Learn from the membership guru - Stu!
Hello, my friend and welcome to this week's blog. I am super excited to be here this week because I have a bonus for you about another way you can make money in Surface Design.
Over the last four weeks we’ve talked about licensing, direct selling, indirect selling and workshops or digital courses. Today I would like to talk to you about Memberships.
A Success Story:
My dear friend and mentor, Stu McLaren, is offering a free workshop right now, all about memberships. Click HERE to explore this category if it piques your curiosity. Stu is the “membership guru" and the best person to learn from. He is also hilarious which makes learning from him all the more fun.
To explain more about it, let’s start with a story about one of my students.
One of my star students is Mary-Ann Walker Le Clair, who got started in my creative community by taking my free From Doodles to Dollars® mini course. She then invested in my 10-week Academy® program, and as she was completing it, she reached out to me and said:
“Anne, you know, I'm not sure if licensing, direct selling, indirect selling, or even workshops are going to be right for me.”
Before COVID hit, Mary-Ann had a very successful business doing in-person workshops involving paint parties. She taught people how to make and paint wooden signs. Over time her parties evolved to include a variety of skills, like painting beautiful patterns on wooden porch signs and even on rowing oars. But when COVID hit, of course, everything shut down. She and I had a conversation about how she might move forward and learn how to become a successful surface designer, because she wasn’t sure what her actual business was going to look like. Mary-Ann landed on creating a subscription membership, something she could customize since memberships come in all shapes and sizes.
Why Online Memberships?
You can create an online membership that people join just to be a part of your creative community. Or you can create a membership to teach what you love to teach. Each month people would pay membership dues in exchange for your deliverable – the skills you teach.
Or a membership can look like a subscription box and that’s the path Mary-Ann chose. She continues to put her beautiful surface designs on a variety of products, and with membership subscriptions her members can treat themselves, or send beautiful gifts to others.
Since adding a subscription box to her business at the beginning of the year, Mary-Ann has seen her business grow. And she recently added Special Occasion boxes. Rather than receiving a box every single month, a subscriber can choose to subscribe to Special Occasion boxes, like for Mothers’ Day, which is right around the corner!
Meet the Expert:
Memberships might be an incredible opportunity for you to explore further, but the guru of all things-membership is not me, it’s Stu McLaren, with his renowned program called TRIBE.
TRIBE is an outstanding program that teaches you everything you need to know about being successful with a membership. Stu dives into all the different types of memberships that exist. And of course, one of those deep dives is on subscription boxes. If you would like to explore this further, click HERE to take his masterclass.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this bonus edition with another way to make money as a surface designer!
Excited about memberships? What are you waiting for? Join Stu’s masterclass HERE. It’s only available for a limited time.
P.S. Did you hear? Enrollment is OPEN to my free mini-course, From Doodles to Dollars®. Discover how to take a doodle or sketch and turn it into a beautiful repeating pattern using the magic of Adobe Illustrator.
Grab your seat HERE.
Get a free 7-day trial of Adobe Illustrator . Select Illustrator 2021 CC for the version I recommend. It comes with the iPad version so you get both!
Bye for now. And I'll see you next week.
Remember,
It’s Never Too Late to Create®
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MEET ANNE
Hi…I’m Anne!
My creative inspiration comes from a lifetime of observation. I grew up in Paris on the Place St. Sulpice and walked to school through the Luxembourg gardens. And that was only the beginning… Learn more by watching the video on my About page.
