10 Keys to Membership Site Success

Posted on 22. Aug, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

There are a lot of things that you need to do in order to make your membership site successful. Everything from your first landing page to your admin area can affect how successful it will be. Fortunately, there are some areas that are consistently more important than others. Here is a look at 10 keys to making your membership site successful

1. Focus – Without a specific niche or sub-niche, your membership site will likely seem generic and ordinary. Make sure that your membership site has a laser beam focus on the topic area.
2. Promote a Community – Even though many people won’t say it, one of the biggest reasons that people join membership sites is to be part of the community. By adding a forum or discussion board, you will make it easier for people create a sense of community.
3. Reason to Join – Before your members actually join, they need a reason to join. They want to justify their purchases, so they need a rational reason to become a member. Since everyone is looking for something different, creating a specific list of benefits (not features) is necessary.
4. Security – If your membership site is not secure, then your members aren’t going to trust you. You need to have security measures from the payment processing forward.
5. Easy Profile Maintenance – You need to make it easy for your members to change their password, credit card information, etc The harder you make it, the more likely they are to decide that it isn’t worth the hassle.
6. Looks Matter – It’s as true online as it is in the workplace – looks matter. You membership site must look attractive. If it looks like amateur made it, then they will assume that an amateur is running it.
7. Easy Admin – The more time you spend doing mundane tasks, the less time you are focusing on more important issues. It is critical that your admin area makes it easy to perform simple tasks such as posting new content. There is no reason to make your life more difficult than it needs to be.
8. Metrics – Peter Drucker, a business management expert, said it 50 years ago – You can’t manage what you can’t measure – and it is still true today. If you don’t measure things such as page views, opt in rates, conversion rates, etc then you have no way of knowing what you can improve on and where you make more money.
9. Understanding the Business Model – There are a wide variety of successful business models relating to creating and profiting from a membership site. The key is to choose a business model that will be effective for your niche and sticking to it. If you don’t follow your own plans, then no one else will either.
10. Unique – It seems like you can find and do everything online today. You need to find a way to make your website unique. If they can get the same thing elsewhere, they probably will.

There are a lot of things that you do to help ensure that your membership site is successful, but each of these 10 factors has proven to be essential time after time.