How Jamie Swanson Niched Down to Stay in Her Zone of Genius and Achieve Professional Freedom

Shelli: Well, what if it were just easy? Today’s guest is the incredible Jamie Swanson and after struggling with her membership site for a period of time, she realized there was a much easier way to do it. Jamie teaches brand photographers how to get there first 12 clients and in today’s episode, she’s going to show us how when we keep it super Swanson simple, we can stay in our zone of genius and make our membership site effective and effortless.

Stu: There is a big trend brewing that’s revolutionizing the way business is being done. Big companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple are jumping on this too but so are thousands of others in all kinds of markets like photography, and calligraphy, fitness, finance, meal planning, lesson planning, dog training, and so many more, and they’re doing it by shifting to a recurring revenue model. Hi. My name is Stu McLaren and for more than a decade, I’ve been helping tens of thousands of entrepreneurs generate recurring revenue through membership sites. Join our host, Shelli Varela, as she takes you behind-the-scenes to see how these companies are building a thriving tribe that spends with them every single month. Now let’s get to today’s episode.

[INTERVIEW]

Shelli: Jamie Swanson, welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. I have been champing at the bit to speak with you for a while. So, I’m stoked that you’re here.

Jamie: Well, thanks for having me, Shelli. I always love chatting with you.

Shelli: I have learned so much from you, as you well know, and I’m excited to share some tips, tricks, and innovations that you’re doing because you’re known as the quick start girl and making things Swanson simple. You actually inspired me at a conference we’re at recently around some of my limiting beliefs so I wanted to share the genius that is you with our amazing listeners because you had a membership site to start with and then you completely revamp the way you were going to carry on with your membership by an interesting switch. And I’m wondering if you can share with us what you were doing before and the switch you made and how that’s working for you now.

Jamie: I would love to share, Shelli. So, I work with professional photographers and help them grow the business out of their business and so I had been doing this since 2011, and I’d always wanted to have a membership site and a few years ago, I finally got my stuff together and launched a membership site basically teaching photographers anything they needed to know to get new clients. Now, I worked with wedding photographers, important photographers, and basically anybody who is trying to sell photography. And I would teach them SEO and sales and planning and like all of these topics because I knew how to help them in so many different ways, and I thought that by giving them all of this stuff, they would be able to take it and succeed and find the one that works for them. And honestly, it was really overwhelming like at first, look, I love the idea and I’ve gone through TRIBE and I heard all about not overwhelming your members and creating content in advance and all of the stuff, but I just could not get it together. I could not do it in advance. I was always doing it last minute it felt like and there’s just so much.

And it just became really overwhelming to run, Shelli, and honestly, I had a hard time growing it because it was so broad and like the messaging was just there were so much stuff for so many people. I was just like, “Let me help any photographer grow their business,” which might seem niche, but it’s absolutely not, because there are so many different ways you can go about doing that. And it never took off the way I expected it to like I have a very large audience. I’ve been doing this for years, I’ve been selling a really expensive marketing course and I was trying to transition into a membership and it just didn’t go the way that I thought it would like I found it really difficult to sell. It was taking tons of time to maintain and it just wasn’t growing the way that I wanted it to. And it was actually kind of a dark period where I was trying to figure out what am I doing wrong like what’s going on like am I screwing something up? I started to really question myself and a lot of the stuff that I was doing in my business and I started to wonder if maybe memberships were a bad idea because maybe they don’t sell as well. Maybe I should go back to doing something else.

I was really looking at what was working in my market and what wasn’t. And at that time, probably about two years ago now, Shelli, I noted that the people who were really doing well as educators for professional photographers and really helping them get results were the ones who are focusing more on them as the personal brand like them being the face of a company and I have never done that. I have six kids. I have wanted to protect them and I didn’t want to have to be the face of things, because like yesterday things came up, I couldn’t work like it was just a mess and I didn’t ever want to have to have the business be that dependent on me because that takes away some of your freedom in some ways and I had built a really strong business brand, but I saw where things were going and I noted that with the thousands of people now who are trying to teach photography, marketing, and there were maybe like 20 when I started back in 2011.

Shelli: Wow.

Jamie: For real like I literally scoured the Internet. There were 20 people teaching just the business of photography. It was niched then, and then it became not niched. There’s probably 2,000 or more teaching it easily two years ago and so I thought the way to stand out I really need that connection with people. I need to share more of me and more of my story. I decided to look for a photographer to take a bunch of photos for me so I could start growing a personal Instagram account. Now, I had one for quilting, but it wasn’t anything business-related. It didn’t have to do with me. It didn’t position me as a leader within the photography industry and so I went looking for a photographer and being in the photography industry, you’d think this would be very easy but it wasn’t. I couldn’t find anybody who really got what I needed and it was like that moment in Harry Potter when Harry learned that he’s a wizard like all of those things start to make sense in his life like, “Oh, that’s why these weird things happen,” and like, “Oh, I’m not one of them. I am different.” Like he takes on this new identity and he’s like, “Oh, this is who I am.”

That’s kind of like what happened to me because I’m like, “Oh, my goodness, I could lead this charge in the photography industry.” I could teach photographers how to work with entrepreneurs and influencers to help them to get the photos they need that really connect with their audience and that share their story with their audience in a split second so that they want to actually read the captions and get them the images they need for their website and Facebook and all the other stuff too. But that was a real big defining moment for me, Shelli, and it changed everything I did going forward. And so, not being super sure about the membership thing. If I’m honest, I kind of wasn’t sold on the idea after having run for about a year-and-a-half and really struggled with it. I’m not quick start. I basically did a beta course to people and say, “Let me teach you how to do this.”

Shelli: Awesome.

Jamie: Thank you. I mean, we’re talking like six weeks after I had this discovery. I dropped everything I was doing. I basically went straight into launch and we were alive like six weeks later. It was insane. That’s not the story for today but I did this beta course and I had I think it was 167 people join me for the beta course. I’m like, “Man, courses are so much easier than memberships.” I dove into this and I actually during that time I made a really hard decision to close my membership and because I just made it as much in a beta launch for something that didn’t exist that I could do a live with them as I did in like 10 months of my membership or something. It just wasn’t going where it needed to. And so, I know this is all about memberships but I decided to close that membership and go back in like all in with courses which has its downfalls too because you get a lot of money and then you get like nothing for months until you launch again and it’s very stressful.

And that’s part of why I wanted to do memberships in the first place was because it got me out of that stressful cycle of feast or famine like big launch and then nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then hoping that the next launch would be big enough to keep at least sustaining if not growing. I had done that for years, but then I had started to see those goes down and so I added. It’s risky. So, I launched this course and then closed out my membership and then as I did this course, I did it again a few months later after we had done the original beta course and I kept having people say, “You know, Jamie, I really want more like we’re just getting into this. This is a new niche that you’re helping shape and I want to be part of this movement. What else can I do? Can I hire you as a coach?” And I didn’t want to do coaching, Shelli, because I can only coach so many people that way and I really want to have a massive impact in the lives of my photographers because I think this is the future for my industry and everyone’s online and there’s more, more business owners who need this and want this.

And I was teaching them how to do the recurring income thing because I talked about how awesome it is to find an entrepreneur, work with them every quarter so they have a steady stream of images. And it was like I love the membership and the recurring model and I was teaching them but I didn’t have it for me and they wanted more. So, I kind of thought what am I going to do? Like, I’ve got to do something. Stu encouraged me because I’m like, “Stu, I don’t know if I want to do another membership. Like, I know you’re the membership guy. I love recurring income but it was so overwhelming like I just couldn’t get it together and batch create.” And I don’t know if that’s because I’ve got all my kids or whatever but I just couldn’t make it happen. And so, he just challenged me and he said, “I think that’s a limiting belief. I really think that you could think it through and make this happen.” And so, I did. It took me a few months to really come to it but I realize that one of the big things that my course does is teaches people how to connect with entrepreneurs and influencers and really network and it took them a while to do that and it took them a while to figure out who they wanted as clients like how to reach and really connect with the people who wanted photography on an ongoing basis.

And during that time, I had given away a laser coaching session to one person because I wanted to do a survey and I wanted to get a bunch of feedback from them so I could make my course better. So, it’s going to take it from a beta version to a recorded version that had been cleaned up and organized and all that stuff. And so, I gave away this price of a laser coaching session to one person and who filled it out. It was kind of a random drawing thing and the laser coaching session is just 15 minutes with me. We go deep on one question back and forth over Zoom and so I can ask them questions, they can give me more feedback, and we can really help them get like action steps within those 15 minutes. It’s pretty fast and easy and I did that and I’m like, “Oh man, this is so helpful for me,” because I get to really see where my people are and what they’re struggling with as we’re defining this new niche within the photography industry and, I mean, it just feels good. When you can go deep and give people help in 15 minutes and they come in not knowing what to do next and leave with all this clarity because you keep it so specific because it’s one question, one problem.

And you don’t have like, “Hey, I don’t know how to grow my business.” It’s like, “I’m having trouble with this very specific thing.” You can do that in like 15 minutes and it’s so satisfying and so it got me thinking about, “Man, I’d like to do more of those, but I don’t want to do coaching. I want to reach more people like I’ve got I think at that time I have like 300 or at around 300 people who had gotten through my course or right around there. And I’m like, “I can’t offer that to everybody and they don’t have the time to do a lot of that.” And then like at some point, the dots connected. It’s like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I want to do membership and give ongoing support but I need it to be easy.” So, what I decided to do was to offer a membership where they would get ongoing support from me and make it super, super specific so it was only about helping them get 12 recurring clients because most of my students only needed to work with 12 people on an ongoing basis to hit their income goals.

And so, I said if I just focus on that one thing, I could do laser coaching sessions. Not everybody gets one, but they can apply to get one and if they’re chosen, we could record that together and then we could release one of those per week to the entire group and everybody could benefit from it because maybe not everyone has that specific question but they could learn from the action points and they could take the teaching from that and they could learn something from it. And so, I said, “Oh, okay, I can do that because I can batch record those in advance. In fact, tomorrow, Shelli, I’m going to be batch recording 10 of these in 3.5 hours and we just set them up 20 minutes apart so they’re 15 minutes on, gives me a couple minutes to transition. We’d batch record them and then they get scheduled out for 10 weeks. It’s really fast. It’s really easy, and then we just release them one per week to the group and then I do a monthly Q&A call so they can actually ask me their questions and get responses. And then every month they give them new implementation task just to help them continue with the networking portion that they’re doing.

So, I give them new ideas on how to connect with the people that they’re really trying to get to know and build a relationship with because that’s one of my superpowers and then I think it’s one of the best ways for them to get new clients. And then we do have a private Facebook group and I’m in there like once or twice a week just kind of answering some questions via the typing in the Facebook post but it’s so easy. Shelli, it’s so easy.

[ANNOUNCEMENT]

Stu: Hey, it’s me, Stu, and mark this date down, April 25. It’s the start of a brand-new free workshop showing you exactly how to build in recurring revenue into your business. Listen, big companies like Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Spotify, and so many more have woven in a recurring revenue model into their business and so are thousands and thousands of others in all kinds of markets from photography, and calligraphy, to fitness, and finance, and health, and music, and dog training, and so many more. Listen, we are going to show you exactly how to do it. April 25, mark it down and go to TRIBEWorkshop.com to register. It’s all free and we’ll show you how to create more financial stability in your life, in your business by creating a recurring revenue membership. It’s amazing. We’re going to walk you through how to do it, April 25, TRIBEWorkshop.com. We’ll see you there. Woohoo!

[INTERVIEW]

Shelli: This is such an incredible example of when you have a gift that’s staring you in the face and it’s sort of like on the left, you’re efforting and efforting and it’s overwhelming and hard. And then on the right side, you’re just kind of the stuff that comes easy to you I feel like oftentimes we’re very quick to dismiss it as it’s not a thing because it just pours out of us like water. And I love what you said because this is a really innovative way to do what you’re doing, because once people have taken the course on the front end that is mandatory for them to get your membership site, they’re all now speaking the same language. So, it’s almost like you teach them the nuts and bolts and get everybody up off their knees and walking and then once they’re mobile then you can just continue to extend the conversation. And I so love what you did with respect to taking something that was overwhelming and lots of moving pieces and niching it down to just that one thing because we mentioned the 15-minute call and you’re back producing them. But when you have niched it down to something as specific as, “Okay, we’re just going to, guys, help you get 12 new clients,” then every single conversation you have with those people is super targeted and relevant.

Jamie: Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right and it’s fun for me now and not only that, but we can repurpose the tips that I’m sharing in these laser coaching sessions, like, obviously, I’m not going to share the actual laser coaching session outside of the group because that’s a big chunk of the membership, but we can take the tips that are in that and repurpose that into a blog post that’s just the takeaways from it or we can reuse this content in different ways and in different formats and so it can also help me create content for not exactly the way it is but by repurposing a little bit, I have a content assistant and she basically takes the stuff and she says, “Oh, that’s a great teaching tip or whatever,” and so she can make that into an email but not the actual conversation, just the takeaway. So, not only am I creating content for my membership but we’re creating the base content that somebody else, my assistant, can take and actually create more content from in a different form that can still nurture my members and my free audience. And they’re not getting the same experiences in seeing me walk through this in a coaching session with someone like my members do, but it made everything simple.

Like, it took the amount of time I was spending creating content like down to nothing compared to what I was doing before this and it’s already making as much, if not more, I haven’t looked at the numbers recently but it surpassed what I was making in my old membership very, very quickly. Now, only people who go through my course can join us, so they’ve already invested a lot of money in front like you said, but I get about 30% of the people who take my course who end up joining this membership and that’s an easy launch. It’s hardly a launch at all because the six weeks we took together going through the course is basically showing them what it’s like to work with me on an ongoing basis. It’s kind of like the onboarding and then at this point, they all just need the same help or maybe they haven’t quite completely finished the course but then they have a place to come and get more feedback from. And it’s been such a breath of relief compared to what I was doing before and it’s just so easy to grow as long as I continue selling my course.

So, I get the ease of selling a course upfront but then I get the ease of selling that membership on the backend and it really shows me who those core people are that are really invested and that really want to make this happen. It’s been really fun, Shelli.

Shelli: For sure. Well, I love about you that you always laser target it down so you took something that’s completely overwhelming and now it’s a seamless process. You’re getting to run the course that you like into a membership that people are already in love with before it’s even available, and most importantly on the backend, you really enjoy doing it. It’s far less overwhelming than the efforting you were doing before. And how does that impact your personal life at home because you have lots of kids at home? How does that impact you and sort of how you show up for your family now because you’re in a completely different headspace?

Jamie: I can take time away from my business now that I couldn’t before. And as much as I hated to do this and as much as I said every week, this wouldn’t be the case, all the fires would get put out there early in the week and then I put off getting the content until near the end of the week because that was easier for me but it was like every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it was still hanging over my head and I can think of so many Sunday nights and I’m trying to get the stuff up last minute because it’s got to go live on Monday and I just wasn’t far enough ahead and I just never got the discipline. But when I set up times to do the laser coaching, it’s set on my calendar, and I can do them 20 minutes apart. They’re 15 minutes long so they’re not long, and it doesn’t require any prep on my part. It doesn’t require a lot of work afterward because we don’t do massive editing to it. We just clip the beginning and the end a little bit and then we get captions for it, we upload it, we put it on the site, we do a transcript there. So, it’s not a huge process. We can batch create both recording them, but then also producing them and getting them on the website within a week.

And so, knowing that if I were to get really sick or if something massive were to happen in my life where I had to step away from the business for a little while, we’re going to be booked after tomorrow. We’re going to have all the content we need for the next three months ready to go. And other than a monthly Q&A which takes another hour and my implementation tasks, those can be done in advance too. Those don’t take very long. Those maybe take half an hour a month for me to go in and write up. And so, it’s nothing like it was before, and it gives me so much peace knowing that I can have like if something were to happen, my business isn’t going to fall apart. I’ve got a little bit of a runway and figure out how we’re going to handle that and I’m not immediately dropping the ball, and I’m not working late on Sunday nights when I told my family I wouldn’t be because it’s done and it is out and I don’t have to worry about if I get the flu and start puking like I can actually make sure it’s out because it’s done.

And it changes everything. It’s really narrowing it down because I think I was hesitant to do that because I didn’t feel like I’d be providing enough to my people so taking the core material and making that into a course made my success path very, very easy. So, it was just step one is them deciding they want to work with entrepreneurs and influencers and do personal brand photography. Step two is setting up their business to do that and doing their first portfolio building shoot. Step three is getting their first paid recurring client. Step four is getting fully booked with the recurring clients. And it’s so simple because it’s so narrow. Before, I didn’t have a success path, Shelli, from my other membership. I had a success matrix and it was faulty dimensional and it was a mess because there was just so much that I was trying to do in one membership and I was trying to serve people on so many different places within a success path that it was hard to really be relevant to all of them and it was hard to make my messaging specific enough so that they would be like, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I need right now.” It was too generic.

And so, when I got really specific and I’m like, “Okay. You already have what you need but if you need ongoing support and you really want help, booking those recurring clients going from none to 12 so basically, I only cover two steps of my success path here.  I go getting their first through getting their 12. That’s just a tiny, narrow part of it. This is for you and it’s not a hard sell. It’s not a massive launch. It’s just a couple of reminders and a, “Hey, I would love to keep working with you if you’d like what you’ve learned, if you want more support, and you want it on this very narrow thing,” which is exactly what they need at that specific point after the course. They’re like, “Okay, I’ve got the stuff, I’m all set up. Now, how do I get these clients? Can I have support as I’m getting them?” So, share how-to in the course. It just makes so much sense and it’s so easy and it’s a no-brainer for most of them. It’s very easy for me to maintain. So, it’s just win, win, win all around and keeping it narrow makes it so, so simple.

Shelli: Well, it’s brilliant too because you’re able to trickle down and capitalize on your area of genius in a way that is streamlined, simple, and super targeted and effective. So, I so appreciate you spending the time and if people are looking for you to contact and reach out to you online, where is the best place that they can reach the amazing Jamie Swanson?

Jamie: You’re so sweet. People follow my podcast or listen to my podcast. If you’re a podcast listener, basically I’ve started chronicling my journey of transitioning from being a business brand to growing my personal brand. And so, I share the stats, it’s all the behind-the-scenes stuff, you’d hear more of my story and how I transition through all of this. It’s called Personal Brand Journey with Jamie M. Swanson. You can find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, I don’t know, wherever you listen to podcast. And then if somebody listening is saying, “Man, I would love to have a photographer that would create 90 days of images for me to you. It’s like have a steady stream of images all in one day so that you’re never wondering what to post on Instagram or you always have fresh images for your website and Facebook. I actually have a list of vetted photographers that I have hand selected as the best of the best hat have gone through my course and you can find them at PersonalBrandPhotographers.com. That’s plural.

There’s about I think 20 to 22 photographers on there around the world. They are not going to be your cheap Craigslist photographer. Let me just start there but they’re really going to help you capture your story and share that with people in an instant so that people, you capture their attention and they do. They start reading the caption. They start reading the description. They start engaging with your business more and you as a person. And so, they’re great. They’re not cheap but they are worth every penny and they really can help you connect with people on a deeper audience so you can check that out too.

Shelli: I love it. Thank you so much for spending the time and for sharing your incredible wisdom. I appreciate you.

Jamie: Well, thank you, Shelli. I’ve loved it.