How to Build a Thriving Membership Site

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Anne, and this episode Bjork is sitting down with Jen Matichuk from Memberful for the third and final episode of our miniseries, sponsored by Memberful. You’ll hear Jen talk about some of the ways that you can create a sense of community around your content from providing exclusive content to creating space where your members can connect with each other. She also emphasizes the importance of offering value beyond your free blog content. This can include behind the scenes content or in-depth recipe walkthroughs. Lastly, she’ll dive into some of the different tools that Memberful offers to keep your membership streamlined so that you can focus on what matters most building your community. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series and found it helpful as you think about ways to diversify your income streams. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jen Matichuk: Thank you so much for having me again.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re in this world where we were just at the time of this recording. Lindsay and I were out in New York and meeting with this advertiser partner that we work with with, and one of the conversations, the conversation that they were talking about was this idea of diversification. And it was like, they’re talking about diversification from a traffic standpoint. Like, Hey, Google algorithm is changing and we need to be strategic about thinking about email signups and getting traffic from Pinterest. And also this idea of we need to be strategic as business owners to diversify the types of revenue that we’re having. And that’s why this little mini series that we’ve done with Memberful feels like it has landed so well is because it’s in this season of the ground shifting a little bit in the world of content creators and nothing seeming super stable. And so that’s why it’s going to be important to talk about what we’re talking about. You get the world of content because not only do you lead some of the creator partner efforts at Memberful, but you also worked directly with some well-known YouTube creators before you started at Memberful. So for those who didn’t listen to the first podcast, can you share a little bit of background with that?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, for sure. So starting with my previous job, I worked for these guys named Rhett and Link. I started working for them in 2013. I worked with them through 2019. I was really hired to help build out their social side of things, and that turned into helping with all of their video content and really making their mark on the internet in the social sphere, which is where they mostly resided. So at the end of that, I actually helped them then build out their membership just because I knew what their fans were interested in and I could really understand and read what they would purchase and what they’d be excited about. So I built that on Memberful, and that was my stepping stone into now working at Memberful and now helping people build out their own memberships within our product.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ve watched a few other videos. My guess is 2013 to 2019 was an interesting time to be a part of their journey because I mean pretty expansive in terms of growth and probably pretty quick, what was that like just at a high level?

Jen Matichuk: It was crazy. Actually. It’s funny that we’re talking about this now because I found our 2014 goals on, I took a picture and my phone reminded me of it, and some of the goals were get 250,000 views on one video a week and post some original scripted content. And then you look at 2015 and 2016, and we were quadrupling those numbers and those were five year goals. So rapid is definitely a good way to explain what happened. The show really took off Good Mythical Morning, their flagship show. It really, really took off at a time when YouTube was changing. They introduced their partner program long, longer form content was being favored, Rhett and Link were really at the forefront of that, and people were coming back to them. They were consistent in their content. They were bringing people to their content all the time, every single day. People wanted to have a piece of that every single day. So to experience that growth was very interesting because sometimes it felt like I didn’t have to do anything and it would just still grow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. Which it’s like, it’s both of those things. It’s really good content. And then you have the multiplier of strategic use of tools, and that is so much of what we do. If you just had the like, hey strategy and you’re applying it to content, that’s not great, that’s not going to work. But also you can have really great content, but if you’re not understanding the strategy of the platforms or whatever it might be, marketing efforts, we’re going to talk about some of that today. You also won’t get the results that you need. And so it really has to be those two things in tandem, really good strategy, really strategic, and also obviously really good content that’s engaging and brings people back time and time again. So to recap some of the things that we’ve talked about in this series, the first episode in the series is really talking about specific in the world of food sites and food blogs. We have this issue, and the issue is that people are really reliant on usually a single source of income, but even if you have that single source being ads and a lot of times are majorly reliant on a single source of traffic in order to monetize those with those ads, which is Google, maybe Pinterest is second to that or direct, but there’s this, you’re not really building a strong business foundation because you’re reliant on a single source. And so that’s where that diversification comes in. In the second episode, we talked about one of the benefits of recurring or the benefit of recurring revenue or membership type revenue is that it’s predictable, it’s scalable. There’s the ability to kind of approach it from a standpoint of content marketing versus marketing content. So with Pinch of Yum, we market our content. We’re out there saying, Hey, you got to show up because we monetize via ads with Food Blogger Pro, it’s content marketing. We are showing up and creating content in order to market people to join our membership. There’s a different approach with it for that. When you look back to launching the membership component for Rhett and Link, how did that fit in? Were they looking to diversify? What was the mindset at the time for them launching this additional revenue source?

Jen Matichuk: It was definitely a piece of, it was to diversify for sure, but it was also a place that they wanted to create for those fans that really wanted more, I think the initial piece was diversifying, and then they realized, oh, this is actually going to be a really great spot. Because Front Link had what they called the Retina Link community before the board. They were big on YouTube when they kind of had a smaller following and it was just like a classic forum website, and It has since gone under, but this kind of turned into that place for the people who are originally on there. But once Rhett and Link realized, okay, we’re making money on the YouTube content, AdSense sponsorships through our videos, we started selling merch more frequently. That’s when we realized that there was much more than just those pieces. And there’s a way that you can just add and add and add. And membership really became a big focus because of that. So between membership, diversification of revenue, and the place for fans to exist and hang out with each other and get a little bit closer to Rhett and Link, that’s really what pushed into the membership world.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one of the things we know with Food Blogger Pro is you could maybe have a forum, excuse me or a group, but it costs money to support those things. And so if you want to do it well, and at a high level, you have to be strategic with saying, okay, what does the business component of that look like? Let’s talk about if somebody wants to do membership, if somebody wants to do recurring revenue, what are the different ways that they can do that? And maybe we can start with the Rhett and Link example of this exclusive community.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, definitely. I think that exclusive community is a huge, huge piece of a lot of memberships. There’s Discord is big for a reason, and even people streaming on Twitch and commenting on Twitch, it’s huge for a reason. People are there for that community. But we’ll stick with the Discord example for now. When we originally launched the Mythical Society with Rhett and Link Discord, we knew was going to be a component of it because we knew we had to have a place for the fans to exist. So really, I think if you’re thinking about building out a community, it can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. You can put as much or as little effort into it as you want to put into it. But the more you put into it, the more thriving it’s going to become. The more you share about it, the more people are going to want to become a part of it. So I think that there’s really three great ways that a community can be successful in thriving, and I can jump into those if you want

Bjork Ostrom: Me too. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, I think so much of it, I think anybody listening understands like, Hey, membership site, people sign up and they pay monthly or quarterly or annually or understand the idea of recurring revenue, but it’s like what does that actually look like for somebody who’s creating content? They have that business model, they understand content creation, but how do you start to be strategic about looking at different ways to section off certain access to you or whatever it might be. So yeah, if you can talk through those different areas, that would be great. Help fill out the picture.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah. Well, I’ll first start by saying a lot of people view building a community or a place for people to hang out as the hardest thing that they can do. They’re like, oh man, I’m going to have so much upkeep. I’m going to have to hire a moderator. I’m going to have to do X, Y, Z. But the beauty of something like a Discord community for example, is, and the beauty of technology is that you can create bots that can be moderators and make that side of things a little bit easier. So that’s the first thing. I’ll say that it feels intimidating, but it’s less intimidating than you would think.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And the bot would be like, Hey, if somebody says this phrase, don’t let it post. Or once a week have this prompt go out to see what recipe people are making or whatever it might be something that doesn’t feel too impersonal, but builds in some things that lift the weight off of keeping the community active.

Jen Matichuk: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Taking that off your shoulders. Yeah,

Jen Matichuk: I would say you would want to probably start with the one bot or a couple bots for the actual moderation purposes of keeping the community safe, especially if you believe that that is a fear. But when you’re first kicking off a community, I would stay away from a bot that puts out the prompts, et cetera. You kind of want to start with your own personal touch and make sure that things are going well on that side of things. And then push into a bot once you feel like, okay, I’ve got the whole of this. I can basically just let this go and make it so it happens on its own time. But I would say jumping back to the three things, the first thing is, and to jump back to the Rhett and Link example, it’s kind of providing a little bit of a closer access to the person putting out that community. So Link’s example, it’s, there’s a few different things that you could do, but your personality is linked a little bit closer to the content, so people want that closer access. So they do things like Ask me Anythings where they’ll say, okay, at this time on this day, you can jump in and you can post all of those questions that you have, and we’re going to type back to as many of them as we possibly can on this other side of that. Sometimes people film those at the same time and they’ll be typing the questions and just filming a piece of side content that they can then post alongside it and really double up in that content.

Bjork Ostrom: So as they’re answering the ammas, they’re recording themselves answering the AMAs, is that right?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, a little bit meta.

Bjork Ostrom: And talking about it as they’re typing. Is that the idea? Sure. Yep. And then it would just be something that maybe people would listen to after the fact. Yeah, it’s not exactly the same, but we’ll occasionally do a Live Q&A on Zoom within Food Blogger Pro, and then we have, it’s called FBP on the Go for Food Blogger Pro members, so they can listen to that after the fact, if not a part of the q and a or they weren’t able to make it, they don’t want to sit down and watch it on their computer. They can just subscribe to the private podcast and listen to it there. So I love that idea of repurposing the content or making it available in a medium that somebody would prefer to watch. And I would imagine the world of YouTube people are comfortable and the idea of watching video, and so you’re making something that’s maybe previously wasn’t available as a video and video format, which is great.

Jen Matichuk: Exactly. So you’re catering to the different pieces of your audience. Some people want to just type and be a part of that, and some people want to watch and some people want to read, and that is their own prerogative.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Jen Matichuk: So I think that AMA is a really, really great opportunity for bringing out that side and actually a really low hanging piece of fruit for that content. Another thing that is really great when it comes to an exclusive community is you get to talk with other people that also like the same things or thing that you like and connect with those folks. So this one in itself is actually what I would say is making that day-to-day membership viability really strong. So you have your weekly benefits or you have your monthly benefits, you have your quarterly benefits or whatever you’re offering for your membership. This is a daily benefit that you don’t really have to even be part of that. If somebody is active in the community and they choose to consider canceling their membership, they’re going to have to look and say, okay, what have I been doing? Oh my gosh, I’m in this community every single day and I’m going to lose access to that sucks. So it’s going to make them rethink where they’re seeing that daily activity,

Bjork Ostrom: Especially if it’s, I imagine in our world, our world being the world of food and recipe, you can imagine people, a great example of that is people who maybe have certain dietary restrictions and it’s like, man, let’s say you live in some random community in Minnesota. There might not be a lot of other people you can connect with who are also trying to figure out how to eat that way. But one of the things we’ve found to be really true is anytime we’re going through a scenario that’s unique or we feel like we don’t have people in our circle that we can reach out to, if we can find a community of people that already exists that can help walk other people through it. And there’s something about generally speaking, people want to help other people and if somebody comes in and they’re in need to be able to say, Hey, here’s what we learned, here’s how we did it. I think of we’ve interviewed Mauricio before and he has a site called the Perfect Loaf and they have the Perfect Loaf community, and it’s like people who are into bread baking. And the nice thing about that I would imagine is that you aren’t necessarily the creator, aren’t necessarily the one having to show up every day and be like, oh, I’ve got a post. I’ve got to create content. That’s probably a part of it, but part of the value is just the community itself and you facilitating that. Is that true?

Jen Matichuk: Oh, for sure. For sure. You’re talking about a bread baker for example. There’s so many people that are also on this journey that want to learn from people who are further along than they are, or they want to meet with people who are maybe in their same community that they’ve never met and bake bread together. Who knows? I have a surf magazine that’s one of my clients and they’re wanting to launch a Discord to create surf trips together. So it’s people that just want to connect and you’re facilitating that for them without having to be part of it every single day.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s cool. Can you talk about with that functionally, how is that working? You had mentioned Discord, and I think people might hear Memberful Discord and think those are two separate things. Is me facilitating the account access within Discord? Are you using Discord just as an example of somewhere you could do that? How does that all work together? If somebody were to say, Hey, I have a good social following, I have people who are coming to my website, I have an email list, I want to create a community. I’ve heard Jen say Discord, but I’ve also heard Memberful. What does that look like?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, that is a great thought. And being so deep in this world, I often forget that people might not connect the two. So Memberful will integrate directly with a bunch of different products. Basically we’re trying to meet folks where they’re at and we want to plug into something that’s already doing something really, really well versus create our own internal tool that doesn’t kind of flow. So in this case, discord is one of those. So we would plug directly into Discord. The way that it would happen is you would create your own Discord server. And again, this is something that you don’t have to go through this journey on your own. Like we’re here to help you out. We have a lot of people who are Discord experts on our team, but you would create your own Discord server and then you would click a button inside of your meaningful dashboard that basically will authenticate your Memberful dashboard with your Discord server by using a little key that connects the two. Once those two are connected, you can go ahead, and this might get a little technical on the Discord side, but you can create roles within your Discord that you can now map to the tiers that you’ve put together on your Memberful.

Jen Matichuk: When somebody signs up, they become a member, they click connect to the community, which is Discord. Once they’ve signed up, that’s going to take them over to Discord. If they don’t have a Discord account, they can create one and that’s going to automatically authenticate across their Memberful account. They already have a Discord account. They just click through, say, let this Memberful bot control your account, essentially giving them the option to bring them into that community. And then they’re in and they’ll have their little role, which says tier one or tier two or whatever tier they’re on in your program, they’ll be able to access all that content. Does that make sense? Does that work?

Bjork Ostrom: And the nice thing about that is then you have ful, in this case, facilitating the recurring payment discord, facilitating the technology of the community, and it alleviates so much of the effort in building a thing and manage a thing and the technical requirements with it. And this is what I’ve talked about with 12 years ago with Food Blogger Pro as an example of how we’re interacting with the membership world. That’s our best example of that. We are building a lot of this stuff, and it wasn’t necessarily from the ground up, but it’s like using plugins and putting ’em together. And the best thing that you can do as a creator is figure out the existing technology that’s already exists that doesn’t require a huge lift. And then pairing those things together,

Bjork Ostrom: This Being such a great example of that. So you can start to see how, let’s say you have that social following, you have a website with visitors, you have an email list and you feel like, Hey, I like the idea of spitting up this exclusive community. Maybe you do a weekly Zoom call and it’s like, okay, then you have a Zoom link that you drop into a Discord channel a week ahead of time or three days ahead of time and say like, Hey, don’t forget. Add this to your calendar in a week. We’re going to be doing this call together. And instead of requiring developers and engineers and designers, you kind of have everything that you need as a digitally capable person. You can put those pieces together without having to do some super heavy development efforts, which is great. So we talked about within this exclusive community, a few different ideas. Number one, just getting closer to the creator. So maybe you have a following, I think of all the different worlds that could exist here, but a musician and people want to maybe hear new songs that are being written, or if it’s somebody who does recipe and food, maybe it’s like a live cooking class that you otherwise wouldn’t do in any other way. You’re just getting closer and answering questions in real time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interacting within Discord, connecting with like-minded people. So we use the example of you’re trying to eat a certain way or you have dietary restrictions or whatever. It might be just this like, hey, there’s a tribe and these people are like me. Whether it’s through interests or other different considerations, but it’s like a group of people who are into the same thing. And then you said there’s three. So what’s that additional consideration with an exclusive community that we could consider?

Jen Matichuk: So exclusive being the key word, which would be posting exclusive content. If you don’t have another place that you’re going to post this to, you don’t want to put this on your site because your site is strictly for recipes or something like that. This is where you could put that more loose content where it’s not fully edited and it’s not fully polished. That’s where this could exist behind the scenes stuff or silly little things that you want to put up if you want to show more of your personality to this audience that has already jumped in. And I would say going along off of one of your points you just made as a bonus point is if you want to share that Zoom link that is a real time announcement, these communities become a place where you can ping people in real time and they’ll get that ping on their phone if they have the Discord app, instead of sending an email and hoping that they’ll sift through their hundreds of emails to get an announcement. This is a real time situation where you say, Hey, here’s something, check it out now. And they’ll go ahead and they’ll check it out. They’ll get that immediate pain.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things I’ve thought about is almost like pop up meetups. So Lindsay and I were in New York and it’s like, Hey, it’d be really cool to just say we’re going to this restaurant or coffee shop six o’clock, come and meet up. And I feel like the filtering mechanism of having this community would be a great way to do that, where it’s not like this blast to the Instagram or whatever or email list, but you are filtering that down a little bit to this group of people and having the ability just to do more kind of spontaneous meetups or maybe not even spontaneous, you plan a 10 day road trip and make little stops along the way and meet up with people. Something like this great way to facilitate that in a great way to connect with people in real life. So I love that. So all of that under this exclusive community example. So as people are thinking about, Hey, what are the different ways that I might be able to create recurring revenue, create a membership site, the first thing we can think about is kind of this exclusive community. And the example from a technical standpoint would be pairing Memberful with a solution like Discord that’s able to facilitate the interactions within that community. Then you can pair in additional things like Zoom or other, even if it’s a scheduling tool, if you are going to do a meetup, you can start to pair those in. What about a second example of a way that people might be thinking about recurring revenue?

Jen Matichuk: So I think that another thing specific to people in the food world would be pay wall meal plans. Wow, I really butchered that.

Bjork Ostrom: We get it.

Jen Matichuk: Pay walled meal plans.

Bjork Ostrom: Say it five times fast.

Jen Matichuk: I dunno why that was so hard to say, but it’s probably something that a lot of folks have thought about that are food bloggers because you’re putting together recipes and people are probably asking, oh, I love what you’re doing here. Or there’s people with a specific diet you’re talking about and the followers of these folks, they really want more from that. So building out a paywall meal plan could be a really interesting place to dive into.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about that functionally, how you might imagine that working within the context of Memberful? So I think people obviously understand a meal plan. It’s like, Hey, it’s probably on a weekly basis. Here’s the plan, here’s groceries for it. Here are the instructions and ingredients. And a lot of times the great thing is it is repurposing content that already exists. So it’s not like you’re having to create new recipes. You can take these recipes that you do have and then you’re remixing them into a meal plan and that’s the value. It’s like the organization of those that creates the value. But then what does it look like to actually distribute that? Or how would it work within the context of Memberful of somebody who’s like, Hey, I would be interested in doing that.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, I think that the beauty of Memberful is that it’s very malleable and I think on our last podcast together I talked about how malleable it was, and there are a lot of different ways to do this. The way that one of my clients does it, which is Workweek Lunch, they use Memberful and they are exclusively meal prep, meal planning type creator. They allow you access to various levels of previous meal plans. So there’s two different levels. They say level one, you get the specific meal plans from the past, and then level two you get access to all of them plus our meal planning tool. And with that, they have built in an app that they use Memberful to paywall. And within that app you basically say, okay, I want to use this meal plan, and it selects all of those meals and you get the grocery list and you continue on. They also have dripped email that goes with that. So I would say that they are an example that they’ve been doing it a long time and they have perfected the way that works best for them. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend starting this way for everybody. I think that starting small and seeing how it works best for your community is probably the way to go. So in that case, I would say you don’t have to build an app that has all of these meal plans that filter in specific slots that people can easily download. It’s doing all the work probably at the top of the month. That is for the next four weeks when someone signs up, give them immediate access to just a boilerplate meal plan that you’ve decided to give access to anybody who signs up for at first, they’ll be able to see, okay, this is what I’ll get as my content. That would come every week, and then on Sunday mornings or something, send out an email with all of those recipes, how to put them into your meal planning schedule and all of the groceries for the grocery list and start with that. And you wouldn’t have to drip anything out because people are getting the same recipes for each different week rather than, okay, person A signed up this week, so they get week one of recipes, but at the same time, person B signed up three weeks ago, so this week at the same time, this person’s getting week one, they’re getting week three. So that’s where things can get a little bit tricky, and that’s where if you want to get to that place, you would have to rely pretty heavily on an integration with your email service provider Like Discord. We have direct integrations with those, but starting small and then realizing what works and what doesn’t and moving forward from that is probably the best way.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. And I think so much of it is just about starting. I think sometimes people get really intimidated by, and you have this huge system and has to all be perfect, and so much of it is starting and iterating, and it’s one of the great things about a membership site is you can have some money that you are earning, you can reinvest it in, it’s more valuable. People will stick around longer. So I love that idea of just starting and iterating over time as opposed to needing to perfect everything. In the example that you were giving, can you talk specifically again how that would work? So people would sign up, let’s say they do that through Memberful. So you’re setting all of that up. You’d have kind of a widget that you’d put on your site, like code that would facilitate the sign up, and then are they getting added to an email list from an email service provider? Would it be memorable sending out those emails? What does that specifically look like in that example that you shared?

Jen Matichuk: So let’s say if you’re starting really small, really, really small, the first thing that you’re going to do is you’re not going to have an ESP. You’re starting really small, so you don’t even have a

Bjork Ostrom: List. Email service provider.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, email service provider. You can use Memberful. So when somebody signs up, they’re automatically added into Memberful. And Memberful has some built-in tools that you can use. So if you want to immediately send them that first meal plan that I was talking about, you could in the welcome email that can automatically be sent out when somebody signs up can include all of that, can include all the information that one might need for that initial meal plan that you have it all queued up. You can also link them into their Memberful account where you could have a PDF waiting for them in that account that automatically has everything they would need. They could print out the PDF if they wanted to add it to their phone. So really two options there. And then moving forward from that. Memberful also has a built-in email tool. It’s a little bit more bare bones than using an email service provider, but like I said, if you want to start off small and not have to expand and buy all of these different tools, you can start there and send out your meal plans through that every Sunday or however often that you decide to send them.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So what I hear you saying is you can start really small. Let’s say you’re a creator and you have 20,000 followers on Instagram. Maybe you have some traffic on your website, you have some email subscribers. So you do have an email service provider, but you just want to keep it really simple. You could go through the process of saying, Hey, I want to do meal plans and for my meal plans, I’m going to do deliver them once a week. What you were saying is to alleviate stress, probably don’t scramble to do it once a week, plan ahead. So you know what you’re going to be sending out ahead of time a few weeks before or month before, kind of have that scheduled out. And then you’re just sending out in real time. So maybe somebody signs up and if they sign up on a Wednesday and meal plans go out on a Sunday, you can send them that PDF so they have something right away of value. But then just once a week you’ll have these meal plans that you have, you’ll send them out and you can just do that through Memberful. The thing that I love in that example is let’s say you have those 20,000 email subscribers or 20,000 followers and maybe a few thousand email subscribers, anybody who’s listening to this that has those numbers, you’ll get somebody to sign up and you have good content, you’ve produced quality recipes, you’ll get somebody to sign up and you will have a business that recurring revenue, which is a more valuable business than a business that doesn’t have recurring revenue, generally speaking. And the reason is because it’s more predictable, it’s more scalable. It’s all of those things that we talked about before. That’s what makes a good business. And it doesn’t require hundreds of thousands of people. It requires a few hundred people or a few thousand people who want to come to you to get a solution for a problem that they have. In this case, it would be help getting meals on the table through you doing the work of organizing the recipes that you already have into meal plans. So I love that. I think it’s a great way for folks in our world to think about taking content that already exists and finding other ways to make it valuable. So we’ve talked about exclusive community and pairing discord with meaningful and how that can work and the different ways that you could do that, the different types of content you could create within that exclusive community. We talked about this idea of people signing up for meal plans, paywall meal plans. So it’s not necessarily something you’re giving away for free, it’s something that people are signing up for and paying for monthly or quarterly or yearly. What’s the third example of ways that people in the food space could be thinking about creating recurring revenue or membership?

Jen Matichuk: So I think the third example is going more in depth on your content. So taking what you’ve already created. So you’ve made all these incredible recipes and expanding on those, making video content off of those, making a full recipe walkthrough video and showing people how to do this versus telling them the classic writers, the classic writer’s note is show don’t tell,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So one of the things, we haven’t ever done this, but I’ve always been curious what this would look like would be, let’s say for Pinch of Yum. So the food site that we run, we have obviously the recipe itself on the site, and a lot of times we’ll have, it’s almost like a trailer for the recipe, which is a short form Instagram video. And the thing that I’ve always wondered about is could there be, and I feel like this is an example of it, could there be a long form video that is the best possible step-by-step video that you could have that walks people through exactly how to make the recipe? And some people would say, oh, you should just post that for free, which I get, and there might be a strategy around that, but I’ve always wondered, what if you had that as an exclusive and you let people know, Hey, if your preference is video, you sign up and get access to this long form explainer video that we do with each and every recipe. If that was something that you were doing, how would that work? What would that look like functionally in terms of embedding that within the site? Or would it be a link and then the link allows you to sign up and then you view that video somewhere else? What would it look like in terms of implementation of that?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, so right now, the way that Memberful functions is that if you are on your own WordPress site and you’re integrated with Memberful, you could create a post that is for members only. So once you create that new post, you basically are checking a box that says, make this so only active members can view this. And that’s in the simplest way that you can protect something within that post. You’re obviously going to have to add that video content. So if you’re doing this in depth recipe piece, that video is going to have to live somewhere. WordPress doesn’t have built-in hosting. So there’s a few different places that folks go to. There’s YouTube unlisted, and that’s the easiest and the most free version of this all.

Jen Matichuk: Also the easiest to share that link out with somebody else. So some people still use it and they just actually trust their community enough. And for the most part, those aren’t getting shared outside of the community.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean if you post a video on YouTube and you say, unlist, we want this to be an unlisted video. People can’t go to YouTube and find it. Exactly. But if you have it on a paywall post on your site and somebody goes to it, they then have access to it. They could click on the YouTube link and they could share it to somebody else.

Jen Matichuk: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So it’s not like the most restrictive, restricted content.

Jen Matichuk: Yes, it’s not the most secure, I would say, but it does the trick for a lot of folks. The next step would be something like Vimeo where you have to pay a little bit more, but you can also restrict films. I’m saying films because I’m synonymous with Vimeo Films. You can restrict your content

Bjork Ostrom: So, it’s like from an independent video producer standpoint, we’d call them films, otherwise referred to as videos in the content creator world.

Jen Matichuk: So you could restrict those videos to certain domains So that if somebody for whatever reason did get that link, it can only be viewed on your domain and your domain only has the content behind a protected post. So they would have to sign up to see that. And then you can get really, really technical. Let’s say you are making incredible money and you want everything to be completely branded and you’re feeling really good about it. You could use something like Wistia or JW Player where you can really brand the video player and then embed it into your own site. So that’s how Memberful operates right now. I will say that Memberful in the future, we are planning to offer video hosting on our internal Memberful site. So it wouldn’t live on your own website, but it could live on the Memberful hosted site that you could use as an extension of your site.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And for Food Blogger Pro, we do Vimeo, and then we do that exact same thing that you’re talking about, which is like, Hey, we’re going to restrict this. It can only show up on food blogger pro.com and they have decent branding. We can change the colors and the prompts and things like that as well, which works out pretty well. So I think people can imagine, Hey, what does that look like? You maybe have exclusive in-depth content where you’re covering something in greater depth than you would’ve in just a typical post video being a good example of that. But there’s probably other examples that you could come up with as well. So I think that helps to fill out the picture. You have this idea of exclusive community and we talked about Discord and pairing that with Memberful, there’s paywall meal plans and remixing your existing content into an organized structure and sending that out on a weekly basis. Maybe you’re just going super in-depth with certain recipes and doing a long-form video, and people are paying for access to that. All of which I think makes sense and allows people to stay within what they’re already good at, which is creating content. And building community is just finding a way to build something adjacent to what you’re already doing and charging for it. And what I love about it, and I said this, it changes the mindset from marketing your content to content marketing and changing to doing content marketing can be a real value add on the investment that you’re making in that content just due to the nature of how it’s being monetized. The last question that I have is around ad-free. Is that something that we can facilitate within a WordPress site to allow people to have an ad-free experience, or how does that work? I know we’ve mentioned that briefly before.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, so it is something that folks are using. Oh, my dog just hopped on.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. For anybody listening, there was a little dog cameo. What’s your dog’s name?

Jen Matichuk: It’s Riley.

Bjork Ostrom: Riley, she’s, she’s just

Jen Matichuk: Chilling in her favorite spot.

Bjork Ostrom: Welcome to the podcast, Riley.

Jen Matichuk: So, oh, I’m going to have to rethink this. Okay, ad-free. Ad free. I will take that from the top. So ad-free. Yeah, you can definitely add that in as a benefit, and people have added ad-free as a benefit into their Memberful offering. The way that you do it can vary based on the ad tech that you’re using. There is one specific way that you grab this snippet of code essentially that we can provide to you. And you’re going to be using short codes from WordPress as well where you add that into the head of your site. So you might need to call on a developer friend if you’re not super familiar with that. Or if you are a little bit more techie, you can add that in and call on your ad tech providers. So if you’re using RIV or something like that, you might need to send their support and email. Just be like, Hey, I’m integrating with Memberful. We want to offer an ad-free for people who have a logged-in state. And adding in all of those pieces into that little snippet of code essentially is if this person is logged in, then don’t show these ads in these spaces type thing. So it sounds simple, laying it out, it can be a little bit complex, but once you get it done, it’s done. And once are actually working on building out very specific guides to some of the top ad tech companies that food bloggers specifically are using, and we’re hoping to have those out sometime in the next quarter.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, that makes sense. And like you said, it feels like beneficial in an added benefit. It seems like the core offering would be one of those things that we talked about, exclusive community or meal plans or in-depth content. Those are the things that people would really be interested in. And I think with ad Free, it might be beneficial like, Hey, that’s kind of cool to do on top of it, maybe different than a, I don’t even know if New York Times does it, but New York Times, which would be like, Hey, you kind of have all of these different sections and all of these different ways that you might interact with it. Whereas I’m thinking of Pinch of Yum. It’s like people probably come there decent amount, but it’s not like they’re there everyday multiple times a day.

Bjork Ostrom: So ad-free, being like, Hey, that’s great, but great on top of some of these other offerings that seems like really should be the core of what you’re looking at. Do you have any creators that you would point Shine a light on that are using Memberful and like, Hey, they’re doing really good work on the internet and you should check ’em out?

Jen Matichuk: Yes. I have a bunch of food specific creators that I think are doing a great job. One of them is Jacques Pepin. Obviously people should probably know him, but he has a video recipe book that is really, really great and I would definitely urge people to check that out if they’re looking to create video content. Bittman Project is another one. Mark Bittman is running that side of things. He does a lot of content. He has so many recipes on his site, and he also does food musings, food writing, so they have a really beautiful site as well. We talked about Workweek Lunch.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jen Matichuk: One other site, Little Spoon Farm, they are just doing ad-free. So if you want to see what that looks like and maybe take that on as a place to start your membership journey, that could be an interesting spot.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Jen Matichuk: And another one that I point to often, her name’s Molly Baz. I’m sure a lot of people know her. I don’t think she’s traditionally a food blogger, but she releases one recipe a week and her personality really shines through. So if you’re starting to think that you want to put more of your personality into what you’re doing, I think she’s a great place to start because her writing is filled with her voice. And when she does her content on her Instagram or anything like that, that teases the membership. It really pushes people through. So she’s a great example for that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And a great example of marketing content marketing, somebody who’s smart about that approach and looking like, Hey, I have a product. I have an offering. I create content for free and I point people to that product. And that being just the different and smart approach to business, I think compared to a lot of food creators who, even if it’s just like Instagram, oh, you’re just growing Instagram followers to work with sponsors that can work and people have really successful businesses with that. But content marketing versus marketing content, if you have that product that you can sell as opposed to somebody else’s, it just allows it to be more predictable, more stable business, probably less stressful to some degree, You have more of a playbook that you can run versus trying to get the next deal. So Jen, you understand this world really well. It’s so fun to talk to you about it, not only because you’ve done it, you’ve worked with creators to implement a successful site, but I know that you’ve also talked with hundreds of other creators and publishers to help them do what they’re doing. And so it’s a gift to have you on to talk about all this stuff. If people want to connect with you or they want to take the next step with Memberful, what’s the best way for people who are starting to think about, Hey, this might be interesting for me to move forward with this. What’s the best way for them to take the next step?

Jen Matichuk: Send me an email. I will talk to anybody who wants to chat [email protected], one N. And yeah, I’m happy to have a chat with anybody who comes from this podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I feel like that’s the best call to action is there’s no download, there’s no URL to go to. It’s just like, Hey, if you’re interested, it’s shooting off a quick email. I tell this story a lot of, one of the most important things that I’ve done with Food Blogger Pro is before I went to bed one night, I sent an email to somebody who’s now a friend who I didn’t know at the time who had built a membership site, and I was like, Hey, we’re thinking about doing this. Could we just talk about what it might look like? And I wasn’t going to do it. And then I was just like, oh, you got to do it. Just do it before you go to bed. It was late night, sent it off, and that kicked off what was for us, a business that we’ve now run for over a decade. And so I think that’s great and a fun time for us, kind of how our journey started.

Jen Matichuk: That’s amazing. What a good story.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Jen, thanks for coming on. Great to talk to you again, and excited for people to take the next step here and not only to reach more people and have deeper impact, but also to help evolve their business. So thanks for talking through it and thanks for coming on.

Jen Matichuk: Thank you so much for having me again. It was a blast.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you’re a new member or you’re thinking about becoming a member. And I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a Live Q&A over Zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google, algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we’ll do an Ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins, site speed. Really, we cover every topic you might need to know something about as a food creator, as a Food Blogger Pro member, you’re given the option to submit questions in advance, or you can submit questions during the Live Q&A and the guest and Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback. It’s always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the food creator community, and it’s just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better these Q and as are hosted live. But we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can’t make it live. So anyways, it’s just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren’t yet a member, and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. And that’s it for this week. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Make it a great week.