How I 4x'ed my Membership in 1 Year (without webinars, ads, or constant selling) | Ep. 54

How I grew my membership from 33 to 133 members in just one year - without running ads, hosting webinars, or constantly selling! 🚀 In this episode, I'm sharing the exact strategies that helped me 4x my Video Brand Academy membership using only YouTube and strategic content creation. If you're struggling to grow your membership or wondering how to scale without the traditional "launch hamster wheel," this video is for you!

Links (when possible, I use affiliate links and may earn a commission. see disclosure.)
▶︎  Rise of the Digital CEO: https://videobrand.link/rise

✨ Cringe or Binge: How does your channel rank? Download the VBA app to analyze your channel in 1 simple step. It’s free! https://videobrand.link/app

📹 Be Binge-worthy on YouTube: https://videobrand.link/become-bingeable

🟣 Video Brand Academy: https://videobrand.link/vba

🎥 CRUSH IT ON CAMERA GUIDE: https://vidpromom.com/crush

🎧 Video Brand Infusion Podcast: http://meredithmarsh.co/podcast

📲 Download my FREE Video Brand Academy app! 👉 https://videobrand.link/app

👉 Consistent Sales of Your Course with YouTube: https://youtu.be/GBhulsp0s-4

📹 Follow on YouTube for Video Podcast: https://youtu.be/zkscCExxg9Y?si=B2EAIPxJV0-jEP-7

Transcript

So I grew my membership from 33 to 133 members over the last year, and I did that without running ads or doing webinars or constantly selling. So here in episode 54 of Video Brand Infusion, I wanna get into the nitty gritty details of exactly how I made that happen as a YouTube creator where almost all of my audience and all of my leads come directly from the free content that I create for strangers on the internet. My name is Meredith and I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can become the go-to person in your niche and generate consistent revenue in your business. And when I first launched my membership, which is Video Brand Academy, that's like the fourth name iteration by the way. I don't plan on changing it again, but when I first launched What Is Now Video Brand Academy back in 2018, I had done the math. I knew that I needed 30 paying members in that launch to make my business work to pay for Kajabi, where I host my courses and the membership, to pay for my email, to pay for Zoom, to pay for whatever other business expenses I had at the time, which I'm sure was like minuscule compared to now. I launched this initial iteration of my membership in November 2018 with a goal of 30 members, and I got nine. I got nine people in my initial launch. And to say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was disappointed, but I was also really frustrated with myself because I felt like there was a lot of pressure riding on that goal of 30 members, and I felt like if I can't get 30 people into a membership, then maybe this online business thing just isn't for me. Like I should be able to figure this out. I'm a smart person, right? So in that moment, I had to make a decision. I had to decide to move forward with those initial nine members and figure it out from there, or I could say, you know what? This membership thing isn't gonna work. I need to do something else. I need to go in a different direction with the business, or maybe I just need to close the doors and get a full-time job. Ultimately, of course, spoiler alert, I decided to just move forward with those initial nine members and figure it out as I went along. Now, I wish I could tell you that the membership grew over time and it was so easy and effortless, and I just made my YouTube videos, and then people would come into the membership and it was all sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. But the truth is, it was a struggle from year one to year five. Growing the membership was a struggle. Now, I was bringing in revenue in other areas of the business. I had some courses. I worked one-on-one with clients on growing their YouTube channel kind of coaching stuff. I had affiliate revenue, I had brand deals, and I had ad revenue from YouTube. If you've listened to any video branding infusion episodes before, you know I am a huge proponent of having your own offers, your own products and programs because the most sustainable, reliable revenue streams are the ones you have the most control over. I’ve talked before about affiliate revenue being ripped out from under me, ad revenue being ripped out from under me, and my own offers are really the way that I grew what was a side hustle at one point into a six-figure business. So I had other revenue streams and the membership sort of was a side hustle itself within the main business for like five years. Even though I put a lot of time and effort into trying to grow it, trying to bring new members in, I did five-day challenges, like multiple times a year. I don't even know how many five-day challenges I ran. I love five-day challenges. They're fun to do. We had prizes, we played bingo. They're really fun to actually create that experience and deliver on that experience. But they're a lot of work. There's a lot of prep work. If you imagine, it's almost like five days in a row of a completely different live webinar. It's a lot of work to deliver, but it's a ton of prep work. Even though it was a lot of fun, and even though I would use those challenges to promote the membership and bring new members in every time, I don't think I ever did a five-day challenge where I had zero people join. But by the end of the year when I would look at the numbers, I was left with about the same number of people in the membership that I had at the beginning of that year, even after I did all of that work and effort into doing quarterly launches. Even though those launches were rinse and repeat launches where I didn't really have to come up with a bunch of new content, the content worked, the challenges were fun, they were effective. They converted pretty well in terms of the conversion rate, but I needed more people in the membership. In 2023, I was sort of looking at my business, looking at the revenue streams I had. I had like I said, the affiliate revenue ad revenue. I was like, I have to go all in on my own courses and programs. When I really looked at where I enjoyed spending the most time in my business, it was the membership. You know, if someone had said, okay, Meredith, here are all of the ways that your business makes money, here are all of the different revenue streams and offers that you have. If you could choose one of them to be wildly successful, which one would you choose? The answer was the membership. It's a fun place to be. I love hanging out with all of my people on our monthly meetups. I love helping them solve the problems and hurdles that they're running into with growing their YouTube channels or starting their YouTube channels or making their videos or generating sales from YouTube and creating YouTube funnels; that is fun for me. Chatting with other people and helping other people and kind of masterminding together is so much fun. If I could be wildly successful at just showing up and doing that, that's what I would choose. All of my efforts to really grow the membership into a primary revenue stream for the business were not doing that. They weren't paying off, they weren't growing from year one to year five and a half, I had like 30 members. So the dilemma I was faced with was, where am I gonna find more people for the membership? Or how am I gonna get the people that are already in my audience or on my list into the membership? That's the million-dollar question right there. I had already tried the quarterly launch hamster wheel. I had already tried just leaving the enrollment page for the membership open. I did that for an entire year. I didn't launch it at all in like 2022. Just left it open. Surprise, surprise, at the end of the year, I had the same number of people in the membership that I did at the beginning of the year. It didn’t matter whether I put a ton of time and effort into promoting it or not. I still had people come and people go. I could either dump a bunch of money into ads and cross my fingers and hope that they actually convert to a sale, and that it actually not only converts to a sale but actually profit from the ads. Or I could utilize the world's most powerful platform, which is YouTube, which I was obviously already on, to figure out how do I get more leads and more members into the membership from all of my effort that was going into YouTube. So going into 2024, I was all in on the membership, but I just wasn't ready to like pull the trigger on spending money on ads yet because I didn't feel fully confident in the membership brand itself. I felt like I was still in that awkward adolescence phase of business where it's not totally beginner when I'm in kindergarten. We're also not a fully built out elevated standalone brand yet. So for the first few months of 2024, I closed down the membership enrollment page. I didn't close the membership. The membership has been going the whole time, ever since 2018. But I closed down the enrollment page while I re-figure out everything from scratch. I got super crystal clear on my messaging, like, who is this membership really for? Who do I want to build it for? All of the positioning that happens with messaging. What do people want? What am I helping people do? Because up until 2024, I was kind of like, oh, you wanna grow your YouTube channel? Come on into my membership. It was kind of for anybody who wanted to start and grow their audience on YouTube, which sounds wonderful because it's very inviting and welcoming. Take anybody, right? But it's not super specific about like who is really the ideal member, the ideal client or customer for this. So I got really specific on that. I really honed in on, I want to help people use YouTube to grow their business, use YouTube to build their audience, to generate leads and use YouTube to essentially create offers that can sort of sell themselves and turn your YouTube channel into a funnel. Because that's what I had done with my own courses and with the membership up until that point. I’m a nerd. I love talking about all the YouTube stuff and all the business stuff. So that's who I felt like that's the who that I felt really connected with, that I really wanted to show up for and help. I got really clear on that, on who it was for. I got really clear on what I felt like. I could actually help people achieve, you know, what are the actual results that I can help you with? I can't help you go viral. I don’t have any experience in that. I can't help you be the next Mr. Beast. I have no experience in that. But if you have a course or a program or a membership or any kind of an offer and you wanna use YouTube to build your audience of ideal clients and customers, and then actually convert those people into your clients and customers, I can do that. If you wanna start your channel from nothing, I can help you with that. I have a really great strategy called the Spiderweb Strategy. Lots of people have done it, and it works really well for growing your channel from scratch. I kind of picked out the areas that I felt the most confident in, that I was most interested in, and that I knew I could create results for people in. All of that was part of getting really clear and really specific with my messaging and my positioning. With that also came a complete visual rebrand and name change. The real catalyst for changing the entire name and then the branding came for two reasons. One is that the course platform that I use, which is Kajabi, used them for a long time, loved them. They were releasing a whole new community platform. With the community platform on Kajabi, you can have multiple memberships or tiers or multiple access groups, as they call them, but they all live under one branded umbrella. I didn't want the branded umbrella for that to be Meredith marsh.co. I didn't want it to be about me. I wanted a standalone brand that stood on its own and everything kind of fell under that umbrella in a cohesive way. The word of the year for 2024 for me was cohesive. That was the guiding, it was like the north star of everything I was doing with the rebrand and the messaging. The other catalyst for the name change in rebrand was Kajabi made it possible to turn your whole Kajabi site into a custom branded mobile app. I knew I didn't want a mobile app for my business that was like, download the Meredith Marsh app. That just doesn't make sense. The domain name for my site is meredith marsh.co. What was I gonna call an app? Meredith Marsh? No, I didn’t wanna do that again. I wanted a cohesive, standalone, separate brand. As I was working on redoing my messaging, redoing my positioning, redoing the entire sales page, I also changed the name and all of the visual branding so that the membership and the app could have their own standalone brand. If you don’t know, there’s a free Video Brand Academy app. You can download it. If you're a member of Video Brand Academy, you can access the community and all of the training portal and all that stuff in the app. If you're not a member, there's still some goodies in there for you to access, like my YouTube channel analyzer that you just put a screenshot of your channel in and it will tell you if your channel is binge-worthy or cringe-worthy. It'll tell you what to tweak. It's really cool. But all happens in the Video Brand Academy app, which is a free download in the Apple Store and the Google Play Store. Quick little plug for the app. While I was continuing to run the membership and the YouTube channel and the other courses and my one-on-one clients, I was building out the app, redoing my messaging, redoing the sales page, and all of the branding and stuff. It was like pulling teeth for me behind the scenes to work on all of this; it was a big project. I got so sick and tired of it not being done, like the sales page not being done and the messaging not being done and the branding not being dialed in. One day in September, I decided I'm gonna launch this thing this week whether it's ready or not, I'm gonna relaunch the membership. That's what I did. I spent an entire week buttoning up the sales page, getting the emails ready to go, finalizing as much branding stuff as I could, and when I relaunched it as Video Brand Academy last September, I brought in 30 new members just by sending a couple of emails to my list. In five years I had grown my membership to 30 members. Then with some messaging shifts and clarity and a rebrand and a whole new sales page and a few emails, I doubled it. The success of that relaunch was enough evidence to me that my messaging was great, my offer was great, and I could indeed go all in on the membership. In December I did a $1 trial, so you could join for $1 for seven days, have access to the entire membership, and if you wanna stay, you can become a full-fledged member after that for $49 a month. I had like 36, 34 people that joined from the $1 trial and actually stayed in. In February of this year, I ran a 90 days to one K YouTube subscriber bootcamp in the membership but did a promo to my list beforehand and said, Hey, I'm doing this bootcamp. You can come in, you can enjoy the whole thing, you can do the work. All you have to do is join the membership to get the entire bootcamp and participate in everything. That bootcamp brought in 30 new members. Now, I mentioned that I 4x'ed my membership without doing webinars or ads or constantly selling. Let me just clarify a couple of things here. The bootcamp was a four-day training basically inside of the membership, so I was adding a mini-course, essentially, to the membership, adding value to the membership inside of the membership. I was gonna do that anyway. I was gonna do that for my members anyway, but I decided let's invite people who aren't members to come into the membership and do the bootcamp along with us. All you have to do is become a member, 49 bucks. All you have to do is become a member. It’s a no-brainer. It really was a no-brainer. It was what my business mentor James Wedmore would call an irresistible offer. There was no webinar, just a video on a sales page explaining the offer, and I sent the sales page to my email list, which is built from the content that I create on YouTube. I published a video podcast on how to reach your first 1000 subscribers or something around that, where I talked about the bootcamp and the offer. The members came from my list. That style of an offer for the membership, where I'm basically giving you a free gift, so to speak, for joining the membership, worked so well with the 90 Days to one K bootcamp that when I created my most recent course, Video Editing Made Easy, I decided for the first launch just to get the course out there, get it in front of as many people as possible so that I could get feedback on it, improve it, and then launch it to the public for real. I figured let’s do the free gift concept again. Let’s just give the course to anyone who joins the membership and run a promotion like that. Again, no webinar, no five-day challenge, no ads, just a sales page with a video on it, and a few emails to my list letting you know that I created this course. Video Editing Made Easy, and if you want it for free, you can get it when you join the membership. It’s a total no-brainer. I track all my metrics every time I have done a promotion and even my Evergreen offers for the membership that have been out there throughout the years. Let me tell you, on this very last promotion, I beat out the record of the most people joining the membership during one promotion. Just this week, I brought in 42 new members to Video Brand Academy, which when I think about 2018, Meredith, who was like, I need 30 members to make this work. Now I'm sitting here at 133 members total. I’m so grateful to 2018 Meredith for deciding to go ahead and follow through with building the membership with those initial nine people. To think about the dilemma that I was having at the time, which was, this is a failure. What am I gonna do? I needed 30 people. Maybe I should just close the doors and get a job or go in a different direction in the business. I am so grateful for 2018 Meredith for going ahead and choosing the membership and growing the membership. Now, I think there are a lot of things I could have done differently over the last six and a half years to grow it faster. I don’t think I really needed to spend five years figuring out all of the things that I figured out in just the last two years. If you are in a situation where you have a membership that’s small and it’s not growing, or you want to create a membership and you want it to be sustainable from the very first launch, I wanna tell you what I wish I could go back and tell 2018 Meredith. Number one, you have to be really, really clear on who your membership is for and what it does for people who join. What exactly is the promise, the transformation? What are you actually helping people do in the membership? If that’s not clear, then no wonder it’s not growing, right? Because people don’t know what it’s actually gonna do for them. You also have to be creative and think, use your magical thinking cap as I would like to say, to really think about the fact that nobody wants a subscription. You have to provide an offer that gets people over that objection of like, yeah, I would love everything inside of the membership and I want that desired result, but I don’t want a subscription. You have to demonstrate that they’re going to get more out of it than what they’re paying for now. One of the things I have found that I believe to be true based on my experience of the membership is if you can get people in, then they can see the value that’s in there. When all you really have is a sales page, all you have is a wall, and trying to get people on the other side of that wall is really tricky when it’s a subscription model. If you can create an experience where you can get people in so that they can see the value of being in, it's a lot easier to create an environment that people wanna stay than it is to get people over the wall of that sales page, if that makes sense. That’s one of the reasons why the seven-day trial works. That’s one of the reasons why using the offer of a free gift with your membership, the 90 Days to One K YouTube subscribers bootcamp and the video editing made easy; that type of offer is a really, I think, easy way, no-brainer way to get people over that wall of a sales page and get them into the actual membership so that they can decide to stay. If not, if they don’t wanna stay, that’s fine. They can come and go as they please. At the end of the day, even if you have an irresistible offer and you have clear messaging and clear positioning of your offer, you still have to have a consistent flow of leads to put the offer in front of whether you’re making an evergreen YouTube funnel offer situation or you’re doing live promotions where you have a specific cart open and cart close day. You have to be able to get people from your YouTube channel onto your email list to make those things happen. Some of the ways that I have done that are, when the enrollment page to the membership is not open, there’s a wait list page. There’s always a way for somebody to express their interest even if enrollment isn’t currently open. Because there’s a wait list then in my regular video content, in Video Brand Infusion episodes, even in my Descript tutorials, I mention Video Brand Academy. I might use a question that we just had in one of our meetups or a question that was posted in the group, or I might mention a training or a mini-course, or a bonus, or a resource that’s inside of the membership. I’m not trying to sell it to you; I’m just trying to let you know that it exists and it’s inside of my membership, and maybe that entices my viewers to join the wait list or join the membership when they get an email from me that says, Hey, the doors are open. Come on in. Even though I’m not constantly selling the membership, I am consistently seeding the membership. The most impactful thing that I have done to grow the membership using YouTube without webinars and ads or constant selling, is creating simple videos on specific topics around a single niche and offering lead magnets that go along with those topics. For example, I’m a subject matter expert on Descript. I have a Descript cheat sheet. It’s a one-page free download. If you’re using Descript and you’re finding trouble with it, and you wanna know the keyboard shortcuts and what are the steps, and what does Meredith know about Descript that I don’t know? It’s a no-brainer thing to download, and that’s a lead magnet that gets people on my list. I have my whole Crush It on Camera buying guide. It’s a whole guide. It shows links to all of the gear that I use and recommend, lights, camera, lens, microphone, even down to the cables that I use to connect the camera and microphone to my computer. It’s all in the guide. It shows how to arrange your office, how to angle the lights at you and all of that stuff. It’s a free download. Anytime in any of my videos, even on the podcast, if I mention my setup, my gear, anything related to that, I can mention, oh, it’s all in the Crush It on Camera guide. There’s a link down in the description. Even when the content isn't directly related to the topic of a lead magnet, I can still mention it because it's still valuable to people. You may not know that I had a Crush It on Camera guide or an entire series on my YouTube channel, right? I’m constantly seeding the membership and constantly mentioning my free guides and cheat sheets and downloads. The thing is, YouTube is constantly putting my videos in front of new people, and that’s the magical component of this whole thing. I’m consistently mentioning my lead magnets and my membership, and my videos are constantly showing up for new people or even for my existing audience. When you build a library of binge-worthy videos and you have hundreds of videos on various topics around your niche, and they all lead to a lead magnet of some sort, and they all mention your membership in some way, then all you really have to do is let your list know that you have this great offer for your membership, a trial, a free gift when you join, or some kind of thing happening where you can get people into the membership easily so that they wanna stay. I’ve mentioned in this episode and in some of my other episodes that a lot of what I learned about online business and creating irresistible offers, I’ve learned from my business mentor James Wedmore. The reason I bring that up is every year, once a year at this particular time of year, James hosts a three-part training series called The Rise of the Digital CEO. I should be wearing my digital CEO hoodie today to record this, but I guess it’s in the laundry. As an affiliate for his paid program Business by Design, I cannot recommend The Rise of the Digital CEO enough to people. The Rise of the Digital CEO is a completely free training that James does. I have access to the paid program, Business by Design, and a bunch of other bonuses and things inside of his training portal. I always do the free stuff. I go through the trainings for the Rise of the Digital CEO because he does them live, so they’re different every year. I always walk away with new ideas, new inspiration, and like a new sort of refreshed outlook. I just feel excited about how fun it is to have an online business and to grow an online business, and nobody is born knowing the foundations of building an online business or even how to sell or how to structure an offer, even if it’s a membership offer or a course offer, so that people actually wanna buy it, so that your audience wants to buy it. If you have created offers that nobody bought, or not enough people are buying them, or if you’re using YouTube to grow your audience so you could eventually create a digital product course or program, I think you'll love the Rise of the Digital CEO. It’s totally free, so I’ll put a link down in the description so that you can sign up. It's like three live trainings, and you can watch the replays on your own time so you don’t have to attend them live. I’ll be there live unless I have something else going on in my schedule, I’ll just watch the replay. I remember in 2017, I remember looking at, like, I had created a couple of courses. It was so far away from even dreaming up the membership at that point. I was a little baby online business owner, like a Baby YouTuber, really, at that point. I knew that if I was going to make my business work, if I was gonna actually sell courses and programs, I had to actually figure out how to sell courses and programs. That sounds so silly and kind of like, duh, Meredith, but the reality is I didn’t know anything about selling, and it was starting to sink in that I was gonna need to learn about selling. It doesn’t just happen. Once I got into Business by Design and started to consume James’s content, I realized wow, I have the world’s most powerful platform, just in my hand on YouTube. If I just take what I know about YouTube and take what James is teaching about online business and irresistible offers and messaging, and building a team and really building a business by design, then, you know, I think I could make this work. I’ve literally just never stopped learning from James ever since. Anytime he has a free training, I always attend the free training because it’s always amazing, and because I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies and ideas into your business to grow your business, then obviously it makes total sense that you would want the foundational online business stuff that James teaches as well. I wouldn't be here; my business wouldn't be here. None of this would exist. None of this would exist if I hadn't figured out those foundations and how to sell and how to craft an irresistible offer way back in the day and then adapt it over time and let it evolve to what I have now, which is a six-figure business that I love showing up for and a membership that is on its way very close to being a six-figure membership on its own. As a lifelong learner, I think it’s so much fun to be able to learn from somebody who’s been there, done that, has way more experience than to figure it all out on my own. I think you can probably agree with that. I hope you’ll join me and James for the Rise of the Digital CEO. Use my link down in the show notes or the description, and if you’re a member of Video Brand Academy, I’ll see you on our next meetup. Otherwise, I’ll see you in my next video.