Membership websites are becoming all the rage - not only do they represent income to a business, they are an excellent way to develop a community around your businesses products and services.
When creating a membership website, choosing the right membership model is one of the keys to its success.
If you don’t choose the right model you could be creating a lot of extra work for yourself or, worse, you may not deliver what your members expect. Neither of these situations are desirable, and taking the time to decide exactly what you want to deliver with your membership site and how you want to deliver it, is essential.
This article assumes that, by now, you’ve completed the basic research required before starting any business (online or offline):
1. Identifying your niche
2. Finding a need in that niche (a problem that needs solving)
3. Determining whether it will be profitable
4. Deciding on what are you going to sell
5. Determining how you will deliver the product or service to your customer
If you can’t provide answers to the five points above, you can’t even be certain whether a membership site is the right way to go.
If you do have the answers though, the next step is to ask yourself the following questions, and write your answers down:
* What type of content will be delivered to your customers - text, video, audio?
* How often will you be delivering that content?
** Will it be all at once, will you be adding content over time or have you created all the content but want to drip feed it to members?
* Do you only want members to have access to the current months content?
* Is the membership for a fixed period only?
* Do you want all new members to start at the first piece of content, or do you want to bring them in to your membership at current piece of content?
* Are you creating a community where you and your members can interact with each other?
* Are you coaching clients and want to share specific information with each client and keep that hidden from your other clients?
Once you have this information, you can then consider the type of membership model to best suit your needs and which platform is appropriate.
Charly Leetham is an Online Business Implementation Expert and Small Business Coach. She is dedicated to bringing useful and free information to new small businesses to aid in their success. Charly uses and recommends Wordpress As A Membership Site for most online businesses.