==== Newsletter Archive ====
Membership sites are all the rage lately.
If you’re considering or have considered a membership site style product or website for your business, here’s what you need to know.
Membership sites are a great way to create a community, monitize expertise, and build continuity income in your business that has a high level of passivity.
They are also complex systems that require setup and thought, and should be approached as a layer separate but related to the design and management of a standard website.
While your investigating setting up a membership site, run through these thoughts for the best experience.
1. Do you REALLY need one?
- Sometimes simply setting up a password protected page or two is a good way to quickly soft test if your project really needs a membership site where you track, manage and manage user accounts. deneme bonusu veren siteler
2. Cost
- In my experience, quality developed membership software is not free. There are free options but they either charge for integrations, are poorly supported, or just don’t work well. Membership software is going to cost, but it won’t break the bank. $100-200.
- Your checkout system [PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, etc.] may cost extra to integrate.
3. Define what you need, then shopping for membership software will be MUCH easier.
- Your e-mail marketing system might not integrate at all, it’s not a standard option to add people to a mailing list in AWeber or Mailchimp when they register, but it’s slowly becoming more common.
- Custom sidebar content is more of a hassle or technical to protect than individual pages. Keep the sidebar simple.
- There are numerous options out there for the various types of membership and course sites. A best fit depends on your business, but these are good to start with: Wishlist Member, MagicMembers. You might even find a “course” oriented site that hosts your content off your website a good fit, look here for two great ones: Ruzuku, Udemy.
4. Think in Layers
- The membership portion of a website, is a layer over a standard website.
- You’ll spend [or risk being utterly confused] 2 hours LOOKING through each configuration page of the membership software to get a general understanding of how it works, what is protected, and how to turn things on and off.
- You have to define the following: length of membership [if any], cost [if any], payment gateway [even if free].
5. Draw your Flow
- Draw the step by step actions [literally] for new users registering and existing users logging in from welcome page to sales page, to registration, to what page they see after signing in, etc. for speedier development times. You can use this yourself to great advantage or hand off to a developer and they will love you for it. You can’t get around these items though.
- Your users need to fill out a registration form, choose a password, be taken to a payment gateway, input their payment details, and then be brought to a registration complete page in order to become a member. You need to think about each one of these phases. You’re going to receive this information, and be responsible for managing it.
- In order not to confuse your users, you should setup an “after registration complete” page, and a “first page after login” page for each [if multiple] level of your membership site.
IT Arsenal has setup over 30 membership websites and helped many entrepreneurs make decisions on implementation, if you have a question, just hit reply!
I truly hope you found this useful!
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