6 Tips for Avoiding Burnout in Your Membership

Over burdening yourself can have bad health effects and make you lose your passion of your purpose of helping others with your knowledge. When you are over worked and burdened out, you will start to hate getting out of the bed in the mornings for your dream job.

Here are some tips to help insure you don’t get burnout with your membership site.

1. Take a look at the big picture.

Your membership site is not a life or death situation. Yes, it’s a biz and you have a commitment to deliver great content but if a course is 2 days late in delivering to your members, no body is gonna die! If you need to take a day off to find your groove, it’s okay to be a little late. If you find that anyone is disgruntled by this in your membership, then do you really want them in your membership? Most won’t even notice. I wouldn’t make it a habit but occasionally it’s okay.  It’s easy to get tunnel vision but instead take a step back and realize if you take a day off, your membership is not going to go up in smoke.

2. Be realistic.

Be realistic on your ability and the time you have to deliver materials to your community. Don’t underestimate the time involved for content creation and managing your membership. When planning out your content production for the next 3 months, you’ll want to double the amount of time it takes in order to create content. It always takes longer than you think. If you find it doesn’t take you as long to created, then get a jump start on the content needed for the next month.

3. Manage your members’ expectations.

The expectations of your members needs to be realistic. If people join your membership and think they can message you or contact you via phone, then you need to make sure you set boundaries from the very beginning. Make sure your sales pages explains exactly what they’ll get. Members should not feel like they can personally message you for favors. There will always be a few but if you place the boundaries from the beginning with guidelines most do adhere to them.

4. Build a team.

This could be hard for those just starting out but it can be a great solution from relieving your stress. Only you can produce your courses but there are other mundane task that anyone can do. If you produce content with worksheets, have a VA create the worksheet. Or maybe you need email digest created, that can be handed off as well. You focus on only the content you can handle and all the other stuff to a team member. Once you get established, you’ll notice there are power members in your membership. They are there all the time highly active and helping others already; so why not ask them to help out with your membership as a moderator to help answer support questions.

5. Bring in Guest experts.

You don’t always need to deliver the training. Try using guests to help deliver content to your members this will help lighten the load and you’re members will love having guests.  Bring in someone who will help give content that you can’t necessarily give.

6. Have a schedule and manage the schedule.

I find it very helpful to set my calendar in advance and then the members know when to expect content from me. Make sure you’re not ‘fitting’ your membership site in around your other ‘stuff’. It needs to be a top priority. While you’re making your schedule, make sure to schedule in marketing efforts.  Marketing your membership is important and should be done on a monthly basis.  Also, don’t forget to schedule downtime. You need to take breaks and days off or you’ll get burned out quickly. Work smarter, always thinking how you can streamline the process of what you produce and it will help with your time management.

Your work is important and vital to the growth of your membership but don’t tether yourself to it. Don’t think you need to work 24/7 in order to be successful.