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Hey, there this is Julie. Today we’re talking about membership sites and how to build a really good one without burning out.

If you don’t know me, I run a 750 plus member site for people who are living their laptop life. It’s called the Create Your Laptop Life® Network and a lot of people ask me, “Julie how do you create such a vibrant community without burning out?”  

So here are my best tips:

Tip number one: Plan the year in advance.

So what we do in our membership group is we pick 12 topics. 12 monthly themes.

So we plan those way in advance. we made a list of 12 and then we thought about subtopics underneath those 12.

Basically, that way you have a prompt or something to go off once a week for an entire year.

This is a fantastic method because you can wrap all of your membership content around these four monthly prompts.

You can also do social media teasers, podcast episodes, Facebook Lives, Live YouTube videos. It actually becomes your entire content calendar.

In fact, the video that you’re watching right now, this one is part of my big content calendar because I’m gonna talk about membership sites in my group. See how that works?

Once you have your year in advance planned out, the next thing you need to do is set expectations right from the get-go.

I did not do this perfectly and it caused me a lot of drama.

So set the expectations.

How much of the owner are they going to get?

How much content are they going to get?

What can they expect in terms of engagement and interaction and support?

And also, you want to make sure that there are community leaders that can help.

The best way to do this if you’re bootstrapping is to just find people in that first month who seem really engaged and really enthusiastic and ask them if they can volunteer to be a moderator or a team leader and give them some incentive.

Maybe you give them the membership for free. Give them some extra perks. Sometimes all you have to do is really elevate them in a position of leadership and that’s all they want and need.

So get other people right from the get-go.

Because on membership sites is a little bit like having a party, and you’re never sure who’s gonna show up. and is it gonna be the cool kids.

You may want to invite some influencers or people that maybe wouldn’t or enjoy and ask them to join for free and promised to give them a shout out just to kind of get the ball rolling.

My third tip is really make it about them not about you.

So things like t-shirts and hashtags contests giveaways.

Ask me anything.

Our members of the month.

The things that really like bring community together, so it’s not just like them

Maybe show so we do those things in our group and it drives so much engagement. It’s really awesome.

Another thing you can do is if you’re using Facebook as your hub for your membership, it’s really easy to lose track of those amazing conversations.

What we do in the Create Your Laptop Life Network is we create a newsletter and we actually curate the best Facebook conversation so that if somebody joins let’s say in January and we’re talking about I know blogging but they really need to know about affiliate marketing, well we did that in October so they can go to the newsletter and they can click on all the links and they can see all those old conversations and still get value out of the group.

So that’s a really really fantastic way to keep all those conversations really like, alive. Even well after the conversation is over.

Finally get somebody in the group to just watch what other people give away because it is exhausting to produce content all the time.

But the truth is that the membership community itself will produce incredible content, and so if you have someone who’s kind of scouring the group looking for those rising stars, you can take their post, you can ask them to maybe do an interview, you can turn it into a blog post or a piece of content, and you can really leverage the power of the collective brain in the membership community.

So as you know the best conversations happen after the camera stops rolling if you’re thinking about doing a membership site let me know in the comments below what kind of site you’re planning what you’re gonna do and when you’re gonna launch I would love to hear more about it.

And if you like these types of videos and you want to watch more you can go to Juliechenell.com they’re all there and you can join all those conversations I’ll see you soon you.