Whether you like it or not, your attitude will be reflected in your membership website. This could be a fantastic advantage or a terrible detriment depending on what you do and how you engage with your members. Just like any other business, customer business and how you interact with your customers will have a big impact on how successful you will be. Here is a quick look at 3 ways that your attitude will affect your membership site.

1. Don’t Be In Sales
Are you going to advertise your website, of course. Are you going to create a sales funnel and maximize your conversions, probably. But that doesn’t mean that you need to be the salesperson at all time. If you really want to gain the respect of your members, it is important to appear more like an expert in your field rather than another person trying to sell them something. The key to a successful membership site your members need to know that you are passionate and knowledgeable about the subject that you are discussing. Ask any successful salesperson and they will tell you that they can sell anything, regardless of what it is. This is because people buy people not their products. You must always show your passion and expertise, not your attention to the bottom line.

2. Answer Your Emails
There will be a large number of people who are going to be hesitant to sign up for membership site. It could be for a variety of reasons, but it is your responsibility to show them that you truly care about them as a member. Your responses must be as quick as possible. More importantly, it must be accurate. While it can be helpful to have pre-written responses, they must be customizable so that they actually answer the question that is being asked. If you think that unhappy members will talk about your website to others, people who feel that you ignored them even before they are members are even worse.

3. Building a Community
The use of online forums within membership sites has become much more popular. It has become fairly well know that a members only forum is a great way to build a sense of community between members, but that isn’t where it ends. To really create a sense of personal community, you must be actively involved in the members only forum as well as other prominent forums within your niche. This goes back to selling your passion and expertise rather than your interest in making a profit. As an added bonus, if you build trust and respect among your members, they will likely defend you and promote your site elsewhere online.

If you become overly focused on the bottom line, there is a good chance that your attitude will quickly turn off members and potential members alike. The best way to make sure that your members trust you is to act like an expert not a salesperson, answer your emails quickly and accurately, and always building a sense of community, both within your website and across your niche.

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There are thousands of things that you can do right when creating a membership site, but they will all be for not if you make any of these 3 critical membership site mistakes. Have you ever heard stories of people who have gone to same restaurant or bought the same brand of shoes for years, but after one really bad experience they completely cut that product out of their lives? It happens all of the time. What this proves is that people, in general, will overlook all of the positive experiences that they have had with a product in the event that a single critical mistake was made. Here is a look at 3 critical mistakes that can ruin a membership site.

1. Information Architecture

It doesn’t matter how great your content is, if no one can find it. A membership website absolutely must be very user friendly and topic-specific. The overall “feel” of your website can be a huge reason that members may cancel their membership and sometime prevent them from ever moving on from their free trial. Make sure no matter what they are looking for, they can find it with as little effort as possible.

2. Understanding the Pricing Game

One of the biggest mistakes that many membership site owners make is pricing their membership too high. Many people will think that with so much content, they should be able to charge a lot more. The truth is, in many niches, a membership site that is more than a similar print subscription will not do very well. Just because you have 1000′s of pages of content, doesn’t mean that your members are willing to pay $1000′s for it.

3. Not Enough Content

If your membership site does not have enough value built into the content, then you are not giving a reason for your members to stick with you. Building value into your content could mean using a variety of mediums such as text, audio, and video, or creating content that cannot be found anywhere else (although that gets more difficult by the minute). Your members will expect to see a similar amount of new content on a weekly or monthly basis. As soon as you do not provide this, you can expect to see your members cancel their membership.

There are a lot of other things things that you can do wrong that will hurt your membership site, but nothing compares to these 3. If your membership site isn’t easy to use, poorly priced, or just doesn’t have enough valuable content, then it will quickly become a barren wasteland.

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The way that membership sites and newsletter websites function to be fairly similar, however they are truly two different types of websites. By not recognizing the difference, you might end up taking the wrong approach, which leads to less profits. Here is a closer look at what a membership site and newsletter site is and how they function.

Membership Site

At its core, a membership site is designed to provide members with access to a library of information. Normally all of the information is related to a specific topic or sub-topic. The overall goal of this type of website is twofold. First you must attract customers and second you must retain. This is true for both free and paid membership sites. A membership site is, in and of itself, a final destination.

Newsletter Website

Newsletter websites are set up for their subscribers. Normally, it will allow members to print newsletters or packages of information. Newsletter websites, instead of being membership sites, are much more closely related to retail sites. One of the key differences is that newsletter websites are organized by date/issue, rather than the topic. Instead of being a destination in and of itself, newsletter sites are considered retail sites that allow subscribers to download PDF versions and also allow non-subscribers to purchase a specific newsletter rather than become a full-time subscriber.

Why Does This Difference Matter?

There are several reasons that making this distinction is important. The first is the way that they are monetized. Membership sites will allow members full access to the library of information, whereas newsletter websites often do not. Additionally, newsletter websites often allow people to purchase specific products (issues of the newsletter) without become a full-time subscriber. Membership sites will not allow non-members to purchase a specific packet of information.

Because of this difference, marketing and profit strategies need to be different. Membership sites need to build value into the overall library of information, whereas newsletter can both sell subscriptions and sell individual newsletters and articles, thus they must build value into each individual product. Because of this, a different profit strategy is needed as well. Membership sites can profit either by members paying a membership fee or selling advertising space. Newsletter websites can profit from recurring subscriber fees, individual product purchases, advertising space. Newsletter sites allow more “depth” to their profit strategies because they are product based rather than library based in regards to the content.

As you can see, although the overall differences may seem slight, different marketing and profit strategies must be used. If your pricing strategy for your membership site or newsletter site does not really promote your actual product, then you will be missing out on a large portion of your potential profits and your overall venture will likely become much less successful than it could have been.

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Membership sites have been proven to be one of the most effective methods of generating serious, residual income online. They also require the least amount of work to get started. With the combination of minimal start-up effort and maximum profitability, it is no wonder why membership sites have become such a profitable business model.

Over the years, wordpress has emerged to be the absolute best platform for membership sites. They are easily the most flexible and easy to use content management systems on the internet. The best part is that it created by an open source community, which means it is completely free to use.

The entire process of setting up a membership site with wordpress can be completed with an hour or two. All you need to do is install wordpress, which can be completed in a matter of seconds. Next, you choose a theme that will control the layout of your membership site. Finally, you install a series of plugins to optimize your SEO, control your membership and administration, create a forum, chat rooms, videos, as well as control any additional features that you may need to add to your site.

The best part about wordpress is that you do not need to be a website design junkie or even a wordpress guru. WordPress was designed to that anyone can create a great website in a matter of minutes.

The best part of creating a membership site is that it does not have to be finished in order to start profiting from it. Additionally, once you have your site finished, you can profit from it for years. If you create a micro-continuity membership site, which has become one of the most profitable and popular models, you only need one week of content to get started. A micro continuity site is a membership site with a pre-determined end. For example a 6 month course on dog grooming. The member will only stay signed up for 6 months and then the “class” is over. It is like taking a college course.

Think of a continuity membership site like teaching a class because that is essentially what you are doing. You only need the first weeks content to start registering new members. Then you create all of the lessons you need, for example 6 months, and you are done. New members can be signing up years later which generates ongoing profits from a one-time effort. Once you are done with your membership site, you can move onto the next.

Micro continuity membership sites have proven to be one of the most profitable online business models because you can set them up quickly and they need no further maintenance. This one-time effort can create profits for years to come.

Source: http://www.wpmembershipservice.com/membership-packages/why-you-should-start-a-membership-site.html

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