have less time for the free content that brings you new people in the first place.
Which brings us to problem number three: How do you find new members who can expand your membership and revenue, while still managing your time well enough to serve your existing members?
This probably wasn't what you wanted to hear when you came to a blog post about selling memberships online, but luckily, there’s a system you can build that addresses all three of these pain points.
After all, we've seen tens of thousands of people like you build beautiful businesses that they love to manage. Businesses that give them the lifestyle they want from their side hustle, or hopefully, their main job.
In the next section, we'll share a framework that brings new people in the door and keeps your membership feeling fun, so you can serve your people and do what you love.
The online business flywheel: this no-hacks system makes millions of dollars every month
The truth about memberships is that they take time and energy to manage. You need to create content and resources for members, maybe host live events, or make products that people get access to when they join, and that takes time.
So naturally, you’ll probably have less time to do other tasks in your business, like grow your email list, promote your membership on social media, and other things that you had time for before. That’s why you need to start by building your new customer engine first.
Build an automated way for people to enter your business, and then you can focus on making your subscription as amazing as possible.
This framework is the same one the most successful entrepreneurs and solo business owners on Podia are using in their businesses. While it looks different for everyone, the core components are almost always the same:
- Start with a simple lead magnet that you can use to collect email addresses
- Add an email newsletter for your subscribers to build trust
- Launch a paid membership plan or paid product
- Add blog content to your website to help more people discover you organically
- Start the process again to level up your revenue
Let's work through this process step by step. You can get your free 30-day trial and get started building today.
Step 1: Start with a simple lead magnet
A lead magnet is a simple resource that you offer for free in exchange for someone’s email address.
Almost every successful online business owner starts off with a lead magnet.
Practically speaking, a lead magnet can be as simple or complex as you want it to be, but we recommend making it easy. The best lead magnets help people solve a problem or create something within a very short period of time, say 20 minutes. It should also be related to the topics you cover inside your membership, so it draws in the right potential customers.
Here are a few quick ideas for lead magnets you could create easily:
- A checklist of steps to follow for a specific process
- A cheat sheet
- A template or spreadsheet
- An idea generator
- A collection of quotes about a topic (this is one of our best-performing lead magnets)
Practically speaking, you can make your lead magnet in Google Docs, Sheets, or Canva and save it as a PDF.
Then you can upload it to Podia as a “Digital download” product type, set it to free email delivery, customize your sales page, and start sharing it with your followers. Podia automatically handles the file delivery and adds new sign-ups to your email list, so you can make this once and let it grow your list for you in the background.
(Read our full guide on lead magnets here. You can follow along in Podia with a 30-day free trial.)
Step 2: Add an email newsletter for your subscribers
The goal of setting up a lead magnet is to provide enough value for free that someone wants to give you their email address. Once you have their email address, you can use email marketing to own the relationship with your subscribers so you're never at risk of losing them when a social network changes its algorithm.
But how do you stay in touch with your subscribers? An email newsletter.
Email marketing is included with every Podia plan, so you can start growing your subscriber list right away. Every person who downloads your lead magnet automatically gets added to your Podia account, and you can send them email marketing.
There are two kinds of email you can send with Podia:
- Broadcasts: one-off emails used for things like regular newsletter updates or time-limited offers
- Campaigns: automated sequences of emails triggered when a subscriber takes a specific action, like buying a product or joining your list for the first time
Your newsletter is a regular email that you send to your full list to provide value. This can be weekly, every two weeks, or monthly depending on your schedule, but it gets your followers accustomed to hearing from you.
Here are a few email topics you could try:
- 5 tips to help you get better at [your topic]
- A story of how I [achieved the outcome your subscribers want]
- A quick guide to [a specific task your subscriber needs to do]
Don't overthink it at this stage. The goal is simply to stay in touch with your audience so that, pretty soon, you can tell them about the paid product you just launched, which is where the real money starts.
You should also set up a welcome campaign.
A campaign that welcomes new subscribers (the people who downloaded your lead magnet) is a great way to engage them and give them a taste of what's to come.
In Podia, you can set this up so it automatically fires whenever someone signs up for your lead magnet, which means your new leads will get helpful information about your business and your membership on autopilot, even if you’re away from your desk.
Add a series of emails that send over time to welcome your new subscribers. Here's an example sequence for a personal side project:
- On day 1, welcome them and share a bit of your story.
- On day 2, go deeper into the topic you talk about.
- Day 6 is where you might present a perspective they'll find surprising.
- Day 8 is where you tell them about your membership and start making money.
And on that note, let's move on to the key piece of this whole framework: making money.
Step 3: Launch a paid membership or product
So far, we've created a lead magnet to convert strangers into subscribers, and an email newsletter to build trust. We’ve also set up a welcome email automation that runs whenever someone signs up for your email list. Now we need a way to turn this into revenue, so it’s time to actually build your membership plan.
In Podia, you can set up as many plans as you like and create monthly or annual pricing. You can also offer a free trial of your membership.
Each membership plan can come with access to different products, events, and spaces, so you can offer more robust tiers for a higher price point. But if you’re new to membership communities, I recommend just adding one paid tier.
At this stage, it’s also a good idea to come up with a content plan for your first month. What types of content will you post each day? Is there anything you can schedule out in advance? Does your membership come with access to products and events, and if so can you go ahead and set those up now?
The more you can plan upfront, the better chance you have of engaging your new members from day one.
A side note here: Some of the most successful creators at Podia combine their community memberships with other digital products, like courses, coaching, and events. This gives you more diverse income streams and lets prospective customers choose how they want to work with you.
For example, YouTubers and off-grid homesteaders Jonathan and Ashley Longnecker use Podia for their subscription membership, as well as their courses, digital downloads, and 1:1 coaching.
Podia supports both community memberships and digital products, so your customers can enjoy everything in one place.
Step 4: Add blog content to your website
So far you've got:
- A lead magnet, a way to encourage people to give you their email address
- An email newsletter and automated welcome campaign, to build trust with your subscribers
- A paid membership (or other paid product), to turn that trust into revenue
What's missing? A way to get more people to discover you without needing to be everywhere all at once.
The simplest marketing strategy is to create pieces of content that help people who are searching for solutions to problems you solve.
With your Podia site, you get an SEO-optimized blog that looks great out of the box, without needing to manage plugins or themes.
To get started, click "Blog" in your Podia navigation and choose "New Post" from the dropdown menu. You can write your content in the main editor.
The goal here isn't to create another place you constantly have to produce new content. Instead, keep your content focused and evergreen by writing about the most common problems your ideal customers have that you can solve with your membership and products.
This way, your blog posts show up in search results and bring in new members for you months and years after you press publish.
A few reliable content formats:
- How-to guides: time-tested for helping people find you through search and solve their problem. Being genuinely helpful (like this post, hopefully) shows people your products could solve their problem too.
- Expert guides: work well when someone doesn't have a specific problem to solve but is thinking about undertaking a process.
- Top tips lists: a mix of how-to and expert guide content. Actionable lists of hard-earned advice position you as someone who can solve someone’s problem
Once you've published some posts, you can add your free lead magnet right into the bottom of each blog post using the Podia website editor. This way, anyone who goes to Google, searches for a question about your topic, and finds your blog post has an easy path to get on your list and enter the system you just built.
Step 5: Start the process again to level up your revenue
From here, the more blog posts you write, the more people find your freebie. The more people find your freebie, the more they get on your email list. The more people get on your email list, the more they learn about your community membership.
It might feel like a lot of setup, but by building all this upfront, you give yourself a consistent system for bringing in new members that doesn’t require a constant content treadmill.
And in doing that, you buy yourself more time to invest in your paying subscribers.
Don’t just build an online membership — build a full business flywheel to grow your work
The dream sold by online membership tools is very attractive: you do what you love and get money while you sleep.
But the reality is different for most people, because it's hard to find lots of new subscribers, and then you have to keep delivering on that value proposition month after month.
That’s why we recommend building a flywheel in your business that acquires new subscribers, provides value for them on autopilot, and monetizes them by promoting your membership after they’ve had time to get to know you, so you can get paid for your expertise and still have time to teach the things you love.
With Podia, you can:
- Build a beautiful website complete with a blog
- Offer a lead magnet that gets delivered automatically
- Set up email marketing that helps you drive more sales
- Set up additional paid digital products
It won't be easy, but it is simple, and you can do it all on Podia. Try it for yourself with a free 30-day trial today.
