The Transcript

Practical Advice on Turning the Challenges of Building Membership Communities Into Opportunities

Voiceover: You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. This is episode No. 19 of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. Today, I am joined by a colleague of mine here at Rainmaker Digital, Pamela Wilson, our esteemed executive vice president of educational content.

There are a couple of reasons why I asked Pamela to join us this week and why I’m so excited that she said yes. Here are those reasons. One is that Pamela’s leading our Authority educational content at Rainmaker Digital, and she has spearheaded some initiatives to grow it and make it better. I have some questions I want to ask her about those initiatives.

Number two, Pamela’s going to be a featured speaker at Digital Commerce Summit, which is coming up this October in Denver, Colorado. Her session will be titled How to Cultivate a Profitable, Interactive Member Site.

In addition to what she’s been doing with Authority, I want to get some of Pamela’s general ideas on what it takes to build a membership site that provides value and drives profits because I know that many of you are working toward that goal right now.

By the way, if you don’t have your ticket yet to Digital Commerce Summit, I do hope that you’ll consider joining us in the Rockies this fall. Early bird tickets are still available, so you’re definitely not too late. Don’t worry about that. You’re not too late. You can still get a great price on a ticket.

Pamela’s going to be speaking, as I said. I will be speaking there, and of course, Brian Clark and Sonia Simone will be speaking as well. They’ve been guests on the last two episodes of The Digital Entrepreneur, along with a host of our friends from around the digital entrepreneurship space, including Rand Fishkin, Jeff Walker, Tara Gentile, Joanna Penn, Chris Lema, and many, many, many more.

This is the conference and networking event where you will discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital products and services, so don’t miss it. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That is Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

With that, I would like to welcome Pamela Wilson to the show. Pamela, thank you again for carving out the time to join us on this week’s episode.

Pamela Wilson: I am so happy to be here, and I love this topic. It’s a fun thing to talk about.

Jerod Morris: It’s a good one, and like I said, you have a lot of experience to talk about this, which is why I’m so excited to have you here as the person to share some experience and share some knowledge with the audience.

Let’s start there. You have really extensive experience in online education, dating back to well before you joined the Rainmaker Digital team. Can you give us just a brief overview of what you were doing prior to joining Rainmaker, which was then at the time Copyblogger, and how that informed the work that you’re doing now?

How Pamela Eventually Turned a Childhood Dream into Reality Thanks to the Internet

Pamela Wilson: Right, so I’m sitting over here trying really hard not to laugh at that introduction because I guess I have extensive experience, but I want to share this with people. This might be something they can relate to a little bit more. I actually always wanted to be a teacher. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a teacher. My grandmother had been a teacher. And I was in FTA in high school, which is Future Teachers of America, so this was my dream.

Jerod Morris: That is not a surprising revelation at all.

Pamela Wilson: Okay, so that’s not surprising, but the interesting thing is, my mother actually discouraged me from becoming a teacher.

Jerod Morris: Really?

Pamela Wilson: Well, she saw that I had always been creative growing up, and she really encouraged me to go into a creative career, which I did. That was my entire career. I worked as a designer and a marketing consultant for decades, really.

After doing that for decades, I started to get antsy. I wanted to do something else, and I started looking into building an online platform and teaching online. I ended up moving into that, so I guess I showed my mom, like, “I showed you, Mom.” I eventually ended up doing the thing that I had dreamed of.

Jerod Morris: You know what’s so interesting about that is you find that a lot when you look around, and you look at successful people. Maybe they’ve been successful in business or something in digital entrepreneurship, but so many people have brought a passion from their childhood and found a way to weave it in there.

It’s like you have found a way to combine your creativity and your business acumen with your ability to teach, which is great. I grew up as a huge IU basketball fan, and now I’ve found a way, with the skills that I’ve learned building membership communities and a podcast, to bring that passion back into it. It’s kind of funny how those things will naturally just start come back. It’s very interesting.

Pamela Wilson: Honestly, I think that’s one of the most beautiful things that the Internet offers us. We really can explore those passions in a place that allows it, and we can find other people that have the same passions. It’s a great way to connect with people who have those same geeky interests that we do. You get to draw from all of humanity. Anyone who is connected to the Internet can find you, so it’s pretty amazing.

I ended up looking into how to do this, and right around the time that I was looking for how to build this online platform, I found Copyblogger. That was like 2009, so it’s not like Copyblogger had been hiding or anything. But I just happened to stumble on Copyblogger at the moment when I needed it.

Just a couple of weeks after I found the site, they were re-opening Teaching Sells, which was the seminal course on how to build online courses. I signed up for that, and so my online teaching story is very much interwoven with Copyblogger’s story and how Copyblogger teaches things.

I learned how to create online courses by taking that course, and then built my Big Brand System site, built a course there to teach basically what I had learned to do in my career, but boiling it down so that people who didn’t have a design background or didn’t have marketing experience could understand it and apply it to their own businesses.

Once I did that, I created all of these smaller products, so I created a product called The Ebook Evolution, which helps people to create ebooks by themselves, PDF e-books mostly, Site Setup Kit, which was to help people who had no web developer background build a website that they could control themselves, and then a product called Visual Buzz 101, which was basically to help non-designers create great-looking images for their web presence.

Jerod Morris: What’s interesting about that, you had this formal training with the Teaching Sells, of developing courses, and then you got into it and went out and did it on your own. I imagine from the experience of Teaching Sells, you had a pretty good roadmap to follow. You knew what to expect, but doing it for the first time with Big Brand System and doing it on your own, what were some of the things that surprised you about the experience?

What Pamela’s First Experience Creating Her Own Membership Community Was Like (and How She Prepared for It)

Pamela Wilson: Honestly, that’s one of the coolest things about being part of this team now is that so much of our effort is focused on making the Rainmaker Platform awesome. The biggest surprise to me was how difficult at that time–this is back in 2010–how difficult it was to put together the technical pieces that I had to put together to create the membership site. I felt like I was scaling Mount Everest. It was seriously way beyond my technical pay grade to put that together, so that was surprising to me.

The course part, I felt like the education in Teaching Sells really helped to guide me so that I could put together education that was useful, effective, and all of that, so that part was great. Then the technical piece was just a nightmare, so it’s very cool to be on the other side of that now and helping to contribute, even in a small way, to this product that just makes all of those things so much easier.

I loved it, though. That whole experience of building a community around something that you’re teaching, I loved that.

Jerod Morris: Speaking of that, let’s talk a little bit about Authority. As a I mentioned earlier, you’ve been leading our Authority membership program. I’ve been a really interested observer, watching you systematically, methodically make improvements over there.

Can you provide an overview of where Authority was when you got involved with it and what you’ve tried to do to take what was working and make it even better?

How Pamela Has Approached the Challenges of Running a Mature Membership Community Like Authority

Pamela Wilson: Right. Sonia and I worked together to come up with this plan. We wanted to inject new energy into this program. It was already a solid program, but it had been around for a while. This is one of the interesting things. A membership site at the very beginning of its life cycle and then after it’s been around for a while, it has a different set of challenges.

Some of it is just making the information easy to consume and making it easier for people to get their way through all the information. After it’s been around for a while, you have a lot of information, and people’s first reaction is, they get in there, and they’re like, “Ah, I don’t know where to start.”

It was that, but it was also encouraging people to consume the information. I was looking for ways that we could involve the community more, and I’ll talk about how we did that. Then I was also looking for ways to just simplify the process, the production process on our end, and make it a little bit more predictable. That’s how I came to this idea that I’m going to be talking about at the summit, which is finding this sweet spot in-between your efforts and your profits.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You mentioned some of these challenges of an older membership site that’s been around a while. It doesn’t have that new car smell and feel. It’s like anything else. You can look at that, and there are challenges there, but you can also flip it around. You can say, “Okay, but what does this make possible?”

Pamela Wilson: Exactly.

Jerod Morris: There are some challenges, but how did you then overcome those challenges, building upon what was already there?

Pamela Wilson: Right. One of the things was to just encourage community. These are all such small things, but one thing was, in our weekly webinar–we have a webinar, a live webinar, every single Friday–and one thing that I’m doing on a lot of those webinars is I incorporate shout-outs to people who have posted in the forum and might have a question. That just helps people to know what’s going on in their community and maybe drives them into the forum to participate a little bit more. That was one thing.

Another thing is just to develop content that highlights our members, what they’re doing, and what their challenges are because so many people have very similar challenges. I set up this schedule of webinars that we do, and it’s basically the first week of the month is always the same kind of webinar. The second week is something else. The third week is something else, so it’s a very consistent … you know me well enough. I like systems and processes. I’m really into that.

I found it made it more predictable for our members, but it also was easier to create content for the program when I had these predetermined buckets that I had to fill. What we’re doing is, the first week of the month, we have this master class educational session. That is no-holds-barred, pure education. We’ve really put a lot of effort you joined us, actually, you and Loryn Thompson joined us last month, or earlier this month, I guess, for the educational session in June.

That’s usually a very high-level and in-depth educational session. We typically create a downloadable worksheet or some kind of handout so that people can apply what they’re learning to their own businesses.

The second week of the month, we’re calling it our ABC sessions, Authority Business Coaching. We invite people to apply to be on these sessions. Then when they are with us live, we do all sorts of things. We look at their websites. We talk about their marketing efforts. We talk about how they could build an email list. We talk about also what’s working because a lot of people have things that are working really well, so it’s a matter of building on their strengths.

That ends up being almost like a private coaching session that others can watch and benefit from. Because so many of us are dealing with the same kinds of business challenges, people have loved those sessions. We’re so grateful for the people who volunteer to basically put their businesses out there and get coaching live. They seem to benefit from it, but then the people watching benefit as well. Those have been a lot of fun.

Then we have always done a live Q&A session every month, and we’re continuing with those. We like to call those mini coaching sessions because it’s an opportunity for people to ask a question directly of staff members from Rainmaker Digital, who are the people manning those sessions. Sonia and I do a lot of them, but I invite special guests in, too.

Then we do this Behind the Scenes session at the end