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Mike McLin was an avid wakeboarder. He knew there was a market for instructional content for other wakeboarders to learn from experts but there wasn’t much available.

So Mike and a partner created a series of instructional DVDs and began selling them to the passionate community of wakeboarders. The success of those DVDs led to the launch of their current membership site, LearnWake.com. (Warning: don’t visit this site if you get jealous easily – it’s incredible and you’re sure to have a bad case of “website envy” all weekend.)

In this interview, you’ll learn how Mike made the transition from selling DVDs to selling memberships to his website. You’ll also hear him talk about how he tried to market the membership website the same way he marketed the DVDs and realized it was a totally different game. Finally, you’ll learn how he set pricing initially by getting into the minds of his prospective customers and how he gets through slow patches by marketing to a worldwide audience.

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):
 

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hello everybody. Welcome back to MemberCon.com. Thanks very much for joining me for another interview with a membership site owner. Today, we’re going to be speaking with Mike Mclin. He has a web site called LearnWake.com. I was interested in talking to him about how he got into starting this site and what he thinks are some good ideas and tips for growing a membership site. So, let’s start with your site. First of all, it’s a gorgeous site. That’s kind of what attracted my eye in the first place. Do you design sites as well? I mean, did you do this thing all yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah, me and my team, we pretty much built the site from ground up including all of the visuals and everything from preproduction all the way to the completed project. And we’ve also populated all the content that’s on the site, all the videos, motion graphics, and stuff like that.

MemberCon.com: How did the site start? Were you a wakeboarder yourself?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Yeah. I used to wakeboard a lot. And I actually used to ride on the Pro Tour and stuff like that. I kind of was deep into the industry and knew a lot of the key people in the industry. And one of the largest wakeboarding camps where people go for instruction from all over the world is right here in my hometown of Clermont, Florida. So, we actually started at a DVD series, an instructional DVD series, and it took off and did really, really well. And we were thinking about making a sequel, pretty much, to the DVDs and we kind of started realizing the business model of delivering instructional content is actually much better suited for a web site than for DVDs because of all the interactivity you can do on a web site with forums and people talking to each other and asking questions. Plus, we started realizing that when we’re selling DVDs, you start off and DVDs sell really well. And then eventually, as they become older and mature, it stops selling in stores. Where a web site, a membership web site, is the complete opposite. The more you mature, the more money you make because the bigger your membership base became. So, that was a really exciting business model for us and we were just really interested in taking the next step in doing a membership web site and it’s worked out really, really well for us so far.

MemberCon.com: So, you kind of got proof positive that people would pay for this content by selling the DVD. Did you do any type of surveys or kind of focus groups to find out if there were other web sites out there that were selling content memberships or was this the first one that would be out there?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: For our industry, we’re the top-selling DVD in the industry, and we sold probably a little over 100,000 units. So, we moved quite a few units. So we knew there was a very big market out there comparably and it hadn’t been packed yet. So, we pretty much knew all the stats and stuffs because we’d already done it to the DVD models. So, we knew the industry was there and ready for something like this. So, we pretty much just, yeah, we kind of pioneered it, at least for our industry. No one was delivering instructional content yet. And we’ve had a lot of people come up to us now and say, “Man, we were thinking about doing that. I wished we had jumped on that before you guys did.” So, we definitely kind of took advantage of that situation.

MemberCon.com: When you first started the site, was it free content or was it, from day one, it was a membership site?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Immediately, we realized that the goal was to make money obviously just like any membership web site. So how we wanted to get people on the site initially was we offered beta period. We figured it was a great way to test out the membership software since we have never done this before. And at the same time, it was a great way to get people to join the web site. So, we offered just a one-month beta because everything was pretty easy to iron out all the little bugs and stuff. And from there on, we just basically started charging. We offered a free week trial for the first few months that we were doing the web site, and that’s pretty much gone now. We’ve been a pay web site ever since.

MemberCon.com: Did you propagate behind the member wall content from the original DVDs to get content, kind of front loaded in there or did you put new stuffs in?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Well, the goal was to have 100% new content. And that was also what we were trying to do. When we created the DVDs, we always prided ourselves on not recycling content. And we tried to do that, but under certain restrictions, since wakeboarding is, for people that don’t know, it’s kind of like snowboarding from behind a ski boat. So obviously, it’s very seasonal. Our memberships are much higher in the summer than they are in the winter. So, we definitely want to make it, to launch the web site heading into the spring/summer area. So we kind of had to rush a few little things here and there. So we didn’t have 100% original content when we first launched the site. I’d say probably 75% to 85% of our content at that time was complete original content. And now all of it is.

MemberCon.com: When you are offering memberships, when they start to drop off, do you do anything to try to keep them? And have you found the people rejoin come next summer?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We definitely, we’ve only been going at this for about one and half years. I think we’re right around 18 months. So we started in April of ‘08 and right now it’s September of 09. So, yeah we have found a lot of people have resigned back up that we had lost during the winter. Also, we basically just change our marketing strategy. Since we’re a summer sport, we try to start marketing towards Australia and places like that during our winter since that’s their summer. So, kind of like just like surfers try to follow the endless summer. We’re doing the same thing with our marketing. We’re always trying to market and get our web site out to wherever it’s summer. So when it’s winter here, it’s summer in Australia, and that’s pretty much the market we tried to tap into at that time.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, that’s a great idea because you’re right. It’s summer somewhere always. How about pricing? How did you decide that it would be, I think you’ve $9.99 a month and then $99 for the year.

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: You know lot’s of people basically have this recurring payments, checking out there bank accounts every month. Lots of times for services they don’t use or they forget about. And $9.99 is kind of a sneaky amount. It’s single digit. Seems like it’s not that much. So, I think a lot, maybe they don’t keep real good track and we’re thinking, “Hey, you know, that’s something that maybe someone just might not notice,” or maybe it’s something that they just might not care. They’re like, “$9.99 seems very cheap. I’ll go ahead and let it go through the winter because I know I’ll be using it next summer.” So, that was kind of our strategy for that. We want it to seem like it was cheap, and $9.99 being a single digit instead of, for example, $14.99 which will be two digits. It just seemed like, it seems like it made it that much cheaper and that much less, you know, significant on a credit card bill. And then as far as a $99.99, that was kind of from our DVD business model. We had a series of DVDs and almost all of our profits are made actually in our box set where people would pay larger amounts and save money on the series as a whole instead buying each one individually. And we basically just took that same business model and applied it to the membership. If you buy a whole bunch now, you get it at a cheaper price. And I’d say, right now, we’re probably at 20% to 25% of our members are on the annual plan instead of the monthly.

MemberCon.com: OK. That’s a pretty good percentage. And I would imagine that, for a site that’s not about a business opportunity or making money, $9.99 would seem to me too to be somewhere where it’s just something you would let it keep going because it’s not 100 bucks a month.

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Right. Yeah, it’s easy to fly under the radar at $9.99 a month or yeah, just to seem like it’s really significant and it’s also something that a mom wouldn’t mind buying for their teenage son and having that recurring payment. She looks at it as $9.99 and it’s not that big of a deal. “I’ll let him keep the subscription.”

MemberCon.com: Well, let’s talk about what’s worked for you best in terms of marketing, whether it be a search engine optimization or spending money on paper click advertising, or live events that you market to. What worked best for your particular industry?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: Just jumping back a little bit. With our DVD model, we were very heavy into print advertising. The industry-leading magazine is Wakeboarding Magazine for our industry and we would purchase ad space in there, which is just approximately say two grand an ad for a full-page color ad. This is very pricey when you’re just trying to start a company with nothing, a web site company where you’re building on your own. You don’t have any revenue out of the gate. So, we kind of went back to that business model to start off with. I think we did two ads, and we realize that we were getting fast with that. And we realized that it’s a different type of industry, it’s a different type of product, and we needed a different type of marketing strategy. So basically, what we’ve done now is we found that getting our web site basically in the news of certain news web sites that deal with Wakeboarding, news web sites in our industry. We have wakeworld.com, Wakeboarding Magazine’s web site which is wakeboardingmag.com. Getting in their editorial content, first off, it’s completely free, we’ve gotten a huge amount traffic back from that. So I would say that’s been our biggest thing mainly because they already have the site. They’re already on the Internet in a web browser. All they have to do is click our link at the end of a story or something that, and they’re on our web site. Whereas if someone’s reading something in a magazine, they got to put the magazine down, go to their computer, browse on the web, remember your web address, and get to your site. So we found that on line marketing definitely works for on line web sites. We have a very good product. We’re definitely leading our industry in that whole situation. So, we’ve realized that we can go ahead and throw some of these web sites a free instructional video here and there. It adds concept to their web site. It adds value to their web site to have our content on there. And basically, we’ve kind of integrated that into affiliate program also to where we have our video player on their site, people click on the video player or what not to get to our site. It’s basically an affiliate click and it’s worked out really, really well. The main bulk of our affiliate clicks and stuff are coming from other media web sites and stuff like that. So, really we have several of our big affiliate accounts which are media accounts, other web sites, and they’re the ones that are really taking advantage of the system.

MemberCon.com: How popular or important is the community aspect to the message boards and having members talk to each other to the value of what you’re selling in the membership site?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We’re looking at wakeboarding camps and wakeboarding coaches, and how much has it cost for riders to, for example, going to a wakeboard camp will cost them over a grand a week. So we’re thinking how can we make it…how can we simulate the coaching online, and that’s what really the forums are for. They can ask questions and do all sorts of stuff. We’ve also got what we call a user clip section which is kind of like a little mini youtube built into our site where our members can upload videos of them doing maneuvers tricks or what not behind the boat and can put it on our bulletin board, and we can basically analyze the clip, tell them what they’re doing wrong. So it’s almost just like virtual coaching, and the people that had really taken advantage of the system are loving it. So it’s really, really kind of stepped up the game, and it’s really just taken kind of what we do in our industry to another level.

MemberCon.com: How often do you feel like you need to add new videos or new content that aren’t submitted by your members, the professionally produced like you have, to the site?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We have several different types of content that we put on the site. We try to create and publish at least one instructional video per week, and that’s a pretty polished looking, about three to four-minute instructional video, nicely edited, done with some graphics and stuff. So, we try to do something like that once a week. We have what’s called a quick clip which are just simple little five, 10-second clips performing a trick from a professional rider. We try to get two of those up a week. And then we have what’s called library pages which is basically just a page kind of like…think of it as an encyclopedia of all the tricks on wakeboarding. We basically try to create an instructional page that tells you how to do a trick. We try to add one of those per week as well. And then everyday, we answer questions in our bulletin board. So quite of bit of updating and currently, it’s just me and one other person. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s really starting to get to the point where it’s starting to pay off.

MemberCon.com: I was going to say is this your full time gig, or do you have a separate career and would you quit that if this got big enough?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: This is not our full time gig, but we’re looking at it to possibly be that probably within the next year or so. We’re over 100% growth every month this year compared to last, and if we do that again next year, then this will be sufficient as to be our only job. We’re also looking at branching out and basically using the business model we’ve done for a LearnWake, and we’ve already acquired the names for LearnSnow, LearnBMX, LearnMoto. So, we’re basically looking at taking this business model, this template that we’ve created and apply it to other sports, and just starting to expand and see where we can go with this thing.

MemberCon.com: Excellent. Well, having those skills to be able to put those together yourself is certainly a big benefit there. Well, let me ask you about those content pieces that you add each week. I’m assuming that you probably do a lot of your filming in a couple of days or a couple of weeks over the summer and then you slowly kind of dole it out over the weeks during the winter. Am I correct in that assumption?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: That is the goal but it’s kind of one of the things that doesn’t end out working out that way. We’re always like going to build a whole bunch of videos and stockpile them up then we then just start releasing them. But it ends up being one of the things where we’ve kind of built on as we go. And, unfortunately, that’s how it’s been. Hopefully, one day we’ll be able to start stockpiling them though and start doing that but we just haven’t gotten to that point yet.

MemberCon.com: What’s the end goal? You mentioned building other sites with the same model. Do you see yourself building a huge media company and then selling it off to a big player or have you thought about it?

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: We have thought about it. We’re not really sure what the goal is yet. We kind of just, I think, want to see where we’re going to take it, and we love having a membership web site because when the economy takes a slide and people start cutting advertising cost, we’re not getting hit at all because we don’t make our money off of advertising. So I love having a site where we’re actually selling a service. So there’s no cost to goods or anything like that. We’re actually just selling a virtual service. So I really like the business model, and I’d like to just keep going with it and see where we could take it. And, yeah, eventually, I guess, either sell it off or have other people running the concept for us, and we just keep it going.

MemberCon.com: All right. Well, listeners and viewers, you got to check out learnwake.com even if you have no interest in wakeboarding, it’s just a terrific, terrific example of a great membership site done right, and we’ll link to that in the notes for today’s interview as well. Mike, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate you talking to me.

Mike McLin – LearnWake.com: OK. Sounds good, Tim. Thanks.

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