Create and Launch your Kajabi Membership in Less Than 30 days

I know I said I would show you how to outline, create and launch your membership site in less than 30 days...but I lied. 

We're going to do it in less than 30 minutes. ;)

But first, a little backstory on how I initially ran my online nutrition practice for the first few years, because it was kind of a mess.

I want to save you some of these headaches of figuring out the best membership site platforms for your nutrition or health coaching business, because I have tried them all.

Rather skip the backstory? You can watch the "Membership in 30 Min" tutorial video right now on this page instead.

Phase 1: Squarespace website with Mailchimp → ConvertKit 

When I was starting out with my first website and blog, I used a Squarespace website and free Mailchimp email software to start building my email list. 

Squarespace proved to be a perfect website platform for newbies like me because it was intuitive, drag and drop, and had everything I needed at that point.

Mailchimp was an easy solution for collecting email addresses because it integrated directly with Squarespace, but I wasn't regularly emailing my list at that point. If I had been, I would have realized that Mailchimp was a little clunky for sending out weekly emails using the free version, but like I said, I wasn't actually doing that so I had no idea. 

After the first year of building up my online nutrition presence, I knew I needed to actually email those fine folks who were opting in to my list. There were 19 of them. Mostly sharing my DNA.

I decided to upgrade my email game by investing $29/month in ConvertKit instead of the free Mailchimp account I had. Boy, was that the best decision ever! Due to the $29 charge coming up every month, I was motivated to make it count.

I finally prioritized nurturing and growing that email list, and a year later had over 2000+ engaged subscribers.

Phase 2: Squarespace website with ConvertKit + Teachable 

At that point, I had launched my first online courses to that growing email list, and was hosting the courses on Teachable. It was working fine, I thought, but there were definitely some technology hiccups and issues that cropped up from having a website to attract my audience, ConvertKit to house my email database and send all my automated emails, and Teachable to host my courses.

All of these platforms needed to "talk" to each other so the students in my courses would get the correct emails after they enrolled, for example, and not continue to get sales emails for something they already purchased.

It didn't go as smoothly as I hoped. In fact, Teachable and ConvertKit had major issues internally and lots of my students didn't get the emails I thought they were. It was probably a pretty poor experience for lots of them, which I had no idea about at the time.

This was quite an online course platform fail, and it was quite expensive in retrospect because of the fees that Teachable collected from my sales. Boo!

Phase 3: Squarespace website with ConvertKit + NEW Membership Squarespace site + MemberSpace

So when I decided to combine my 1:1 clients, health and wellness product customers, and digital course students into ONE epic membership site platform instead of selling everything separately, I knew I wasn't going to use Teachable.

To be honest, I wasn't a member in very many memberships at that time so I didn't even know what it should look like. I remember Google-ing "membership site examples" and being so frustrated that no one was showing their actual sites. I need to visualize what this was even going to look like.

(Spoiler: That's why I'm going to bring you behind the scenes and show you what my membership sites actually look like inside!)

The first version of my nutrition membership site was created on Squarespace, because I was familiar with how to create websites there already, and I was able to get it up and running fairly quickly. I used the paid software MemberSpace to make the site password protected for access by current, paying members only.

The only issue with this solution was that I had to create every single page from scratch and the various components of the membership weren't integrating together very intuitively. Let's just say it was a very rough beta version, but it worked for a few months.

Phase 4: Custom Wordpress membership Site with OptimizeMember plugin + SamCart Checkout Software

Can you believe I still hadn't figured out a better solution by now? As I type this out, I'm kind of amazed at how many months of effort I completely wasted trying to DIY all the technology in my business.

I would have saved SO. MUCH. TIME. (and money) if I had known everything I'm about to share with you.

But first, let me go down the Wordpress rabbit hole, because that was Phase 4.

After a few months of using the DIY Squarespace workaround membership site, I knew I needed to upgrade it and make a better member experience. And this time, I was going to hire someone to do it for me.

Progress!

I researched the best membership site plugins for Wordpress, which it seemed like everyone else was using for their sites, and decided on OptimizeMember as the plugin. (The "plugin" in this instance is what made it password protected for only paying members to access.)

I needed to have a separate checkout software because that's not included on a basic Wordpress site, so I opted for SamCart. (Very expensive and robust payment processor and checkout pages that is capable of recurring payments for memberships.)

At that point, it was time to hire a web developer to design and create my custom Wordpress site...so I did that, too.

I was learning a whole lot, let me tell you. Hiring my first freelancer overseas was a great experience, and he did a fabulous job following all my directions and creating my custom Wordpress membership site.

Which didn't integrate with my checkout software, it turns out.

I also had so much difficulty navigating Wordpress that I couldn't even add a new page or edit settings on my own site without hiring my freelancer in India to step in and do it for me.

Ummm, this was not going to work.

Again, 3 months of wasted effort and way too much $$ to mention down the drain.

I really REALLY don't recommend using Wordpress for your nutrition or health coaching business. Way too steep of a learning curve.

Phase 5 (current): KAJABI FOR THE WIN!

I was ready to tear my hair out after the failed Wordpress membership site. I really was. 

Luckily, I heard a short blurb about Kajabi on a podcast around the same time that mentioned Kajabi being an all-in-one software. (I had heard of Kajabi plenty of times before, but assumed it was just a course hosting software like Teachable.)

Boy, I am so glad I was wrong!

Upon a little investigation, I found that not only could I create a beautiful and intuitive membership site on Kajabi in just a few minutes, but I could also have my entire website, landing pages, checkout pages and recurring payment processing, email list and all email sending, webinars, events, and even a dedicated membership community forum all on Kajabi.

And everything would always "talk" to each other without breaking.

And without any hidden transaction fees or extra charges.

Basically, it's online business magic, which is why I don't even want you to mess around with ANY of the other softwares I talked about if you're going to create online courses or a membership site in your health and wellness business.

Start with Kajabi from the very beginning and save yourself so much time and headaches.

BONUS: I have some juicy, EXCLUSIVE bonuses that I share with those who start their free 28-day Kajabi trial through my partner link, such as a free course where I show multiple Kajabi membership site examples, LIVE Zoom Strategy sessions, and my Easy Outsourcing course for exactly how to hire overseas experts to do your tech for just a few bucks. Learn more on this page.

I wouldn't leave you hangin' to figure it out all alone like I had to!

All the info on those bonuses can be found on this page.

Now let's get your membership site started. 

I'm sure you've taken my advice to heart, so you're ready to build your nutrition or health coaching membership site on Kajabi and start making some cha-ching right now.

Perfect, that's what we're going to do! In fact, I have a whole video recorded showing you exactly how to do just that in 30 minutes or less, which you'll see at the bottom of this page.

👉 Start your free Kajabi Trial Here

After that, there are 3 things you need to do to launch your membership site:

1. Outline the core content

2. Set up your site

3. Set up your checkout page so you can get paid

By the end of this video, you're going to have ALL the initial content outlined for your membership site which is positioned to SELL, and you're going to have your shiny new site set up and ready to beta launch and accept new members in 30 minutes or less. I'm not kidding.

To do that, we're first going to outline your core membership content together, and then I'm going to turn on my screen share and show you exactly how to set up your membership website in real time right along with me.

I can't wait to show you all this goodness! Everything you're about to learn is going to get you PAYING MEMBERS in your membership before your first Kajabi payment is even due. Boom.

I'm going to outline the steps below for your reference, but I go into WAY more detail on exactly how to do these items in the video tutorial, so make sure you watch that as you go.

STEP 1: Outline The Core Content of Your Membership

• In my paid programs we call this the progress path
• This is the ONE problem you solve for your audience. ONE. The big result. Put it into one sentence.
• Now break down how you solve that problem into 3-5 big steps if you don't have a progress path yet. If you have one already, you already have this done!
• Do a quick 5, 6, 7 by asking "why is this important" a bunch of times to get to the big problem, then look at your secret sauce and nail down how you can help them get from where they're at to where they want to be in 3-5 main steps
• At the most basic level, these 3-5 steps ARE WHAT YOUR MEMBERSHIP CONTENT IS! Congrats!! This is your core curriculum that you're going to build off of. Name it something cool like framework, blueprint, roadmap, etc and you're good to go!
  
  

STEP 2: Set Up Your Site!

• Now you can see the actual creation of a membership site in real time. Yay! (Remember, this is a demo site and not my actual membership, but if you signed up for a free Kajabi trial through my partner link, you will get an automatic email with invitation to the mini course that shows behind the scenes and setup of my actual sites.)
• To start with, we are focusing on Products, but you are going to get email tutorials for ALL OF THE THINGS from Kajabi over the next 28 days to get your entire online business up and running, so don't worry about that.
• Go to products, then click "new product" and click membership. (I think a membership is the ideal online business model for a health and wellness focus because of the support that it offers your members and the increased results they usually get, but the same process will work for setting up a digital course instead.)
• Name it and look at the site all built out on the backend! Whoo hoo!! Everything here is a starting point that will work just fine for now, but you can also customize everything you see.
• I like the format of using posts as lessons, categories as modules. You can name these categories the framework name you decided on in Step 1 and then add/remove/rename the posts as the lessons where you're going to teach those things. Boom! You now have the framework laid out and it just needs a few pieces of content to get started!
• Add videos, text, downloads, automations, etc inside your posts. 
• You can see the difference between products vs offers and how helpful that distinction is for using different membership tiers, as an example. (This was way harder to do in the other platforms I used.)
• EVERYTHING within your site is customizable, but it does pre-generate a great framework to start with so you literally can have this up and running in 15 minutes if you want to skip the customization for now. I prefer to build out the skeleton and framework myself, and then hire a web designer to make it all look pretty later.
• Check out all the components you now have access to in one central spot: your WHOLE website, lead magnets and opt in pages, emails, webinars and membership events, your own domain, private forum, free app for your members to stay connected at no extra charge, etc
• You can edit the logo, navigation bar, etc on each page/product as needed and make it as customized as they want
  
  

STEP 3: Get Paid

• Make sure you're set up to get automatic deposits into your bank account when those enrollments start rolling in! Go into settings and follow the easy Stripe / Paypal prompts so everything is connected
• Create an offer to sell
• If your content isn't created yet (and I hope it isn't!) you can set up access to start at XX future date, which is important for pre-selling so you can get paid TODAY but the whole membership doesn't have to be done yet. You want to validate that people will pay for your offer before you spend all your time creating it!
• Use recurring payments and how you structure that with free trials, etc as options so Kajabi will continually charge your members without you having to worry about it
• Make the checkout page with your logo and a reminder of the bullet points of the BENEFITS they are getting, which is the core content you outlined in Step 1 along with a reminder about your money back guarantee if applicable
• Note that Kajabi DOES NOT take a transaction fee on your sales! This is huge because Teachable and the other softwares I have used took a chunk of each sale, which is ridiculous when you're already paying for the software.
• Remember: you want to get paid before you create your site. The whole beta launch process is part of what we teach in the PPIC membership because it's so important!

Phew. That was an action-packed 33 minutes, now wasn't it?

The time is NOW to create the beta version of your digital course or membership site and get it out into the world. You can do it, by following the steps outlined on this page, and I'm here to help every step of the way.

As a reminder, when you start your Kajabi extended free trial on this page, the 28 day challenge emails will be sent each day prompting you to customize and refine your site, along with the behind the scenes free mini course from me and an opportunity for us to jump on Zoom together and strategize how to lay out your site if you want.

Like I said, I wouldn't leave you hanging. :)

Getting your health and wellness membership site up and running is just the beginning, because then it's time to fill it with members, which is my favorite topic! I have all sorts of great resources to help you when that time comes.

Read through first before watching the video tutorial? I see you. ;) 👇