3 Critical Membership Site Mistakes

Posted on 18. Aug, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

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.