THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO STARTING AND GROWING A MEMBERSHIP SITE

Membership sites help you build brand awareness, generate traffic, and boost your earnings.

However, most people don’t know where to start growing their sites and ensuring ROI.

So, take the following steps to start and grow a profitable membership site you’re proud of.

Choose a popular topic

Identify and choose a popular niche topic to get people interested in becoming members.

Do market research and find out what your target audience is interested in. What are they already buying? What do they need?

If you know what prospects are buying and understand their needs, you can offer the right product.

Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner to find out what people are looking for. Go to www.amazon.com and www.clickbank.com to identify bestsellers in your niche and build your content around that.

Find your Unique Selling Point

Find your USP to get prospects to favor you above the competition. Give customers what your competitors aren’t offering. Know your competitors’ weaknesses and improve on them.

Add extra benefits to your product and make sure you offer at least 3 things that your competitors aren’t offering. You can set a low membership price, offer live events, offer lifetime content access, feature guest experts, have a private support forum, offer one-on-one coaching, or charge a high price for unique content.

Create your content strategy

Create a content strategy. Pick a membership site model and decide how you are going to deliver your content. For example, are you building a one-off membership site, a tiered membership site, a fixed-term membership site, a free membership site, a modular site, or a SaaS site?

Your success depends on the number of people that remain members. So, your top priority should be to retain your members.

Here’s how you:

• Make your offers unique. Give members bonuses and other benefits they can’t get anywhere else

• Offer benefits to members that stay with you for a certain period. For example, you can offer bonuses or discounts to everyone who remains a member for 6 months. That means you’ll have valuable giveaways twice a year

• Provide practical solutions to problems

• Use surprises to retain members. Such as surprise discounts, giveaways, and features.

Create valuable content

Create high-quality content based on your audience’s interests, needs, and wants.

Answer key questions as you curate your content: “What format can you use?”, “How much content do you need?”, “How often are you going to create content?”, and “In what way is your content unique?”

Make sure your strategy allows for continuity. For instance, the new content should build on previous pieces.

Set the right price

Set your price right and avoid undercharging or overcharging. Consider your income goals, membership site model, and competitors.

How much money do you want to make from your site? How much is the competition charging? How many members do you need to achieve your monthly income goal and yearly income goal? And Are members paying monthly or is it a one-off payment? Which methods allow you to reach your overall income goal?

Remember that 80% of your income will come from your back-end sales and 20% from front-end sales. That is why the next step is important.

Get backend sales

Companies make most of their money from backend products. So, optimize the backend of your sales funnels to increase revenue.

Promote offers in the backend and recommended related products or services to your subscribers.

Add your offers in your ‘thank-you’ emails, coaching sessions, and order form.

Add links to your giveaways, bonus materials, private groups, membership site content, and all the email you send to your customers.

Set up your site

Pick a reputable and secure platform to set up your site.

You can set up your membership site with WordPress and a popular plugin. Such as Ultimate Member or MemberPress.

You can also set up your membership by having customers sign up for your autoresponder.

Determine how you are going to receive payments. Pick a platform that allows you to set up different payment methods or at least 2 common ones that are not restricted to certain geographic locations. For example, PayPal and Stripe.

Develop a marketing plan

Next, develop a marketing plan to reach a bigger audience and get more people to join. Have different marketing methods but pick one, master it, and then move to the next one on the list.

Here’s a list of the best methods to use:

• Blogging on your site
• Creating viral content
• Guest blogging
• Social media marketing
• Building a mailing list
• Working with joint venture marketing partners
• Using paid online advertising
• Running contests

Conclusion

Go through the steps mentioned and start building, running, and growing your membership site today.

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