Jaime Oikle started the first version of RunningRestaurants over twenty years ago as a static website. Today, this membership website publishes industry news, seminars and webinars related to providing independent restaurant owners and managers with the business tools they need to succeed.
Covering everything from digital marketing tips and templates, to operations and service advice, Running Restaurants has a wide range of information in their membership portal, as well as downloadable ebooks, spreadsheets, checklists and more for sale in their online shop.
RunningRestaurants serves a specific industry niche. Industry news is one form of content that can be successfully monetized with a membership website.
Many professionals are willing to pay for access to reliable, comprehensive industry reports and analysis which provide them with the knowledge to make well-informed business decisions.
RunningRestaurants delivers a mixture of free and paid content. This balanced approach allows them to build a relationship with their wider target audience while generating revenue from their paid premium subscriptions and offerings.
Posting free content is actually an established marketing strategy for a successful membership website. It attracts organic traffic, establishes industry credibility, acts as a lead generation and can be shared on social media platforms.
The decision to start a membership website
Jaime first started exploring membership platform options because he was frustrated with the limitations of his static website in terms of income generation.
He wanted to transfer from the static webpage to a more managed and dynamic interface that would be sell memberships and take transactions. He also wanted a content management system that would be easier to update. He wanted to focus on the content, instead of building the website from scratch.
Jaime was looking for a platform where he didn't have to build the technology himself but one where all the tech stuff was happening in the background. His expertise is not in the coding but delivering industry content to his audience. He was looking for an all-in-one managed solution and that's why he chose SubHub.
Reasons to choose an all-in-one membership website solution
Jaime wanted to be able to easily and seamlessly monetize the content he was producing without having to worry about managing multiple plug-ins. He was looking for a single, unified solution that could grow with his business, as well as being super simple to use so he didn’t have to worry about the technical side.
Jaime says, “SubHub had all the things we were looking for, and over the years we’ve pushed to get the platform to do more things. The SubHub team have always been very responsive about making those changes. And they’ve obviously been proactive to stay in tune with the changing landscape that's out there as well. I find SubHub to be very straightforward, very easy to use, and compared to similar services it’s towards the top, for sure!”
Multiple tools to monetize your content
Jaime’s business has continued to grow during the time he’s been using SubHub, and he’s been happy to see how SubHub has grown along with him. RunningRestaurants has a solid membership base that generates income on a monthly basis, and they’ve made good use of SubHub’s online shop and articles features both to encourage new memberships and offer support to non-members.
Jaime says. “What SubHub does is take a publisher or an expert in something and free them from the constraints of technology, and just let them get directly to the consumer in a mass way that you can't otherwise do. Experts, for example, in the yoga space or training space, they want to sell their expertise to an online audience versus five people in a physical space. SubHub manages all the technology, taking that issue away. It lets people get straight through to the users so that they can make money through technology.”
Committed customer support
SubHub's responsive customer support team has been a major factor in his commitment to the SubHub platfrom.
Jaime says, “Everybody has always been super-duper nice, super helpful, and very responsive. When they respond to support tickets it’s always quickly and they'll escalate it to the development team where necessary. Then they follow up make sure it's done, make sure it's happening, make sure I am happy with the result. So all of that has been great. We did the redesign with their design team, and it all worked very well from the skeleton layout, to the feedback and then the graphics. The final results have always been great.”
Jaime's advice for building a membership website
“I would just say there's a lot of ways to do it - you can spend zero or you can spend a hundred thousand dollars. You could do it all yourself and learn everything and there is value to that. Or you could just pick a platform that's figured it out for like ten, fifteen years and has solved the majority of the problems, and it has a ridiculously economic price and just do that. So, that would be my advice. You can reinvent the wheel but there's really not a reason to do that. Do your research, check out some options, but definitely check SubHub out as one of the main ideas.”
