Marketing vs. Membership Site, Organizing Non-Course Content, and Bulletproof Logins with Melodie Moore

[00:00] Micah: Hey everybody, welcome to the Membership Site Success Show. My name is Micah Mitchell. Have with me another double M, Melody Moore, the princess of Membarium. And Melody, welcome to the show. Good to be here. You've got a couple topics for us today. We're going to talk about with a membership site, whether you should have your marketing site and your membership site together in one spot, or whether they should be separate, some of the pros and cons of that. We're also going to talk about different types of content because a lot of things, as you were saying, Melody, a lot of platforms, I should say, just push you into making a course, push you into fitting into their model. But there are other models, other types of content, right? And then finally, we're going to talk about how to make your logins bulletproof. And in this case, I think you're talking about with Membarium, but kind of, it is a common thing actually with membership sites to say you really

[00:51] Melodie: got to nail the login process. It's often a big problem. So again, welcome to the show. Let's jump right into it. So Melody, and for those of you who don't know Melody, we'll put in the show

[01:03] Micah: notes, another episode with her, where we talk more about her background, but she is an expert in membership sites. She's Canadian, but we don't hold that against her. We love her for it. Tell us, Melody, why should somebody, you know, should they build one site or two sites? Meaning, you know, marketing membership, does it all go into one site? I've seen that. I've also seen it separated. Why should they do which one? And just to give a little bit more validity to like

[01:26] Melodie: why I make the suggestions that I do, our specialty really is in the seven figure membership sites, and then scaling up to two, three, up to five, and even $10 million sites. And it's one thing to have these types of problems when you have a hundred members. It's very different when you have a thousand or 2000 members. And that's typically what we're used to is like those high volumes. So whether you're just starting out or you have an established site, the advice is solid, but start, you know, start with good advice and then build on there. So do your original question, Micah, of why would you want two sites? Now, I'd like to kind of just give an example here of a client that we were working with. Now, this client had worked with another developer for two years building out a website, and that was supposed to be a combined marketing and membership site into one. And they have a lot of content over 15, 20 years of content and content buildup. And we wanted to have a staged approach to be able to launch their two sites so that we could reduce down the noise for them. Because a lot of the reason why they came to us is like our current setup isn't working. They were on a Joomla site connected to keep at the time. And it was just constant everyday fires of this person didn't get access, this person didn't get a login. And so that creates a lot of noise for them on a day by day basis. And we wanted to be able to launch as quickly as possible to reduce down that noise. So we made the decision to launch their membership site first, and then to work on the marketing site after. In general, the best practice is to separate the two out, because it means that you have a lower risk of both of your site, like, if it's on one, if one site goes down, your business is dead. If you have them on two, then at least people can still buy or people can still log in. So you don't have to deal with as many issues when you when you frame it like that. It's a very long winded answer.

[03:17] Micah: No, I love it. Let me be the devil's advocate, though, and ask, doesn't that give you twice as much to maintain?

[03:23] Melodie: It could. And it is the trade off. And I think when you're when you are smaller of before 500k, that you can survive on doing doing one site, like it kind of makes sense at that revenue level. But once you get to that 500k mark, then you're installing plugins that are meant for marketing on both sites. And then you're also installing these heavy plugins that are meant for content on the one site. And that's going to reduce down your speed by quite a bit. And speed is a very big factor on the on sites, people expect it to load really, really quickly. So I would suggest that you can keep it on one before that 500k mark. And then if you've done your site set up well, then it's not too hard to add an additional site later on, whether you want to separate out your marketing or separate your membership. But really, if you're if you're around that, like seven figure mark, you should have two sites because you've got so much volume there that you also have more team members and they push the wrong buttons sometimes. And so you want to mitigate down your risk as much as possible.

[04:23] Micah: Yeah, I'll say that for us as a software company, not just membership sites, we follow that same process where we say, even a members area to manage our billing, that's going to be a different installation. You know, for us, we have kind of two versions of our software, they each have their own separate sub domain. So ultimately, we have about four sites, for the exact reason you're talking about. I will say, though, there was a time long ago, just like you're saying, when we first got started that we did start with one site. And it was okay, initially, because it didn't have too much traffic, too much content, it was, it was fine, right. But we had to outgrow that. And I'll tell you, this year, and kudos to you for recommending a great designer to us, by the way. You know, shameless shout out, membarium.com, you can go check out the design that Melody got us hooked up with. But that project was crazy, because we were then designing four websites, right? We're like, you know, once we were finished with root, it's like, well, we also have these other ones, and they're just slightly different. The end product is great. But yeah, I just want to point out that trade off. And I'm glad you made the point of like, hey, around if you're under half a million, maybe it's fine, go with one site. But as you grow, you know, I appreciate you bringing up kind of the context.

[05:32] Melodie: I wonder if you see this pattern of, like somebody like hasn't made their first sale. And they're thinking about their they're making decisions like they are at the seven figure mark. So they're putting technology in place, or they're putting systems in place that are like 10 steps ahead of where they are. And I like the analogy of if you're single, you probably don't need an eight bedroom house. And when you think about that, like when you're when you're just starting out, like if you are like that pre revenue or very small in your member base, keep it as simple as as possible, as much as possible. But just make sure that you're choosing tools like memberium that allow you to grow with your tool not having to replatform. Because sometimes what people will do is they'll take that simplest option when they're either pre revenue or very early on. But that decision will then make it so

[06:22] Micah: that they have to completely replatform down down the road. Let me ask you a question. What is the perfect, like, let's say, simple tech stack that will grow into a bigger tech stack without replatforming? Like what's a newbie tech stack that can actually grow? And it's okay, if there's not one, you can replatform a little bit. Putting you on the spot here, what what would you answer that?

[06:42] Melodie: I love WordPress. So I in there's so much debate. And I feel like I spend most of my week debating with this on people on Facebook, about what the best like should we use Kajabi? Or should we use Thinkific? Or should we be because that is kind of your first portion? Like there are other I don't know if you know this, but there are other membership plugins, too. But the first kind of question you to ask yourself is, do you want a platform based tool? Or do you want to have a WordPress based website? I like building on WordPress because it makes it so that you don't have to replatform. And whether you want to just keep it super simple and just have them log into the site immediately, then you can add Membarium on later on. Like the first your first goal when you're pre revenue is to make money, you need to close sales. So it's like, what's the simplest tech stack that you can do in order to be able to do that? Our current recommendation is Astra

[07:33] Micah: and Elementor with WordPress. And I don't see that changing right now. We've played around with a

[07:39] Melodie: couple other builders, but you do kind of want a builder. And there's some people out there, they're like Gutenberg, but it's real hard to use. And I have to get my developer to make things look pretty. Whereas Elementor, you can make it look pretty right out of the box.

[07:52] Micah: Yeah, I totally agree. It's I never quite thought of WordPress as as the beginning, like the starter. But it's really not that hard. Meaning like, yeah, maybe you can sign up for some service where it might be slightly simpler than WordPress. But I think like you said, if you start in WordPress, if you take at least that much of a little bit of a leap, then you can grow as far as you really want to grow. There's very advanced sites on WordPress. And I've heard complaints about

[08:15] Melodie: Kajabi and Thinkific and all of these platform tools that really sell themselves as easy to use. Just as much as that, you just get a different flavor of problem. And I think there's always that sense of the grass is always greener and sales pages lie. Like there's a purpose of a sales page. And that is to sell you on their product. So it's like, don't, of course, they're going to tell you it's super easy to use. But it's like, you're on a first date with somebody is like, the honeymoon will wear off. And there's going to be problems no matter which tool that you use. And any tool that sells itself is the most easy to use. It's like, you just always want to take that as a grain of salt. And I realized that member does say that. So take it with that, take that with a little bit of grain of salt too. It just depends on, it depends on your mindset on like what matters in that tool. Everything can either be easy to use or very hard. It's not a clear cut answer.

[09:07] Micah: Yeah, I will, in our defense say for a while we were trying out the easy to use and we've mostly dropped that because it's not the memberium is not the easiest to use. I will say, if anybody's wondering what platform, you can always reach out to our support team because we are often telling people to go use a different platform. We're not, we're not going to say, yeah, you should use memberium if we understand what you're doing. And we're like, yeah, you don't want to do this right now. Maybe come back later. And people really love that. So yeah, feel free to ask us. We're not going to tell you memberium if it's wrong. We'll make another recommendation. But yeah, we did discover that was our error, I guess, in saying we're easy to use because it's like, well, we're always trying to be easier to use, but it's all relative, right? So. And I think that's a noble, like every software

[09:53] Melodie: should always want to be easier to use. But what I love about memberium is it's deep integration with WordPress and its ability to play with others. And I always like the analogy of like Microsoft or Apple, like there's other tools and other plugins up there that are much more like Apple, like, yeah, it's on WordPress, but it don't play well with others. Like you can integrate other things, but it's very difficult. Whereas with memberium, it's like, I basically can do anything I want with it to for the most part. So it's like, what do I want to protect? What page do I want to protect, which really allows us to be able to give a really exceptional user experience, because it's like when you get up to that higher figure mark of, you know, seven, and you get to two, $3 million, it's like your customer service costs and usability costs are so much higher. So really creating an experience that makes sense for your business becomes that much more advantageous. And I, you know, not just because we're here talking, Micah, but this is the tool that I find to be the best that that allows us to get that experience.

[10:52] Micah: Yeah, I would agree. And not just because I'm biased. I will say there are other WordPress plugins. So somebody could, let's say, start with WordPress and use a totally different WordPress plugin, right? Because memberium is, is it only works with keep an active campaign. And the good thing about then still starting on WordPress is their content is still in WordPress. And so they could always still switch to memberium without moving their content, changing their design. It would just be a little backend kind of plugin. So I do think WordPress is a great, great place to start.

[11:19] Melodie: And that speaks to the, the not having to read platform again, because moving your content is the most painful part. And if you don't have to read platform, because that's like when we're, when we're looking at changing over a site, like the first question is, well, where is your content currently? Because if it's in pretty much any other platform other than WordPress, it's like, well, the first part of our work is just going to be moving that over.

[11:39] Micah: Yeah. Just if you can get to all of it. Right. And one thing we've mentioned here on this podcast before, but whenever you move platforms, it's not like all the data makes it. I mean, very rarely does all the data make it, you have data loss. And so that's why we're saying you don't really want

[11:54] Melodie: to move because that data loss is expensive. Well, you use, you lose progression tracking, which oftentimes is problematic when we're moving somebody off of like Kajabi or Thinkific or something along those lines. It's like, there's no way for us to get that progression tracking. Whereas if you're already using like LearnDash or Sensei on WordPress, it's like the users are already there. You're just connecting it to a different system.

[12:17] Micah: That's a good point. I didn't think about that. Anything else you want to say about the two sites before we talk about different types of content within the site?

[12:23] Melodie: I don't think so. I think just in general, no, that's all. I feel, I feel complete.

[12:29] Micah: Well, good. Good, good. Well, let's talk about the content because I've seen so many, I guess, and you have, I'm sure as well, different styles, different combinations, right? There's like a jillion ways to provide content on the internet. So what are your thoughts on kind of the optimal way? And maybe you could speak to, again, kind of a beginner or a business that's far along. Like, you know, I want to almost give you a example to get you to answer, but I'll just let you kind of start wherever you want to start with content and how to best use it. Go ahead.

[13:01] Melodie: So if we're, if we're thinking about like when in, it kind of feeds into a little bit of like your stages of membership site stuff too. When you're in that, that first stage, it's like, you really are just looking for proof of concept at that point in time. And it'd be curious to see what you've seen of like where they're currently at, but the successful ones that I've seen, they start with some sort of like one-off course. Sometimes they start with a membership, but usually it's a sell a one-time feed and it's, it's an easier commitment level to get from somebody to spend $97 or $497. And the typical progression that I see is they, they sell a course and then people love their course and they're like, but we want more. We love you. And you're like, let's, let's offer a membership now. And then they go from there, but they never get out of the course mindset. And I do want to start there and just validate my thought process on like the stages of, of membership site or memberships. Like, do you typically see people starting with a course or just going right? And I guess it would depend on if they already have an existing business too.

[14:03] Micah: Well, to something you said at the beginning, like a lot of people are trying to act like they're already gigantic. And so they're going to sometimes try to like launch their book and their course and their membership and their mastermind all in the same weekend or whatever. Right. But, but I think the people, like you said, who are more successful or like the people you run into who are like, Hey, I'm having some set success. Help me have more. Yeah. They did typically start with a course and they got that moving. And then they're maybe getting people saying like, Hey, we'd love to connect more community, whatever, you know, coaching. Right. So that at least is the most organic way. I see it go. Like you said, some people might have an existing business, existing markets on. And so they might be able to, to pivot into it a little better, but yeah, mostly courses are the starting

[14:50] Melodie: point with a few exceptions. And I like, and I think to your point of like, I've definitely worked with a number of clients over the years that do that whole, I want to do a mastermind and there's going to be three different levels and there's going to be this, that, and the other. And I've, I've rarely actually see that, seen that be successful of the, and I love this quote of like the do less and obsess type mindset. And I think as entrepreneurs, we always just got so many ideas and that's what drives success to some degree, but it's balancing that out with, with focusing and saying, okay, but if I was just going to do one thing and focus on one thing in the, the clients that we have that have honed in that discipline have outshun all of the others over time. They don't like, it's not as fun and interesting to talk about because they don't get to talk about all their great ideas all the time, but they, they outperform them as far as the freedom they have from their business and also the revenue that they create too. It totally took us off track from content types, by the way.

[15:44] Micah: No, it's perfectly on track because I think what you design and choose to sell very much impacts your life. If you just make a course and you're selling it and it's passively delivered, that's way different than, Oh, I got to show up for all these calls. Right. And the worst thing is to show up for calls that are poorly attended. So if you've committed to a call schedule and you've got three members, but you still got to do the full thing, it's horrible.

[16:08] Melodie: You promised it. You have to show up. You can't just say, I'm just not going to do it now. If

[16:13] Micah: you can't. Yeah, exactly. I think it's almost for some reason, I'm going to get nerdy here and say, it's almost like the wise old Jedi advice of like, you know, focus and make one thing really, really good. And of course, most people are, you know, the surface of the water is all choppy

[16:26] Melodie: because they're like, I could do this and that, you know, but you're right. The people who keep it

[16:30] Micah: simple, they're just quietly having nice family vacations and eating what they want, getting healthy and, you know, living the good life. Basically, I definitely see that difference. And having met a lot of these people and like gone to their houses and stuff, it is interesting the way those choices affect them. You know, if you love interacting with people, great, not saying don't, but when it's overdone, you know, then you're reaching out to somebody like Melody and being like, save me.

[16:57] Melodie: And it was just like a reset. And I feel like I can resonate with it because it's like, I always have so many ideas too. And it's like, how do you keep yourself in check as an entrepreneur? I was like, like most people was like, I am, I am one of those people of just always wanting to add more. But I think there's like almost like a, a little bit of a deeper question of like, why did you, did you start your business to be busy all the time? And it's like, no, I wanted more freedom, both in financial freedom and in time freedom. And, you know, we're seeing more and more of this trend of like, I didn't start my business so I could work more than what I was working before. I started it to, to be able to do cooler things with my life, but then we get distracted with what success can be. And, you know, part of the joy of, of having an online business or a member, on a membership site and a course site is that, you know, you can work from anywhere and you can deliver that from anywhere, but we get so caught up in different ideas about what success is that whole like bro game of you need to wake up at five, be doing stuff all day long. And then like only sleep for three hours. And that's the joy of life. And it's like, for who?

[17:59] Micah: I totally agree. So let's say somebody, I will give you an example. Let's say I've got

[18:03] Melodie: a hundred great 10 minute videos and they're non-sequential for whatever reason. How would

[18:11] Micah: you throw that into a site? Just a general non-sequential library? Would you try to group them? Would you, how would you deal with that?

[18:19] Melodie: Well, and I think that's most people, what they would do is they would throw that into a course course and they'd maybe have a all content like bonus podcasts course page. And one of their admin assistants would add one of those videos in there. But what we've been playing around with is something called the content library, which is a term we came up with to kind of understand, because we saw the

[18:38] Micah: user experience impact of people doing that. And like, we went through the, the user experience of

[18:44] Melodie: it of like, okay, I've joined this course. And then I go to the course page and then there's like module one, module two, module three, module four, bonus content, call recordings, resources, but it's like, you're never going to complete any of those. And it's also just really hard to find. And it's one of the limitations of working with one of the platform-based solutions. And I imagine that as time goes on, they'll probably develop something with that, but you really only have one option of how to display your content. And that's in a course. I love the phrase of like, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's what I think of when I think of these platform-based solutions. So in a, in a content library, it's meant to be something where it's a library. You can see your lovely little bookshelf with all of your books on there. And you can say, okay, I really like this one. And you can click on that one. You can add it to your favorites, or you can say, Hey, I've done that one. If you, if you wanted to, it's flexible in that way. And then it's also, you can organize it by like, what's the most recent, which ones are the most visited? Which ones do most people click on? So it really curates the content in a much more, in a way that makes it easier for your people. And that's the trend that we're seeing with membership sites and content online in general, is that there's no lack of information anymore. It used to be that, gosh, if only people had more education, then the world would be a better place. And now it's, there's, you can go on YouTube and learn pretty much anything for free at this point in time. And the reason why somebody is going to purchase a course or a membership is because they don't have the time to look through all the free content. And the mistake that a lot of membership site owners are making is that they're like, I just need to give them more content. And it's like, no, that's not why they came to you. They came to you because you're the expert and you're going to point their attention in the right places to say, okay, go here and look at this. So that sequential

[20:38] Micah: course is one example of that. But then when you have a library of 100 different videos, it's like,

[20:44] Melodie: how do you point their attention to the right spot? So is it the most recent content that's going to be the most valuable to them? Is it going to be the content that most of your members in that 100 vault really like the most and like showcase those and bubble those up to the top versus putting the work onto your members who are paying you by the way of saying, here's 100 videos, you go through them and you decide what's important to you. And it's like, no, like, aren't you the expert? I thought

[21:14] Micah: you were supposed to tell me what's important here. Yeah, it's funny because the more I pay for content, the more I want less of it, the more I want them to point out this, that and this other thing.

[21:27] Melodie: That's what you're paying me for is to skip the rest, right? Because we don't have any time. Like, I don't, I don't have time. Like I pay for lessons on things because it's like, yeah, I could go online, I could go through YouTube videos, but it's like, I pay for dance lessons because it's like, you're going to tell me what I need to know and curate that to me so I can get better in a much

[21:47] Micah: shorter period of time than I would otherwise. Totally. Tell me about the content when you talk about, I almost envision like, is it pages or posts? Like, are you categorizing? How are you making it? Let's say there is a hundred videos. And like you said, they can now kind of sort it, they can pick through it. What are some of the things you're doing to the content to make it index like that or to make it friendly searchable? I mean, if you're technical,

[22:12] Melodie: it's a glorified custom post type. If you're not technical, I don't have a good analogy, actually. It's a, it's just backend technology of how, how we make that function. But even if you were as somebody that maybe is not more technical, if you were to go to a developer and say, Hey, make me a custom post type library, they will do that, but they probably won't give you what,

[22:33] Micah: what I would deem as a content library. And when I think about a content library,

[22:37] Melodie: there's a couple of key functionalities of it, of one, looking at what are the key portions of your content. And then to giving spots in the backend of WordPress for people to input that content in those places. So typically how content is organized in WordPress is through just like blog posts, but in a blog post, your admin assistant can just go in and add whatever they want in that text field. And, you know, sometimes they remember to put the references on there. Sometimes they don't. Oh, and those download links, some of the content has download links and some of them doesn't. And you can't pull each one of those fields dynamically. So if the content is connected in some sort of way to something else with a content library, you can say, okay, I want you just to pull the resources from this content or just the video link or just the short description, because we have it all separated out in the backend. Whereas typically people would then just maybe make them blog posts, which really doesn't give you the adaptability with your, with your content. So what the content library does is it enables you more adaptability to be able to put your content in multiple different places and also keeps the consistency of your content too, as your team is putting in different items of making sure that they actually put things in the right places, because that can be a challenge. Let's just put it that way.

[23:56] Micah: Yeah, definitely. Especially over a long period of time and different team members, like the same team member might not do it consistently, but different team members for sure. I have an analogy that might help for people who are a little bit less technical. So when she talks about a custom post type, she's talking about a WordPress custom post type. And I think Melody, you can correct me here, but a good analogy might be like a document or a spreadsheet, like in a document, they can put the text wherever they want in a spreadsheet,

[24:23] Melodie: you can label the rows and then they put this information here and that information here and

[24:28] Micah: that info. And then like you're saying, then when the system goes and says, okay, what content do they want? Now it can pick out an individual field from the row and say, oh, this one's about that, or this one is recent or, or whatever's in that information. And then likewise, if anyone's ever done a mail merge out of a spreadsheet where you can put first name here

[24:48] Melodie: and last name there and address here with a custom post type, you do it similar. You say,

[24:51] Micah: hey, I want the title here and I want the download link there. And I, and you can format the page. So whatever they've put in the backend and the custom post type, you can control how it displays. Am I kind of right with that?

[25:02] Melodie: Totally. That's a great, can I steal that?

[25:05] Micah: Yeah. Yeah.

[25:05] Melodie: I mean, it's kind of similar to like custom fields and keep too. Like it's not on the contact record level. It's on like a content level, but it really gives you that flexibility as you're trying to use your content in different ways. And because it is most, a lot of businesses, once they get up to that level of scale and you know, it is about organizing what you already have, not creating more things. It's about that whole expanding contract. You've expanded. You're now at seven figures. You now need to contract down of like, what's actually valuable here. Similar to like decluttering your house of you realize how much stuff you have. You're like, I actually don't need three different types of toothpaste. Now that I think about it, maybe just one.

[25:46] Micah: I think for content, yeah, it's really helpful at your idea of the content library for people. And I know for myself in the past, I thought too sequentially when I was making content and always kind of twisted my mind. Cause I'm like, yeah, but if they come in at this stage, then how do I accommodate that? Because that sequence I just, you know, is perfect for person A is not okay for person B. But I think with your library, if you add enough fields to the content or descriptors or whatever, then you could, I think you could create different sequences for people to go through, right? Same, same hundred videos, but one person might get a totally different sequence than another that makes sense for them.

[26:25] Melodie: Yeah. You could do like an, I mean, just to volley off of that, do an onboarding to figure out where they're at. So, you know, are you, you know, just using the business example, are you pre-revenue? Are you under a hundred K you 500 K? Cause revenue is just a good marker of like just where people are at. And then in the content library, you can have conditional pages or conditional content on there, depending on what answer that they gave. It's like, well, these are a hundred videos. Here's the most recent, here's the four that are recommended for you based on what you'd had there, because then it is, it is custom tailored to that. And we're seeing that big trend right now. It's like, I don't just want a membership site. I want a membership site just for me.

[27:04] Micah: Mm-hmm. I love that. What you just said about the page itself can have content that might show or hide depending on what they filled out in their onboard so that, you know, they're, they're consuming whatever the basic content is, but, Oh, they're the special person right after the basic content. And if you're in this position, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, Oh, that's me. Perfect. Right.

[27:25] Melodie: And generally we see that trend with content on sites. Is there like, this is the stuff that everybody should do this stuff? Hmm. I guess it would depend on where they are here. So it's like, it's like a choose your own adventure thing. It's something that we're, we're actively developing. It's like, how do you really create a phenomenal choose your own adventure on a membership site?

[27:46] Micah: Yeah. And I'm sure we could, well, let's, let's get nerdy for a second. Talk about AI for this, because that's my, you know, that's kind of my dream and I haven't seen it implemented perfectly, but let's say that you create these hundred videos and you do fill in the fields with all the details that should make it easier for your AI as well to go in and find them the right thing based on their profile. And that's kind of, you know, a new thought process is you're not only formatting for people, but you you're formatting for bots too. If you want to use bots in the future,

[28:16] Melodie: right? Yeah. We're playing around with some really cool AI tools right now where it's really conversational and like the onboarding could be with the AI, even through voice too. And instead of them going through forms, it's like the AI asks you questions like, okay, here's, here's their videos for you to watch now, how that integrates back in the backend to be able to keep track of that is the question. Cause you can have that in the AI, in the AI's chat history, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to pass that back and forth right now. I'm sure it's coming. We know how. Membarium

[28:45] Micah: custom fields, that's what we're doing. And then we insert them into the prompts. Well, we won't get too nerdy there. Anything else you want to talk about with content before we talk

[28:52] Melodie: about logins. Yeah. Just thinking about like the four different standard pages, which I think people get wrong. I said earlier, like most people default to a course page. So in about 90% of sites that we go into, they have a page that has all of their learn dash courses on it. And it doesn't really

[29:08] Micah: have much else. And it's like, your courses are down below if they have that, by the way, so that

[29:13] Melodie: sometimes people just don't have anything. And really what you want instead is a dashboard pages, which is, this is all the things you could do with our company. And then a program page, which is you bought this specific program and here's all your information for that program. And then a content library, which is all the extraneous stuff that could be related to either your program or your overall business. And then you have one layer deeper than that, which is your course content. Whereas most, most of the membership sites that we look at just have course pages and like an overall like overview course page, but you're really selling yourself short of a lot of usability options with that.

[29:52] Micah: Makes sense. And I think maybe a couple of years ago, that was the trend is to just drop them on a course page, right? And everybody was used to it, but it is a little disorienting. I think what you just said of more of like a, Hey, like here's, here's the more global options, conceptual options, and then you can go from there into the proper content.

[30:09] Melodie: Learn dash has only been around for what, like 10, 12 years. Yeah. And they were the kind of the first to market with like a real LMS system of Mark. This is complete Mark. This is complete Mark. This is complete. So like, when you think about that 12 years is not a long time. And then of course, things are going to evolve as people get more and more familiar with a tool. I think that next level is, is really, you know, what is beyond courses.

[30:34] Micah: That makes sense. So recap for me, if you would, the four pages, the four layers.

[30:38] Melodie: So you think about high level, you want to, what I would consider a dashboard page and the dashboard page purpose is here's our storefront kind of idea. Here's our company. You can have course number one, course number two, or we have this great other program here, but you're not eligible for that until you complete course number one or course number two. But it kind of allows people to say, okay, here's, here's all the things down below that is a program page. Unless this could just be a, they could just link to a course, but it, when I think about a program page, it should be like something more robust than a course. Usually typically we'll have other resources or call recordings or other things that are associated with it, which makes it more robust. And then another layer deeper with that would be a content library, which is a whole bunch of things that are all organized, typically call recordings or resources, that kind of jazz. And then you have

[31:29] Micah: your actual course pages. That makes sense. So yeah, I guess I've seen people do that wrong. Now that you mentioned it, where they create the course and the course is the top level. And then they just slap stuff into the course where it doesn't quite fit. But like you're saying, really, they're approaching it from, I'm coming into your company to get to this product, which contains these resources, some of which might be courses. Yes. So it's like more of a, like a storefront.

[31:53] Melodie: I think the store analogy makes a lot of sense of you're, they're not just like, actually, no, it doesn't make sense. I'm trying to make that analogy work. Like, you're just going to get into the shoe box. They're like, wait, no, that doesn't happen. It makes sense to me. You walk

[32:05] Micah: into the gym, the front is a store you're not in yet. Right. And then you, oh, I have access to this

[32:10] Melodie: or I have access to that. Right. It's like that, that map of like, okay, here's all the things in the

[32:15] Micah: gym versus, okay, you're just going to go into the meat locker. Walk right into the sauna from the front door. Like, oh, Hey, you know, whoa, clothing optional weird. So let's talk about the logins next. So assuming somebody, you know, they build their site structure, like we talked about in the beginning, then they lay in their content and whichever, whoops, on my mic, whichever format they do there. Great. Now they got to get people in. What are some of the common issues with logins? Cause you would assume that like, oh, you sold a course all as well. You don't have to do anything,

[32:46] Melodie: but what's missing some of the time. So the two main, well, there's two and a half main drop off points. The third one is not so common, but the first one is a password just doesn't end up on their account. And it is a problem. It's a problem for Membarium, but it's a problem whenever you're connecting to any third party thing, whether it be Membarium or any tool out there of that password, just not populating correctly. The second one is somebody not having an email that's valid. And that could be becomes a hard bounce or opt out or any number of different reasons. And then the last one is there, they shouldn't be in that campaign in the first place. We don't know why they're in there. They're in the wrong, they're in the wrong spot altogether. And what we found is we do a practice at BTN called proactive checks because you, you, people are technology is unreliable, much like people. And instead of just saying, well, I'm just going to trust it. And, you know, it's always going to work. We want to trust that verify. So when you are creating your keep campaign, and I will give you a link to put in the show notes, some screenshots of the campaigns that we use with some like instructional stuff for people of what that actually looks like of it. There's an ultimate campaign that has, I remember years and years ago, I was tired of customers complaining that people weren't, they weren't getting their welcome emails correctly, or welcome emails were blank with their passwords. Like, there's so many things I want to focus on in my life. And this is not one of them. And so what we developed is that when they go into that sequence, what you do is you use an action set to check and see if the field for the password actually has a value in it or not. And then, and I believe with a recent update of keep, we can actually do this to the decision diamond. Now, if there is no value in that field, we'll just hard code a password, and then send out an email to the support team to say, hey, something went wrong with this. But the client still gets their email right away. I wouldn't recommend hard coding a password for your entire membership. It's just bad security, you want to use that memberium HD post to populate a password. But it's better for me to still get that email out to that customer at 1am than it is to say, okay, well, it has to be a unique password. And then we can address the issue, like when somebody logs in in the morning, but that customer is not unhappy. Whereas if I stop that email from going out altogether, with that password isn't populated, then it means I have an unhappy customer, which I would rather not have. So it's they get we send the HD post, we check and see if that password is populated. And then we run a decision diamond, okay, passwords populated, great, send them the welcome email. If passwords not populated, then we do a manual, okay, hard code this password. And then we need to fix this so multiple people don't get it because it's a security risk to have that hard coded value in there. And then they'll still get their their welcome email. And then the second step from that is you need to try to send that welcome email out, and then see if it actually works. And when I say if it works, at least in the keep automation, we want to see if it hard bounces or something happens with it. And then you do that through email off the top of my head email status automation or something. And then it will apply a tag which says if the email is valid or invalid in that. And then if it's invalid, then again, that needs to be a manual process where somebody needs to look at that. The common reasons for it is they opted out in 2010. And now I've decided to come back to your business, but there's no way for the system to recognize that. Number two is our company name is business tech ninjas. And I constantly misspell my own email. So if you have a customer support person, look at that and be like, Oh, I'm thinking that their emails, not gmail.com. It's probably gmail.com. I'm just going to fix this and resend their welcome email. And this really lowers down your customer service complaints and gives that exceptional user experience for your members where you're not having to deal with angry customers. Because if I've just paid you $37 for my program and never got my email, you didn't deliver on the product for me. And like taking on that responsibility of rather than making it your customer's problem, making it your problem and solving it proactively. And that's what creates retention. That's what makes it so that your customers want to keep buying from you time and

[37:02] Micah: time again, other than your superb content that is. Yeah, you, I think hit the nail on the head because a lot of people think, Oh, how do I retain customers a few months down the road? And it's like, no, you retain them from the beginning, right? When you first send it, that's the, you know, the onboarding essentially, I'm going to kind of repeat some of that back and maybe simplify it for people who aren't as familiar. But what she's basically saying is any membership system that involves a password at some point, somewhere, it's got to generate that random password. And if there's some sort of hiccup somewhere in the land of the internet, and something doesn't connect somewhere and it doesn't get generated, having a fail safe that checks that and realizes it's

[37:41] Melodie: not generated, puts in a dummy password temporary, and at least gets the person into the site, right?

[37:49] Micah: And I'm sure then they can update their password or whatever. But, and then you also mentioned that the next thing, so like just password generation is one thing, but the next thing is if their email is valid. And for a lot of reasons, like you said, they could misspell it. It could bounce. Sometimes it's not the customer's issue or yours. It's the system you're using, right? It might be, and it could even be temporary. Sometimes, you know, one route or somewhere in the chain or the web or whatever goes out. So that's a great idea as well. Just kind of, you know, making sure it got there proactively, just, is it a good email in the first place, dropping it to support. And then I'm sure there's other things we can do after that. Like, did they log in? And if they haven't logged in, send them, you know, different emails, right? But once they do log in, kind of shift that.

[38:31] Melodie: Have you played around with like the first like portion of value too? Cause there's one thing, so it's like, you want to get them to log in. And then we've been playing around with the strategy with clients of, so login is the first check mark that you're looking for. And then the second one is, did they complete the thing that, you know, if they complete this thing, they're going to get value out of your membership. And that could be attending their first call or completing the first thing or doing something. But I love building that into automation too, because it really is about curating that experience of encouraging, because they paid you money for some reason to get some sort of result. And it's like, how can you push them to do that? Cause you know, sometimes you need

[39:09] Micah: to push. Yeah, definitely. They, they need it. I feel like at least, you know, I'm definitely easily distracted. Don't know if I'd say ADD or not, or if I believe in that, but when I buy something, I would, I want them to follow up with me. If I drop the ball, like that's part of what I feel like I'm paying for is for them to follow up with me. Right. And, and hold my hand a little. I wish I was better, you know, in some areas great, but in the areas where I'm buying a course, chances are I'm pretty weak in that area and I'm going to need extra assistance, right? I'm buying it because I want to grow. And so the more I think you can kind of handhold and, and, and baby them along the better. We're all adults, but we're busy, right? So just kind of staying on top of them. And luckily automation can do a lot of that. And then, like you said, some things you might have to drop down to the support team or whatever. But I think if your support team reaches out and says, Hey, we noticed you didn't spell your email, right? We've corrected it. Let us know if you got this. They're going to be like,

[40:02] Melodie: Oh, these guys are all right. It's, it really is about creating that relationship. And then with automation, if you have good automated systems, then your support team has the time and space to be able to create that relationship with your customers. Or this is that, that caring. Cause I think as humans, we all just want to feel like we're cared about. And there's an element of like, even when you feel seen by like a company that you've done business with in some way where they're like, Hey, this, your problem matters to me. There's like a human connection to that. I think that is really valuable. And if you can encourage that with your interactions with your company, like you will have retention, like people will keep buying from you because they'll want more of that.

[40:38] Micah: Love it. What else is on your mind about logins?

[40:41] Melodie: The other portion to the logins is if you really wanted to up your ante for creating an exceptional user experience, have them create their password right on checkout. So that way they can set it right away. And then on the thank you page, they can then just go right to the membership site. Potentially. It is a more advanced setup because you then need to recognize people that already have a login. We have a good system for it now, but it definitely took some, some troubleshooting back and forth. And this is not something I would recommend to an early stage membership site. It's not worth the pain in the hassle stick simple of doing HP posts, but then that functionality to have people set their password on checkout is quite nice. You do need to weigh that of, do you want to add more friction to your checkout? Cause it is another field. And anytime you add another field to the checkout,

[41:30] Micah: then you lose some people there. So what is the advantage there? It's just that they feel like they've, they've customized the account to themselves by setting their password. What's the

[41:41] Melodie: reason that you're saying to do this? It's higher security one, cause it's a unique password to them right away. So you're not, you're not having to send any posts whatsoever. And then, then even if you don't use an auto login link on the thank you page, they already have their password. If they never get their welcome email, they can go to the site and log in right away. So you kind of circumvent a lot of like the email deliverability problems of, well, I never got my welcome. And I was like, well, you sent your password on checkout. So you could just press that login button on the top right hand corner. So it kind of helps to ease some of that frustration. And, and again, it is a higher security because it's like, they set their password unless they make their password, their name one, two, three, four, which sometimes people do.

[42:23] Micah: That's my formula. No, just kidding. So I guess we've, we've gone from like the high level of how do they start off, you know, WordPress, and then maybe branch it out into two sites, how to put the content in their custom post types is kind of the highest, I think, version of that. And I would say within any membership system I've ever seen, that's probably the highest version, the most robust. So it's not like there's some other higher level tech that's going to get you further. And then, yeah, with the logins, just layers of redundancy, which I think is definitely the way to go with the new customer. Just the opportunity to, to not only keep the money you already collected and not have them refund, but sell them many things in the future because they're happy with your company. Any other sage advice from the princess of Membarium to the membership site owners and

[43:09] Melodie: membership site people out there? Keep it simple. Join the Simplicity Club. We'll be like AA for business owners. Well, on that note, I'll say that we are,

[43:19] Micah: you know, we're eating our own dog food and creating our own, you know, new membership area and things like that this coming year. And our theme for the coming year is kiss, keep it stupidly simple. So I agree. I think it's, that's the way to go. This stuff is so easy to complicate. Most of the complications aren't actually valuable, you know, they're just shiny object type stuff, but I'm glad you pointed out some of the, some of the times and places where it makes sense to do more, right? Like when should you have two sites? When should you use a custom post type? When should you, you know, so I think your experience and the level of client that you are typically working with is cool because you've, you've had to work through these issues. Like you said, there's enough people there where it makes sense to work through it. Obviously, like you said, at the beginning, people can keep it simple, but then as they work through the stages, as long as they start on the right tech stack, they're good to go. Melody, appreciate you coming on. We're going to put your other episode and some of these other resources in the show notes, but Melody's business is business tech ninjas. You can go to business tech ninjas.com. I know you are changing your logo and branding a little bit to BTN, but I'll say that I have a very cool t-shirt from you. It's unfortunately too small. So I need a new one and we'll send you some cool mimbarium t-shirts, but thanks for coming on, Melody. Thanks for having me, Micah.