Quick Overview

Since its launch in March 2009, Ann Farrell’s executive coaching membership site has made money for her, indeed, but she mainly uses it to nurture leads for offline coaching services. Most of her six-digit income comes from offline coaching gigs at corporations. We think other membership sites could learn from how she nurtures leads to purchase offline services and how she gets traffic to her membership site without an SEO strategy.

Target Market

Farrell targets two main groups with two different types of memberships.

Group #1. Executives and potential leaders within corporations who want more of a work/life balance and/or more success in their careers. This includes business owners and, most recently, individuals in career transition due to recessionary layoffs.

Group #2. Executive coaches, like Farrell, who want to break into the coaching business or grow a current coaching business.

Content Model

Each target group gets access to a separate section of content behind the paywall. Farrell creates most of the content herself, based on her 30-years of corporate leadership experience. Much of the paid content is text-based, including: articles, tools, and worksheet exercises. Very, very little of the content is free. Free content includes a link to past issues of her free ezine and promotional information about upcoming one-off workshops and products.

Paid membership content for corporate executives and leaders includes: :

• TeleClasses: These are monthly, single-topic classes that Farrell conducts via phone. Paying members are provided a dial-in number and are permitted to participate. The class typically lasts one and a half hours. Each one comes with specific exercises in worksheet format. The worksheets correspond with class topics, such as: Fear to Farfegnugen: Your Key to Personal Success and Culture Fit, Flex, or Flee: The 10 Fit Factors for Career Success.
• Group TeleCoaching: These are monthly calls where members can join with no agenda and just discuss issues they’re facing in their careers or with their work/life balance. The call is facilitated by Farrell, but she mostly is there for direction. She lets her members provide feedback to one another and makes sure every member on the call gets to talk.
• Archived Recordings: Some TeleClass and TeleCoaching events are recorded and kept in an archive library behind the paywall.
• Career management articles and tools, and leadership exercises.
• An online discussion forum.

The most clicked-on is anything in written-form, Farrell said. The teleclass recordings, for example, don’t get as many clicks as the worksheets accompanying the recordings. The content that’s gotten the highest click rate is an article called: The Living I Will, which guides members through exercises that help them determine how they want to live their lives.

Paid membership content for executive coaches includes:

• Access to some recordings of the executives’ group telecoaching sessions, from which coaches learn the pain points of the people they want to coach.
• Downloadable contracts and forms to help them start and grow their coaching business.
• An online discussion forum.

Revenue Streams

YourCorporateSuccess.com is basically an ancillary to Farrell’s offline coaching business. Paid memberships and one-off product sales make up about one-tenth of her total revenue.

Paid memberships targeting coaches brings in the most revenue. Those memberships range from $197 to $500 per month, whereas memberships targeting executives and leaders range from $9.97 to $99 per month. Higher priced memberships include 20 minutes or more of one-on-one coaching time with Farrell.

One-off products sold via the membership site include:

-1-year license for Farrell’s proprietary “Coaching for Corporate” coaching and business system

-One-on-one executive coaching sessions priced at $125-$500

-Half day and full day workshops priced at $99-$189

-Six-month leadership teleworkshop for executives and individuals in career transition priced at $299 per seat (multiple seat packages also offered)

-Third party books

Marketing Tactics

Farrell uses the membership site as a marketing tool to attract corporate clients (i.e. corporations who hire her to conduct leadership training for one or more executives at the corporation). The six-month teleworkshop for executives (mentioned under one-off products above) is most effective at attracting corporate clients for her offline coaching services.

How it works is:

1. After she meets individuals from potential-client corporations through LinkedIn or offline industry events, she directs them to sign-up for her free ezine, which is basically a monthly email newsletter. 2. She promotes the workshop through the ezine. 3. After individuals buy single seats or corporations buy multiple seats and attend the workshop, she offers them two-months of free membership to YourCorporateSuccess.com to keep the relationship going. “At the end, they know me well enough to hire me,” she said.

Farrell doesn’t use any kind of SEO or PPC search marketing tactics to generate traffic to the membership site. Tactics she does use include:

• Social Media: “I use a lot of social media,” Farrell said. “Social media is where my clients live.” Farrell belongs to several groups on LinkedIn, where she posts new articles from her free ezine. And every time someone asks her to join their network, Farrell asks the person to sign up for her free ezine. “A high percentage will sign up,” she said. “It’s my way to get them to know me more.”
• Affiliate marketing: Farrell has marketed her membership site, particularly her coaching memberships, to partners’ lists. “That is very effective,” she said. “I’ve partnered with some real biggies.” Farrell finds the big marketing partners while attending industry-specific events. Partners are often speakers at the events.

For conversion marketing she uses:

• Ezine: The free monthly ezine is sent via email to opt-ins who choose either the ‘Personal Success’ or ‘Just for Coaches’ ezine. She uses the ezine to promote different teleworkshops each month. Usually the topic of that month’s ezine is parallel to the teleconference topic.

Technology and Vendors Used

Constant Contact: Email marketing service used to send the monthly ezines http://www.constantcontact.com/

MaestroConference: Technology used to produce and record the teleworkshops. http://maestroconference.com/

MemberGate: All-in-one membership and subscription site platform that powers the site http://www.membergate.com/

About Ann Farrell

After 30 years of successfully moving up the ranks from entry level to the C-suite at a Fortune 100 company, Farrell decided to take her passion — leadership development (a.k.a. executive coaching) — and start her own leadership coaching business in 2006. “In the beginning it was very scary walking away from that big executive salary,” she said. “But it only took me 6 months to match that, and now I’m making even more.”

Farrell does all of her membership site marketing, content, and maintenance from her home office in the suburbs of Chicago. A big reason she started her own business, and then her own membership site, is because she wanted more work/life balance and flexibility to spend time with her teenage son.

Subscription Site Insider’s Quick Analysis

It’s fascinating, the case this makes for using a membership site to market offline services. Still, we think there are several ways that Farrell could take this membership site to the next level. First, offering more keyword-heavy free content could boost the site’s natural ranking in the search engine results for those keywords. Her blog would be a good place to experiment with SEO. She could even repurpose content from her free ezines. Also, the site itself could benefit from a minor redesign. Perhaps by getting rid of the stock photos of corporate executives at the top and replacing it with Farrell’s headshot, and some copy that designates her as the “executive coaching expert.” That would give the site a more personal, less generic feel.

http://www.yourcorporatesuccess.com/