614 – Behind The Scenes Of Running A Membership Site – The Membership Series

Podcast: Download (Duration: 34:32 — 31.8MB)

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John Lint

In the podcast:

02:14 – The private coaching question
03:54 – A couple of considerations
05:57 – Canned responses and expectations
08:01 – Too many questions?
12:01 – Audio and video participation
17:04 – Making your onboarding awesome
20:08 – Supporting different time zones
22:11 – Seeding and releasing
26:30 – What you need to succeed

Manage a profitable and enjoyable membership business with personal help from James. Click HERE

Part 3 of the series
Part 5 of the series

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 614. Today we’re going to go behind the scenes and we’re going to talk about the day-to-day running of a membership site. And for this episode, I’ve brought back my special guest, John Lint from KLEQ.com. And this is part of The Membership Series. Welcome back, John.

John: Hey, everybody. I’m here. Nice to be back.

James: So John, we’ve been recording a few episodes. We’ve talked about membership sites, we have talked about attracting and converting members to your site, we have covered a few different scenarios on what sort of membership sites are good or when you might consider products instead.

A lot of this has come from a combination of your experience and my experience. I’ve been running membership sites for about nine years, I’ve advised plenty of people who have membership sites, and we came into contact and you’ve got software that makes it very easy for people to set up their own information products, to set up their landing pages, it’s got all the tech built in. That’s called KLEQ.com.

So we thought we’d make this Membership Series and cover the most frequently-asked questions people have when it comes to membership sites. Now I believe you’ve got a few questions from users of KLEQ that might be good for us to discuss in today’s episode, because this is like in the trenches, real-world challenges, and I’d love to see if we could tackle these together.

John: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, for sure. So I got a few questions from our members. And whenever you’re ready, and we can get started.

James: Fire away.

John: OK, awesome.

The private coaching question

So first question is about providing private coaching, which is a great feature that you do a lot, James, in your membership area. And the question is about, OK, “How should I manage the one-on-one coaching with the 100 new students that just have just signed up? They’re going to start in January. And it’s a leveraged model, doing that private chat is leveraged, but how can I ensure that they’re still happy, that they get a good experience? Will it be super time-intensive to start and then will it get easier to provide that private one-on-one coaching? How should I manage it, the processes, the saved responses? Do you use saved responses?” Basically they want to know how you do it, James, providing that private coaching to all the members that you have.

James: It’s a very powerful question, because this is actually the subject of one of the most popular videos I released recently on social media, which was that real coaches show up. It’s become trendy for people to sell a course where they have some automated training series and then FAQ sessions to try and deal with questions. And that can work, and it’s great. However, if you are prepared to offer private coaching, it’s a really high-value thing, and you can certainly charge more.

So over time, I’ve introduced private coaching into my communities. And over time, I’ve increased the rates. And I’m still going to continue to increase the rates, because it is a very valuable feature. It’s hard to actually get someone who knows what they’re talking about to look at your personal situation. That’s very different than doing a $2,000 course and then trying to figure it out yourself.

A couple of considerations

So a couple of things. If you’re going to offer this, I do suggest you filter who is buying your membership, because some people are just more needy than others. So in my case, the type of member that I have is already having expectations that are matching the kind of person that I like to work with. Beyond that, it’s very important that you have an introduction that, in my case, I’ve made a video that everyone will see that explains how it works and the best way to get value from this section or this particular offer.

Beyond that, it is going to take some more time. If you’re going to put 100 members into a new membership in the beginning, you would want to allocate a little bit of time for that. And certainly until you get used to this style of coaching, it will be a little bit resource-intensive on you. And I found that some people are more suited to this than others. I’ve had many, many years as a manager, and towards the end, a General Manager. So I got really used to hyper threading multiple conversations, being aware of multiple things at once.

So I’m simultaneously looking after hundreds of members, and I’m able to use some memory devices, like I ask people to put a picture of themselves. When I log into their private coaching, I see their picture and I remember who they are and what their situation is. We also keep a running dialogue of their conversation. So it’s not the same as when you just have a Facebook wall or you have people sending you SMSs. I’m able to keep the information there so that I can refer back and see what we last spoke about.

I also use coaching techniques like asking a question. I seek some work from them as well, like they need to do things in between their coaching questions. So I might suggest to them they go off and research something, I might ask them to go and collate some information on their top-selling products. So they might sometimes have things to do, and I might not see them back again, straight away. I also might ask them to reflect, and sometimes they even answer their own questions, which is quite interesting.

Canned responses and expectations

Now in terms of canned responses, what I do is if enough people ask me the same question, I will create a specific training on it and put that into the general membership. So often my monthly trainings are a collection of what people are asking me right now, and this has the added benefit of your members certainly wanting to stay because they’re getting fresh information. But the amount of people who say, “Wow, this is exactly what I need right now,” it’s no coincidence. It’s because I’m being asked that by a good portion of the data set that is your membership.

The other thing is, you can set the expectation in terms of the timing and the cadence. Maybe you log in once a day and clear every single private coaching question, and you do it every day, and they will know that they’ll put a question there, then it will probably be answered within the next 24 hours. Some people I know do this every week. Other people like to have asynchronous conversations, and if they’re sitting on their membership site all day long, then they might be answering multiple questions in one sitting. And I’ve got a few customers who like to try that on. But eventually I’ll stop after a couple of questions.

John: Yeah, yeah.

James: The other thing is, I help them ask better questions. So I help them refine the question they’re asking. And also, if they’re asking multiple questions, I number them. This is a really simple thing you can do so that I can reply back by number. So we’ve got a codec or a system. And rest assured, over time, if you get good at this and you don’t let a difficult customer take too much control of you, you will have an enjoyable experience, and it does get easier. And I’ve got this down to about 30 minutes a day now. And just for reference, there’s about 500 members in SuperFastBusiness. Not all my members are using this feature every day. Some members use it a lot. Some members never ever use it. And some people just regulate it from time to time.

Too many questions?

John: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I find this as well, with KLEQ members, some will use it, some will not use it. That’s how it is. People are busy. Some people need more help. That’s OK. What are the things that you do when someone starts asking too many questions and they are like, really bombarding you? How do you handle that?

James: Well, you can slow down your answers, that’s one easy thing to do. There’s this funny feature in the platform that I’ve used which makes me laugh, and it’s called “Discourage User”, and if you tick that box, it actually starts throwing them errors for their connection and stuff. I’ve never used this, but a friend of mine told me that he ticks that box sometimes if he gets a bad user. And it made me laugh, but I don’t have to do that because I filter pretty carefully on who is a member.

But if they ask too many questions, I might say then, “Hey, slow down there, Sunshine. That’s a lot of questions and you got a lot going on. Let’s just strip this back to what’s the high impact. Of all the questions you’ve asked, which one is going to move the needle the most? Let’s start with that.” And it’s up to me to re-pace them and to get them, because having 16 questions is not going to get them anywhere.

And here’s the interesting thing I’ve noticed: the couple of members who have by far asked the most questions, are also some of the least successful in terms of the results they get. And it’s no accident. It’s because they have an inability to know what the right thing to do is, and they just don’t take instruction. Some of them are unbelievably stubborn, and they’ve pushed my limits in the past, and I actually end up saying to them, “You’re overstretching this service here. You’re asking far too many questions and you don’t seem to implement on this. So I’d question, what is it you’re trying to achieve here? And Could it be that your approach is causing you to get the results that you’re continually getting?”

John: Wow. Cool. And what kind of answers do you get from that?

James: Oh, they always say, “You’re right. Thank you, I appreciate you being upfront with me.” And “Yes, I do. I do tend to take on too many projects. I am not that good at executing.” And then I shift gears and I say, “Right. So let’s talk about which of these items is the most important? Who can we get to do things now, instead of you having to do it? If implementation is the issue, let’s get someone else to do it.”

John: Yeah, yeah. And it’s funny, because the guys who are going to take more action, that are going to do the things, usually are the ones who will ask a question, you give them an answer, and they say, “Cool, awesome”, and then they go back to work and you don’t hear from them after five days because they took action. They got the job done, right?

James: Yep, and there’s the occasional one who just wants to argue every point, and after a while, I just don’t want to argue with them anymore. Like, look, you’ve asked me my opinion, I’ve told you, you’ve ignored it. You’ve tried your thing, it didn’t work. You’ve asked me again, I’ve told you, you’ve ignored it, you’ve done your own thing, it didn’t work. At what point will this cycle change? And will you have a breakthrough? That’s the only question remaining.

John: Yeah. Because ultimately, that’s why they purchase, right? That’s what they’re here for, they’re here for our leadership, they want to get the results, they want us to help them. So yeah, you know, you have that customer service perspective, but you have also that leadership position, and it’s important to, once someone is starting to take over the boundaries, well, sometimes it’s important to just remind them hey, listen, this is how it works. And this is what you need to do. And this is my part, this is your part, right?

James: Exactly. And also, it’s important to let them know if you’re not the expert on something, if you don’t feel confident in the answer. I will also be very upfront with that. I might say, this is not my area of expertise. Here are some resources of who I feel would be good to reach out to. I can make introductions. So in that way, I’m supporting them by making a good referral, but I’m not pretending that I know the answer when I don’t, which luckily is getting rarer and rarer because of the data set that I have access to now is quite solid.

John: Yeah, and you have a lot of members as well in SFB who are always helping, so if you don’t know, you know that you have a traffic expert or you have a whatever expert in there who is going to be able to help, right?

James: Exactly. If they’re going to ask me all technical questions about memberships, you know where I’ll be sending them to, John.

John: Yeah, for sure. No problem. Awesome. So hopefully that answers your question, Stevie.

Audio and video participation

Here we have another question. “I want people in my forum to share questions, comments, not just by typing them but also by recording an audio or video. So what is the easiest way for them to do this? Any possible problems you can see doing this?” Are you doing this in your forum, James?

James: Yes. So some of the students like to send me, they put a YouTube video or they put a Loom video. Some of them put audio, they might send a Voxer link, and that is fine. As long as they’re short, I don’t mind.

John: Yeah.

James: It’s much easier for me to read text, but if that’s how they like to produce, or they want to show me something… And quite often, I’ll actually respond. I’ll make a Loom video. They might ask me to have a look at their site and ask me something specific about it. If they don’t ask me something specific, then I’ll actually say, “What is the feedback you want here? It’s a very general question. Do you want feedback on the whole thing, or just a part of this, or the price, or the whatever?” And I might make a Loom video and send it back to them.

So if you want people to make audio and video, then a few things would have to happen. One is, you have to make it very easy for them to do that with your platform. So it helps if the platform can easily embed that and play it without people having to click away from the site. So, I’ve made that happen. If someone pastes a Facebook or an Instagram or a Loom video, it will stream in the post.

The second thing is, lead by example. If you want people to make videos, then make videos. If you want people to make audios, then make audios.

And figure out what sort of modality people are. Especially, tell them. So you might say, the best way to get a result here is to make me a little video. This is the tool I suggest you use. It’s called Loom, and you can go there and get a free account, and once you make the video, it will generate a link which will automatically copy to your paste pad and then you just come and Command-V or Ctrl-V that into the thread here and I’ll be able to see your video. And of course, you would make this on Loom, to demonstrate it.

So, that’s what I would do, make it absolutely simple to demonstrate it and show them which tools work for this. And explain to them how you’d like to coach them, and also options they have in ways they could be coached.

John: Yeah. And obviously, as a KLEQ.com member, you know that you can embed those videos and files. So if you have a YouTube video, Facebook, you can also obviously just add a video there into your forum post, into your social walls, into any type of comments. So all the commenting areas that we have in KLEQ, you can easily embed that. And like James said, make sure that when they click, it plays in the browser. So we do that. So that’s something super easy that you can do.

And yeah, I think the most important is to, if you really want people to do that, just like you said, James is to really tell them. You always want to tell people what you want them to do. Spell it out, right?

James: No ambiguity. You’ve got to really make it straight up. Like, you could put a PDF document, you could make a video, you could put audio. Just expect some people have different modalities. I had this hilarious situation the other day. If you’ve been following SuperFastBusiness for a while, you know that we transcribe all of our podcasts. And inside my membership, we transcribe every video training, and we put the audio version as well. So someone could watch the video, listen to the audio, or read it on the page as a PDF. So I’ve been really focused on that. And the other day, I made a little video, a short video, it was 30 seconds long or so, explaining that it’s a great time to buy a ticket to SuperFastBusiness Live. And I put that video directly onto Facebook, and under the video, we actually spelled out the words from the video and we put the closed captions into the video, and then we put a screenshot of the video and sent an email to our audience saying, “I’ve just made you a quick video.”

And guess what? One person replied, and she said, “When will you marketers learn that not everyone likes watching videos?” I don’t have time to watch videos, that’s not how I learn.” And she goes, “So I didn’t watch your video.” I’m like, Wow. So you know, some people have convinced themselves they’re not video watchers; some people have convinced themselves they’re not readers. Well, I felt sorry for this person, the fact that she couldn’t watch a 30-second video and she couldn’t click on one link to discover that the entire thing is transcribed. You’re not going to please everybody, but putting multiple modalities will certainly help.

John: It’s a good tip. It’s definitely a good tip.

James: And I would say this: If you like audios and videos, say that on your sales page before they even join. Give an example of how people get coached, and spell it out before they even join. You’ve got to set the expectations. And then when they join, put it as part of the onboarding documentation so that they get that in perhaps a written version now. And then when they’re in there, make a video that introduces them to how it all works before they have to do anything. And that way, you’ve really got it nailed. And in my case, we even send a follow up a few days later via automation just to lock this in.

Making your onboarding awesome

John: Awesome. Yeah, awesome tips. And that’s a good point, because the next question is kind of about that. It’s about the onboarding process. It’s basically, “I want to create an onboarding that is super awesome and personal. I will record a video like you do (You know, like I do for KLEQ, and like you do, James, for SuperFastBusiness) for each person who joins my site, my membership site. What else could I do that would make joining really special? I could send a small gift, like a gorgeous journal. With your experience, do you have any thoughts, objections about doing extra stuff? Like any ideas?”

James: Well, if you send physical things, that’s a really good thing to do. And I certainly do that in my top tier, I send a big physical envelope stuffed full of things that are really nice. Certainly for every membership now, it would be best practice to send a personal video. That has a huge impact. It’s still unique.

I would segment people when they join by their interest or challenge. So what we do is before someone joins, we know which one of the four main challenges that people have, that they’re joining to solve. And we will send an onboarding document that focuses on that particular challenge, and it points them to the pieces of content within our membership that solve the challenge, so they can get onto that straight away, and we don’t show them that other three quarters.

I do send a personal video, we do send them that PDF. We welcome them in the thread, one of our team members will create a personal welcome for them. And then we will mention them in the very first newsletter that they receive, that comes out that week to all the other members. So other members can say “Hi”, and find out about them and to make them feel warm and welcome. And then what usually happens is our local meetup facilitators will say, “Hey, we run local meetups. We’d love you to come and visit that.” And if they come to that local meetup, they’re going to be a member for a long time.

John: Yes, yeah, that’s pretty powerful. And I remember we were talking about this on the boat in Maldives about what kind of gifts you know, what physical stuff work the best. I think you asked that question in one of the sessions that we had. I think you were asking, what have we sent to people, and I think T-shirts work really well. Things like that, right? I mean, what has been your experience with that?

James: When people send me a T-shirt, I’m going to bin it, or use it as a car rag, because it’s usually got the logo plastered all over it, and i’m not going to walk around with some big logo all over the back of the T-shirt. It’s just not what I wear.

So I think sending things that people will keep, I mean a simple one here is like, you know, a SuperFastBusiness pen that also doubles as a stylus is nice. you could send clothing that’s not overtly branded, would be really good to send. In fact, I’ve got a cup here in front of me that was sent to me by Chandler Bolt, and I use it pretty much every day, so much that the actual branding is worn off, but it’s very useful. And I also have kept things like Sharpie pens and stuff. But anything that’s either personal or that is not going to be chucked would be good.

John: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome for sure. OK, let’s have a look at the other questions here.

Supporting different time zones

Yeah, this is interesting. It’s about doing live events. “My members are all in different time zones. And so for our monthly calls and online retreats, how to choose a time that suits so people don’t feel like they are missing out?”

James: So, I’ve got clients all around the world, and I’ve found two time zones that work pretty well for most of the world. And you’re going to miss a segment, so what I do is I generally rotate. But generally in Australia, our morning, like nine or 10 am, will work pretty well for North America and Australia. It doesn’t work so well for the UK. And then I found that 8 pm at night works really well for Australia and the UK and Europe.

So there’s the two time zones that work quite well. What I’ve done in the last, I think all this year, is I’ve actually run my training at the same time, and I’ve done it to suit Australia and me. It’s the time of day I prefer to run my training, because I’ve got all day to think about and prepare my training properly before I run into that training at 6 pm Sydney time. And that means some of my members can’t attend live, but I always record it and I put it into the membership. And some enthusiastic members still actually attend it live, and they can.

But the easy way to solve it I’ve found is either pick a time that gets the majority of your customers, or alternate it between them each month, which we did for many years. And it worked well, but I found that I much preferred when it was in the afternoon, because I’ve got a little bit better preparation time.

John: Yeah. Now some of the sessions that you do, I know that in SilverCircle for example, you run two sessions in a day. That’s something that you can do, Lisa, to answer your question. You can do that if you want. Or yeah, I mean you can’t win. I mean, if you just do one, well, some people will be able to attend, some people don’t. I know that I have hardcore people like Jeremy right now, who is in the States. He’s watching live, so thank you, Jeremy, for being online. But yeah, otherwise, you know, all these sessions, all these live streams, they are going to be recorded and we’re going to put the replay and I’m going to post it in a few hours. So yeah, that’s what you can do.

Seeding and releasing

Cool. So, here. OK. “By the time I set up, my membership site and create the back end, it will be January, which may not be the best time of year. What is the best way to to seed this with my inner tribe before I open? I want to pre-sell to my past clients first at a grandfather or grandmother rate. And then what kind of simple enrollment marketing would you suggest for the first open? Do I do a series of videos like earlier launch, or just get a bunch of content out there, get engagement and then open the doors?” So, kind of like two questions here, how to seed, and then how to actually release it for the first time.

James: Sure. I wouldn’t worry too much about what time of the year, probably any time is a good time. Maybe it’s hard in the last week of Christmas and New Year’s, but that being said, I’ve done really well. I just ignore all times. I really don’t care.

To seed, I would say the first thing to do is have a waiting list page so that you can at least announce it, tell people something’s coming. And that way, you can gather a bit of interest and build yourself a little pre-sell list. I usually use a series of emails, and that would be that something’s coming, and then something’s about to open, and then the email’s it’s open. And then it’s a little case study, it’s a demonstration of what’s in there, it’s a call to action to buy, and then it’s closing. And then it’s about to close, and then it’s closed.

So I like to do an open and close intake for the first round. Because then you can see what you’ve got, you can let the dust settle, you can serve everyone you’ve got who’s joined in a nice way. And then you can make adjustments and refinements for the next opening. I mean, we did this manually for many, many years until we automated it. But that’s probably my suggested route.

If you want to get JV’s, if you want to have affiliates, if you want to drive a lot of paid traffic, if you want to run all the ads, if you want to do the product launch, by all means, go for it. Some markets it’s a bit tired. And then just open it again, when you’ve built up your list a little bit more. And then by then, you’ve probably got case studies and referrals and some success stories and just keep growing. But the idea would be, build up enough demand so that you could open with enough members that it becomes worthwhile and you’re happy to spend the time on it.

John: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. I mean, it kind of depends as well on the the relationship you already have with your audience, right? If it’s completely cold, then you kind of want to warm them up with some good content before you open the doors. And so they get to know you, like you and trust you. But then opening this is as easy as yeah, you just said, and that’s something that we actually just recently did with KLEQ.com. It was just like, hey, it’s open; next day, hey, you got some questions? It ends tomorrow. And then the last day was like, hey, it’s the last day. So it can be as simple as that. Just give some good, valuable content before, a little bit, so that people get to know you. I would just recommend that a little bit.

James: So in my case, I’ve been publishing a lot of content ongoing, and I usually just release stuff when I announce my live event. I just say it’s available, you know, you can buy it. I send an email to my database, and then just before the deadline we turn on some ads. We spent $1300 on Facebook ads last week, and we made just under $30,000 worth of sales, within a day, because there’s already a base of people watching the content, and now I’ve just made an offer. I think Gary V calls this “Jab Jab, Right Hook”, or something to that effect.

But that’s not to say you have to do any content and warm people up at all. There’s people out there who have already been warmed up and are already ready to go on something with your competitor. You can just arrive and start running ads and draw people into your membership overnight, cold. And one of the other series we have on SuperFastBusiness is The Get Clients Series, and we’ve been talking about cold outreach and email.

So you can actually drive people into a program. This would be especially good for a high-end program where you don’t really need many members to make it worthwhile. If you had five members paying $5,000, each, for some people, that would be enough to be worthwhile. And you could get that going really quickly without building up the know, like, trust. You can just reach out with a very, very good offer that’s super relevant for your customers. So it’s not the end of the world if you don’t have a huge database, and if you haven’t been content marketing, however, if you have, like I have, then it’s very, very easy to just reach out with an email or a specific paid ad to ask people to buy, and they will.

John: Awesome. Yeah, cool.

What you need to succeed

Alright, so let’s have a look here at another question that we got. “What are some of the critical success factors around sustainability and longevity of the membership site business model and your personal ability to continue to offer a great membership site?”

James: So, you’re going to have to be adaptable. One thing, that is to be able to deal with change. Since I’ve been running membership sites I’ve seen (for context, that’s nine years, coming up to 10), I’ve seen Facebook groups appear from nowhere. I’ve seen every membership platform under the sun, we’ve been on four or five or six in that time. So you’ve got to be able to adapt.

But a couple of things don’t really change. One is, you have to have a good product. Two is, you’ve got to keep churn low. Churn is the enemy of a recurring subscription. And we talked about that in quite a lot of depth in one of the previous episodes, because you’ve got to get results for people. They have to stay in a small percentage. You want to be under five percent, you want to be two percent would be great, five percent is OK, 10 percent you don’t have a subscription business – it’s going to go out of business, unless you have a really solid way to tip leads into the front door.

So I would say being OK with change.

And another thing to keep in mind is some kind of control or ownership. I like to keep my database. I have a backup CSV copy from Ontraport. So even though my emails are sitting in Ontraport, I’ve got a CSV file stashed away on my computer somewhere that I could upload to another provider if I lost my Ontraport. The same would be true for my videos and PDFs and audio. Well, my audios are sitting in Dropbox and on Amazon S3. My videos are sitting on our Google Drive and in Wistia. And my PDFs are sitting on Drive and Dropbox.

So it wouldn’t matter if I had to change platforms, I could. I could just re-upload my content to a new shell. I’d like to think of it as a shell. I could plug in my Stripe details and PayPal details, I could put in that content, and then I could have it talking to my CRM provider. So keep some semblance of control. If you built on what Google had one, didn’t they, Google+? If you built your membership on Google+, then you lost your content.

John: Yes.

James: And you lost the platform. You lost it all, because you lost your CRM and everything. I would recommend always having an external CRM system, and it’s nice to put your content externally and then feed it into the platform that you’re using, and that’s better. And I’d say anyone who has a Facebook group right now, do so on the basis that you could lose everything. So every video you natively upload in there, and if you’re only using Facebook to be able to contact your customers, for goodness sake, make sure you get an email address, because you could lose that. It could just switch off. I wouldn’t even suspect that it’s a slight chance. I would say that it is inevitable at some point in the future that it will no longer be an option. That’s how bold I am on that. I don’t know if you agree.

John: I totally agree. You know how I am, man. Don’t get me fired up with Facebook.

James: You’re not sending Zuckerberg a Christmas card this year?

John: Not this year, this is not happening. Guys, this is super important. Super powerful stuff right here. You know, a lot of people know James because of owning the racetrack. Yeah, it’s about that. It’s about owning your content, owning your email list. These are the biggest business assets that you should be controlling. That doesn’t mean that you need to control every single piece of software.

James: And you can’t. I mean, I’ve still got my site on Amazon, and it crashed a few times this week. And we still use different platforms for our website and our forum, and I’m using a separate shopping cart. So like, you still have to use software as a service, it’s inevitable. I don’t have a black box in my office here serving up my website, I have to use other providers. And sometimes there’s hiccups.

But I think it’s good to take backups and it’s good to have control of the documents. Where there’s a choice between the very, very easy way and having zero control, or a slightly more inconvenient way but you have a lot of control, then I would usually go down that path.

John: Yeah, and that’s exactly why I built KLEQ.com. I built it for myself, because I’m running my own information business as well, a publishing business. I build it for clients, people like James who have been building their email list for a long time, and they have a ton of content. There’s no way I’m going to ask people like that, Hey, start putting your leads in my system. No. You need to control your content, put it wherever you want. Wistia, Vimeo, Amazon S3. That’s fine, great hosting solutions. That’s fine. They’re sitting there, you are in control. But then you use tools such as KLEQ.com to just use, for example, the video player. In that case, you simply say, this is my video URL, and then the video will play. That’s an example.

Same thing goes down the… I see this right now, it’s crazy, drives me nuts. People don’t think about it and just start putting their leads wherever in whatever system. What you’re doing, you’re giving your leads away and you’re losing control. You don’t want to do that. There’s a reason why you have companies like Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, big companies that have been in business for a long time. They know what they need to do when it comes to email deliverability and making sure that your emails get delivered, but you want to make sure that you keep control of your email. Super important, guys. That’s really why I built KLEQ, so we can do all these things but you always remain in control.

And when it comes to Facebook, if you think that you’re simply going to do cool stuff and nothing’s going to ever happen, unlike so many spammers who get a problem, think again, OK? Think again. And right now what we’re doing, when you’re building an online business, you’re building just that – your business. And you’re building your business asset. If you have a Facebook page or a Facebook group and it’s awesome, an Instagram account, and you have a lot of followers, awesome. What you’re doing, you’re building their business, that’s what you’re doing. You’re not building your business, you’re building their business. Why? Because the more people in their platform, the more ads they can run to more, they can sell their website to someone else in the future. You’re busy increasing their business.

So what we want to do, we always want to capture our leads. We always want to transfer anyone who you have on Facebook, put them into your email list, because now you have control. Now if Facebook closes your account, it’s fine. You don’t care, right? You can use something like KLEQ.com to set up your private group. you can do like James, set up your own forum, and now you have your own members area. But now you are in control and you’re building your business. Super important. I get fired up about this. Let’s go to the next question.

James: Well, hang on a second there. Why don’t you save a few of those questions for our next call, John, and it gives you a chance to get some ice water and cool down.

Wow, that was great, John. I love your passion. So you’ve been listening to Episode 614 of SuperFastBusiness. This is part of The Membership Series, and we’ve had a look at the day-to-day running of a membership. We certainly covered a few other aspects here, especially control and how to get people up and running when they join. We’re going to invite John back for a future episode.

In the meantime, if you need some coaching for your business, of course, check out JamesSchramko membership. If you would like to access the top-level platform that I’m recommending these days, it’s KLEQ.com, which John Lint, the founder and owner of that program has just been on this podcast. Check it out. And of course, he’s very knowledgeable and super passionate about helping you grow your business. And this is SuperFastBusiness, I’m James Schramko. Thanks, John, for coming and sharing.

John: Thank you.

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