“I want a recurring revenue offer…what are my options?”

So often, people assume a recurring offer HAS to be a high-touch membership with calls, and experts, and a community, and and and. 🤮 Or a SaaS (software as a service), like MemberVault is. But there are other options!!

See my 6 categories below with an optional podcast episode where I share more about each (transcript included below). Recurring revenue isn't just the traditional membership or SaaS (software as a service) tool. You've got options!

We'll have speakers for EACH of the below categories in the Recurring Revenue Summit, talking in depth about what they like/dislike. So definitely sign up for the free summit if you want to hear more.

1. Transformational membership - this is your standard format that you think of with a membership (ie community, calls, etc)

2. Content membership - this a membership with limited access to the founder, and primarily content based (ie monthly templates)

Considering either of the above? Check out this “2 Types of Memberships” blog post to avoid overwhelming yourself by doing both. 

3. Direct access to you - ie recurring VIP days, coaching or even being a recurring guest expert for someone else's community

4. Conversational - ie paid newsletter, paid podcast where people are paying to hear what you have to say

5. Container - ie you organize monthly events like coworking or networking and create a "container" that people are paying for

6. Software/tool - ie MemberVault

OK, so that's the quickie category list. If you want to hear more, listen to the below podcast OR read the time stamped transcript. 

Learn more about each category on the quickie podcast episode below, pulled from my All Access Q&A private podcast (transcript underneath).

Erin Kelly [00:00:00]:
The question for this episode is, I want recurring revenue. What are my options? So this is a great place to start. If this is where you're at, where you know you want recurring revenue, you know you don't want to be starting from, from zero every month. And even if you're not starting from zero, let's say you have a bunch of retainer clients, like you're a service provider or even a coach, and you know that you have these people locked in, but it's probably not more than ten people if you're a coach or a service provider, and it's probably closer to five or even less if you're a service provider. I know back when I was an online business manager, I had two to three retainer clients at any given time. And it was usually a long term arrangement. But if someone changed their business model or if they went out of business or whatever, it was like, it didn't take much to shake up what I was bringing home every month revenue wise. I mean, usually there was like a 30 day notice.

Erin Kelly [00:00:53]:
And it's, this isn't, this isn't something that happened a lot to me, but it is something to be aware of. And it is actually the reason why I ended up going all in, in with membervault. My biggest OBM, which is an online business manager, my biggest OBM retainer client decided that they were closing their business and they were going to be changing their business model and opening a different business, and they weren't ready to, for that new business. They weren't ready to have the cost of an OBM on staff. And at this point, we had a lot of interest in membervault and, but it wasn't bringing in very much money. And this is definitely a scary place for anyone that's starting off with recurring revenue is like, ah, like, if I want to go all in with this and I only have so much time, like, where do, when do I decide to cut off and to free up more time from the thing that I've been doing to bring in revenue? And so for me, in that case, you know, and it just so happened that we were pregnant with our second kid. It was like Max stress levels. And I decided, you know, hey, this is the fork in the road.

Erin Kelly [00:01:56]:
Do we go all in with a software tool which is recurring revenue, which is membervault in this particular story, or do I go and get another large recurring client? And I totally could have, I could have gotten another big retainer client that would be paying our bills. And it, but it would have taken up so much time and energy that I really wouldn't have been able to go all in with membervault. And so Mike and I had a big heart to heart, and we decided, like, we're gonna go all in. And so even if you're not starting from zero every month because you have these clients, it is really nice to have this recurring revenue, especially if it's spread across a larger number of people. So that barring, like, anything huge, where, like, there's like a disaster that, you know, like a messaging disaster or something where a bunch of people cancel all at once. For the most part, if you have a large number of people that are paying you for a recurring revenue model, the stability of your revenue is so much greater than most of the other business models that I've been involved in at least. But not everyone wants to do the standard membership. I know I don't.

Erin Kelly [00:03:04]:
The standard membership where, you know, you have this content and you are showing up and doing like, weekly calls, and you have a community and you're bringing in experts, like, no, like, that is my nightmare. I would not run a membership like that. And there's different types of memberships. So that's not, that's the first kind of, like, if you're thinking that's the only way to have recurring revenue, and that's the only way to have a membership, that's not true. But also, you don't have to have a membership of any kind to bring in recurring revenue. So I have six different types of recurring revenue to get you thinking about. And, like, they're like the big picture. In my next episode, I'm going to actually break down ten specific ideas to get you thinking that are recurring revenue ideas that are not memberships.

Erin Kelly [00:03:47]:
But for this episode, let's talk about, like, the six big brackets of recurring revenue models that you can be thinking about. So the first one is transformational membership. So that's the standard membership that I just mentioned. And I am going to link to the article that I'm pulling that breakdown from, because for transformational and content, there is an article that I think is the best one that I've ever read in terms of being really, really clear about the two different types of memberships. And she used the word transformational. And I think that that is such a good way to look at it. So there's a transformational membership model, and then there's the second one is the content based membership model, which is what I'm doing with the all access membership that I have for member vault so for the transformational, you are actually, they are getting, people are getting access to you and you are helping them transform to an outcome that they desire. And so there might be content, although in that article it's really great because it's like, don't try and do both at the same time, like you're either doing one or the other.

Erin Kelly [00:04:46]:
But I would argue that you definitely need to have some kind of curriculum or resource available for your transformational membership. But that's not necessarily, that's not the value proposition for that membership. It is access to you and access to the community. So access to the other people that are in the membership. So that is a transformational, that's the first type. Second type is a content recurring revenue model. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be a membership. There doesn't have to be a community or anything like that.

Erin Kelly [00:05:13]:
It could literally be, I've seen some really great ones popping up where like they deliver for blog post ideas for you each month and that's it. Or they deliver email templates for you every month. And that's what I just introduced for the all Access membership and it's really great. I would definitely describe the all Access membership as a content based membership where I'm like, everyone, you know, everyone that's in the all Access membership is getting access to all my action labs and to these monthly marketing templates. So email and social post templates and that's like, that's really it. And then of course, this podcast itself is also content, right? But it's not necessarily access. We kind of dabbled with a community. I'm actually going to be closing it down just because we don't use it.

Erin Kelly [00:05:52]:
And seeing the difference between a transformational and a content, like for me and my personality type and my goals for my life and like what my daily, my day to day looks like, a content membership makes a lot more sense for me. But there's a lot of different ways that you can structure this. So remember, this is definitely like the big picture bracket of the recurring revenue model for these different options. So content, like, you're giving people content, it could be access to like all access to all of the things that you, all of your digital offers. Like, there's so many different ways for you to do this, right? So then the third type is one to one, direct access to you. So that could be like a VIP day recurring revenue where you only have, let's say it depends on you and like what you want your life to look like and what kind of like workload, you can work with. It definitely needs to like keep some, some space in there in case you need to like reschedule somebody. But let's say you have like 15 people that you're working with on a month to month basis.

Erin Kelly [00:06:50]:
They're paying you recurring, they get one vip day a month and they don't get any other access to you. Like, it's just a VIP day. You show up, you probably touch base with them beforehand. You can do that all with automations and you show up and you do the work. And that, if I was a service provider, I would totally do that. I probably would combine it with a content membership and then have the VIP 101 access to me as like the upsell. But that is, that is pretty cool. That's a pretty cool way to do it.

Erin Kelly [00:07:18]:
So one to one access, it could also be coaching where they get access to you for a set period of time for the month, or they just have open access to you for the whole month. So many different ways to structure this. So the fourth type is conversational. And so I was thinking about what to call this and I'm thinking about things like Substack where people are paying you to get emails delivered to them. I, I subscribe to a lot of sub stacks and I have been, it's been really interesting to see that they actually do get some like a community feel because it's like everyone that is paying for that sub stack that is commenting on those articles, they're there for both the person who's writing it, but also because they're interested in the topic. And so it kind of forms this like really nice community. It's not a super interactive community, like there is for like a standard membership. Um, but it is, it's a pretty good, it's a pretty cool feeling.

Erin Kelly [00:08:14]:
There's also, you could do a paid private podcast model. That's also fantastic. So conversational, or it's kind of like a blend between content and. But I think that the way that I'm looking about for conversational is that it's like an ongoing conversation where you're sharing your perspectives or you're sharing your ideas over time, where the content one is, to me, more like actionable content that you're giving people access to. So that's just the way that I'm looking at it. The fifth type is a container. So you could be, people could sign up for your recurring revenue model and every month you're organizing a set number of co working calls that they get access to, or like happy hour calls or whatever it is, like you're creating your, what they're paying you for is your ability to create this like container that they now have access to. And then of course the 6th is the classic recurring revenue, and that is software, which is what membervault is.

Erin Kelly [00:09:11]:
That's definitely, I almost didn't include that because it's not something that most people are going to want to dive into. It's pretty complicated. You have to have a developer. But I do think that there's, I've seen some really cool software memberships where it's like, you know, they're, they're creating something with like chat GPT and you're getting access to the prompts and like, it's not really, it's not as traditional software, it's not like membervault where, you know, that's being built by us, but it is, I think, kind of like a hybrid and it's still someone like using the tool that you're creating. So maybe instead of software it should be tool like a tech tool. But that's, that's like the classic recurring revenue. It's like membership and SaaS, which is software as a service. So those are the six different types of recurring revenue.

Erin Kelly [00:09:59]:
As I see it. I am not all knowing. I might have totally forgotten one. But out of all the years and years and years that I've been working in online business and my fascination with all things like sales and offers, these are the brackets that I see. And they're going to be, like I said, they could be upsells or downsells, you can combine them, but just be really intentional about which one are you doing and you're not combining like four different models. And then I think that's how you end up getting really overwhelmed. You know, you're trying to do too much, too much in one package. And so definitely be, you know, looking at like which one's gonna fit me best and like how I like to show up and what I teach people or how I support people, what my audience is like all that good stuff.

Erin Kelly [00:10:50]:
So the next episode is gonna be talking about ten different ideas, very specific ideas that you can take and run with that are not a standard membership.

This is a sample episode from the Your Questions, Answered podcast, which is part of the All Access membership.

If you’re on our All Access plan, you can also listen to this on-the-go inside our private podcast, Your Questions, Answered. ❤️

Want to try this out in your own account? Sign up for our free, no credit card required trial here, or look up your account here.