How To Start A Successful Membership Site
How To Start A Successful Membership Site : If you’ve heard anything about membership sites it will most likely be that they are the most profitable method of generating recurring revenue. It’s also likely that you’ve heard that it’s not easy to set up a membership site.
To be perfectly honest that was us too once upon a time and that was because we didn’t really understand how to start a successful membership site because there wasn’t much education around ten years ago when we began our online business career.
Now we’re a little older and a little wiser and thought that you might benefit from what we know about how to start a successful membership site and what you need to do to get started creating recurring revenue from one.
Starting your own membership site is perhaps THE best business model ever. Just think about the profound ultimate benefit
You Find A Customer ONCE And They Continue Spending Money With You Over And Over Again Automatically
You might also know this as a continuity program but either way they are the best way to create regular income in your business whatever niche you are in.
Top Tips For How To Start A Successful Membership Site
Time to get down to the meat and potatoes…
But first of all it’s best to understand the principles of a membership site versus a traditional course or program… it lies in the fact that you are going to be creating content on an ongoing basis and for that your members will pay a recurring fee to access the content.
There are of course different kinds of membership site from the traditional membership site which has a “never ending continuity” until the member cancels and where you have to keep adding content to the more popular fixed term membership site (our favourite) which is for a fixed period. Our membership training program Recurring Revenue Mastery is an example of a Fixed Term Membership program
The type of content people create for their membership site can vary from videos to downloadable worksheets, PDF’s, checklists and more
So without further ado
Tip #1 Essential Elements Of A Membership Site
The four most essential elements that you need to do in order to create a membership site are:
- Organise your membership site content
- Sell your paid content as a subscription
- Restrict access to your paid content
- Manage content on an ongoing basis
There is a lot of flexibility in how you do and many different platforms available to help you manage all of this – something we cover in our Recurring Revenue Mastery Program
Tip #2 Getting your course out to the marketplace
One of the most effective ways to get your membership site is by offering subscription trials. Offering a trial allows you to build a good relationship with your members and with a continuity program and billing in place it’s a no brainer
When it comes to executing this strategy, you have two options: you can either create a free trial or you can create a low-cost trial (e.g. $1 trial).
If you’re presenting your trial offer to cold traffic, it’s better to offer a free trial whereas if you’re presenting your offer to warm traffic such as your existing subscriber email list then you might think about the low cost trial
Just test what works better for you!
Tip #3 Create Different Subscription Levels
The simplest way to do this would be to have say two levels of subscription – a basic and premium level. There will always be people who want the premium option and it allows you to increase the revenue from your membership site just by adding premium content.
Tip #4 Upsell Memberships
A little different to Tip #3 this strategy is designed to make your members spend more and increase your revenue. This might be a silver, gold, platinum offer and can be made either at the time of checkout, during delivery of your content or even via email when a level of your course is completed by your member. Offering different levels of coaching is a prime example of this.
Like Tip #3 there will always be people wanting to take this option
Tip #4 Create A Checklist Or Action Plan
Having a clear learning path for you members will keep them moving forwards with their course and achieve the set goals. In our recurring revenue mastery course we have at the end of each lesson an assignment that the student should complete before moving forwards to the next lesson. Check lists are a great way to do this as there’s a great feeling of achievement in ticking off each item as you proceed and student satisfaction.
Tip #5 Spice Up The Content Delivery
At the heart of your membership site is your content. If you can deliver actual value to your members while keeping them engaged with their lessons they will not just continue their subscription payments but they will actually come to you asking for premium content or wanting your coaching etc. Therefore it’s important to include different media in your membership site – videos, downloadable PDF’s, Assignments (see tip #4), webinars etc
Tip #6 Reward Members For Taking Action
We’re firm believers in rewarding for taking action. This can be discount coupons for additional training, special content just for your achievers or even certificates of achievement. Our advice is you should have a strategy in place to reward your members.
Tip #7 Create An Affiliate Or Reward Scheme For Your Members
We’re not talking here about an affiliate program as that’s something for a little further down the road and we;’ll cover in another article. What we’re talking about here is your brand ambassadors – the people who love our course and could be rewarded for referrals
That concludes our thoughts on how to start a successful membership site. We hope you can see that membership sites can be incredibly powerful and are a great way to build a recurring revenue stream for your business.
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Until next time…
