1,200 members at $97 a month the online community I built on school has 1200 members currently paying $97 a month now you do the math on how much that is so I'm going to break down exactly how we make money with school and how you can do it as well even if you're a total beginner so this really is three main steps first you have to come up with an idea for a community then you have to figure out how to get people to pay to be in the community and finally you have to figure out how to get people to stay and not leave so you keep making money and the community grows all right so how do you come up with an idea for a membership site or a paid Community well you have to solve what I call a Perpetual problem that means it's a problem that someone has to keep solving pretty much for the rest of their lives so an example of this in the real world not the online world would be something like a gym people always need to work out it's not like you work out once and then you get jacked that would be great but that's not how it works and so people pay monthly to go to the gym people pay monthly for things like credit repair even if their credit is good if something pops up boom the credit repair agency takes care of it people pay monthly for Netflix because why you need to be entertained every month it's not like you stop wanting to watch shows so it's a Perpetual problem now if you compare that to something like a divorce attorney well once you get divorced that's it we're done here so moving back into the digital world what I discovered is the best membership site or Community is where people are constantly trying to solve the same problem and they want to interact and get feedback while they're solving that problem another great example is recipes there's a ton of very successful online recipe communities Foodies will pay every month to get new recipes because they want to keep cooking new foods they don't want to just keep cooking the same Foods so this is what the community looks like on school now what's great about school is you can actually put a video right here that is basically a sales video and people can sign up to your membership site right here pay school they pay you they don't charge any fees which I don't even know how Sam does that but you literally get $97 out of $97 if you charge $97 it's bananas and school takes care of all like the payment processing and if people cancel they remove remve them from the group and all this stuff it's all built in however because I'm more of an advanced uh online marketer I use my own software and I created a page that looks like this and this is the whole idea it's if we could get you just one new client each month for only $97 a month would you take that offer now the reason why I went with that I'm a business and marketing consultant I know how to get customers on the internet because it's what I've been doing for 10 years everyone wants new clients or new customers every month that owns a business it's a Perpetual problem getting new clients is something you will always need which leads me to the next question once you have that idea how do you build it out well here's exactly how I did it on school so the first thing is in the classroom you have to put in some content there has to be some content that people can go in and watch immediately this could be if you're a recipe membership site it could be a list of recipes from different cultures if you're somebody that teaches how to save money on taxes it could be just different categories of tax saving strategy but what I like to do is I like to put in here a start here course so what I do in this start here video is I give them one tactic that they can use to get an immediate result and it's a tactic that I learned years ago that if you know if you're short on customers and you need to get customers you can do this and it's manual it's not automated and it takes work but it has a high chance of working I call it the Phantom offer so I taught that thing in the classroom and because it works so quickly it's great because when you join the membership if you get an immediate result you tend to stick around a lot longer so this really increased um our retention and how we were able to get people to love the community because they got that that Rush of dopamine that they got that quick win as soon as they joined but this what I'm about to show you really is the key every month we do calls and we've actually built this up to now where there's a weekly call and what's cool about school is it has a calendar where you can put all of the events and what these are that we do is we do a weekly call one of them was with me so I do one a month my coo does one a month we have a professional Facebook Advertiser and media buyer that does another call each month and so there's always something going on every week for them to attend get feedback and this really helps Foster Community but and this right here this right here is why the community is so engaged look at this engagement rate the members are 91% active that is fantastic and the reason for that is this little button right here that says gamification this is how it works so let's say you're in my school community and you make a post or you drop a comment and it gets a like that is worth a point and the more points you get the more you move up on this leaderboard and what's really sweet is as you move up you unlock new courses and new content for being engaged so it's this incentivized system to remain engaged constantly and when you do that you you just get a an amazingly engaged community of people who have content that they can go watch they have calls that they can attend to get feedback maybe you do live cooking shows or something like that they have incentivized reasons to engage and they get rewarded for it it's like one big hyper dopamine centered I don't know but it works and people really love it so to summarize before we move on to the next point which is how to get people into your paid Community you find an idea that is a Perpetual problem that people have then you create a community on school where you provide some basic trainings or content in the classroom you unlock new content the more points they get so they are incentivized to move up the leaderboard and you do some sort of live call or live something every month so they have something to look forward to and get feedback from and here's a pro tip what I do on our calls is if you are in the top of the leaderboard that week we actually bring you on at the end and do Q&A so you get like free one-on-one coaching As you move up so we're just always looking for ways to incentivize people more and more so that the community stays engaged so now how do you get people in especially if you don't have a following if you don't have a big list so how this works is you're going to create a mini product and for instance this is a little Facebook ad training because you know when you own a business a lot of people look to run ads on Facebook to get more customers and so we made this little training because we've spent quite a lot of money on Facebook ads for our business we created this little discount Workshop uh and the reason it's called this is because generally when you buy a Facebook ads course it's a lot of money it's like $1,000 or something so this is like a discounted version of it and the reason we do this is just to get people in the door so we give away this amazing product for $47 now here is where the magic happens once they click here to buy the workshop on the next page it looks like this it's an offer to immediately join the membership site and how I frame this is I always tie it back to the original offer so they bought this cuz maybe they're a beginner at Facebook ads and they want to learn more on how to launch so on the very next page I say want to learn from the ninef figure media buyer that ran ads for Frank ER Agora Dean graziosi Jeff learner these are big companies in the space and the media buyer that we brought into the community to do a monthly call he's run uh he's managed advertisements for myself and big names like this and he does a call every single month answering questions for our members so it it just totally ties into the initial offer now I could have mentioned all the other things that we have but I specifically mention that one thing because it is directly correlated to the thing they just bought now if they click yes and they join well they're in if they click no then they go to the thank you page but if they click no it's not over yet and I'll show you how we add 60 to 100 members every month of the people that said no but first here's a little tip on how to get people to say yes one of the most powerful things to get people to buy something is to give them something for free people will literally pay for free things I learned this back when I worked for a company that sold cookware and my job was to go into a Sam's Club or a Costco do this cooking show and sell them this set of cookware but in order to get them to the booth to watch the presentation we would give away this little cheap potato peeler and we'd get on the intercom and we'd say attention Sam's Club Shoppers and N 5 they'll I'll be a cooking show in 5 minutes and we're giving away a free gift please come watch it and people would come and watch it to get the free gift and a portion of those people would buy the cookware this is very similar to time share presentations where you go in and you're going to get this incredible hotel package but only if you sit through a six-hour grueling sales presentation and so what I do to get people into the membership is I say hey here's three really cool things that you would love to have I'll give them to you for free if you join right now and even if you cancel you get to keep those free gifts and so people will buy the membership to get the gifts for free and then when they get in the membership they realize oh my gosh this is a great community and they stay at least that's the idea it's working for us and I imagine it would work for most people if you did it that way and so what do we do with the people that clicked the no button what we do is we send them a boring email every day and encourage them to join the membership now you might think why would that work people don't actually like Sensational marketing why because if I send you an email and I say you know I was just chilling on my yacht today and I thought blah blah blah blah blah you're like well I don't have a yacht I can't relate to this dude n but if I tell you a story of how I had a fight with my wife or my kid uh did something that all kids do whatever you're like oh my kids's done that oh I've had a fight with my wife ah I connect I relate to you you're a normal person you've done something that I would love to do or you know something that I would love to know but I'm we're still kind of similar let me give you an example one of the most boring stories I've ever told is one of our top selling emails meaning when people read it they go and they join at client's University and that's the story of a glass of almond milk so just to demonstrate I'll tell you the story very quickly right now one day I come home and there's a huge cff of almond milk on the counter so I look at my wife and I say hey what's with a big caraffe of uh almond milk and her eyes got wide as silver dollars so then she marches over to the fridge flings the fridge door open grabs a carton of store-bought almond milk that I had recently purchased and says do you know what this is and I'm like almond milk she goes exactly but this cost $6 for the carton and look at all this this chemicals and gum and stuff it has in it and I go okay so she marches over to the big caraffe of almond milk and she says do you know what this is and I'm like is it's still almond milk right yes but it's homemade almond milk she lifts up this black Contraption and she says I got this for $50 on Amazon and all it takes is a little handful of almonds and water and it'll make this huge caraffe of almond milk and it has no gum no poisons or preservatives or anything in it and I did the math real quick in my head and I worked out that the equivalent of homemade almond milk to a $6 carton was about 23 and she looks at me and she goes H and I knew she was right and I knew she was right because I was spending $200 a month on almond milk and ingesting a bunch of stuff that I didn't need to ingest because of one simple reason I didn't know you could make homemade almond milk and isn't it the things that we don't know that cause us the most pain and suffering in life and this is where I transition it to getting them to join my membership site it's kind of like when you're growing a business if you don't know how to get new customers what is that costing you how frustrating how horrifying is it to wake up every single morning look at your bank balance and know that you're not making the type of money that you want to make and if you just had more customers you could it feels terrible why cuz you just don't know how to do it and that's why we created get clients University and then we do a quick little pitch boom I call this a money tail email the framework for it is a boring relatable event that happened like this almond mil story then a it's kind of like transition teaching a principle that they can relate to and think about and go huh yeah that's right it is kind of like that and then a that's why that's why I created this product and we found that when you do this you can send an email to your customers or your potential customers every single day and they'll enjoy it and they don't mind being pitched every single day in fact check this out these are the stats from the last 30 days let me let me move myself over here so y'all can see these are people 57 people said no and then they got a daily email about nothing signed up and we added $642 in monthly recurring Revenue meaning every month they pay that using these daily boring emails and it just goes to show you that if you really connect with your customers they will love to hear from you in fact I made a post in my group and I said hey for those of you that have already bought do you want me to like not send you these emails anymore and everybody was like no we love getting them and that's the thing when you establish a connection with your audience this could be through email through social media whatever they want to hear from you because you you said something that made a difference in their life why would they not want to keep hearing from you and so the strategy here to get people in is you you create a little discount offer and then you talk about it on social media you email it to your email list run Facebook ads to it you create organic content and you say Hey you want more help go get this thing go buy this thing they buy it some of them join your membership ship site some of them don't the ones that don't get a daily email and the membership grows but you probably have multiple more detailed questions about how to grow a paid community on school and because I don't want this video to be 7 hours long I've decided to create a mini course on how to build a profitable membership Community I am in all transparency going to charge for it but if you want it for free if you're thinking about joining school and creating a school Comm Community I'll leave a link in the description it's my special link if you click on that link and you create a community in school I will give you this course for free I can actually see who I've referred in the school dashboard so I'll just reach out to you when the program is done and send it to you for free oh and if you want to see me rip someone's online business apart and give them brutal honest advice on how to grow it you can check out this video here because that's exactly what what I do