Welcome to episode 362 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.
We are celebrating. Yes, that's right. This month marks two years since the launch of Hit the Mic Backstage, so we're starting the whole month celebrating the anniversary. I wanted to talk about what I have learned and has taken for me and the lessons I've had in running this community for the last two years and in continuing to run this community.
I see a lot of the membership sites that started just after I launched or in the year after I launched, a lot of them aren't around anymore. I think a lot of that comes from not really being super clear on what it takes to maintain a membership site. We spend a lot of time curious about what it will take to launch, what tech we need to build it on, and how big our list size needs to be and how to process recurring payments and all of those things.
Sometimes, I know this was definitely true for me, I didn't think nearly as much about what it would take to run a membership site. That's one of the things I love and you're going to hear me shout these guys out probably several times during this episode, The Membership Guys, who have a great podcast. Mike and Kelly are fantastic. They have a great membership site I'm a part of.
They also have done masterminds that I've been a part of and live events that I've attended and they're friends of mine. They're just fantastic people who genuinely know their stuff. They spend a lot of time in their community and in their marketing talking about not just what it takes to launch, but what it takes to run.
They're doing a really good job of educating us on this stuff. I wanted to tell you from somebody who doesn't teach this day to day what my experience has been, my lessons have been, maybe a couple of things I wish I would have known earlier. We're going to focus on three or four main areas and we'll dive in in that way. The first thing I want to talk about though is commitment. You really have to be committed to growing this membership site.
One of the things that I had to choose very early is if I wanted to have launch periods and I wanted to launch multiple times per year or if I wanted to have it open all of the time. I chose to have it open all of the time, which basically means I'm always in some way in launch mode. Instead of having the collective stress of a very intense launch over a week or two weeks and the work it takes to do that both before the actual two week open period and then during that two week period, I have a slightly lesser version of that all the time.
I'm always selling the membership site. We have put in place a lot of pieces so that the membership site can always be in launch mode. It can always be in sales mode. That means little stuff like budgeting for Facebook ads all the time, meaning I don't have a launch budget that's XYZ and it scales down for the month afterwards. No. I have a budget for 12 months and there's a monthly budget for Backstage.
In addition to that, there's a monthly budget for anything that I do have a launch period around. Earlier this year, we launched the Backstage Amplifier Mastermind, which I will talk more about later because we're changing it up a little bit. That was a more focused launch period. It had an o
