How to Make Money Online for Beginners with $5,000 a Month Making You $60,000 A Year!

After talking with Shane for 5 minutes, I was sold on memberships.

Personally, I had coaching, courses, etc. in my online business Master Passive Income but did not want to do a membership.

I didn’t want to have extra work to do.

Now, I’m a believer!

I love working with my members, helping them how to invest in real estate, getting them to become successfully unemployed.

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How Shane Makes Money Without Having a Job

Shane hosts memberships online. What that means is he has a product or service that is supported by a community. When you combine those two things with leadership, you have a membership.

The basic principle is if you can get 100 people to pay $50 a month, that is $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year. They sell memberships.

What Shane Was Doing Before and How He Became Successfully Unemployed

Shane and his wife, Jocelyn, were school teachers, until about 10 years ago. They were living the American dream and thought they would continue doing teaching until they retired.

They were making good money, but they would get paid on Friday and the money would run out the next Thursday.

Shane had a bad experience with a boss that showed him he wasn’t only going to a job, he was selling power over his life to somebody else.

One morning, when Shane’s son was three, his son became very scared to go into his daycare. He told Shane, “She hurts me, I’m scared of her, I don’t want to go in”.

The lady inside of the daycare was locking his son in a bathroom, in the dark, for hours at a time. She was punishing him for potty training accidents.

They found out later that there were horrific things happening in this daycare. The daycare had changed ownership and hired a few new people. They were sitting on kids in bean bag chairs.

One child had a potty training accident and they made him stand on a table in his underwear and encouraged the other kids to make fun of him.

Shane found out about this when he was on his way to his school, and he had a legal obligation to be in his classroom. He couldn’t get a hold of his wife or his boss, so he took his son, Isaac, away from the daycare.

At the time, Shane’s daughter was 18 months old and she was at a different facility that didn’t have a license for children older than age two.

He knew the employees there and asked to leave his son with them for just a while, until he could get someone to take over his classroom.

Shane drove the 25-minute commute to school, found someone to watch his classroom, and went to find his boss to tell him he needed time to sort this out. His boss was gone, so he spoke to the vice principal.

She wasn’t really paying attention and, after he finished speaking, she said that she couldn’t watch his class and she didn’t have any substitute teachers available. She said she knew his son needed him, but his job needed him too and Shane needed to deal with his problems after work.

Shane said he was going to leave and she would need to write him up. He was furious at himself that he gave so much power over his life to another person, because they promised him a paycheck and health insurance.

He made a promise to himself right then that he wasn’t going to let that happen again. He wasn’t able to quit right then, because he had to pay his bills, but he needed to figure something out.

Shane started looking for ways to make money offline and online. One day, he was listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast, with Pat Flynn, and he was talking about making money online.

Pat made a study guide for a test and he was emailing a PDF for $49 each. Shane ran inside and told his wife that he knew what he was going to do to replace their income and he knew how to get people to give him $50.

Watch the Video Interview How to Make Money Online for Beginners

It was a disaster for the next six months. He couldn’t figure out how to make anything work. Shane wasn’t getting any traffic and he was about to give up.

One night he looked up and asked God if it was real, if it was possible to make money online. He asked for a sign that it works.

Before he went to bed that night he checked his Google Ads account one more time, and, where there was $0 before, there was $.11 in his account.

Shane started jumping up and down and showed his wife. He knew that if he could make $.11, then he could make $11. Jocelyn got onboard and that’s when they launched their education company, where they sold lesson plans to teacher.

They sold playbooks to football coaches, lesson plans to librarians, and lesson plans to history teachers.

They built a little list and, when they launched that first list, they made $2,700 on their first email. That was for the August lesson pack, so then they sold September, and it worked again, and they kept going.

After they created the whole year, they realized they created a monthly membership. They decided to launch their membership and charge $49 a month.

In July 2013, they made $15,000, in August 2013, they made $36,000, and on September 27, 2013, Shane turned in his resignation. Shane and his wife have been working online ever since, sitting on their porch in Southeast Kentucky.

How to Start a Monthly Membership

We all have God-given talents and experiences that we either innately have or that we’ve learned over time that we can use to serve someone else.

If you are one chapter ahead in a book, you can look back and help the people who are one chapter behind you. We all have something to offer someone else and that means we can solve problems for people. What problems can you solve for someone else?

Once you figure out how you can help someone else, you need to turn that into a product. This is a product-first company and you need to have a core, curated system, or a step-by-step process, to teach people something. This is where your membership starts.

Get your post-it notes out and write down 10 things. What are your God-given talents? Write them out. Then, reach out to people who you love and who love you and ask them what you are good at.

Write out 10 more things. At that point, make a pile of anything you are really interested in and make one pile that is skill based.

Shane is a trained teacher. He has a master’s degree in history from the University of Kentucky.

He taught in public school for 10 years. He is not necessarily passionate about teaching, but he has the skill. He was also a football coach, which is more on his passion side. Those are the first two things he created.

Once you have these two piles, ask yourself: can this make money online? Are there enough people looking for this? Look up your idea on Amazon.

If someone wrote a book about it and that book has sales, that means there is a market. Look up your ideas on Google.

You aren’t looking for search results, you are looking for ads. If you find an ad, that means someone is spending money. You need to pursue this, put it into the market, and see if you can get a piece of the action.

The Market is Not Already Filled, if You Find Other People Doing the Same Thing

When Shane was 27 years old, he became a head football coach for a high school. His first year, he went 0-10 and got crushed. He realized he knew nothing about football.

Over the next 10 years, he had other coaching jobs and learned what it took to get the wins and to create a good, solid, competitive program.

He realized he could write about defense in a way that others didn’t. Shane wrote a book called, The 3 5 3 Defense for High School Football. Shane’s experience is what he leaned into to create this book.

Writing from your voice and your experience is going to appeal to a certain segment of the market.

There are four billion people on the internet. You only need 100 people to pay you $50 a month to make $60,000 a year, to become, and stay, self employed. If you want to make six figures, you only need 200 people.

There are people out there who want to listen to you instead of someone else. There are so many nuances and branches in what you teach.

The First Step to Building a Membership Business

Building a membership is a chicken or egg situation. There is either an audience or a product, and you need to bring those two things together.

Some people think you need an audience first, but Shane recommends having a product first. The product should have three main components:

Create a minimum viable product. For a lesson plan, this could be the first month of lessons, while you make the next part. What are the categories or phases you will be taking people through? Your module will fill in over time. This is the big picture.
Figure out where you are going to host your community. Facebook is the fastest, easiest way. When someone joins your membership, add them to your Facebook community.
Figure out how you are going to lead them. This could be you going live every other week to answer questions.

It only takes about a week or two to create the structure.

Once you have this done, as well as figured out a place for them to pay you, it is all about creating consistent content over time.

This could include podcasting, blogging, or a YouTube channel. Shane’s membership looks like this.

Why Have Content Outside of the Membership

Publishing is the most prolific way to build traffic, and there are different levels of people. There are people who don’t know you, and your job is to get in front of them somehow.

There are people who know about you, and that is your audience, but you need to move those people to prospects.

This is when you want them to sign up for your email list. You may have free content, like a podcast or course, that you can give them, if they sign up on your email list.

After they sign up, you have follow-up sequences to join the membership.

People don’t come for the content, they want the curated roadmap to get to their goal. The content is organized in the membership. We sell them the organized content and when they come in and start walking that path, we are their guide. They are not alone.

A big mistake is to make your content into a payment plan. The most important thing is to connect your people together within your community, and then they have friends.

They won’t want to leave their friends. Show up for them and be a leader. It doesn’t need to be all the time, it could be 90 minutes a month.

How to Start a Community and Keep Members Engaged

Last year, Shane and his wife did their second big live event, called Flip Your Life Live. Internally, it is called the family reunion. It is 100 people who go to Lexington, Kentucky, and hang out with Shane and Jocelyn for two days.

They create all of the content and Shane does eight speeches on stage. They cram it with content and there are workshops.

Shane and his wife hosted a VIP dinner, and sold 25 tickets. They had a dessert reception, where they all mingled. At the dinner, nobody talked to Shane and Jocelyn, they all talked to each other.

It was a chance to connect with people they knew online. Shane was proud, because it proved to him that their community was working.

You need to be very clear with who you want to attract into your community and you have to create filters to keep the wrong people out. Shane and Jocelyn do not try to attract people in their 20’s.

They are usually really tight with their messaging. When they post a picture, it is Shane and Jocelyn and their kids.

They use language that they think will appeal to people ages 30 or 35 and up. They want it to be married people with school-aged kids. They say things like their community is filled with people who are family-focused entrepreneurs.

They use words like this as much as they can. You don’t want to try to attract everyone.

When you get them in the membership, you need to strategically get them to connect with each other.

This means you need to get out of the way. Shane and Jocelyn are in the forums, but they don’t answer questions during the first pass. They give them 48 hours. Create an environment where you are not coming to the rescue.

You can push a question, but don’t give all the answers. Step back, show up on member calls, but let the community work together. Start conversations but don’t finish them.

Great community doesn’t really build until you get 75 to 100 people. Lead more until you have about 75 people. When you get between 100 and 200 people, it is easy, because members talk to each other.

Forums Aren’t Necessarily Needed

For Flipped Lifestyle, Shane and Jocelyn didn’t want to use a Facebook group. They are teaching people how to start a website, a membership, a platform, etc.

They are coming in with the expectation of learning new habits and skills. It made sense for them to build a forum, and they own and control all of the content.

In Shane’s U.S. history business, it is hard. It is hard to teach people who are not necessarily techy to learn something new. However, the members are all already on Facebook, so Shane built the community through a Facebook group.

In Shane’s football business, none of them wanted to use technology. The only way to build community is through Q&As each week with his members. They love to see each other, so a platform like Zoom worked better.

It will take experimenting. The biggest thing is to have a place to keep your content where it is protected with a paywall. You need to decide the best solution for creating community for your audience.

Your email list and your forums give you control, but if Facebook is the only place your audience wants to be, then use Facebook. Just realize that you are building your community on someone else’s business and have a back up plan. You don’t need to have anything, but you need to find a way to build a community. Don’t let anyone join, unless they pay you.

Leave Your Comments On

Everybody you encounter is one question away from giving you money. You need to facilitate as much open communication with your community as possible, which includes retention.

If you close off comments, you might be that one question away from someone paying you and joining your community.

Shane leaves everything open as long as possible. However, this creates a new problem, and you need moderation. If your message is correct and the right person is joining and paying, you shouldn’t get the troll problem.

Leave everything open, let people talk to you as much as possible, and figure out ways to mitigate that.

Communication is key.

Shane doesn’t limit his members. He doesn’t require approval for posts to go through. Ninety nine percent of people don’t see 99% of what is posted.

Let your community police it. If something gets through, delete it later and move on. Don’t moderate everything in your forum, mitigate it.

How Much Time is Enough for Group Coaching

Some people do coaching quarterly. Shane and Jocelyn tested everything. They tested quarterly, monthly, weekly, and everything in between. They found the best response was every two weeks.

They have rules, though, where they will only answer 10 to 15 questions. You want people to be hungry and to want more. They aren’t the steak, they are the bread.

They give good, detailed answers and everyone is going to learn.

At the end, Shane encourages members to post their questions in the forum. This fuels the members for the next couple of weeks, until they do another coaching session.

They see the forum activity soar after their coaching sessions. The community is going to serve the other members well.

You are doing your members a disservice if you show up too much and member attendance will go down. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Figure out what your community needs and also what you enjoy.

It isn’t all about the money. If you have a heart to serve people in your space, and you want to reach more people, this is why you do the membership. This is a way to scale coaching in a way that helps people.

The more people you help, the better their lives get. It changes their lives. Everybody wins in the membership model.

Promoting Your Membership

The most important thing about promoting memberships is knowing your points of least resistance (POLR). This is the best promotion, at the right time, for that person to have a no-brained decision to join your membership.

If your membership is aimed at helping high-income business owners make more money, you can charge significantly more for your membership.

One of Shane’s members has a higher end membership that is about $300 a month. Her business is aimed at pharmacists who own their businesses and she is helping them increase their income. She and Shane experimented with $1 trials, $9 trials, and free trials.

What they found is nothing was working until they raised the price on the trial offers. They found that a $100 price was was the point of least resistance.

When that didn’t work, they found that there was a timing issue where flu shots were coming out, so they focused their bonus training on flu shots.

The POLR can be behavioral, something that is happening in the market, price sensitive, etc. Black Friday is always price sensitive. Every membership does better, if they offer a really good annual deal for Black Friday. People love to save money on Black Friday.

What is the POLR? What is happening in your niche? It could be a bonus, a price increase, a price decrease, a $1 trial, a free trial, etc. During back to school, Shane offers a lot of discounts for his lesson plan memberships.

During the Coronavirus outbreak, Shane and Jocelyn wanted to help as many people as possible. Everyone was stuck at home, so Shane did an eight-week challenge.

They offered a 60-day trial, and it was the first time they ever did a trial for more than 30 days. They had 205 new members in five days.

They will retain about 50 to 60 percent of those people, and he expects to make $10,000 later. He just planted seeds for harvest.

Shane found the POLR, because this was a new offer.

These people are stuck for the next two months, so why not help people launch their memberships. If they launch their membership and get 20 members, it will be free for them anyway.

They are doing a weekly eight-week challenge, where Shane shows up and answers questions from new members. This is a way that proves their value.

It will be different next month and the month after that. Put a price on it and see what happens. If you are confused, pick $47 or $99. You will learn fast, but you need to have a price before you can figure out the price.

How to Figure Out the POLR

Every niche is different and it is all about trial and error. It depends on the average income and the average desire to work on this thing.

The POLR is difficult for teachers in June, because no one is teaching, so Shane promote heavily at the end of the school year. There are a lot of different tools to overcome challenges in their business cycle.

It is all about experimenting. Launch as fast as possible and get a price out into the market. You are going to find out a lot of different things that work in your space that doesn’t work in someone else’s space.

Try to attach your POLR with the conversation your potential member is already having with themselves. If you do that, you will find 1,000 ways to do this. Have a promotion every week.

The monthly price never goes down, it only goes up. The promotions are different, and almost all of his members come in on a free trial.

If a member says they would like a month free, because Shane is offering a free trial, he will say no, but maybe he will offer them six months free, if they commit to an annual membership. They are investing money up front into the company.

Any time someone buys a quarterly or annual membership, Shane immediately invests that back into getting more members. The upsells become investment money and the monthly income is revenue.

The people who are being rewarded are the ones who are committed.

Never offer a deal more than what you offered the founding members. If you offered the founding members half off, only offer 40% off the membership for the next group.

Successfully Unemployed Rapid Fire Round

How Shane is Making the World a Better Place

Shane will sometimes personally reach out to someone on the email list or in the community and give them his time.

Also, he is blessed to give financially to his church and serve them with his time.

The Advice Shane Would Give to Anyone Who is Just Getting Started

Be the glacier, not the prairie fire. A prairie fire looks cool, but then it burns out. It isn’t real and it isn’t going to last.

You want to build your membership like a glacier — snowflake by snowflake.

Start stacking it bigger and bigger, and you will be an immovable force going forward.

The Advice Shane Would Give His Younger Self

Shane would go back to his apartment when he was 23 years old. He had just started coaching football, and he had gotten a few coaches to give him their playbooks to sell.

He was selling them on CDs on EBay, and he bought a book about Dream Weaver, an HTML website builder.

He started and made money, but he burned out when he was trying to learn some things. He would go back and tell himself to keep going. It might be hard, but don’t quit. Figure it out.

The Tools Shane Uses in His Business

Zoom: Video meetings

Kajabi: A great platform for a layman to quickly build a website and a content area. You can tag a Facebook group and get a membership going really quickly.