We’re back for Part 3 of our latest WordPress Website Design series – How to Create a Membership Website!
Now that you’ve chosen the type of membership website you’d like to offer, and the price point you’d like to create, it’s time to decide how your clients can access your site. Once again, you have choices to make that allow you to determine whether your members have access to everything immediately, or if your content will be presented on a month-by-month basis.
Membership website structure
- Yearly Membership Website: Whichever structure you choose to use, you can create all of your content in advance, prior to launch, but with a concept known as “drip content” you can release the content on a schedule that you’ve created, thus letting it “drip” out to the site. This means you don’t have to create new content every month since it’s already been created and scheduled to release throughout the year and, as long as each member is paid up, they’ll have access to it. In other words, as long as their one-year membership is paid, they will have access to all of the prescheduled content that you have created to flow to your membership website.
- Multi-Level Membership Website: Another option to consider is to create multiple levels for members. For example, my Authentic Business Summit Site was a single-level membership site. For $197, members received everything I had to offer from the very beginning. But let’s look at what could happen if I offered a second level. What if, if I asked my clients to pay me $497, they would also receive three live coaching sessions with me, a monthly Q&A session with me, or additional interviews and resources with the experts? That would be a two-tier membership. This allows your members to decide if they want the basic level – with access to the expert interviews only – or if they would rather pay more for real interaction with you and a LOT more content.
I’ve actually been involved with membership sites that have as many as three tiers: the basic content level, the mid-level with more interaction, and the advanced VIP level membership at the top end.
How to get your membership website started
Of course, we would all like to monetize to the max right off the bat, right? But multi-level sites are more complicated to set up and require a lot of work to maintain – not to mention the increased interaction with members that will be required. Remember how much you already have going on in your business: you know you’re blogging … and posting to social media … and running the membership site … and marking the membership site … on top of everything else you have going on. (Whew….just thinking about all that makes me tired!)
So, I suggest you start simple and build your membership site into something great as you go along. Maybe you start with a one-time, lifetime fee, leading to one level of content; they buy it and they get access to it all up-front. Then, six months in, why don’t you consider adding another level to that, or maybe adding a VIP option?
We’ll look at other monetization options later, but give it six months to get your marketing funnel down and get used to this amount of workload. From there you can expand. You don’t have to have everything perfectly amazing right from the beginning. You should be in this business for the long haul, so there’s no problem if you need to get used to a certain way of doing things.
Too many entrepreneurs take on way too much in the beginning. They burn themselves out and begin to doubt themselves. They criticize themselves and compare themselves to other people … and then they stop trying. If that happens to you, your dreams never even get off the ground, which is a real shame because you have a lot of people that you could be helping. So let’s just calm down, take a few deep breaths and take it one step at a time.
In the next blog post on How to Create a Membership Website, I’ll go into choosing the software for your membership website that will automate all of the steps for you: sign-up, payment, delivery, and email autoresponders. (Sweet!)
Would you like me to help you build your own Membership Website? Get in touch with me today and apply for that 45-minute free strategy session. Then, I’ll get to work on your behalf, supporting you and keeping you motivated in every way I can!
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xoxo
Amber Vilhauer
