How (and Why) to Build a Kajabi Membership Site in 2023

You’re thinking about building a membership website on Kajabi. Great idea!

But how do you build one? What are the tools the platform offers, and how to use them?

In this guide, we’ll show you step-by-step how to build a Kajabi membership site from scratch. We’ll cover everything from setting up your products to designing a marketing funnel.

Let’s start by discussing why using Kajabi for membership sites is a great idea.

Why Kajabi Is a Great Option for Membership Sites?

Kajabi is one of the best platforms for building memberships. With Kajabi, you get access to a wide range of tools and features that make building your membership site fast and straightforward.

Some key benefits of building a Kajabi membership site include:

All-In-One Membership Platform

The most significant advantage of using Kajabi is that it is an all-in-one membership website platform, so you can create your products, build your website, run a blog, and handle end-to-end marketing on the platform.

This helps reduce dependency on third-party apps, allowing you to create and run your membership site easily and quickly.

It Supports Different Product Types

Kajabi is the most versatile membership builder in terms of product creation. It lets you create online courses, online communities, coaching programs, and podcasts for your members.

Moreover, you can bundle these products in any way you want, so you have great flexibility with your membership content.

It Offers Mobile Apps for End-Users

Kajabi provides iOS and Android mobile apps for your end-users, making it easier for them to consume your content on the go.

Additionally, features like push notifications for community mentions and creator announcements help increase your member engagement.

It Offers All Necessary Subscription Features

Kajabi allows you to create weekly, monthly, or yearly subscriptions and also charge in different currencies. Besides that, you can provide a free trial and collect an initial setup fee.

In terms of payment processing, Kajabi lets you use both Stripe and PayPal for recurring payments, which is awesome.

Powerful Subscription Reporting

Kajabi has fantastic reporting and analytics tools to help you make data-driven decisions.

Besides essential reports such as member progress and net revenue, it has a separate report for important membership subscription metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR), average revenue per user (ARPU), and churn rate.

Here we’ve given a brief summary of why the Kajabi membership site is a great option. However, if you want to analyze the platform in more detail, check out our in-depth Kajabi Review.

1. Create Your Kajabi Account

The first step is to sign up for Kajabi and create an account. If you already have a Kajabi account, you can go to step #2 directly.

Go to Kajabi, and you’ll see a page like the one below. On this page, you’ll see a special offer for a 30-day free trial of Kajabi. Click on the free trial button.

You’ll then be taken to a page to sign up for Kajabi. First, you’ll need to enter basic details like your name and email address. Then, you’ll need to enter your payment details in the next step.

Once you complete the above steps, you’ll be asked to verify your email address and answer a few onboarding questions before you can access the admin area.

Kajabi’s user interface is simple and easy to use, and you can access all the tools from the sidebar menu. It will take some time to get familiar with these menu options, but don’t worry; we’ll walk you through everything in this guide.

Now, it’s time to start setting up your Kajabi membership site.

2. Set Up Your Membership Products

The first step in building a Kajabi membership site is to set up your products correctly. Kajabi allows you to create a few different types of products, and the most popular one is online courses.

To create a course on Kajabi, click on the Products menu on the Dashboard and go to Courses. There you’ll find the Get Started option.

After that, Kajabi asks you to enter some general information like the course name and description. It will also ask you to choose a template, and we recommend you start with the Blank Template.

The curriculum builder will open once you have added the general details and selected the template. Here you can organize your course content into categories (sections), subcategories, and posts (lessons).

First, you need to add categories to your course. You can do that by clicking on the Add Content button and selecting the New Category option.

After adding a category, it’s time to add lessons to it. You can do that by clicking Add Content next to the category title add selecting New Post.

Once you have added a lesson to your course curriculum, the next step is adding content.

Click on the Edit Post option next to the lesson title. This will open the lesson builder, where you can add video, audio, text, and downloadable files.

You can also add a Kajabi Assessment here. Assessments is a feature for creating quizzes, assignments, and surveys in your course.

To do that, select the Assessment option under Media. Here you can create a new Assessment or add an existing one as well.

You’ll need to repeat this process to add all the categories and lessons to your course outline in Kajabi. Finally, your product outline will appear like the screenshot below.

There’s another way to add content in Kajabi, i.e., to bulk upload your videos. When you do that, Kajabi will automatically turn them into lessons, making it much faster to build your course curriculum.

To bulk upload videos, click on the Add Content option and select Upload Multiple Videos.

This is how you create a course in Kajabi. The next step is to customize the course area. You can do this through Kajabi Product Themes.

When you click on the Customize option in the course builder, it opens the theme manager. Here you can preview your existing theme or pick a new one from the library.

When you click on the Install Theme option, it will open the theme library. There are multiple themes, and you can choose the one that’s best for your brand.

Other than courses, another important product type that the platform supports is Communities. Kajabi Communities lets you build a private community area for your paying members and is great for driving engagement.

To create a community, go to All Products -> Community from the sidebar and click on the Get Started button. Then enter your community details, select your brand colors, and upload your logo.

After that, you’ll be taken to your community dashboard. Here you can edit your community details, customize the sidebar, and add Topics to improve the organization of posts.

Now, click the Go to Your Community button to access the community feed. Here you can create new discussions and also moderate existing conversations.

This is how simple it is to set up a community in Kajabi. After these initial steps, you and your members can start adding posts containing images, embedded videos, and links.

While courses and community are the two most important product types supported by Kajabi, you can also create coaching and podcasts. For example, Kajabi Coaching lets you create a coaching product, which you can include in your membership site along with courses and community.

What this means is that you can create all types of membership sites on the platform.

Now, let’s move to the next step of creating membership tiers using these products.

3. Set Up Membership Plans

Now that your products are ready, it’s time to create membership tiers. Depending on your membership model and the number of products, you can create one or more levels.

Kajabi has what it calls Offers. You can think of an Offer as a pricing plan. This is where you restrict access to the premium content to your paying members and create multiple tiers.

To create an Offer, go to Sales -> Offers from the sidebar and click on the + New Offer button.

A popup will appear, and you’ll have to add the Offer title (plan title) and select the products. Make sure to choose the subscription payment type and set the price and the billing frequency.

When you click the Create button, your plan gets published, and you’ll be taken to the Offer page. For additional Offer settings, you need to click on the Edit option.

On this page, you’ll be able to add a free trial and a setup fee. You can also set a time or quantity limit to the plan.

If you want to have different membership tiers, you’ll need to create a separate Offer for each one. For example, you can include your courses and content library in the Basic Plan while restricting community access to the Premium Plan.

4. Build Your Membership Sales Page

Kajabi has some fantastic features to help you build your membership sales page.

To create one, click on the Website menu and go to the Pages section. Here you’ll find a separate tab for landing pages from where you can create your sales page.

For that, click on the + New Landing Page option to open the landing page theme library.

You’ll manage and create new sales pages through the Kajabi Landing Pages Dashboard.

Here you’ll find a variety of landing page templates, including for sales pages. You can preview the themes and select the one that matches your brand style.

Once you create a sales page, Kajabi will take you to the page builder, where you’ll see a real-time preview of the sales page on the right and the page sections and settings on the left.

Kajabi page builder is easy to use but, at the same time, is super flexible. You can easily reorder existing page sections by dragging and dropping them from the left panel.

To add a section to the sales page, click the Add Section button and see all the available page sections.

Kajabi has 40+ different sections—such as a hero section, pricing table, multi-column layout, etc.—for building a good-looking page.

You can further edit a page section by clicking on it. You’ll be able to edit the text, add new elements, modify the layout, change spacing, etc.

One critical thing you must do on your sales page is to connect the pricing buttons to the respective Offer checkout pages. You can do that by clicking on the respective button and modifying the button action.

Before you can make your membership site live, you need to do a couple of other important things. So let’s go through them.

5. Set Up an Onboarding Sequence

The next step will be creating an onboarding sequence for your members, and Kajabi has exclusive email marketing tools to help you set it up.

Go to Marketing -> Email Campaigns, click on the New Email Campaign button, and then choose the Email Sequence option.

This will lead you to Kajabi’s email template library. While there are several templates, my favorite one is the Simple Text template.

Select a template and click on the Get Started option.

Kajabi will take you to the email editor, where you can set a schedule, add a subject, and modify content.

To modify content, click on the Edit Content button. Your email will then open in the same page builder interface, where you can add media elements, buttons, social icons, countdowns, and more.

Once you save the email, you can go back to the email campaign dashboard, where you’ll find the existing emails in the campaign, and you can add new emails as well.

To do that, click on the Add New Email and follow the same steps above. You can add as many emails and schedule them as you want.

Once your email campaign is ready, it’s time to connect it to your Offer using Automations. Go to Marketing -> Automations and click on the New Automation button.

This will open a popup where you can create an Automation rule to add your membership buyers to the onboarding sequence.

The Automation will have “Offer is purchased” as the trigger and “Subscribe to an email sequence” as the action.

Now that you have successfully created your onboarding sequence, it’s time for the last step.

6. Create a Funnel to Market Your Membership

Kajabi doesn’t just offer you tools for building a membership program but also promoting it, and the most important one is Funnels.

The funnel builder allows you to create marketing funnels for collecting leads and nurturing them before turning them into customers.

While Kajabi Funnels allows you to create all types of funnels, we recommend you start with a simple lead magnet funnel for your membership. The funnel will have:

• A landing page for users to get your lead magnet
• A thank you page to confirm subscription
• An email sequence to nurture subscribers and sell your membership

So, how do you create a lead magnet funnel using Kajabi?

To create a pipeline in Kajabi, go to Marketing -> Pipelines, and click the New Pipeline button.

Kajabi will now show the different blueprints available. Select the Freebie pipeline, add a title, and upload the lead magnet you want to promote.

After that, Kajabi will automatically generate the pipeline with all the pages and the email sequence. This is already a functional funnel, so when someone opts in on the landing page, they’ll be subscribed to your list and can download the lead magnet.

The next step is to customize the pages and emails. You can do that by clicking on the respective element in the Pipeline Builder, and it will open the page/email editor on the right side.

For example, when you click on the optin page, the Kajabi page builder will open in the same interface. It’s the same page builder you used to create the sales page, so you should be able to modify the landing page easily.

Similarly, you can click on the email sequence to modify existing emails and add new ones.

Once you’re done customizing the pipeline elements, you can copy the funnel URL from the top right and start sharing it with your audience.

Next, we’ll share some bonus tips for growing your membership site. But, before that, you may want to check out our examples of Kajabi websites. These include membership sites built through Kajabi and will give you inspiration and help you understand what you can achieve with the platform.

Bonus Tips for Growing Your Kajabi Membership Site

Now that you know how to create a Kajabi membership site, it’s time for some actionable tips to grow it.

Build an Active Membership Community

Irrespective of the membership type, we recommend you build an online community for your members. A community can go a long way in boosting engagement and improving member retention.

With Kajabi Community, not only can hosts interact with members, but members can interact with each other using posts, comments, and mentions.

But how can you ensure active member participation using the Kajabi community features? Here are some ways to do it:

• Enable Kajabi’s iOS/Android app to make it easy for members to access the community.
• Create topics and assign them to posts to keep your community organized.
• Create engaging content in your community and send announcements to your members.
• Activate the member directory so that members can see others’ profiles.

Gamify Your Kajabi Membership Site

Gamification is one of the best ways to engage your members. Though Kajabi doesn’t have dedicated gamification tools, you can use Automations for this purpose.

For example, you can:

• Do weekly check-ins with your members and ensure they don’t get stuck.
• Follow up with inactive members to bring them back to your site.
• Send a congratulatory email when someone completes a lesson or passes an Assessment.

These are just some of the ways to gamify your membership. If you want to learn more about Kajabi Automations and how to use it, you should check this guide.

Collect Feedback to Improve Your Membership

The best way to improve your membership site is to collect direct feedback from your members.

You can use Kajabi Assessments to create a feedback form and then place them inside a course or share it with members via email.

However, the key to collecting feedback is the right timing. Here are a few suggestions for when you should collect feedback:

• One week after someone joins your membership
• When a member completes a course or makes significant progress
• When a member cancels their subscription

Use Kajabi’s Sales Conversion Tools

Kajabi offers several sales-boosting tools, which you can use to improve your conversion rates and average order value. Here are a few of them:

• Abandoned cart tracking: With Kajabi’s abandoned cart tracking feature, you can send a follow-up email to customers who don’t complete their checkout.
• Coupons: Kajabi allows you to create coupons that you can use to discount your membership pricing during your launch. Or, you can send discount coupons to customers when they cancel their subscriptions.
• Upsells and Order Bumps: Kajabi lets you add an order bump to the checkout page and 1-click upsells to the thank you page. These two features are effective in increasing your purchase value.

Run an Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways for any online business to promote its products, including membership sites. The good thing is that Kajabi has built-in tools to help you create and manage an affiliate program.

With Kajabi’s affiliate marketing tools, you can:

• Create a public registration page for your affiliates.
• Offer a commission to affiliates for every new member they refer to your site.
• Give your affiliates a private dashboard where they can track clicks, sales, and commissions in real-time.
• Pay commissions to affiliates using the automatically generated report.

Conclusion

We started this guide by explaining the perks of choosing Kajabi to build a membership site— including all-in-one features, product types, mobile apps, etc.

We then guided you through the steps in building a Kajabi membership site. The process includes creating products, setting up tiers, making a sales page, creating an onboarding sequence, and building a sales funnel.

Lastly, we shared some bonus tips that you can use to grow your membership website.

If you are not using Kajabi yet, sign up for a free trial to start building your membership site.

I hope you found this Kajabi membership site guide helpful.

If you have questions or suggestions, please share them in the comments.

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