How to Market Your Membership Site Successfully in 2025?
The Best Digital Marketing Strategies To Market Your Membership Website in 2025
Market your membership site like a pro! Discover proven 2025 strategies to skyrocket subscriptions, boost retention, and maximize ROI. Don’t miss these game-changing tips.
Unlock the secrets to successful membership marketing in 2025 with our latest show. We delve into cutting-edge digital marketing strategies designed specifically for membership websites. We cover everything from leveraging social media and content marketing to optimizing email campaigns. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting, this video will equip you with the tools you need for success.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:09.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine show. This is episode 102. In this show, we will discuss how you market your membership site successfully in 2025. There are great opportunities in membership building a real online community. We love WordPress, both Kirk and I. I’ve got my regular co-host with me. Kirk, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:00:57.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure. Jonathan Kurt. Kurt von Ahnen with MananaNoMas. We focus on membership and learning websites and work directly with WP-Tonic LifterLMS And Kirk.
[00:01:08.420] – Jonathan Denwood
The schoolmaster, aren’t you?
[00:01:11.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
I like to think so, yes.
[00:01:13.100] – Jonathan Denwood
He is the schoolmaster. He’s had a rough day already so I will be ruthless and merciful to my beloved tribe. So, in this episode, we’re going to be talking about something important: your website’s marketing. And things are changing; they’ve been changing in 2024. I’m grappling with these changes myself. Many people online are. We’ve got some great insights about what works and what doesn’t work in marketing your membership community website. I want to start, so I think we’ll leave it at that and go into one of my adverts from one of the show’s major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out that I’ve got a great, free resource for you all. It is a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services, plus some great special offers from the sponsors of the show and a load of other goodies. A free course developed by Kirk himself that shows you how to build a WordPress membership website quickly and efficiently utilizing the most modern WordPress technology will give you that fantastic discount price.
[00:02:56.880] – Jonathan Denwood
You can get all these goodies by going to wp tonic.com deals wp tonic. So this is a vital subject, folks because I think people, for understandable reasons, especially if this is your first time building a course or creating a membership website, there are a lot of balls in the air. People get worked up and mesmerized by the technology, by all the options I linked to WordPress, or if you’re not utilizing WordPress, if you’re using something like Job your Mighty Networks, they seem to be the two leading platforms people look at. Suppose they’re not, well, podio as well. Podio, Kajabi, and Mighty Networks are the three prominent leaders. If you’re not going to use WordPress, if you’re not utilizing WordPress, people have the same problem. They get mesmerized by the technology. It would help if you concentrated on what we’ve preached consistently in 2024: build a minimum viable course. And you need to focus on marketing for that course. So this is a vital subject. How would you respond to what I’ve just outlined? Kurt?
[00:04:29.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
One of the biggest things to think of is that I was listening to you, Jonathan, and you said people get mesmerized by technology. People get mesmerized by the technology. I’m going to go out on a limb, and I’m going to say there’s an excessive percentage of people that don’t that, that get down the road of making a course or making a membership and haven’t even considered the marketing of it or what’s going to be involved or the work involved. I think there are a lot of times you and I will work with a client, and it hits like a ton of bricks. Like, oh my goodness, they still think this is 1996. They believe they will put out a URL, a website and people will come to it. And that’s just not realistic right now. I mean it, it’s, it’s a job in and of itself to market whatever it is you’ve developed.
[00:05:19.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that. You have a great point. It’s not that they haven’t concentrated on marketing. They haven’t done anything about marketing. They have spent a long time building a course, and when you ask them how you will market this and how you can get your first clients, which we’ve covered.
[00:05:43.170] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:43.960] – Jonathan Denwood
It doesn’t have to be that difficult. You just need some strategy and we’ve got some episodes that you can listen to in the catalog that covers that. Folks, I don’t plan to repeat in this episode that deeply, but they’ve. The reply normally is paid advertisement. And don’t get me wrong, I’m a great believer in paid advertising. I might be doing Some of it myself in 2025, but. Well, I will be doing some paid advertising in 2025, but I see you got to prove your business model. You got to prove that there’s a demand for your course. You’ve got to have a few students go through the course to work out the bugs. You do not want to go down the paid advertisement route unless you’re proving your business model there’s a demand for it. You worked out the bugs and you got some processes because paid advertisement is expensive and it won’t work unless you’ve got an effective membership business model. Your response, Kurt?
[00:06:57.110] – Kurt von Ahnen
I agree. I agree 100%. To me, paid advertising simply amplifies whatever the results are. So if you’ve got some good results and people coming in and liking your product, paid advertising will amplify people coming in and liking your product. But if you have any paying customers and you just launch paid advertising and you have copy that’s not verified, images that aren’t verified, no one’s consuming, you’re amplifying zero results.
[00:07:25.330] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you got to have your homepage normally is your main landing page initially or you set up a landing page with the offer. You don’t even have to build out a whole or you can just build a landing page specifically for this course offering. Offering a special offer for early bird signups.
[00:07:48.730] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yep.
[00:07:49.410] – Jonathan Denwood
You 50% of your time should be spent on the marketing, then setting up the landing page and how you’re going to market this course and 50% of your time on building the course and getting it set up. Would you agree?
[00:08:05.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah. You definitely got to have a time split and it’s got to be substantial. It can’t be some 95, 5% thing. It’s your 50, 50 examples. Pretty dang close.
[00:08:17.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Normally I see 95% of the time on the look of the website that they look at the course where the sign up button will be the look of the grid, or if you’ve got multiple courses and about 5% of time on how we can this thing and then they wonder why they’re not getting any sign up and then they think my course, there is no demand for my course. It I spent all this time and it’s been a waste of time. I’m just going to give up.
[00:08:52.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:08:52.930] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s regrettable because some of the best courses and the best instructors and the most knowledgeable people that really got something to offer are some of the regular people that I see giving up.
[00:09:07.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that too.
[00:09:10.250] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s very regrettable. So how can you avoid that? Well, fundamentally there’s two areas I think that people saying that SEO is gonna die in 205, I personally think that’s nonsense. Basically search is going to be linked to AI. You’ve got chat search. Now the results that come up if you’re using AI chat search functionality that be. Be in that snippet, it’s called a snippet is really important that you be the one from free of the resources that the snippet is getting its information from. The fight will just move to manipulating the AI to come up with the, with, with the snippet of information and you be one of those free links. And the truth with SEO, traditional SEO is that if you weren’t in the top three of traditional search, you hardly got any traffic. And the, the truth is if you wanted to get some real traffic, most of the terms are called long tail SEO terms. They don’t get a high volume anyway. You can overcome that by being really targeted at initial audience. But a lot of them didn’t get a lot of traffic anyway. And if you weren’t number one, the number one spot of organic search got 70% of the search anyway.
[00:11:17.510] – Jonathan Denwood
So when you look at the actual facts, it’s quite a brutal battlefield, isn’t it Kirk?
[00:11:27.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah, it’s. And this was kind of in our discussion with the WP Tonic show with, with Jack and that’s business owners course creators, entrepreneurs on the Internet are almost being forced into a content creator mode. Right. You have to have something on all these channels to generate interest, eyes and traffic to whatever your main product is.
[00:11:54.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So I’ve got this concept of quality marketing hubs and this comes from this is that you’ve got to get offer authority as I call you got to be seen by Google as being our authority in your subject. And really you should try and build this before you build your course. Really, if you don’t haven’t done it, don’t, don’t give up. Because if you have listened to the previous episodes and you’re, you have niched, you’ve got a broad category but you zeroed in on a niche. You with the writing of the right articles, you can get some level of Google juice. If you’re, if one of the ways you’re going to get traffic is by writing articles. The problem is around this is the concept of domain authority. And what I mean by that, if you’ve got a domain and it’s less than a year old, you’re going to be put into a semi sandbox by Google anyway. They treat all domains that are new with a high degree of suspicion and it’s very unlikely that you’re gonna get even though the article, the piece is focused, it’s focused on the niche, it has good content, it has relevant information, it, it has all the factors that Google is looking for.
[00:13:34.490] – Jonathan Denwood
If your domain is less than a year old, it is unlikely to get the traffic that you feel it deserves. A lot of people buy especially digital experience marketers buy domains that are 2, 3, 4 years old that have been given up by the original register, that have a history in a particular category to overcome this hurdle. But Google, no, Google’s gotten on to that as well. So if you get old domain in a particular subject, let’s say health and they haven’t published anything for, for a while and then suddenly a hundred articles a week have been published on it, it will just trigger Google. But basically what if you’re in a pacific area and you, you’ve got to understand this but don’t let it put you off. It’s still worthwhile putting the effort in because that year or six months will go quickly. He’s building your content, but build it in particular subsections of your main subject and have a central page that’s about these subcon. Sub topics and that central page should lead to the main piece that you’re promoting. So it’s a bit like a spider web of you have subcategories in the main category and that builds a good quality website that Google will in the end see as a authority in that particular niche.
[00:15:34.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Is this making sense, Kurt?
[00:15:36.370] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and I think people that are new to the concept that might be listening might need some more clarification. But you know, pick fitness. We’ve mentioned fitness before. So let’s say you have a fitness oriented project and then you have a branch of that that is weight loss and then you have a branch of that that is flexibility and you have a branch of that that is strength. And then you’re writing specific articles that reinforce each of those branches to become kind of the authority on that, on that sub topic. And I think that’s the way Jonathan’s describing that.
[00:16:09.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, basically there are some, there’s some good WordPress tools. I tend to use external tools to do the SEO research. Folks, I, I think you, at this stage you don’t have to bother with them. Just look at the, what the competition is doing. Look at, look at the knowledge you have around the particular subject. Do some Search, write down some subject headers, then put them into search. Look at the competition, look what they are producing and be honest is you know, what are the good bits about the competitions pieces? What are the areas that they are not giving the information that if you were that student would be looking for. And just make sure your first few articles are well written, not too wordy. You know, there’s plenty of YouTuber tutorials about writing for websites. People that, that tend to write a lot but not for websites tend to overwrite. It’s too wordy, it’s. But there’s plenty of resources out there about short paragraphs. The other thing is it does depend on the subject folks is that people tend to write to a higher educational level. They write at a level at stu university or master level.
[00:18:01.690] – Jonathan Denwood
The average reading level should be at seventh grade. There’s a, there’s a great free truck tool out there that can give you advice. It’s called Hemingway. It, they do a paid version but they also do a free version and that you can put your writing into it and it will tell you if it’s too wordy, if it. And you’re looking depending on the audience between seventh and ninth grade when it comes to readability, what do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:18:38.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, all of that and the structure, like long paragraphs, you want to avoid, you want to split your paragraphs into shorter paragraphs and then you want to use, you know, good headings, a lot of H2s and H3s. So that when Google or other search engines, you know, scan it, they go, okay, this, this is broken up. This is. This, this information is, you know, parsed. And so if you follow certain structures, you’re going to have a certain amount of success. But it’s really important to note this is not an overnight thing. This is not, this is not an easy button. This, this takes work and planning.
[00:19:14.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Now when it comes to AI writing tools, I. None of us knows precisely what Google thinks, but this is my perspective of it and I’ve done a lot of research on this. I don’t think Google fundamentally cares. What Google cares is does the content that you’re producing match the requirement of the search. So a person does a search, Google’s looking for certain signs that confirms that when they come to your page, the content that they’re exposed to meets the search intent. That’s all that Google cares about fundamentally. Now I think there are people that about a year ago when AI really started to get traction, a year and a half ago, they were on YouTube. They were marketing SEO influencers. They were pushing this concept that you could buy a domain that had some history. They were aimed at people that make a good living from affiliate links and they were suggesting that you could build up a high traffic affiliate website which would normally take three to four years would at least 18 months that by using AI you could build up 300, 400 articles in less than a month or something and you could get traffic.
[00:21:12.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Google soon cottoned on some of the biggest influencers on YouTube that were pushing this message got up absolutely destroyed with one or two Google search updates. They their whole they had to basically do a pivot and basically these people are just pushing Pinkerest now and becoming a getting traffic from Pinkerest now. A lot of people got scared off with AI fins but I think along as you use AI as a tool and edit the material and conscious that you’ve got to add other parts to it and add that use AI to make the process easier so you can add even more value to the content. I don’t think really Google cares. It’s when you just use AI just to produce any, any rubbish. You’re not. You don’t know anything about the topic, you haven’t bothered to do any research, you haven’t looked at how you’re adding any extra value to the content. That’s when you’re going to get into trouble. Unfortunately because of these influences and in my I’m going to use the word misuse of AI everybody got clobbered to some extent. Everybody A lot of quality websites in the word and I know this because I’ve spoken to a number of WordPress entrepreneurs and they’ve seen.
[00:22:57.620] – Jonathan Denwood
They’ve seen their traffic half they’ve seen their traffic go down by 2/3. I was expecting it to happen to me it didn’t for quite a while I thought I missed a bullet and then about two months ago I got clobbered so but I’m work I have worked out a strategy to recover from it. It is going to cost money and time and energy but I’m pretty confident in the next few months I’ll be able to. But it’s meant folks that the whole situation has been in a lot of flux. Now there are a couple AI writers that I would recommend to you that are not that expensive there if you’re paying monthly. One is called SEO Writer AI. That’s a pretty good one. And the prices like I say you can buy their middle plan for around $20 a month. Another one is Agility Writer. The links will be in the show notes, folks. Agility writer. That’s the same. It’s a little bit more expensive. They have a plan that starts I think around $30 a month. These are a cup. There’s a load of these AI writers, these two. If you do a search or you do a search through YouTube, you see that a lot of people that are giving advice rate these quite highly.
[00:24:31.300] – Jonathan Denwood
So I have used them, I use other tools, but they’re much more expensive than these. I think the price metrics for what they produce, they’re definitely two tools that you should look at. What do you reckon? Everyone be making some sense.
[00:24:48.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah, it’s. And, and I don’t want to people that are, are new to the, the course or membership pathways. You know, listening to the show, I don’t want to, I don’t want to communicate that you’ve got to be this SEO expert and all this stuff. I think the main core of your message coming through to a startup or to a new person is if you don’t jank around and try special tricks and black hat weirdness. If you just make good content that is organized and specific and niched down to your specialty, you’re, you’re gonna do okay starting out in the Google world. Right? Like, like you’re. I, I think I want to see people try something as opposed to getting overwhelmed and doing nothing.
[00:25:36.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Exactly. Use these tools. You don’t have to do too much SEO research. Yeah, that’s when, when you start getting traction with your business. Just, just, you know, you should, you’re the expert in your particular area. Niche down. Find a niche. Do some. Join some Facebook groups, find out if the niche, if, if this niche really exists. You know, if you got pacific Facebook groups, Reddit for Reddit areas. There’s a number of discussion platforms out there. Find groups around your niche, join in the conversation, observe. Write down problems that are coming up regularly. Can your course help solve those problems and then write posts about those problems?
[00:26:35.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yep.
[00:26:36.570] – Jonathan Denwood
That gives some insight about the problem, why people have the problem, give them some tips, insights about fixing the problem. And then when you developed your course, you can have a link that goes to your landing page. Can you see how this works, folks? It’s not jetside. So thanks, Kirk, because that’s one of the problems of going into these conversations is obviously I’ve got a fair bit of knowledge in this area. I spent enough hours researching trying tools. It consumes my whole life. Kirk. I have become my. Because I can’t afford to pay for a digital Marketing manager. I’ve become one myself. Right. So I think this is a good time for our middle break. Hopefully you haven’t lost too many of you. I’ve tried to keep it as non techy in language as possible. We will be back in the second half with some more marketing advice in a few moments folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back folks. We’ve had a feast. A feast about AI writers, AI in general, marketing in general, how marketing your membership website is gonna is gonna change in 2025. But I found mentally believe that the fundamental principles aren’t gonna change.
[00:28:13.250] – Jonathan Denwood
But it’s a chain really flexing, changing environment for everybody folks. Before we go into the second half I want to point out also that we’ve got a great free resource, totally free where you can ask me or Kurt questions, you can ask other people questions around marketing, around WordPress about membership and that’s the membership machine Facebook group. It’s a totally free resource. We’ve got a great group of people there. Why don’t you join us on there? Like I say, you’ve got any questions about the show, that’s the place to put your questions on and I will attempt to answer them or Kirk will or somebody else that really knows what they’re talking about, that’s a member of the group, we’d love you to join it. So let’s move on. Upselling, cross selling subscriptions. I suppose that’s around working with partners. I think it can work really well if the problem is trust and what I mean by trust is that you’re trying to piggyback on somebody else’s notionality in a particular niche area. You’ve approached them and you’re prepared to offer them a really great affiliate or partnership deal. The thing is they’ve got to really believe in you.
[00:29:47.530] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ve got to believe in the course and they’ve got to believe that you’ve got to do, you’re going to do some reasonable marketing. But on the other hand, if you set up a decent landing page, it’s obviously worked out the thing you can, you can actually talk to this person, do a quick zoom with them, it can really work. But I think this has really got to be laser focused. You’ve got through your research or your niche, you’ve got to find some established players that aren’t direct competitors but have some influence in, in a more broader area of the subject, not a direct competitor of your niche area of that broader topic but and then through the forums, through joining certain Reddit areas by social media. Try and build some kind of relationship so the person can recognize you and then when you’re ready, have a one to zoom with that person. Do not send a mark, a kind of a typical affiliate email to these people because it, it will just end up in junk. I think just being honest, you know, and saying I built this website, I’m looking. There’s various advisors on YouTube and on the Internet.
[00:31:19.130] – Jonathan Denwood
How to do your initial outreach. Get a small group, try and build some relationship online with that person. Direct message them about you would like a quick zoom with them. Do not waste their time. Get to the nitty gritty as quickly as possible. You might get a bigger player that is prepared to sponsor your new course and it will make a big difference if you can get the right partner. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:31:49.340] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I think this one’s harder. This one’s harder in practice than it is in thought.
[00:31:55.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Right.
[00:31:55.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
For, for it to work successfully. I mean immediately I think of, you know, think of like coaches, trainers and speakers. Right. So they go and get some John Maxwell certification. And so the John Maxwell connection is the, is the higher tier. Right. But then how do you piggyback off of that John Maxwell association to sell your, your coaching and your consulting and so you could have other coaches and consultants within that circle. You know, maybe do some affiliate or cross selling with you based on regions and stuff like that. But it, it takes a lot to pull that off and make it successful. To Jonathan’s point, if you just start spamming people or hitting LinkedIn and sending people blind LinkedIn about become an affiliate and make money selling my training for me, that’s not going to work. If anything, that’ll just create some negative flow in, in your direction. So you want to be really careful and personable as you, as you try and launch an affiliate or, or cross sell with other folks.
[00:32:56.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s not a volume game. You just want one or two, one.
[00:33:00.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Or two of the right influence, the right solid connections. You know, Jonathan, this is a really good point to just reiterate and we’ve said it many times so we don’t have to go deep on this. You’re not looking for 10,000 students. You’re looking for 25, 30, 50 students. And to begin growing your brand, growing your circle, your own community. So these are the things that we’re talking about that get you those first 25, 30, 50 students.
[00:33:32.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, these are realistic goals for a realistic launch of a new membership product and website. These, these are the realistic goals. And then you can, that would be a great start. And then you can rapidly move on to stage two.
[00:33:49.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, if I, if I have a solid affiliate relationship with somebody that refers five paying students to me and they’re at the magic number of 497.
[00:33:59.980] – Jonathan Denwood
497 is the magic number for 20.
[00:34:04.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
25, then that, that’s a huge success. Right. And then if you’ve done it right, increasing by the, Those just those five students, that’s going to become 10 students next year, 15 students the year after that. And that’s, that’s what this is meant to be. It’s gonna, it’s gonna grow over time.
[00:34:22.770] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re on to audience segmentation. Well, that’s really linked to number one about quality marketing hubs, you know, but the more you niche down, the more you have naturally done audience segmentation. But there’s also, there’s the segmentation of behavior as I call it. You know, if you try and hit somebody too early, too hard, you’re not gonna have success. It’s a bit like dating. They’re going to be something else about it, in my opinion. But you know, it’s the same here. As you grow your audience, as you grow the volume of traffic that hits your website, the more segmentation becomes more important. And marketing automation around a lot of SaaS platforms really go on about marketing optimization and segmentation. It’s really important at the right stage folks really you just. But it’s actually a much higher stage than most of the audience that probably listening to this podcast you need a certain amount. You really just want a decent newsletter and you want on boarding sequence. Where marketing optimization is important is having a really good onboarding process and also having when people finish having a sequence that gages them into a quick survey. So you can gather at the really urge early stages when people finish in.
[00:36:14.820] – Jonathan Denwood
If you’re offering them a really great early bird offer, one of the, one of the things you’ve got to get from them is their agreement that when they finish the course that they can have a zoom with you and you can spend a quick 20 minutes finding out what they liked and what they didn’t like. As it grows, you just do online survey or after they finish the course because finding out what the good bits and what the bad bits, you’ll be surprised. I’ve said this a number of times when I’ve set up online businesses. The fins that I thought people would really rave about are the fins they really don’t care anything about and the fins that I Thought they really wouldn’t care about. They really do care about. And it’s the same if you’re starting of course. What do you reckon?
[00:37:08.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, right on the money. You. It’s we. We start with the best of intentions and we think we know what we’re doing but the audience really tells us for sure and, and you. And you need to get that feedback. It’s precious so that you can you know, retool the offer for the new people coming in.
[00:37:24.390] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And we have onboarding process at WP Tonic but our onboarding is that we have a one to one zoom with you to find out your pacific needs. I have quite a few people say to well I just want a vanilla membership website. I can tell you folks that does not exist. Every customer that we help has different requirements and we have a Be Stoke boutique hosting environment around WordPress aimed at membership and community. People building community that want the freedom that basically they want to own their business not lease it off a SaaS platform. They actually want to own it. Isn’t it best in in the end to own your home rather than lease it in the end it’s the same with your membership website. Paid advertisement. Paid targeted democratic demographics. I did pronounce it correctly in the end like I say, paid advertisement is really effective if done in the right way. Great believer in YouTube advertising and Facebook advertising. You’ve got to have good landing page, have the right offering and you got to know how to do the adverts. The more you niche your own product when it comes to Facebook over the last three years your ability to really micro target has been diminished.
[00:39:17.370] – Jonathan Denwood
But by utilizing the right graph graphics, the right video, you can self get people to self identify themselves. The other really great thing is if you can get people to sign up and start building up your email list, you then can import that list into Facebook and you can then set up a lookalike audience. They will look at that email list and then they will find people that are similar. YouTube has similar functionality as well when it comes to online YouTube. Facebook knows a lot about their audience. They know a lot about me, they know a lot about. Well maybe not Kurt because he doesn’t use it that much but Facebook really knows. So building out your email list, it doesn’t have to be massive but is something that it’s also easier to market to people that sign up to your email list for your next course for your next digital product. So offering having some really good offers, some freebie offers that really gets and spending time on the message and, and just the offer in general. The other thing is importing that list and doing a lookalike audience campaign. It’s going to be cheaper and it’s going to be a lot more effective.
[00:41:01.090] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:41:04.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
I definitely hear what you’re saying and I’m trying to line that up with real life experience with, with both me and my clients. And the one thing that I have come away with on paid advertising, Jonathan, and feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I have found that people that come in with a very limited budget get not great results, very little roi. But the people that I’ve worked with that have had three to five thousand dollars of budget money to play with in paid advertising have seen a better return.
[00:41:36.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you will need a budget between five and a thousand a month for this to get any kind of result by retargeting lookalike retargeting. Retargeting is that people that hit your website, you can put a pixel, a Facebook pixel on the website and people that hit the website they will then see your advert if they go to Facebook or Instagram.
[00:42:06.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:42:06.510] – Jonathan Denwood
For instance. That is quite effective. Right because. Right because most almost. I forgot the precise statistic folks. It’s quite breathtaking. I think it’s almost 60 to 70% of people that come to your website will never come back again.
[00:42:25.150] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yep.
[00:42:27.220] – Jonathan Denwood
You got to get traffic to your website that is not easy folks to have. In general, to have a functioning commercial website you’ve got to get about 5,000 unique hits per month. That’s a very broad figure but that’s a industry recognized figure folks that is and almost half the registered hits, this can fluctuate and be different are bolts anyway. They’re not real people hitting your website anyway. There’s their bolts, their spiders of some type. So can you see? You know, it’s brutal folks. But if they’re hitting your website and they’re real person retargeting can be really effective and it will be a much lower rate than then driving new people to a Pacific landing page by using Facebook or Instagram. Lookalike audience if you’ve got a. Some kind of email list, I really like that. And it’s even, it’s at a lower rate as well. So more of your Facebook marketing budget will go further and it’s much more targeted. So I’ve just given you two types of usage with Facebook that I think are quite suitable for people. But you’ve got to have a mark, you’ve got to at least have 250amonth and then grow it to 500.
[00:44:13.380] – Jonathan Denwood
And if you’re starting to get to traction, you really got to be looking at a thousand a month.
[00:44:18.140] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:44:18.890] – Jonathan Denwood
At least to really start. But it can be effective. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:44:25.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, no, I, I agree with everything you said there. I’ve just, I’ve seen a lot of people go into the ad machine, right. And start setting it up and they just go, well, I just want to try it. I just want to sample it for fifty dollars or a hundred dollars and it’s like you’re not going to see anything.
[00:44:39.490] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re gonna get some traction. But it’s more of experiment. It’s about more trying out efforts and finding fins that start. One of the problems with Facebook manager Facebook advertising platform is they’re always changing it. It’s a dog’s breath of Interface. So is YouTube paid advertising, their interface linked to Google Analytics? It’s a dog’s interface. Far as I can talk about interface design and usability, it’s just a joke to the major advertising platforms. I literally have to retrain myself. I have run for clients Facebook campaigns. I’m probably gonna have to delve into it in a lot more detail in the coming months because I’ll be planning to run my own campaigns. I have got a partner with another business that I run that he does on Facebook campaigns for me, for our clients in my other business. And we plan to do some advertising for that business and we got a new client as well. Do you know it? Another way is to set up your own Facebook group and your own Facebook page, post consistently content and then boost some of that. Unfortunately, your Facebook page, unless you spend a bit of money, it’s really not going to be shown to a lot of people.
[00:46:16.410] – Jonathan Denwood
But by. But the page has to be at a real niche and you’ve got to do some really good graphics and. But then spending a bit of money to promote those posts on your page and then have links on your page. It takes people to a Facebook group. That’s another method that I’ve seen work and get some reasonable results. Kurt.
[00:46:49.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
[00:46:54.180] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’ve already talked talked about affiliate to some extent.
[00:46:59.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:46:59.380] – Jonathan Denwood
And virtual events. Yeah. I think YouTube, all the social media platforms, they’re really promoting people that are doing live events. The thing is they’re time consuming. But I presume you, you’re in the scenario where you’ve got more time than money. So if they’re, if you’re doing all the other things that we’re talking about and you can promote your live event. I’ve got it here, virtual event. But it’s that it’s really live eventing using something like we do our podcasts and our live events here. Some of when we got a guest that promotes the podcast or promote. When I have a special guest for this podcast, we get a few people joining us. Try and do this at the same time every week we’ve had a few people. We have had. Got nobody joining us this week. It’s quite surprising. It’s probably the, the title or ever. I’m not saying he’s easy but if you do, if you can build a Facebook group and a community and you can get them joining you for the live event, that really will accelerate how many new people that will see the live event. And then if you’ve got a good special offer, you can send them to a landing page that is around your new course.
[00:48:41.290] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve seen loads of people. It works. What do you reckon, Kurt?
[00:48:47.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
Real, Real Life Talk. You know, a couple of months ago we were looking at the types of clients we were getting at Manana Nomas and we started to focus on Scorm work.
[00:48:56.150] – Jonathan Denwood
As you well know, the School Master.
[00:48:58.010] – Kurt von Ahnen
School Master. So we, we made a dedicated scormpress.com website. We have some dedicated blog titles on Scorm. We made a couple of videos about Scorm. We made a course about how to put Scorm on your website. And Jonathan, we had like five or six serious leads just last week from this. If you do the work, it will happen. And to Jonathan’s point, with this virtual event thing, you know, we put out a webinar on how to add scorm to a WordPress website. If we list that on Streamyard and connect our Streamyard to Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn, all of those platforms will post you as an upcoming live event. And so it drives people to at least click in and see if they’re halfway interested. And then if you do it right, the retargeting takes over and some of the other tools that we’ve talked about today begin to send people to your actual asset. So it works, but you have to put it, you have to put in the work and you have to provide value and you have to make yourself back to Jonathan’s original thing. You have to create domain authority over the fact that you’re the expert in whatever the niche is that you’re providing, promoting.
[00:50:15.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, what I resent is there’s a subsection of so called YouTube influencers Facebook influence. Give us $6,000, give us $10,000 and we’ve got a. What? They don’t say because it would get them into legal troubles, but they influence the impression that it’s a guaranteed process. The only defense to it. There’s one lady that pushes it, but they do, they are pushing. It’s a 6 to 10,000 course mentorship. But it does really also depends the type of people that can lay that money down. I would imagine they’ve built some influence anyway and such customers, if you can attract them. It’s probably a more technical problems about their marketing that it’s little tweaks that you, that if you do, you probably can get them because hopefully they’ve got, they’ve got audience, they’ve got experience, they’ve got the course, they’ve got the knowledge. It’s just they’re not doing some things correctly. So in some ways such people are easier to deal with because they’re at a different level of their journey. So they’re self selecting through their price mechanism to some degree. Yeah, that’s, that’s to be fair, I think I just don’t want to get the impression because it can’t.
[00:51:56.990] – Jonathan Denwood
You might be listening to this podcast, folks, and you’re thinking, oh my God, this sounds terrible. This is a ton of work. Well, it is work, folks, but the great thing is that long as you got some plan of action, you can do this as a side hassle and you can do this when you’re in full time employment. And it’s totally achievable. And it’s at a level which you can, you can work on and gradually build it out and if you wish to get it to a stage where you can give up your job if you want to, and it’s totally achievable. That’s the good news. But the bad news, yeah, there is some work into it. If there wasn’t any work into it, everybody would be doing this, folks.
[00:52:47.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:52:47.720] – Jonathan Denwood
And you wouldn’t be able to make any money from it, folks. That’s just the brutal truth about it. I think that’s enough of me. Waffling, isn’t it, Kurt? But I think it’s not been good. I guess, I think we put, I put some meat on it about Facebook advertising, some accurate recommendations about AI. It’s not all being pie-in-the-sky stuff. I think we’ve done a reasonable job, haven’t we?
[00:53:15.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, the most reasonable job we can do, Jonathan, is what you said at the very end: don’t talk people out of it. This is a pathway. The thing is, the glory is you’re working with something that you hopefully have some passion for or love for, or you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. Right?
[00:53:35.970] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they see the course. The course must be part of this organic authority building.
[00:53:44.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah.
[00:53:44.530] – Jonathan Denwood
You must realize that course success is around the success of promoting you or yourself as an expert in that particular niche sector of a broader category. That is the. If you look at making a course, Kirk is a significant trainer with lifter lms, and he. I’m part of some of his lifter LMS groups, and people tend to see building the course as something they have no concept of. They need to be building themselves as the authority in the niche of which the course is part.
[00:54:33.830] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, yeah. The course is just an element of the project. It’s not the project.
[00:54:39.770] – Jonathan Denwood
The. The project is for you to be seen as an influencer expert in that particular niche area. It’s going to be our last show for 2024. We will be back in the new year. I wish you a great Thanksgiving, a happy Christmas, and a New Year for yourself and your family. And I want to wish Kirk and his family that as well. He’s been very supportive of the podcast. I think our numbers have gone consistently up. As I said, if you have any questions, join the Membership Machine Facebook group, and you can ask anything there. Kirk, what is the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:55:31.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for work stuff, Manana Nomas. For sure. Manana Nomas is where we take care of a lot of folks. Then, on a personal connection note, just hit me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt von Ahen on LinkedIn. I’m easy to find.
[00:55:43.720] – Jonathan Denwood
He is the link linking. School Master, my beloved audience. I love to say that. I don’t know. Very char this part of me. That’s very childish. I’m a bizarre concoction of different things. No, I’m well aware of it. There’s an actual charity. I love saying the schoolmaster. The school Master, the schoolmaster. All right, we. We will be back in the new year, folks. We’ll see you soon. Bye.
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