Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson. Welcome to episode 36 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is Lee. How are you doing? Now in this episode, we we have Marcus Couch, and he’s kind of involved in a whole load of stuff, but you’ll probably know him from a very well-known WordPress podcast. And you may have also heard of the new offering he has, which is the Membership Coach over at membershipcoach.com. So today we have a great episode. We’re going to learn about what he’s doing there, but also we’re going to find out what he’s been up to with his agency over the last few years. And it’s an amazing, exciting story, and he drops real good value left, right, and centre. Before we crack on, can I encourage you, head on over to the Facebook group at LeeJacksonDev.com/group. You’ll be redirected and I would love to meet you. Everyone there is having a great time. We’re chatting, we’re asking WordPress-related questions, sometimes not even WordPress-related questions. We might even be sharing cool pictures and funny jokes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Let’s go over, let’s have a conversation, let’s all meet up because it’s a great place to be. Guys, enjoy the show. Hello, it is your host Lee here at the WP Innovator Podcast, and today we have two bald guys in the room. Whoop whoop.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Sorry, mate. I noticed these things the minute I see another bald guy. I’m like, yes, we have a connexion. We’ve got something in common. And that guy is Sir Marcus Couch. How you doing?
Marcus Couch
I am very good. How are you today?
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’m good. I just knighted you. How do you feel about that?
Marcus Couch
I think that distinction is probably fitting coming from where you’re from.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I don’t think I’ve got any authority to actually do that, but feel free to use the title. I’m not going to complain.
Marcus Couch
I will. I’m going to use that tonight on WordPress Weekly.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Hello everybody, this is Sir Michael Couch. Go on, go on, do us a British accent. Can you do one?
Marcus Couch
Not very well, no. I am 100% English. However, Um, I, I, I lost the dialect really generations ago. Yes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh, you mean 100% English generations ago? Not like you were born out here and then kind of escaped and went to America?
Marcus Couch
No. Uh, actually my family migrated to America from England in 1690. And, uh, I don’t know, maybe they just, they just hung around other English people and you can barely remember it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So that’s right. 1690. That’s insane. Well, let’s tell people who this lovely man is. Marcus Couch, I’m going to— this is always like the This Is Your Life round. All right. Marcus Couch, he is a podcaster and has been so for 11 years, so that must mean you started at age 10. You’ve been using WordPress for 10 years, which pretty much means you’ve been using WordPress since it started. You run a WordPress marketing agency of over 40 employees. I’ve got 2. I know how stressful that is, so 40, you have my respect. You currently do a membership— site work with high-level clients, which is awesome. I know that’s highly in demand. Lots of people are talking about membership sites, which is why I was really excited when we connected. And you’ve just launched the Membership Coach programme, which is at membershipcoach.com. Do you want to kind of expand on who you are, say hi, a bit more about you, maybe talk about your podcast? Just give us a little introduction into the world of Maka’s Couch for those people who live under a rock who’ve never heard of you. In the web?
Marcus Couch
Sure, absolutely. So most people have referred to me as kind of the plugin guru in terms of the WordPress community. That started with an obsession that I got about 10 years ago when there were just a few hundred plugins in the WordPress repository. And so every day, unlike most people that cheque in with the news or the latest happenings or the weather or things like that, my first link of the day is actually the new plugins that come out in the repository. So I’ve literally window shopped probably all 40,000 plugins that have come about in terms of the repository. So that’s given me a pretty keen edge in what is trending in terms of WordPress, uh, what new innovations and new developments have come out from a technological standpoint. And I’ve tried to convey those over to the listening audience. So. Even though I did podcasts, I started 11 years ago. I actually did a music show, and that show became so popular it was rebroadcast on satellite radio. And after a while, I, I really just got tired of only talking for 10 seconds at a time before I would introduce a, you know, a song or something.
Marcus Couch
And so I really wanted to start getting into doing more WordPress stuff. Here’s a secret that maybe some people don’t know that hear me on WordPress Weekly for a long time. I asked to be the co-host 4 years before it actually happened and was declined. And how rude. Yeah, I know. So that’s what brought me to the WordPress Plugins A to Z podcast was I wanted to get some sort of street credibility within the WordPress community. And so I started doing that, and then eventually people took notice, and then I got my wish. I got to be the co-host on WordPress Weekly.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s pretty awesome, mate. Yeah, yeah, you did something to stand out. I was interviewed the other day actually about why I’m in podcasting, and I said one of the things I’ve done podcasting for is to stand out in my particular niche because there are a lot of developers and people in my niche know of developers, but when they suddenly see a guy who’s podcasting, you, you kind of get— it’s kind of a natural exposure, isn’t it? People are going to listen to you, drawn to you. I’ve— I don’t know how you heard of me necessarily. Well, actually, I do know, you told me just before, but you know, you naturally found me through a podcast. That’s pretty freaking awesome. I mean, I already knew of you because I’ve been listening to WordPress Weekly. I’m into WordPress. It would be a sin if I was not listening to that podcast, obviously. Um, but that’s, that’s a cool story, man. So, uh, family, kids? Any of that good stuff?
Marcus Couch
I have a beautiful wife and a stepson who is grown and lives a couple thousand miles away.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So that’s the thing about the US, isn’t it? It’s so big. You’ve got relatives across the— like 2,000 miles away. That’s insane, right?
Marcus Couch
Yeah, he lives in Hawaii actually. So, um, but, um, that must be tough for him. Yeah, yeah, no, I don’t think so. Um, so I’ve, uh, you know, I’ve done a lot in WordPress. I do a lot. I— the nice thing is, is I do have a lot of high-level clients with really deep pockets that allow me the opportunity to review different things on their dime and learn different techniques and, and all of that. So, you know, WordPress Podcasts for me adds to that, and it enhances what I’m able to do because of the fact that I’m I’ve got my pulse on all of the influencers like yourself and Matt Medeiros and some of the other great WordPress podcasters that are out there and their guests. They frequently contribute to my arsenal in terms of, you know, external tools, third-party stuff that’s not even WordPress, CRM systems, emailing funnels, all that kind of stuff. So that’s why I’m really deep into the community via podcasts. I think that you can probably get I don’t know if you, if you listened to all the different WordPress podcasts that were out there, even the really, really high-level coding ones, um, it’s not hard to fall into the crowd in terms of being an influencer yourself, you know, when you start your own podcast.
Marcus Couch
The, the company that we’ve got in terms of all of the different podcasters are really heavy hitters. I mean, you’ve got guys that run million-dollar businesses, you’ve got people that, you know, like yourself that talk to agencies and people that are behind the development cycles of WordPress. It’s a pretty diverse group that we have on all different skill levels in all different regions.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I love as well that, I mean, originally back in the day, WordPress was very much about just the plugins and things you could do and create, but over the last 10 years, there’s been this huge kind of, Convergence, where we all talk about not just WordPress but things like lead generation, marketing funnels, you know, those things you mentioned, things that 10 years ago when I got into WordPress as well, when it was just this tiny little slightly ugly looking baby, um, and I thought this is the best thing since sliced bread, you know, the conversations and stuff I’ve learned because I’ve been a part of the community for, you know, it’s been, it’s insane really. I would have never have got into any of this stuff. Um, so I, I don’t know if it— where did your agency start? Was that kind of a pre-WordPress thing or is that something as a result of it, of WordPress itself.
Marcus Couch
Uh, the agency started, uh, 2009, and I had actually been the director of marketing for Entrepreneur Magazine, um, for a couple years and dealt with, you know, monstrous clients and strategic partnerships like American Express and, uh, you know, Visa and giant insurance agencies and banks and, and that kind of thing to deal with strategic alliances in terms of content and events for Entrepreneur Magazine. And what’s really funny is while I was there, which is 2006 through ’08, I had to beg them to get involved in social media at the time and was shut down many times. And it’s funny because that’s the cornerstone of their entire business today. And that’s a lesson to be learned for all of you out there that are running your own businesses, is that you don’t have to go through that corporate bureaucracy that everyone else does. You can be a lot more agile than big media companies are, believe it or not. And it’s, it’s something to understand that even just the basic WordPress user who’s got a year’s worth of experience probably has more know-how in terms of online site development and being able to tweak a funnel and make landing pages and all that, you’ve got more power than most Fortune 500 companies when it comes to being able to develop things without having to go through so much red tape.
Marcus Couch
And that’s something that I think people get intimidated by when they know that they have to compete with a bigger entity. But for me, I look at it as just kind of an unbridled challenge to, you know, to throw down and know that, you know, these guys are a whole team of probably, you know, millennials that don’t have the experience. And, you know, you can really, can really drive a lot of traffic over them. So it’s, it’s a, it’s an interesting dichotomy what WordPress allows you to do, and the fact that it’s open source, the fact that it leads in so many different directions versus you know, with all the themes and plugins and all of that versus every other platform that’s out there.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So true. Just as you were kind of saying that, it really felt, it was really valuable what you were saying. I love that, you know, it is, it’s an equaliser, if not a massive threat to the big organisations that, you know, we can do these sorts of things nowadays. Um, but, uh, I kind of, as you were giving the speech, I kind of imagined you as the William Wallace of WordPress just then, like giving that speech. And I’m kind of tempted to edit some music in, in the background. Because that was well cut and well done and really inspirational. It was one of those speeches I just wish there was a soundtrack around, you know. Yeah, yeah.
Marcus Couch
So, and it’s not meant to be an inspirational speech, it’s really just meant to be, um, the first stone on your path.
Lee Matthew Jackson
But it is though. The thing is, people don’t get that. I meet so many agencies, so many small agencies that do not get that aspect. They, they won’t even go for bigger jobs or anything like that because they instantly feel like they cannot compete. And yet what you just said was hit the on the head. You know, the very first thing, you know, believe in yourself because you absolutely can.
Marcus Couch
Completely. Yeah, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s not even a question. Yeah, if you’ve got basic drive and WordPress skills and a little bit of graphic knowledge, you can do anything you want there. I’ve, I have seen— here’s a good challenge for everybody out there: find the most technically complex site from a big media company that you’ve found, and then go theme that. Go make that theme. Go see if you can replicate that. And I bet you can do it under 24 hours. And that’s, that’s the entire, uh, strategy of that media company is that theme and the content that lies within it. You can do that. You can make that in, in a day. You could. It’s just people don’t challenge themselves oftentimes.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, why don’t we throw that down to people right now? There’s a challenge there from Marcus. We can make a landing page and put it in the show notes, and it would be great if you find a site like that, theme it. Go and have a go at theming it, and we’ll share it all with Marcus as well. I’ll get, you know, submit— I’ll create a page, we’ll put it in the show notes. Submit your link of whatever the work you’ve done, uh, the site, why you did it, etc. And let’s take a look at that. The reason being is it’s going to prove Marcus is right, but also hopefully it will boost your own confidence as well. You’re like, crap, yeah, I can actually do this. I can compete with these big guys. And I bet they spent millions of pounds as well on those websites, mate, didn’t they? Oh, I bet.
Marcus Couch
I bet. And probably 6 months and tonnes of time. And it probably changed 50 times in that 6 months because some C-level executive didn’t like the type style.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So you started in 2009. Was that with a WordPress Drive at the time?
Marcus Couch
Yes, actually, uh, we did a lot of multi-sites, so I used to do a lot of real estate sites and for real estate agents and pulling off of the MLS database, which is just, uh, property listings that, that people use. Um, and with that, uh, it eventually led me to dealing with other high-level clients. I was dealing with like Shell Oil Company, um, a lot of big apparel companies, uh, like Foot Locker and Eastbay, which are pretty giant. I dealt with a couple banks, and then I started doing a lot of work with GoDaddy and some of the other big marketing initiatives that, that were out there once they did their transition. So, um, it was fun. And then I started working a lot in, uh, with authors. I started going to like some motivational conferences and, uh, speaking engagements and things, and I would always talk to the team that was behind the scenes, kind of the back office people, and let them know, you know, I went through this process, I went through the onboarding process, I signed up, got the ticket, all that. And, you know, there’s really about 5 or 6 things that you should be doing within this.
Marcus Couch
And so I started to gain their attention, you know, they would, they would lean their ear my way when it came to those things. So if anybody out there has ever seen the movie The Secret, Those are about half of that cast is my clients. They’re, they’re clients now. I’ve got, uh, no way, huge authors, motivational speakers. Um, I’ve got, uh, 2 musicians as clients, um, one of which is a platinum artist and the other one is a kind of a punkish band that always plays on the Vans Warped Tour. And they wanted to find ways in which to get recurring revenue all of the time. So, it wasn’t just a question of them touring or anything like that and they wanted a more solid connexion with their fans. So, we developed a lot of fan sites and things that were like $10 a year. Some of them are $15 a month depending on what level and what content they want. And so, these artists share that content as they’re on the road, as they’re in the studio and kind of give everybody a sneak preview of what it’s like to be in a band.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So over time, you, you’ve kind of diversified into these high-level— sorry, high-level membership systems, essentially. So recurring review in that, in that way.
Marcus Couch
Yeah, I started out really small doing themes like, um, like Wishlist Member, I think was the first membership plugin I used. And then eventually it all gets higher and higher and higher in terms of what you use. And nowadays with things like that, I’m using stuff like Infusionsoft and then I use Memberium to do a connexion between Infusionsoft and WordPress for the member gateways. I’ve even started to get into really crazy stuff for online learning. There’s a thing called Tin Can API that— imagine this, Lee, if I have you play a game with an Xbox or something, and I can tell by your reaction times and the way that you interact during the game and actually output an XML file based on your score. And then based on that criteria, I can tell how fast I should give you online training courses solely based on your score in the game. And not really— oh yeah, that’s my main—
Lee Matthew Jackson
brain’s just melting a little bit.
Marcus Couch
Um, I can tell how long you’ve watched a video, when you paused it, when you started it, what the frequency is of that, what the psychology is behind that. If you’ve got a bad attention span, something—
Lee Matthew Jackson
I get you.
Marcus Couch
And then I can alter my courses based on that. So it’s very interactive. It’s like the— it’s the new thing when it comes to, uh, learning, learning.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s amazing. Well, I didn’t know about that. That’s incredible. I mean, so you’ll know every time I went for a coffee, which is a lot of times during a training course, but The idea there as well is, is that that helps you— do you mean that helps you deliver very specific training? So you might send me down a slightly different training funnel on the same course with some maybe shorter, shorter videos or something?
Marcus Couch
Sure, because maybe, maybe you are remedial and maybe I need to give you the refresher course, or maybe you’re advanced and I can just cut the first 3 things out of it because I know that you already get it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s amazing.
Marcus Couch
It is. And the thing about it is it’s It’s called— so we all know what an LMS is, right? Learning management system. This is what’s known as an LRS, which is learning record storage. And it’s just supposed to be kind of a portable case that contains all of your different educational markers, milestones, things you’ve accomplished, things that you may be having trouble with. And then the next person down the chain that that has this Tin Can API can actually pull your LRS and design courses and systems and market around that. It is pretty amazing.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And is that— so that— so, so you’re implementing this with, with the membership sites that you’re putting out there, and that’s to the advantage of the people that then run those courses, etc.? And assumedly you help them with that content as well, um, kind of disseminating, kind of splitting out and sending people off in the relevant directions. Is that the data, the LRS data stored only for that client that you’re doing then for their future courses, or is that something that could in theory be shared with other people for that particular learner, or is that like a data protection issue?
Marcus Couch
I suppose it could be shared with other entities as well. I haven’t run into that just yet, but I imagine someone, uh, maybe a few years from now when this is a much more relevant technology that maybe somebody just starting even in preschool might get their learning record started. And instead of that—
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, this is what I’m thinking. We were all forced to learn at school in the exact same way. Do you know what I mean? And I basically waited to leave school before I actually learned much because everyone else learned by being talked at and reading books, and I don’t. I learn by doing. And this sort of thing sounds incredible, especially if you could— sorry, I’m like, I’m going, my brain’s going a million miles. I love hearing about new things. I’ve literally never heard of this. It’s already blown my mind. This is freaking awesome. But the idea, I guess, is in the future is maybe people could, you know, advantage from, from that in the future. Other people could like pay to access their information, but I’m kind of going off on a tangent. But yeah, that’s amazing.
Marcus Couch
Yeah. And then you’ve got the ethical questions behind it, which is what happens if I start hacking my learning record? But let me tell you the practical application that we use this for. So, um, there is a gentleman, his name is Jack Canfield, and he wrote this book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and he’s got a bunch of different training courses. And one of the things that he does is he has an initiative called Train the Trainer where you can be involved in his programme as an instructor and as someone who actually kind of pitches his content and some of the events that he has. And you can do that on kind of a meetup style basis where you get a room and you get a bunch of people in the room and you show them a video and then talk to them and do all that kind of stuff. So With that is involved a number of different techniques. We’re talking like NLP, you know, neuro-linguistic programming stuff, and, you know, watching people’s eyes and how they react and taking action accordingly. But what we were finding is that even though this was a 64-course module, there were people that were completing it in 30 minutes even though there was 17 hours worth of video to watch.
Marcus Couch
And so we wanted some sort of a tracking mechanism that would actually tell how frequently they were absorbing the content, how they were going through it, and what their interaction with the video was. So we could tell when somebody marked a lesson as complete that, hey, the video is only 7— you only played it for 17 seconds. You didn’t absorb any of this. So therefore, we’re going to pull your credentials away from you and you’re going to have to go through the programme again. And that was sort of the biggest thing. And another thing is we wanted to see where within the training system of those 64 videos, where were people getting stuck? Where did they stop? Where did they not go to the next lesson? And so what we found is, is that video that, that was kind of the bottleneck was too long. So we just split it up in two pieces and away they went. It was a lot smoother of a process that second time around.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. This is so cool.
Marcus Couch
Yeah. And that’s, that’s the kind of thing. That a client— that you experience through client. I would have never even thought of touching anything like this before.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, I’ve never even thought of explaining this idea to the few membership sites that I have with clients.
Marcus Couch
Hopefully I’ve done it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh my gosh.
Marcus Couch
Hopefully I’ve explained it well.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, you’ve explained it well. Definitely, it sounds incredible. So I’ll go cheque that out. I’ll probably not do anything with it, but at the point where that conversation then comes up with a client, like you said earlier, on their dime, I’ll then be able to go and research this and work it out and see what I can do with them. I’ve got no particular reason to do it right now for me because I’ve got other projects on, but if this came up, this is something else now in my armoury of, wow, I, yeah, if someone says, how can we work out what’s going on here? Tin Can it is. That’s amazing.
Marcus Couch
Yeah. So good call. The WordPress people out there, which is all of you, better be. The thing that, that is the biggest catalyst for this, there’s two things. So Tin Can is just a, a, a language. It’s just a system, but you need something to actually manage that. So there’s something called GrassBlade LRS that is just another plugin that hooks in. Uh, that’s, that’s the WordPress component. And then, um, we use it with LearnDash and Vimeo in terms of the videos. So both of those things work very well with that GrassBlade system, which runs Tin Can API. So there’s 4 different components involved in that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So I’m gonna have Larissa Madley write all this down as well so we can get these in the show notes for everyone.
Marcus Couch
Sure.
Lee Matthew Jackson
And you can go and cheque those out and connect all of them together. That’s amazing, mate. Thanks for that. Yes, good call.
Marcus Couch
So you would think that, you know, now the biggest challenge for me, and this is kind of a segue into the membership coach programme, is I have clients that pay me, you know, near— nearly 5 figures a month to manage all of their resources cumulatively. With all of my clients and all of the members that they have, we service over 5 million members and annually it’s about $200 million in revenue that they bring. I have some people that are clients that do a webinar and can pull $1 million every time.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Wow.
Marcus Couch
And so—
Lee Matthew Jackson
I want to be there one day.
Marcus Couch
No kidding. So the thing that you have to remember is that what it pays to kind of specialise your agency. I just had a request to build a site. They were going to give me $15,000. I could have outsourced it for maybe $500. I don’t want to do it. And before everybody starts emailing me saying, I’ll take it, I was about to say the same thing. This was a complex site. And the things that they’re listing in terms of what they want it to look like and what they want it to compete with are like Tony Robbins and all of these things.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay.
Marcus Couch
It’s like, really?
Lee Matthew Jackson
I don’t want that.
Marcus Couch
Yeah. And they want a multi-site for every city that’s in the network. They want members to be able to control their own profile and therefore control their own pages and make public-facing pages and all of that. And when you look at all that together, you’re like, uh-uh, it’s not gonna happen. No way. But the thing that I really, really like about membership sites with the cumulative total that I now represent is that you know what works, you know what’s not going to work, but sometimes you get surprised in that. Um, there was one time that I actually put some— I, I left a title wrong in an email blast that went out to 1.2 million people, but that was the biggest converting email that we had sent in like the last 6 months. And it was just because I wrote the word free on there by mistake. Oh.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now you know you heard it here first, guys. Yeah, put the word free.
Marcus Couch
But it had a $600 conversion component on the other end, which we sold tonnes of because of that. So it’s, it’s a big experimentation model in terms of membership. You’re dealing with things like webinars, CRM systems, email systems, landing page drivers in terms of third party. You deal with podcasts, you deal with live events, you deal with ticket sales, all of those things. And when you can specialise in something like that, you’ve got a winner. If you start to know what the top 5 CRM tools are and you master every single one of them, if you look at every landing page generator out there— I’m talking like OptimizeMe, OptimizeMe, Act-On, What else is there? OptinMonster, LeadPages, all those things. Yeah, subscribe to them even if it’s just for a month to get your feet wet. If you’re an agency, figure out how they work, figure the best components of each one, use them for yourself, right? Any of those things. Find a niche, find something that you’d love to do. And in case— in my case, it became membership sites. And stick with it. Only take that kind of work as a client, you know, from, from clients.
Marcus Couch
Only work on things that you love doing rather than things you hate doing. I’m not a very good graphic artist. I’m okay. I can do it in a pinch, but that’s the thing that my clients know I’m not going to do for them. And so therefore, they, you know, they know the game when they say, okay, we need X, Y, and Z. Okay, great. I’ll do X, Y, you do Z. I’ll meet you there, right?
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah. Yeah.
Marcus Couch
So that, that kind of expertise, I guess you could say, was— I felt wasted in some sense because I was just selling myself out to the highest bidder, and I didn’t really get the sense of accomplishment like I would helping somebody that starts out new. When, when I started to ask, there was a time where I would go on Twitter and say, I’ve got an hour free. And rather than veg out and watch YouTube or some crap like that, I would just say, I’ve got a free hour. Anybody who’s got any kind of problems with their WordPress site, tell me, I’ll help you out. And believe it or not, I would get 30 or 40 replies almost every time. And that helped me because, A, I become somebody who’s really generous with his time to the WordPress community in general, but B, it threw projects and problems at me that I wouldn’t get otherwise.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Yeah.
Marcus Couch
And so I could figure out how to solve problems where it wasn’t my neck on the line in terms of somebody that paid me. If I didn’t know the answer, I could just say, I don’t know. You know, I don’t know the answer. But that’s something else that people out there that maybe you’re just starting their agency or something like that, if you don’t know what it is that you want to do, do something like that. Give yourself a little bit of free time in order to do it and put it out there on Twitter to your followers and your friends or Facebook or whatever it happens to be and start taking on other people’s problems and figure out which ones you hate and which ones you love. And that’ll be a great pathway for you to decide where you want to go with your agency rather than just taking every crappy proposal that comes your way.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Mate, that’s so good. I can really connect with everything you’ve said there as well, because over the years I’ve been in web development for many years. This company has been around for 3 years and we niched and specialised, and it’s been wonderful because we’re only doing the one thing. But I can, I can kind of harken back to when we were our old agency where we were accepting every piece of work and doing stuff that I just absolutely hated. It wasn’t necessarily my specialism. I would struggle with for hours, and it would also lead to kind of upsetting the client as well. Everything was just to the extent where I didn’t enjoy going in and doing this stuff anymore. Um, so yeah, I can definitely connect with that.
Marcus Couch
That’s why I started the membership coach programme, because it, it gave me a way that I could still— so my end goal with this, and I’m not there yet, I don’t have the great numbers yet. I’m still kind of in pre-launch when it comes to that site. Um, I’ve got some amazing that have already signed up. I’ve got somebody in the military that is a pilot, one of those giant refuelling jets, you know, that refuel people in midair and all that. He flies that, and he’s about to transition into becoming a civilian pilot. And he basically said to me, and this was just yesterday actually, that Um, once you put your notice in, in the military, that that’s the direction that you want to go, they start giving you crappy assignments. And it’s kind of this unwritten rule that you don’t talk about something like that. But he told me the very first thing that happened was other people that were in the service with him, other fellow pilots, came up to him and said, all right, tell me about the process. What happened? What do we got to do? What’s, what’s going on? So he’s starting a membership site that is exactly that.
Marcus Couch
How do you transition from being a military pilot into a civilian pilot? And then, so for me, that was amazing. And we were talking just yesterday, okay, what do we need to put on the welcome page and the page that’s, you know, what do we get in terms of content on this membership site? And he had just an audio player, you know, podcast player or something playing there. I said, do you have the access to where you can just like be in the pilots dressing room? Like, I’ve only seen it in the movies, right? But you know, the locker room where they’re all gearing up and all that. Can you do it there? And he goes, I can do it in the plane while I’m flying overseas. I’m like, make your welcome video, do it, do it from the cockpit. What other thing could you do to get yourself tonnes of credibility?
Lee Matthew Jackson
My gosh. Then that.
Marcus Couch
And also, one thing I know about pilots, they love checking out each other’s planes. It’s like, you know, car drivers, you know, people that are into cars, enthusiasts, they love checking out each other’s ride. And so that’s a pretty big component. And with membership sites, that’s the one thing is first you’ve got to convey your expertise. Second, you got to convey the need in terms of what it is that somebody’s out there that, that has to have. And then you have to teach things like how to develop it, organise it, and deliver it. And those are kind of the big components within membership sites. So for me, I couldn’t be happier than dealing with people that have never put a membership site together, that just have an idea that they want to flesh out and put through. And I know for a fact that a couple of my clients are sitting on million-dollar ideas and they have no idea yet. Wow. They have no clue as to how popular their sites are going to be once they start them. And that’s, that’s amazing for me because I get to take the credit at the other end.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Now the membership— you’ve got then the Membership Coach. Is this where you are giving, helping people? You’ve got the benefit of all of your past experience and people can come to the Membership Coach and learn this sort of stuff. So can you tell us what that’s about then and how people can go cheque that out and potentially get involved?
Marcus Couch
Yeah, sure. Just go to membershipcoach.com and there’s a little landing page there and it tells about all the different programmes. I start people off. This is an interesting concept as well. So I made a 64-video series. And on paper, I thought the videos were going to be 5 minutes each, but me being a talkaholic, they ended up being a lot more. So many, many hours worth of content that I’ve put together. The interesting thing about it is I will not let anybody go any farther within the programme until they’ve gone through that entire programme. And the reason is, is because I want to have minimum expectations of what somebody knows when we do our membership mastermind calls and our training calls and things. I want to know that they have a good foundation and that they know the fundamentals of what things are. And it’s just overviews of things. I mean, I talk about delivery methods, whether that be, you know, a drip method or à la carte or any of those things, and why you might decide to go one way or the other. For example, If you— a lot of people think, oh, I’m just going to drip the content out.
Marcus Couch
Well, that really depends on what your content is. If it’s something where it’s maybe health-related, where it’s about, you know, dealing with a specific illness or treatment methods or things, you don’t want to drip that content out. You want to give them all that content because that’s somebody that’s got a specific need. If it’s online guitar lessons, you don’t want to You don’t want to give everybody everything all at one time. You want to make sure that they start in one place and go through the progression of what’s got to be done without, you know, just taking them right to the advanced and then they get bored or they get, you know, it’s above their level and then they quit. So there are many different sciences behind it. So we talk about stuff like that. We talk about basic stuff, the sales page, the order page, the thank you page, welcome pages. How do you organise those? In terms of what it is that you’re going to be delivering. What are you going to use as a subscription model? And by the way, those are two different things. Membership and subscription are two completely different things.
Marcus Couch
A subscription is a transactional relationship. You get this because you’re giving me money. A membership site should always be a relationship type of a thing where it’s personal. It’s not just something that they just get it and it’s done and it’s, it’s over. You’ve got to somehow connect with— if you have an organisation or an association or something like that, you’ve always got to make sure that your members not only feel welcome, but they’re getting value at the other end. And, and that’s what we get into, is those types of things. Sure, I talk about WordPress plugins and all that. Yay, you can go on YouTube and find that. That’s not a big deal. But when it comes to the personal relationship Yeah, I’m on 2 hour-and-a-half-long calls every month with the people that are part of the programme. They wouldn’t be able to get access to me otherwise except for that. So, I kind of put a piece of myself out there and, and in the early onset of the members, the first 5 at least that joined, I’ve given them carte blanche in terms of anytime you need to contact me. Here’s the link, set it up, it’ll be in the Google Calendar and we’ll talk.
Marcus Couch
And I found that very valuable because it also helps me to shape the content, because when I run into recurring problems that all of my new people are having and I don’t have a course for that, well, I better get something together. So those types of things are a fishing expedition for me for future content as well as helping to solve people’s problems.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s amazing. That’s awesome, mate. So that’s membershipcoach.com, guys. You can go and cheque that out. There’s a cool video on there as well, which explains it. And I believe as well, kind of, we were talking just before we started recording as well, you mentioned that quite a lot of our audience are web designers, design agencies, etc. So this is going to be particularly useful for them. Why would that be?
Marcus Couch
Because I’ve designed a majority of the content in terms of worksheets and checklists and things. Expressly for agencies, and I’m not doing it just to say, here, let me do all the work for you. I’m doing it to guide you and let you know what it is that you need to know and what it is that you don’t need to bother with at the time of submitting a proposal or something like that. I also get into how to pitch a membership site to a potential client. I love— now I’ll say this now because this is the audience that did I love to say this kind of thing too, but if you get into designing and developing membership sites, you’ve got a client that’s recurring for life. You will get them to run your email cycle, your social cycle, adding events, things like that to the website, making sure that the members are taken care of, making sure that the, uh, that the, the rate in which they sign up you know, for in terms of analytics and sales reports and things like that, that all of that stuff is involved. And when you master it, it makes your life so much easier knowing that you’ve got a set documented routine that you follow every month, that it’s something that is valuable to the person on the other end and that they’re making recurring revenue with.
Marcus Couch
So therefore, so will you from a maintenance perspective. And that’s why I love membership sites, because it gives you a wide kind of a broad stroke in terms of what it is that you can do, yet you can hone any of those individual skill sets down to the clients that need them most. So if you’re an Infusionsoft master, you’re, you’re gonna do very well when you start putting membership sites together that harness your own skills within Infusionsoft.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I love that the way you talk about that as well, as agencies we already have a potential client base there. And you mentioned you’ve got there, you actually cover how to pitch this, this, the, the concept, sorry, of membership sites to the existing client base that already know, like, and trust you as well. So you’re going to be helping them by offering them this sort of service. And it’s actually something that, until talking to you right now, mate, it’s something that seems to be like the holy grail for agencies is how can we create recurring revenue? And we always think it’s gonna be support contracts that frankly we all hate doing, unless you’re WP Curve that actually created a business doing it. And, you know, talking— listening to what you’re saying here, this is an incredibly exciting idea. You know, you’ve got the skill, you’ve got the client base, and you could help your existing clients, you know, help them find that niche and help them put that skill out there and create and generate monthly revenue. It’s really exciting. So that’s I feel like I’m going to be signing up for this. It’s membershipcoach.com if you want to go and cheque that out.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Really, really excited to see that and to go and cheque out that course. So membershipcoach.com if anything in this podcast today has excited you, go cheque that out. How can people connect with you, mate, if they’ve got any questions?
Marcus Couch
Oh, you can get me on Twitter @MarcusCouch. You can find me at MarcusCouch.com. I’m pretty much everywhere. Marcus Couch, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere else. So yeah, that’s a good place to find me. But the membership coach thing, if you’re kind of on the fence, if you think, oh, I don’t know if it’s for me or not, hit me up on Twitter, tell me your exact situation, and I’m happy to even get on a call with you and tell you if it’s right for you or not. It may not be.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Nice one. So remember that, feel free to call this guy. He’s very approachable. You can tell he’s been wonderful on this podcast, very friendly guy. And I really appreciate your time, Marcus. You are a legend. Absolute legend. I’m loving everything you’ve said. I love doing this podcast because the people like yourself who come on just give amazing value, amazing information, and my brain just gets fired up. And I, I, as you’ve spoken, I’ve just had loads and loads of new ideas birthed that I’ve been trying to quietly write down whilst they’re fresh in my brain, thinking I’ve got to explore this avenue, I’ve got to explore that. And I’m sure people listening to you may have had the exact same experience. So I can’t wait to one day be in the States and have an actual beer with you.
Marcus Couch
Well, that would be great. Um, yeah, I’m actually going to be going to Europe in the fall, uh, going to Greece actually, but I’ll probably, I’ll try and make my way over there.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, if you dip your toe into London, we have real beer.
Marcus Couch
Okay. I’m down for some of that. Um, the thing that, um, I wanted to also stress to people especially you agents out there, is that when it comes to— yeah, when it comes to membership sites, you’ve got to make sure that it’s something that you want to do in terms of all of those different components. Because once you master all those things, believe it or not, the clients just keep flooding to you. Like, I only got one client that, that was my first membership site client, and that referred me all the rest of the business that I have today.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Wow.
Marcus Couch
Just word of mouth. Who does your site? Oh, this guy. Oh, okay, cool. I need to work with him. And so it’s very easy. And I don’t, I don’t go out and solicit business really anymore. It comes to me. But the— it’s not hard to find bestselling authors. There’s new ones every single week, right? Find the good nonfiction people out there, find the good tech people out there and approach them. Hey, how would you like to start a membership site based around your book or some of the lessons that are in your book? Maybe you want to get a video tutorial system going that we can work on. Even if they don’t have money, do it for half, do it for 50% of the revenue that the site generates. Maybe you’ll get some money out of it, you know, maybe you’ll do well. Um, those are some things that you can do to start in terms of getting your agency to start creating membership sites. I’ll give you a couple other examples real quick just to kind of leave everybody with a great insight. There are a lot of software companies now that are transitioning their complete— their support model to a membership model to where you pay $10 a year or something like that, you become part of their membership cycle.
Marcus Couch
And what’s nice is a lot of times some of the forums and things that those support groups put together half the questions are already answered by other people within the support system. So that saves. It also gives you a very ardent and enthusiastic core of people that you can try new things with, betas and different software releases with them first because they’re already in your programme. There are barbershops. There’s a chain of barbershops around me that just started a membership component to their system. To where, you know, I don’t need this. You probably don’t either, but you can go in and get unlimited hair trims and beard trimmings.
Lee Matthew Jackson
I’ve got a beard. Just—
Marcus Couch
oh, great.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Okay, I’m good there.
Marcus Couch
Okay. And, you know, beard oil and all the rest of the stuff that goes along with it. And then they have a lovely— a beer tasting event that they have a party every month that, that they all go to. So that’s a, that’s a membership site, believe it or not. You took a barbershop and you made it into an actual event for men. That’s recurring and that they can use to schedule their appointments and things. So that’s huge and that’s not just a subscription model that they said, “Hey, pay $50 a month and you can come in and get your haircut anytime you want.” It’s interactive. It’s something where they actually earn points and activity badges and stuff like that. So the sky is the limit when it comes to membership sites. Really it’s just this, is there content that someone has that somebody else is willing to pay for and have gated behind some sort of a membership plugin? If the answer to that is yes, then you’ve got a winner and you need to pursue it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
If the answer to that is yes, you’ve got a winner, guys. That’s freaking awesome. If you want to hear amazing content like this regularly, I recommend you also cheque out the Membership Coach Podcast, which is on membershipcoach.com/podcast. Did you mind me doing that?
Marcus Couch
Nope, I don’t mind.
Lee Matthew Jackson
That’s all good. I don’t mind. So that is freely available, is that correct?
Marcus Couch
That is free to everyone. Uh, I’ve got some pretty interesting guests that are on the horizon for that show. Um, one of my superstar musicians is actually going to make an appearance.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Oh, excellent. Well, that is going on my smartphone. I have to admit I’ve got Android, not an iPhone, but yeah, that’s going in. That’s going in my podcast player. Uh, I’m going to look forward to that. Also, don’t forget to cheque out Marcus on Twitter. He’s a prolific Twitterer, if that’s a real word. That’s, uh, Marcus Couch, @MarcusCouch. If you look at July 12th, whenever you’re listening to this, there’s a really cool picture of the presenters of WordPress Weekly saying that when WordPress passes 50%, then we’ll be just like the nightly news guys and the picture on the side of a building. It looks hilarious. I thought it was real. I presume you Photoshopped this.
Marcus Couch
Yes, I did. I’ve got a number of mockups and templates and things that I have a lot of fun with. When the meme calls for it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
For it.
Marcus Couch
Yes. So in that case, it was a double take when I saw it, mate. I was like, whoa, it was Jeff Chandler, my co-host on WordPress Weekly. He, yeah, he has a new avatar for like the first time in 6 years, so I had to have a lot of fun with that.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Awesome, mate. Thanks so much for your time. Have an awesome afternoon, I guess, where it is. So yeah, what afternoon over there? Have an awesome afternoon. Have a beer on me, mate.
Marcus Couch
Thank you very much, and I appreciate being on the show. And anytime you want to have me back, I’m happy to do it.
Lee Matthew Jackson
Well, I feel like we’ve only unpacked a small part because we’ve talked a little bit about your agency. We’ve talked about the membership system, but honestly, mate, I have got stacks of questions, including things like plugins. So if you’ll come back, I would absolutely love that. And we’ll have to get that arranged soon because I haven’t asked half the questions I wanted to ask you.
Marcus Couch
So, uh, anytime, anytime.
Lee Matthew Jackson
All right. I’ll arrange it. Take care of yourself, bud.
Marcus Couch
Thank you.
Lee Matthew Jackson
So here endeth episode 36 of the WP Innovator Podcast. I, I really hope you enjoyed that because I enjoyed that so much, just being a part of that. The great thing about this podcast is I get to meet really cool people, find out fascinating stories, and learn from them just as you’re learning from the very same episodes. So you’re listening, you’re running, you’re in the car, wherever you are, you’re learning from this, but I’m also getting that as well. Firsthand and really enjoying asking these sorts of questions. Now, if you’d like to connect, if you’d like to be on the show, or you’d like us to cover a particular subject, then please do reach out. Head on over to leejacksondev.com/contact and get in touch. Also, feel free to email me direct. It’s [email protected]. It’d be really cool to hear from you. And again, if you want to be involved in the Facebook group, come on over. It’s free. I’m not charging for it. It’s fun. It’s private. And it’s a great place to be. Head on over to LeeJacksonDev.com/group. You’ll find us all there. Really look forward to meeting you. Have a freaking awesome week, weekend, day, whatever you’re doing.
Lee Matthew Jackson
If you’re driving, keep your eye on the road, and just remember to keep innovating. Yeah.
