In my series of articles in this magazine I’ve been discussing various ways that coaches (as well as small business owners) can generate more leads and close more sales.

Previously, I explained how coaches can move from the “time for money” scenario we all find ourselves subjected to toward building a more passive recurring income stream by developing products versus simply offering services.

I ended my previous article promising you that today I would show you the ULTIMATE product you should seriously consider developing as a coach… a membership site. A membership site contains content available only to members who pay a monthly fee to gain access to it. My current membership site currently produces well north of 6 figures for me annually, and it’s ALL passive, recurring income – meaning I don’t invest any of my personal time to generating that income.

I actually created my membership site out of frustration. When I was coaching full time, I took on the responsibility of developing everything for my clients that they needed to grow their business. I wrote their marketing and sales letters, I created their ads and marketing collateral, I crafted their elevator pitches for them and so on. As the years went by, I found it increasingly difficult to locate previously created materials for a new client I was now working with. I knew I already had created most of what my new client needed for their business, but it would often take me hours of searching to locate that content.

Hey, I’m a “D” personality, and we’re not known for our organizational skills. So out of frustration, I finally took the time and organized all of my materials into easy-to-locate folders on my desktop. It took me 3 months to do that – I NEVER realized how much content I had created. But when I looked at these folders I had now assembled, I realized I had, in essence, created an “online coach.”

The ONLY thing I was missing was a way to perform the standard business assessment I always performed with every new coaching client I signed up. I found a computer programmer… and after 6 painstaking months, we found a way to create an online business assessment that produced a detailed roadmap for my online clients to guide them step-by-step in what to do  and where to go within my membership site… based on their business’s specific needs.

This allowed me the opportunity to enroll EVERY prospect I spoke with into this online site at a low monthly fee and provide them the help they needed in a self-directed coaching program. So why was this so important to me? Well, tell me if this sounds familiar to you as a coach.

As I spoke with business owners regarding a coaching relationship, a solid seven out of every ten prospects flat out could NOT afford ANY form of one-on-one coaching. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a LOT of broke business owners out here these days. Asking these people to pay just $297 per month for coaching was completely out of the question for them. SEVEN out of every TEN!!! Talk about wasting time!

But these business owners needed and wanted help, and they were more than willing to pay for coaching if they could find a low cost program that would provide them with the tools and resources they needed to learn how to do sales and marketing on their own.

That’s what a membership site can provide to them. So when I developed my site, it served two major functions. It helped ME coach my one-on-one clients more effectively and efficiently… but then it gave me a “product” to offer all the broke business owners I met and allowed me for the first time to “monetize” every one of them.

I carefully considered what amount I thought they could comfortably afford on a month-to-month basis, and decided $97 per month would be a no-brainer decision for any serious business owner. For that low rate, they could have total and complete access to my membership site 24 / 7 / 365. I began to mention this option at networking events, speaking engagements and live events that I hosted. Now remember, my main focus was signing high dollar, one-to-one coaching clients. But when that wasn’t possible financially, I would then downsell the prospect into my membership site.

I will also openly admit this to you. I NEVER really thought much about the revenue my membership site would produce. At $97 per month, I thought it would basically generate “lunch money” and that would be it. What I thought would be the huge benefit in enrolling my $97 members was my own personal belief that once someone buys something from you, then tend to buy from you again down the road. I thought if I could get them to engage with me, they would eventually seek out my higher dollar coaching programs.

While that did indeed happen (approximately 30% to 35% did eventually ask for higher priced coaching), after my first year I checked the number of members I had enrolled over 12 months, and I was absolutely floored. That number was 109, and I was making $127,000 in PASSIVE RECURRING annual revenue. Turned out that was TWICE what I had made that year in one-on-one coaching fees. And perhaps best of all, these online members were HANDS-FREE to me.

Take your coaching content and use it to create your own membership site. It’s one of the keys to building a 7 figure coaching practice.

So until next time