Create Your 6-Figure Membership Plan

Discover how to develop an income-generating membership plan in 5 days so you can confidently launch your membership site with at least one money-attracting online course inside.

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How To Plan A Six-Figure Membership Site In Five Days

Chris Badgett walks through the five-day framework LifterLMS teaches for planning a profitable membership site before you build it. You will learn how to step into your power as an education entrepreneur, focus on the right learner avatar, craft a winning offer, structure your course, and design the success systems that turn members into happy customers.

What You’ll Learn

• Why so many membership site launches stall, and how a five-day plan fixes it
• How to find your ikigai as a course creator and build a Creator Sanctuary that keeps you producing
• How to define a specific learner avatar using pains, desires, goals, identity transformation, demographics, and psychographics
• The six components of a winning membership offer, and how to pitch it short or long
• How to structure a course into phases, steps, and actions so it delivers a real result
• Why success systems matter more than more content, and how to pick the ones that fit your personality

Key Takeaways

• Sell the outcome, not the mechanism. Members do not want a course, they want the result the course delivers.
• Put the customer at the center of the business, not the product. Focus outward.
• You can pre-sell a membership from the outline. The syllabus is the product before the content exists.
• Chunk your course into three phases, then steps, then actions. Phases become sections, steps become lessons, actions become the content inside them.
• Success systems are a personality choice. Pick your mix of private versus group and synchronous versus asynchronous, then design around it.
• The best marketing is happy customers. Design for member success and the growth follows.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Most Membership Sites Struggle Without a Plan

Welcome to this complimentary training. It is called Create Your 6-Figure Membership Plan. You are going to discover how to quickly develop your income generating membership site plan so you can confidently launch your membership without losing money or time. I am Chris Badgett, CEO and co-founder of LifterLMS, and I have Will from LifterLMS helping co-pilot the ship today.

If you do not know what LifterLMS is, it is a leading membership and learning management solution for WordPress. We have been around the membership site space for a very long time, and we have watched what actually works.

The problem is that a lot of people come into this space and they do not have a plan. They start buying tools. They start creating a course. They are not sure what to make and what to put in the membership, and it gets messy really quick. That creates a huge problem in our industry, where people fail to launch, or they launch with poor results because the whole thing was not really well thought out.

The Five-Day Six-Figure Membership Framework

The best way to start a membership site is to think from day one about having some courses inside. Courses do not have to be overwhelming or huge. You could do one little one, one big one, or a bunch of little ones. Today I am going to walk you through how to launch a membership site by starting with a single course that you can have a rock solid plan for in five days.

This is for subject matter experts, or for the agency and WordPress website building professionals who help experts. If you are on this call, you are somebody who wants to have a training based membership site of some kind. That is the avatar I am working with right now.

The five-day plan is a framework we have built into a free challenge you can enroll in. It is one hour a day for five days. About twenty minutes of training and thirty to forty minutes of taking action on a worksheet each day. Today I am going to fly through the whole thing quickly and give you the high level view.

Real Membership Site Success Stories

We have sold to millions of dollars worth of software to membership site creators over the years. Between the YouTube videos, the LifterLMS courses, the Udemy courses, and the LMScast podcast, we have served over sixty seven thousand course creators, and the real number is probably much higher.

Ziv is one of the members of our community. He did over three hundred and seventy seven thousand dollars in course sales in his membership site in 2021, and that was in a very small niche of child entertainers. These are people who go to parties and tie animal balloons for kids. In a niche he said had a total addressable market of only five thousand people, he pulled it off.

Angela Brown started from nothing, just an idea to create a membership site for house cleaners, teaching them how to start and grow their house cleaning businesses. Over the last four years I have watched her go from zero to two hundred and fifty thousand YouTube subscribers. She has become a phenomenon.

Jay Abraham is famous in the internet marketing world. A lot of the people you may look up to as marketers or coaches, Tony Robbins, Eben Pagan, and others, learned from Jay. Jay uses LifterLMS to teach through his Academy for business training. He is valued at over seventy three million dollars.

Day Zero: Commit To Success

Day zero is really about committing to the idea. Block time in your calendar. One hour a day for five days, ideally in a row. Commit to taking action on what you learn each day.

Then set a launch date as a forcing function. Keep in mind, you can launch this membership site without the course even being created yet. You can pre-sell. If you go through the five-day plan and use the bonuses on launching a site, pricing your offer, and getting traffic, you can literally launch a membership site with paying customers in as little as one to two weeks.

Day One: Step Into Your Power As An Education Entrepreneur

Day one is all about stepping into your power. If you do not step into your power as an expert and as an education entrepreneur, you are filled with doubt. You start losing motivation. You feel that sinking sense in your gut where you are not living up to your potential.

When you do step into your power, you uncover incredible confidence and a motivation that keeps going. You unlock a meaningful life. The main benefit is energy. You know that person who seems to have unstoppable drive, who shows up every day and creates? That is what stepping into your power looks like.

Finding Your Ikigai As A Membership Site Creator

There is a Japanese concept called ikigai. It means your reason for being. Iki means life, gai describes value or worth. Your ikigai is your life purpose and your bliss. It is what brings you joy and inspires you to get out of bed every day. Most of us have it, and it may be dormant.

Ikigai sits at the intersection of four things. What you love. What you are good at. What the world needs. What you can be paid for. You figure out what you love, whether there is a market for it, and whether you have the skills to deliver on it.

One of the challenges I see is that people get focused inward. I want to make money online, I want to work from anywhere, I want to build my business around my lifestyle. Those are not bad things. But when your ikigai has an outward focus on the customer you serve, you are a lot more successful. There is a famous quote that if we help enough people get what they want, we get what we want.

Building Your Creator Sanctuary

After the outward focus, you need to build your Creator Sanctuary. This is about having a location where you do this work of creating your membership and your courses, having rituals to support the work, and having inspiration to keep you motivated. For me, I built a small cabin in my backyard where I run my online business. That is my Creator Sanctuary. I am speaking to you right now from that place.

Ikigai In Practice: The Balloon Artist Story

Ziv, who made three hundred and seventy seven thousand dollars teaching balloon artistry, is an ikigai example. He loves balloon art. He loves making children laugh. He loves the clown work you do at parties.

Does the world need more laughter and fun? It does. Will other aspiring balloon artists pay to learn how to do this professionally and build a career around it? Yes, even in a niche of only five thousand people. Was he good at it? He is a professional balloon artist himself. That is his ikigai, and that is the energy he puts into the world when he serves those members.

Day Two: Focus On Your Learner Avatar

If you do not have a clear ideal customer profile, your progress will be slow. You build a hodgepodge, confusing product. You lose focus and motivation. When you focus your avatar, you move fast. You build a great product. Everything gets a hundred times easier because you have clarity.

Your learner avatar is a fictional or real person who has the same needs, pain points, and wants as the ideal customer your course or membership is designed to serve.

Mapping Pains, Desires, Goals, and Identity Transformation

To focus the avatar, list four things. Their pains and frustrations. Their desires. Their primary measurable goal. Their primary identity transformation.

For a training based membership site creator, the pains often look like frustration with software solutions that did not deliver as promised, slow progress, marketing challenges, and confusion about what to put in the membership. The desires look like wanting an online business that helps people, making income and impact, creating more freedom, and turning your knowledge into a product.

The primary measurable goal is usually money related, often a six figure membership site. The primary identity transformation is the shift from subject matter expert to membership site entrepreneur. That is a real change. Knowing a lot about something is different from building a platform that delivers the learning and helps people at scale.

Demographics And Psychographics Of Your Ideal Member

Beyond pains and desires, capture the demographics and psychographics.

Demographics are the outside details. Gender, age, location, income, marital status, number of children. This is the ideal avatar, so not every member will match every attribute. For me, gender does not matter much. Age skews thirty plus for this audience. Income varies because most creators already have a skill they are monetizing.

Psychographics are the inside details. Interests. Experts and authors they follow. Tools and software they use. Online communities they hang out in. Products they buy. What they do for entertainment. If you are here, you are probably into entrepreneurship, you have read Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets, you use an email tool like ActiveCampaign or MailChimp or ConvertKit, and you are part of some Facebook groups for course creators. Once you can see it that clearly, everything about your marketing and your product gets sharper.

Day Three: Craft Your Winning Membership Offer

Every step up to this point matters, and defining your offer is where a lot of the work becomes concrete. Without a winning offer, you end up overwhelmed and creating a confusing pitch. Nobody attaches to it. With one, you have focus. You know exactly what to say. Your stress level drops.

An offer refers to a promise a course creator or membership site owner makes in exchange for another person’s money, time, and effort. That is literally what an offer is. An exchange.

The Six Components Of A Winning Offer

There are six key components. A clear customer. A specific result they want. A mechanism to deliver it. A guaranteed time frame. The two biggest objections you resolve. And a promise that ties it all together.

Most creators pitch only the mechanism. I have a membership site for balloon artists. I have a membership site for entrepreneurs. That is not the whole story. People do not want the course. They want the result the course promises. Sell the outcome.

Short Offer Pitch Versus Long Offer Pitch

There is a short version and a long version.

The short pitch works at a cocktail party where someone casually asks what you do. It is one line. I help balloon artists start and grow their companies. I help house cleaners start and grow their companies.

The long pitch is for when you are talking to your ideal avatar and you have their attention. It adds the mechanism, the time frame, and the objections. My membership site helps balloon artists start and grow their business and make fifty thousand dollars in their first year, without feeling alone or running out of time before their dream dies. Same offer, different depth.

Day Four: Build Your Course Outline

If you do not create the course outline, you do not know what to teach. It is like writer’s block. You get unorganized and it is easy to end up in the weeds. Most of us are subject matter experts, not trained teachers.

Once you build the outline, you know what to teach, you stay organized, and you enjoy the freedom of an actual instructional design system. And here is the cool part. Even before the content exists, the outline is a product. You can pre-sell against it with a future start date, so you can put it in front of buyers before you have made a single lesson.

Chunking Your Course Into Phases, Steps, and Actions

Start from the customer and the result they want. If they are going on a journey, chunk it into three phases. For a course creator, phase one is Create. Phase two is Launch. Phase three is Scale.

Inside each phase, list the steps. To create a course, step one is come up with your offer. Step two is come up with your outline. Step three is make the content. To launch, get your website, put your content on it, set up your marketing systems. To scale, do word of mouth, content marketing, paid advertising.

Inside each step, list the actions. If step one under Launch is get your website, action one is buy web hosting and a domain, action two is install WordPress, action three is install LifterLMS. Now you know what to actually make.

Phases become course sections. Steps become lessons. Actions become the content inside the lessons. This whole webinar is structured with the same framework. I am practicing what I teach in real time.

Day Five: Design Success Systems For Happy Members

Almost nobody talks about this last piece, and it is one of the most important. When you do not have a success system for your learners, you end up with a low value course, low completion rates, and unhappy customers.

When you design good success systems in alignment with your personality and style, you create a desirable product, you get high completion rates, and you get satisfied members. The big outcome is happy customers.

Do you know why Tesla has almost no marketing? Because they have a great product full of happy customers who spread the word. The best marketing is happy customers. When success systems work, you get word of mouth for free.

Customer Success Is A Business Discipline

Customer success is the methodology of ensuring your customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your course or enjoying your membership. Never forget about them. Your product is not the center of your business. Your customer is.

Success Systems That Fit Your Personality

There are two spectrums to design against. Private versus group, and synchronous versus asynchronous. Right now you are in a synchronous group experience, a live webinar. A one-on-one call is a synchronous private experience. Email is asynchronous and private. A Facebook group is asynchronous and group.

You do not have to do all of them. Pick what fits how you like to work.

On the group side, synchronously, you can run group coaching calls, peer masterminds where members help each other, and live in-person or virtual events. Asynchronously, you can run social media groups, a Slack community, a Discord server, a LifterLMS social learning feature, peer review inside the program, or lesson comments where members talk in the open.

On the private side, asynchronously, you can email members, or use a feature like LifterLMS private areas, which lets a teacher and a learner have a private blog together. Synchronously, you can run one-on-one coaching calls, and at the top end you can run an in-person VIP day where you fly to them or they come into your office and it is entirely about them.

If you are the kind of person who does not like to be live with people all day, lean asynchronous. If you love live interaction, lean synchronous. Mix as you go. As your time gets more limited, shift to more group options or raise the price on your private options so your calendar stays sane.

A Real Membership Site Example: Melissa Love

Melissa Love is a LifterLMS customer who helps web designers start and grow their companies. Her success systems include a calendar of live events, group coaching, and coworking sessions where members hop on Zoom together, work in parallel, and break out into rooms. She has also run one-on-one onboarding calls with new members. That mix is deliberate, and it fits how she likes to work.

Why Content Alone Is Never Enough

There is a reason MasterClass is only ten dollars a month, even though you are learning from Steve Martin on comedy or Gordon Ramsay on cooking. It is content only. You cannot get Steve Martin to review your set. You cannot get Gordon Ramsay to help you rescue a dish.

Pay attention to success systems. A membership site is not just about content. It can be, but if you want to increase both the value and the odds that it works for your members, design the systems around the content.

How To Know If You Have An Avatar Problem

If you are stuck at zero customers, that is an avatar issue. The biggest challenge of any membership site, coaching program, or course is going from zero to one real paying customer. Not your friend or your mom. A stranger who bought because the offer landed.

If you feel lost and you keep thinking you need to run ads, or build something more complicated on your website, or add more courses, that is usually an avatar issue too. The avatar is fundamental. Put your customer at the center of the business. If you have done everything you think is right and sales still are not happening, revisit who you are actually serving.

A pro tip. One of the easiest avatars to start with is an earlier version of yourself. Build the membership site or course you wish had existed when you were at that stage. Ziv was a balloon artist. Angela ran a cleaning business. There is less guessing when you are honest about what you needed back then, and you end up creating exactly what your past self would have paid for.

Membership Site Benchmarks And Realistic Expectations

If you want to benchmark against real membership sites, the LMScast podcast is a good place to start. Many of the guests are successful membership site creators who share their revenue numbers and the details of their launches. K.C. is one to look at. She launched a membership site called ActiveCampaign Academy to help people learn ActiveCampaign for their businesses, and she goes deep into her first launch on the show. Another good listen is the Behind The Membership podcast from Mike and Callie Willows at The Membership Guys.

Be careful with benchmarks though, because not all membership sites are the same. I know operators with a hundred members who are wildly successful because their coaching is high end. I know operators with fifty thousand members whose average price is much lower. The numbers are not directly comparable, which is one of the reasons pricing your membership correctly is so important, and pricing depends on your avatar’s willingness to pay.

Go easy on yourself if the beginning is slow. The best membership sites are built iteratively over time. A strong first launch is great, and so is a slow one that gets sharper year over year as you learn from your members.

Celebrating Your First Paying Customer

Celebrate going from zero to one. I still remember my very first online course sale in 2012. It was in the gardening niche. A guy named Ron in New Zealand bought my permaculture gardening course through PayPal. Somebody I did not know, on the other side of the planet, paying real money for something I had made. It was the best feeling. That first paying customer is worth celebrating every time.

The Framework, In Summary

Some of the people who influenced the way I teach and plan deserve credit. Simon Bowen had a huge influence on me around teaching through models like the asynchronous and synchronous framework. Julie Dirksen is an excellent instructional designer I have learned a ton from. Aaron Fletcher taught me a lot about structure around course creation and business.

Thank you for being here today. My job is to help education entrepreneurs, whether you think of yourself as a membership site creator, a course creator, a coach, an expert, or a professional who serves that market. Slow down, give yourself the hours to plan, and remember that it is great to be with you on the journey.