Transcript Of This Video

[00:00:00.29]
Should you offer a lifetime membership to your membership site? I want to talk a little bit about that here because I messed up pretty badly at the Blogmarking Academy with my lifetime membership offer, and I need to share the experience and what you can learn from it. Now, offering a lifetime membership can seem like a really smart thing to do. Let’s just put it that way. It can seem that way because you get that nice influx of cash. It can be a lot of times also easier to sell because you’ll feel as if people have a hard time wanting to get into a monthly or an annual membership. And there is a little bit of truth of that. A monthly or annual membership can be a little harder to sell. But then again, if you turn around and you look at your phone bill and electric and Netflix and Amazon, all the things that we do pay recurring for, you’ll see that, generally speaking, people don’t have a big problem getting into recurring memberships. It really comes down to, are you offering it a value to justify the recurring billing? But a lot of us, including myself, have taken the lazy way out, the seemingly easy way out, by offering a lifetime membership.

[00:01:15.12]
Now, here’s what happened with me, and I just need to share this right off the bat, because you may have noticed, if you’ve been to blogmarketingacademy. Com lately, that I don’t really do… I don’t focus so much on training content anymore. I’ve really pivoted the business into services like the Concierge service, and I’m very happy doing that. I’m really glad that I made the switch. But part of the reason why I made that switch, not the entire reason, but part of it was because I got myself into a real pickle by offering and relying on lifetime memberships. When I had the membership called The Lab at the time, which is the membership for the Blogmarketing Academy, I started out by offering a lifetime membership for a Black Friday, an annual Black So you guys have seen all these Black Friday deals. And I did that. And the first time I offered the lifetime membership as the offer, it honestly had made a killing. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was a lot. I was very happy with the results of it. Now, once I got a taste of that drug, I was like, Well, that was fun.

[00:02:17.19]
So I did offer the lifetime membership several times after that, until it got to the point where I started to rely upon it, because I was starting to notice an increasing friction with selling monthly memberships and annual memberships. And so I started relying too heavily on the lifetime membership plan. You combine that with the fact that some of the things that I had promised in the membership, such as office hours and on going workshops. And I think at one point, I was even promising I was going to be putting out another course every single month. I mean, these were stupid promises to make. I didn’t want to do office hours anymore. And yet I had people who I was promising to do that essentially without an in, and they were only going to pay me one time. Not only that, the laziness was compounded by the fact that I started even running sales on the lifetime membership. And at one point, I was even offering a lifetime membership to the lab for $299, which is just atrociously cheap. It’s just stupid that I ever did that. So what happens is that I had a whole army of people, and I’ve got many hundreds of people in the database, God bless them.

[00:03:31.29]
They took advantage of the offer, but they are now lifetime members. And if I release something, they inevitably will come out and be like, Do I have access to that as well? And that was the nature of the offer. So therefore, I do it. More recently, I came out with a workshop for what’s called Digital Sovereignity Workshop, and put it into what’s now called the One Pass Membership. And I had many members come out of the woodwork that I hadn’t heard from in a long time, and they say, Do I have access to that? Well, yes, because that was the terms of the deal that they came in on. And so what you have are people who are now, unless I re-nig on the deal, if I put out a workshop, they get automatic access to it because that was the promise that was made.

[00:04:18.06]
You can see the pickle I got myself into it. So what happened was that, especially around the time of COVID, when things were really changing, I got myself into a cash flow problem because I had way too heavily on these lifetime memberships. I had people who basically, if I put out something new, some of my best people, the most engaged people, had already purchased the lifetime membership, and essentially, they didn’t have anything more to buy from me. That’s a big problem. And so that, along with some other things, I said, I don’t want to deal with this anymore. And I pivoted into services, and I now do concierge, and I’ve remade the business around this in a pretty big way. And I will I’m not even going to ever offer a lifetime membership to that. I’m not even going to ever offer an annual membership to that, most likely, because recurring billing is the name of the game. If you’re going to run a business, you need to have a reliable degree of cash flow. And And what I did is I killed my customer lifetime value by offering and then overly relying on that lifetime membership.

[00:05:24.18]
So with that story, let me share a few lessons just from my own experience, things that you can keep in mind, because I I don’t want to come off and say that it’s never good to offer a lifetime membership. There is a time and a place for it. I just got to be overreliant upon it. I will say, if you’re going to offer a lifetime membership, you absolutely have to do it with a strategy in mind. Never get yourself into a place where you’re going to depend upon the revenue from a lifetime membership. You need to be mainly focused on monthly and annual. And at the very least, if you’re going to have a lifetime membership, do not promise everything. It needs to be something where whether they’re in there or not, the deliverables that you’re going to give them have a time cap on it. That was a mistake that I made, is that I did not place an automatic time cap on it. I’ve seen some lifetime memberships. In fact, I’m in one that I think, this is several years back, I initially purchased it for about $4,000. The thing is now, even to this day, there’s a maintenance fee of 129 bucks a year that gets charged to it.

[00:06:28.11]
And I don’t really mind. It’s not that big of a deal, but that’s one potential way to do it. But you definitely don’t want to get too reliant on it. If you’re going to offer a lifetime membership, I recommend that you price it at least double what your annual membership cost, probably more like three times or higher. So instead of me ever contemplating something like 2.99, I should have been way up higher than that. I should have been probably 6, 7, $800, and I just didn’t do it. And so that’s something you should keep in mind. Try to shoot for a 2-3X multiplier in order to get to your lifetime membership asking fee. The other thing is that you probably should not have a lifetime membership that’s just out in the open all the time. I think it works best if it’s under a time limited circumstances with a sense of urgency, perhaps as a one time offer or an upsell or something to that effect, but probably not sitting right next to your monthly on the pricing table. I think it’s better to have the lifetime off on its own. That’s just from my experience.

[00:07:30.18]
And that being said, and like I mentioned, be really careful with what you include in a lifetime membership. I think ongoing support needs to have a probably a one year time cap on it. I don’t think you should promise unending support. If you’re in the course business, if you want to include all future releases and all content, fine, but it does not need to include ongoing support that’s going to take your time moving forward, because then what can happen is you can end up in that trap where you’ve over-promised on things that you may not even want to do in the future because you just change your mind or you just killed your customer lifetime value. So that’s basically the summary version of it. That was the mistake that I made with lifetime memberships. You need to be careful of it. It can be a great sales strategy if done correctly, but it is a bit of a double-edged sword, and you need to go into it with your eyes wide open so you don’t mess up. As you can probably tell, I’ve got a lot of experience with membership sites, different niches. I’ve been involved also in the building of them because that’s a lot of what I do these days.

[00:08:43.02]
So of course, if you need any help with your membership site with regard to either building it, putting it together, coming up with a strategy, or even just you wanted to bounce some ideas off of me and get a second set of eyes on the strategy of your membership site, come on over to blogmarketingacademy. Com. You can book a call with me. You can also get it involved in concierge service, and I can help maintain that thing for you. And I’ll be happy to talk to you. All right, talk to you later.