130: How to Grow Your Membership Using Affiliate Marketing With Kelly McCausey

In this episode, I'm joined by Kelly McCausey, Business Coach with Love People and Make Money and founder of several different memberships. Kelly has been in business online since 2002, doing internet radio since 2003 - jumped into podcasting when it was invented in 2004. Her main business model over the years has been memberships and she provides some great insight into the marketing strategies behind a successful membership.

Highlights

• Why Kelly has focused on memberships as her main business model since 2004

• How she finds customers for her memberships and her best tip to grow a membership even if you’re just starting out

• How events are her biggest driver for membership sign ups

• Why affiliates are key for memberships especially low offer memberships

Mentioned In This Episode

• Where you can find Kelly: Website

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Transcript:

00:00:03 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And my special guest today is Kelly McCausey. Kelly is a business coach and she owns several different businesses, and I'm not going to go into all of them. We're going to let Kelly kind of give you the background there, but I am super excited to chat with her. She has been doing business online since 2002, doing Internet radio since 2003, and then jumped into podcasting when it was invented in 2004.

00:00:32 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And she has a wealth of knowledge. And I know you're going to enjoy the conversation today. We're going to be talking about content marketing and all of the businesses that she has, including the memberships that she's been running for years. So if you want to learn a little bit more about that, let's jump in. And Kelly, thank you so much for joining me. I am so excited to chat with you, especially somebody who's been in the Internet business for so long. I know you're going to have a wealth of knowledge to share.

00:01:03 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
With us today.

00:01:04 Kelly McCausey
Destini, I'm glad to be chatting.

00:01:06 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
With you. So why don't you, Kelly, just jump right in and tell the audience a little bit more about you and all the businesses that you have?

00:01:16 Kelly McCausey
Sure. So my brand is love. People make money.

00:01:24 Kelly McCausey
Which is all about content marketing and community building. I always say you're my people if you want to publish content you're proud of for people you love.

00:01:37 Kelly McCausey
And.

00:01:39 Kelly McCausey
And, and I don't know anybody who can't say yes to that.

00:01:45 Kelly McCausey
So I talk content marketing. I talk about building a list, affiliate marketing, creating courses, running memberships.

00:02:00 Kelly McCausey
Ah gosh, the whole gamut.

00:02:04 Kelly McCausey
And blogging and podcasting. There I'm I have a mastermind membership. There I do private coaching and then under the umbrella of content marketing and community building.

00:02:17 Kelly McCausey
I do have a side business.

00:02:22 Kelly McCausey
That I partner with my friend Samantha Angel. We run two done for you content brands.

00:02:29 Kelly McCausey
You might be familiar with the phrase PLR private label rights. We have white labelperks.com and daily faithpr.com.

00:02:38 Kelly McCausey
Where we create content for business, self development and Bible based faith.

00:02:46 Kelly McCausey
And then another I own mom webs.com.

00:02:51 Kelly McCausey
A hosting company that's been around since 2004.

00:02:56 Kelly McCausey
Well, everything, everything relates to content, your content online.

00:03:01 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And right, I mean because content is so critical for us to get our message out in the world and to build that community, which I know is what you what you focus on. So let's talk about this because you and I chatted a little bit before we started recording here and I know that you have a membership or multiple memberships that you have launched and managed.

00:03:26 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Over the years and a lot of people who are listening that podcast, this podcast here, they either have online courses or membership or they want to. Now I know that, you know, you could talk about the benefits of membership and we can definitely go into that. But I'd love to know more about your membership, why you actually created it, and how you have grown it over the years.

00:03:53 Kelly McCausey
Well, I'd love to talk about my very first membership.

00:03:58 Kelly McCausey
Way back in 2004.

00:04:01 Kelly McCausey
So, so much happened in my business back in 2003. I launched my Internet radio shows work at Home Moms Talk radio.

00:04:12 Kelly McCausey
And the following summer?

00:04:16 Kelly McCausey
Podcasting was invented and that blew everything up.

00:04:21 Kelly McCausey
For me, but that same summer, my friend Alice Siba.

00:04:27 Kelly McCausey
Who had sponsored been sponsoring my Internet radio show asked me if I would like to join her in creating a membership. She was running a busy thriving free forum on her website. Back then it was Internet based moms.com.

00:04:48 Kelly McCausey
And she's like Internet based moms and Wham talk radio. Like we're reaching these moms. Like, let's start a membership. Let's create a private forum that people will pay to have access to and will provide them with monthly training. And I'm like, yes, yes, yes.

00:05:05 Kelly McCausey
That sounds exciting, but you know the feedback. When we started to talk about what we were going to be doing, the feedback was scary. So many people said you're all are nuts. Work at home. Moms are frugal. They will never pay for training. There's way too much free stuff out there. There are way too many free forums. You have a free form yourself. Why would anybody pay you to to be part of a membership?

00:05:35 Kelly McCausey
That would have scared me, but Alice was just dead set. Nope, Nope. I believe this can work.

00:05:43 Kelly McCausey
And by golly, it did. We launched that summer of 2004. Our membership at that time was just $25.00 a month.

00:05:55 Kelly McCausey
It blew up. It was extremely successful. By the end of the year I was making thousands of dollars from a membership and this is blowing my mind because I'm a poor, broke single mom.

00:06:09 Kelly McCausey
And.

00:06:11 Kelly McCausey
It's like once you've created a membership, the work you're doing for one person.

00:06:17 Kelly McCausey
Is basically the same work you're doing for 100 people.

00:06:21 Kelly McCausey
Like you create the content, you put it out there. Sure, the more people and inform, the more chatty it was, the more time that was invested in that. But we were already.

00:06:31 Kelly McCausey
Engaging on forums and enjoying that.

00:06:35 Kelly McCausey
So.

00:06:36 Kelly McCausey
If you've ever been told your audience won't pay for that, there's too much free stuff out there. Please just let that go. Tell people.

00:06:45 Kelly McCausey
Thank you for your input.

00:06:47 Kelly McCausey
I'm going to do it anyways.

00:06:49 Kelly McCausey
I'm so glad we did, because that membership completely changed my life.

00:06:55 Kelly McCausey
That was mom masterminds that we launched in 2004.

00:06:59 Kelly McCausey
Now memberships are an interesting beast from this perspective, now of being 18 years later.

00:07:10 Kelly McCausey
I do. I do not run my masterminds anymore.

00:07:14 Kelly McCausey
And in 2000?

00:07:17 Kelly McCausey
11 My son was grown and out of the house, and I felt like I was no longer a work at home Mom.

00:07:26 Kelly McCausey
And.

00:07:27 Kelly McCausey
I started I I ended up going through a rebrand.

00:07:31 Kelly McCausey
And in that process, mom masterminds became solo masterminds.

00:07:38 Kelly McCausey
Along in in the the years between, Alice moved on to pursue different brands herself, and I ended up writing the membership myself.

00:07:49 Kelly McCausey
And the interesting thing about memberships is that they're not forever. I don't, I don't personally know of any memberships that have been forever.

00:07:58 Kelly McCausey
But my mastermind slash solo masterminds ran from 2004 all the way up to 2018 was when I officially let it go.

00:08:09 Kelly McCausey
Umm.

00:08:11 Kelly McCausey
The.

00:08:13 Kelly McCausey
Social media had exploded. The way that people were spending their time online was less forum based. There's a lot that contributed to the decision.

00:08:23 Kelly McCausey
But memberships aren't forever. And that's OK. It's really OK. It was a hell of a beautiful run to have a membership as long as I did.

00:08:34 Kelly McCausey
Um, but I've gone on to offer a variety of other memberships since then, and different forms and under different brands.

00:08:43 Kelly McCausey
So do you want to talk about that a little?

00:08:45 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Bit let's talk about that because one of the questions I had for you as you were going through that I was thinking, you know, well she started that a long time ago. You know, people's perception may have may be that that was easier to start something back then than it is now because the market is so saturated. So what is a membership that you may have started a little bit more recently and tell us about how that evolved, why did you start?

00:09:13 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
But how did you actually find members? How did you get it up and running?

00:09:17 Kelly McCausey
Yeah. So first I'll share an example from my main business. Like I said, I closed down the membership in 2018 and I thought that's it. I probably won't run memberships anymore. I started to focus on private coaching and coaching programs, which are like little mini memberships where people sign up to coach with you for a year at a time.

00:09:40 Kelly McCausey
I ended up relaunching a membership, a mastermind membership in conjunction with an annual challenge that I do. I do the stretch yourself challenge in September each year.

00:09:54 Kelly McCausey
We're just focused on helping people.

00:09:57 Kelly McCausey
Do content marketing. There's a variety of content marketing challenges that you can choose from and complete and earn points and win prizes.

00:10:07 Kelly McCausey
And at the end of that challenge, I always invite you to join my mastermind membership, which is just a weekly call. I provide no training. I include no resources.

00:10:22 Kelly McCausey
I don't create new resources. I give them access to to my courses. But I don't create anything new. I don't promise them anything new. I promise them me I will be in my zoom room every week for you.

00:10:36 Kelly McCausey
And because they've just spent a month with me accomplishing a lot, a lot of people then say yes to joining the mastermind membership.

00:10:48 Kelly McCausey
So that's my personal membership that I offer. A lot of people make money. That door is always open. New people can come in at any time, but they usually I usually gain new members in conjunction with events.

00:11:02 Kelly McCausey
That the stretch yourself challenge. In February, I do a content refresh challenge and those are always real nice odd ramps for my memberships, but there's also looking over at my done for you content brands, white label, perks and daily faith POR. We offer memberships there, so we're creating done for you content.

00:11:29 Kelly McCausey
We're releasing new products multiple times every month.

00:11:34 Kelly McCausey
People can buy them all a carte.

00:11:37 Kelly McCausey
And as soon as we achieved a predictable publication schedule, it was a natural next step for us to offer a membership model.

00:11:50 Kelly McCausey
Where?

00:11:51 Kelly McCausey
Let's say if you are buying the products Ola cart, you're spending like 38 to $50.00 a month.

00:12:00 Kelly McCausey
As a member we offer a membership. We just rolled out the the Faith Journaling Club membership at daily faith at $15.00 a month.

00:12:12 Kelly McCausey
It would cost about $35.00 a month to buy the products a la carte. They get everything for $15.00 a month as a member.

00:12:20 Kelly McCausey
Um, and we onboarded a really nice starting cohort of members in November.

00:12:30 Kelly McCausey
Launching a membership.

00:12:33 Kelly McCausey
Requires.

00:12:35 Kelly McCausey
Some effort.

00:12:37 Kelly McCausey
Some commitment and.

00:12:41 Kelly McCausey
An affiliate program. That's my that's my stand.

00:12:45 Kelly McCausey
If you want to offer a membership.

00:12:49 Kelly McCausey
And you don't want to offer an affiliate program? You better have a damn fine plan.

00:12:55 Kelly McCausey
You're reaching lots and lots of people all by your lonesome.

00:13:00 Kelly McCausey
Um, but I have always had an affiliate program for any business that I run and so.

00:13:07 Kelly McCausey
Memberships are extremely attractive to affiliates because they're going to earn a recurring Commission for every Member that they send my way. So when we launched and and we said, hey, we're going to do this.

00:13:24 Kelly McCausey
Faith Club, Faith journaling club. We've got a publication schedule that's reliable. We know that. We know that we can have these new products available every single month on time. So here's our membership model. Affiliates, if you would like to share this with your people, you're going to earn 50% of the membership month after month for as long as their members and Members stick really nice in these low-cost memberships. So we had a lot of great.

00:13:54 Kelly McCausey
Partnership and helping us to launch it.

00:13:58 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And I agree with you, affiliates I think are a must when you're launching a membership. But how did you find your affiliates?

00:14:07 Kelly McCausey
Well.

00:14:08 Kelly McCausey
They oh gosh, that's a really good question and I don't want there's.

00:14:13 Kelly McCausey
There's the jerk answer.

00:14:16 Kelly McCausey
Which what? Which is? I just looked at my own community.

00:14:20 Kelly McCausey
That's a jerk answer. I've been in business for 20 years, so I've got a community of people who teach content marketers.

00:14:29 Kelly McCausey
So it's it's relatively easy for me to go out there and and tap affiliates. So let's shake off the jerk answer and and talk about like if you're starting from scratchy scratch.

00:14:43 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Which a lot of people are that that are listening to the to this for.

00:14:47 Kelly McCausey
Sure you're going to, you. You're going to.

00:14:54 Kelly McCausey
You're going to do a lot of research. You're going to find out who your contemporaries are.

00:15:00 Kelly McCausey
Which is the the nice word for competitor? You're going to find out who your competitors are.

00:15:07 Kelly McCausey
Who reaches your target market already?

00:15:12 Kelly McCausey
Research who they are.

00:15:15 Kelly McCausey
I make a list of people who I think of as reaching my desired audience.

00:15:22 Kelly McCausey
That's my first point of research is just make a great big list of people and then I look for signs that they are active as affiliates already because not everyone is there are there are actually people out there who don't affiliate market, they're they're not interested. I don't know why. It confuses me.

00:15:43 Kelly McCausey
But I look for, I look for my contemporaries, I look for signs that they are active in affiliate marketing.

00:15:50 Kelly McCausey
I I subscribe to their mailing lists, I read their blogs, I read their social streams, and I just look for affiliate activity once I identify those contemporaries who are active affiliates.

00:16:05 Kelly McCausey
Umm.

00:16:07 Kelly McCausey
I'm going to reach out to them personally and invite them to explore my resources.

00:16:14 Kelly McCausey
I want to give them free access to it.

00:16:17 Kelly McCausey
I want to. I want to be up front. I want to say, hey, Destini, I see that you reach my audience and you are an active affiliate. I have an affiliate program. I would love to have you on board. I would love to support you in any way I can. What would you like to see? I'll give you anything. Want to see my products? I'll give all of them to you. You want to see my course? I'll give you access. You want to come to one of my calls? You're in like sister, please. What do you need?

00:16:47 Kelly McCausey
To decide whether or not you want to promote me as an affiliate.

00:16:52 Kelly McCausey
Just make this this specific invitation. Don't don't fool around with people like just go. Go straight to the request. Affiliates respect that. Like, I'm an active affiliate, 30 to 35% of my annual income comes from affiliate marketing, so I like it when people with affiliate programs contact me. I want to know if there's more money that I could make out there.

00:17:16 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And I agree with you, Kelly, I would say and I do a lot of affiliate marketing myself and.

00:17:22 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
The products that people give me access to is so much easier for me to promote them when I've been in there and maybe use them myself or tested them out myself. Then I've tried doing affiliate marketing for products that I haven't used in. I just don't feel like I can promote them as well because I just don't use them myself. So I like what the tip that you gave us in terms of going out and finding affiliates, but also kind of bringing them into your.

00:17:52 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
World or giving them access to what you're offering so they can actually speak to it personally.

00:17:57 Kelly McCausey
Yeah, but I should say before you start knocking on doors, make sure that you have good affiliate information on your website.

00:18:10 Kelly McCausey
If you click on the Affiliates link on the bottom of of say white label perks for example, it says right up top the affiliate program pays 50% Commission on all product sales.

00:18:25 Kelly McCausey
And memberships and then 30% on the vault slash lifetime offer. So that's the most important information up top. How much money can I make?

00:18:36 Kelly McCausey
And then down further there's more information about like what kind? What tool do I use to manage my affiliate program.

00:18:45 Kelly McCausey
What's you want to tell them about your cookie and how long you pay commissions? And do you have a second tier program? There's you want to provide good, clear, non complicated information about your affiliate program so that affiliates can get a feel for whether or not they can work with your program.

00:19:08 Kelly McCausey
And then the other thing that's really important is providing good affiliate tools. So for our products, our affiliate page lists the products with the most recent releases 1st, and it shows their affiliate link and a graphic.

00:19:28 Kelly McCausey
That they can take and use really easily. The more tools that you provide to your Affiliates, the easier you make it for them to grab and go.

00:19:39 Kelly McCausey
If they wanna give you a try.

00:19:43 Kelly McCausey
So have that page ready, get some feedback on it and just make it neat and clean and easy for people to sign up for your affiliate program before you go knocking. Because if if you come knocking on some affiliates door and they go peak and they can't find any information, they might not even reply to you.

00:20:04 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
I I think that's some good tips. And you know for me and what I've done with my affiliate programs, I have a leaning patient they go to and it does include everything that you mentioned, the system that we're using to track affiliate revenue, how long the cookie is and also giving them access to like the Google Drive where you have your camera templates or your e-mail spot files or your social media captions that they can just copy and paste and easily modify for their business and brand so.

00:20:34 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
I love the tips that you gave us there, so.

00:20:37 Kelly McCausey
One more tip for affiliate building, yeah.

00:20:43 Kelly McCausey
So our daily faith POR brand, we do not have a lot of contemporaries. There are not a lot of done for you Christian content out there.

00:20:52 Kelly McCausey
And so we have struggled to find Affiliates. My, my.

00:20:58 Kelly McCausey
Trick for finding affiliates there was to have an event.

00:21:02 Kelly McCausey
We created a summit / giveaway.

00:21:06 Kelly McCausey
And invited people to partner with us.

00:21:10 Kelly McCausey
And news spreads about something like that. People share it with other people.

00:21:16 Kelly McCausey
And we ended up with, you know, 9 speakers and 20 some bundle partners.

00:21:26 Kelly McCausey
Who want to reach our audience?

00:21:29 Kelly McCausey
Hello Ding Ding Ding. They are my affiliates.

00:21:33 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
That that was genius. I have to say, that was absolutely genius.

00:21:37 Kelly McCausey
Rather than me finding them, they found me. So provide an opportunity.


00:21:42 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
That is, that is such a great tip for people out there. They're like, I don't know who to go contact. That's one way to do it. I love that. I love that. So let's switch gears just a little bit more because we only have a few more minutes and let's talk about content marketing. So you have all of these businesses, and I know that you've been building your business for a while, but I'm sure that even in the past few years you have some tips and tricks.

00:22:13 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
For us related to content marketing because it has changed you know recently. So the talk a little bit about what you're doing in terms of content marketing and marketing, the brands and businesses that you have.

00:22:27 Kelly McCausey
Yeah, the so for a lot of people make money, I am still blogging and podcasting.

00:22:34 Kelly McCausey
I am.

00:22:38 Kelly McCausey
What's worked for me beautifully over the last couple of years has been.

00:22:45 Kelly McCausey
Collaboration.

00:22:47 Kelly McCausey
I became a licensed foster mom.

00:22:51 Kelly McCausey
And the last year of my life has been absolutely bonkers.

00:22:56 Kelly McCausey
So focus for me to sit down and focus on creating A blog post. I have a hard time just unscrambling my thoughts.

00:23:06 Kelly McCausey
But I can go.

00:23:08 Kelly McCausey
Open up a collaboration and say rather than write a blog, post myself about a topic, I can go out to my community and say, hey, what do you have to say about this topic?

00:23:19 Kelly McCausey
And, you know, get 678 people, contribute their ideas. And then I put those together into a collaborative post published on my website. Have it have a graphic made that makes everybody look fantastic. Publish that. e-mail it to my community. Share it on social media, send links to all of the collaborators. They do the same.

00:23:42 Kelly McCausey
Uh, it's.

00:23:44 Kelly McCausey
It's content marketing. It's collaboration. It's easy. It feels easy.

00:23:51 Kelly McCausey
So looking for lots of collaboration and and then.

00:23:56 Kelly McCausey
Another form of collaboration. I've done some really fun ask me anything.

00:24:04 Kelly McCausey
Content.

00:24:07 Kelly McCausey
Props. So I asked my community, you know, and ask me anything about mindset.

00:24:18 Kelly McCausey
And they shot me questions and I recorded short video answers and turned those into blog posts.

00:24:26 Kelly McCausey
And and then I a little while later I did a content creation ask me anything.

00:24:33 Kelly McCausey
And man, the questions that came in were so crazy respond to respond to like one person you know, said, you know, I'm, I've made my offer, but I'm not getting sales. Should I rethink? Like that was the funniest thing to respond to.

00:24:51 Kelly McCausey
I make a video. I publish that as a blog post. I've got content on my website.

00:24:57 Kelly McCausey
I love.

00:24:58 Kelly McCausey
Collaborating, I think the days of going off into our Heidi Hole.

00:25:07 Kelly McCausey
Thinking up ideas, developing them, writing them out and then sending them out in hopes that they resonate. I think those days are gone.

00:25:16 Kelly McCausey
We've got to create content.

00:25:19 Kelly McCausey
In.

00:25:20 Kelly McCausey
Tune with our audience. You've got to be interacting with our audience. The more time I spend with my community, the better my content is.

00:25:29 Kelly McCausey
So involve them.

00:25:31 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And Kelly, what I love about what you just said is that would be so easy to take. Not only do the video, the blog, but also that's perfect content for social media, whether it's a real, it's a tick tock video carousel post. It is absolutely perfect for that.

00:25:49 Kelly McCausey
Yeah, yeah, and.

00:25:51 Kelly McCausey
Man.

00:25:53 Kelly McCausey
I.

00:25:54 Kelly McCausey
You have and again, there's a little bit of. I feel like a jerk saying that because if you don't have an audience.

00:26:01 Kelly McCausey
To ask them to send you questions.

00:26:05 Kelly McCausey
You know, you might feel like, well, I I can't leverage that idea. And it's true if there's no one to ask to ask you something.

00:26:15 Kelly McCausey
But there, find someone to borrow someone else's audience. But listen, do not go into someone else's Facebook group and and ask what's your biggest problem? And blah blah blah, nobody freaking likes to respond to that stuff.

00:26:30 Kelly McCausey
It that's lazy, it's lazy, and it's rude to the to the person who runs the group, in my opinion.

00:26:38 Kelly McCausey
But you can still hang out in their communities and notice the questions that are being asked.

00:26:44 Kelly McCausey
Ah, you can develop your own list of questions from observing other people's communities interactions. Just do it.

00:26:59 Kelly McCausey
With integrity.

00:27:03 Kelly McCausey
Please.

00:27:04 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
I I think, I think I that's a great tip and I certainly agree with you. Now, I don't go on Facebook groups myself generally as a general rule, but I'm sure that that happens. Kelly, before we hang up here today, do you have any last minute tips for our audience here?

00:27:23 Kelly McCausey
Trust your creative urges.

00:27:26 Kelly McCausey
Trust your instincts. Trust your curiosity.

00:27:33 Kelly McCausey
The world needs you and your unique perspectives.

00:27:41 Kelly McCausey
The world does not need a magpie. The world doesn't need you to be acting like somebody else. The world needs you. Your stories.

00:27:54 Kelly McCausey
Even if that means just sharing really honestly where you're at. You know, when I got started with work at Home Mom's talk Radio, I was not an expert. I was just a curious enthusiast.

00:28:07 Kelly McCausey
And I went out and I asked people dumb questions until I knew how to ask smart questions, and that built a community around me.

00:28:19 Kelly McCausey
That.

00:28:21 Kelly McCausey
Changed my life.

00:28:23 Kelly McCausey
So just be yourself and have fun.

00:28:26 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And I think you gave me some quotes for Instagram there. So,  thank you for that. And can you let the audience know where they can find you?

00:28:38 Kelly McCausey
Lpann.com.

00:28:41 Kelly McCausey
Is my home base.

00:28:45 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And I will make sure, Kelly, that that link is in the show note. So everybody has it and I'm sure they are. If they go there, they'll have a free gift so they can join your community and learn from you.

00:29:00 Kelly McCausey
Awesome. Destini, thank you. I enjoyed talking with.

00:29:02 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
You thanks so much, Kelly.