So you have decided to build a membership site for your business. Great news! But before you actually take the plunge, you need to have a detailed understanding on what goes behind developing such a website. It’s easy to use a membership site creator but it takes a little more time to understand how to monetize it.
Taking the decision to build a membership site is only the first step; however, there are more components that you need to take into account for creating your site. The first being, why you want to build a membership site at all. It is vital for you to realize whether you want to create a membership for the benefit of your business or just following the trend. The latter choice will hardly yield any results. However, if benefits act as the foundation of your decision, then you can surely taste success. Let us take a look at some of the benefits, membership sites entail with it.
Benefits of Building a Membership Site
- Easiest way to create user interaction between committed members of a particular community, who have paid a certain amount for membership.
- Fastest medium to distribute your message via written content, audio, video and pdf downloads. So, it is one comprehensive product that is offered to the users, where they get to choose their preferred way to accept information.
- Allows quick and smooth updates. Membership sites make sure that adding or editing content can be done without any hassles.
- With time the product gets bigger and better. More user interaction on the latest information incorporated within the website ensures that the site becomes more valuable with the passage of time.
- Recurring income generation. Depending on the type of fee you will charge on your website, monthly or onetime fee, both will act beneficial for your business.
Now that you are aware of the benefits membership sites offer, you need to know how enthusiastic your target user base is. Only when you test your market properly and realize how worthwhile your idea would act, you can expect your website to hold its ground.
Ways to Test the Market
- Survey Audience Base – A properly conducted survey can reflect what exactly the users might be looking for. It is quite possible that the idea behind your website might have been something users were not even considering. On the other hand, they might provide feedback on something that they want to see or use the most. By doing this survey, you can clearly accept the information from the survey and craft a product that is more valuable and useful to your user base.
- Split Test – Once the idea behind your website is clear to you, you can start providing offers. Creating 2-3 sales pages with different set of features, copies and concepts can bring forth variations in user response. From these feedbacks, you can analyze which one converts the most visitors to consumers.
- Buy Traffic – The previous way can only work best if there is sufficient traffic to generate results. In order to do so, you can try buying adwords traffic paying a minimum amount of $50-100 and check the conversion rates. Only if you have couple of opt-ins or faux sales, your membership site can possibly tap a huge market.
- Keyword Research – This has been a tried and tested method to find out which keywords are searched maximum. Using this knowledge, you can try generating maximum traffic to your website.
Once you understand your market well enough, you can have your website built in the most optimum way possible. In addition to this, you can add elements such as interactive forums and comments, where you can allow users to have discussions and so on. Thus, with an overall understanding of whatever goes into a development of a membership site, you can try building it with the help of popular membership software.
About Author: Stella Holmes is a Professional content writer. She likes writing in blogs and posts about software testing. Stella has written a number of articles for various web-sites. Stella is a big fan of Manchester United football team and tries not to miss any match of them.