How To Build a Community and Get Subscriptions

Transform your membership site into a thriving community with actionable insights from my personal journey. Discover the secret weapon that took my Patreon from five members to 100 members. By offering something of real value, I was able to attract and retain members, setting an ambitious goal of reaching 500 members. Learn how an irresistible lead magnet can be the game-changer you've been searching for.

Follow Dr. Sheena Howards' socials:
@drsheenahoward | Power Your Research

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

A lead magnet is like bait. It's the thing that gets somebody to pay attention and say, oh, I want that and I'm willing to join the membership site to get it. I'm willing to give the email address to get it. And so if you want somebody to join your paid membership site, you have to give them something of value. I don't want my work to be stuck behind an academic paywall. I want to leave a legacy, I want to reach my potential and I want to change lives. This podcast, power your Research, is my attempt to help the smartest people in the world do that very thing. My hope is that you use the lessons I share to make more money than what your higher ed job can ever pay you. I've done it, my clients have done it and so can you. My hope is that you'll apply what you learn here and one day join the Power your Research program where you can work with me one-on-one. For all of you out there that you're thinking about starting a membership site because you think it's going to be passive, consistent income, or you have a membership site and you're trying to get more paid subscribers and members into to this site, I learned something this year that really, really really increased the subscribers. I got to my membership site. So I have a membership site on patreoncom and I'm finishing out the year with about 65 people on my membership site, and last year at this time I'd had like five. And so I'm going to be scaling up this system next year so that I can eventually get to a thousand members. And I want to share with you what I learned, because I spent years trying to figure out how to get people into my membership site and I had a lot of false starts, a lot of things that didn't work. But you know what you water grows. And so here's what I figured out for me, and it seems so simple because people talk about this all the time and I guess you just have to have the right lead magnet. A lead magnet is like bait. It's the thing that gets somebody to pay attention and say, oh, I want that and I'm willing to join the membership site to get it, I'm willing to give the email address to get it. And so if you want somebody to join your paid membership site, you have to give them something of value. And so for me I figured out after a bunch of trial and error is that if I give my why Wakanda Matters book autographed to everybody that joins a paid tier of my Patreon. People want to sign up because they want that book and they want it autographed, and there's literally nowhere else to get an autographed book from me besides joining my Patreon, or or that's pretty much it, unless I do a special thing throughout the year where you can get an autographed book from me, which I very rarely do.

Speaker 1: 3:06

Hey, everyone, real quick. I don't run any ads on this podcast, so I have to rely on word of mouth. If this podcast has helped you in any way, please share it with a friend and follow me, dr Sheena Howard, on LinkedIn, where I give more free content on building your brand as an academic. If you tell me you came to my LinkedIn from the podcast, I'll make sure I accept your request, and so this is something that people can't get anywhere else, and so if they like my work and they want this book and this is one of my favorite books they're willing to join the Patreon site for $7 a month or $12 a month, because they'll get the book mailed to them in a few weeks. Now, once you get them in there, obviously they're waiting for this book and they might leave after they get the book. So then the next trick is to make sure that you're giving them so much value inside the membership site that they want to stay. So for me, once people get in, they're going to get the book.

Speaker 1: 4:01

The book takes like three weeks to come because I got to get them, order them, ship them all that stuff. But if they stay on for three months they get free merch. It's not free, they're paid members. They'll get merch.

Speaker 1: 4:13

So, like this shirt that I wear, I don't sell this on any shop.

Speaker 1: 4:17

You literally can only get it if you're a member of my Patreon, and you can get mugs and all those types of things, but only my members can get them, so it is exclusive to them, and so I wear my merch in a lot of my videos.

Speaker 1: 4:31

People always ask me you know how do I get that shirt? And the answer is on Patreon. So as you create engaging, amazing content, you can prompt people to DM you if they want the free lead magnet and tell them hey, you join Patreon, you get the free lead magnet and then make your stuff so valuable inside of the membership program that they will want to stay. You know, by creating engaging content and talking to your audience, asking them what they want, paying attention to the things that they keep asking you for over and, over and over again, you'll get a sense and feel for what they actually want, and so I hope this helps somebody out there. And again, my name is Dr Sheena Howard. I'm the founder of Power, your Research, an academic branding company, and I hope you have an amazing day you.