The Benefits & Challenges of Setting Up a Membership Site
Membership sites are touted as one of the easiest and fastest ways to develop income continuity. It’s true that a successful membership site can provide income stability. The learning curve can be daunting. However, it’s nothing you cannot tackle, especially with the amazing software that is out there today. You really can set up a membership site to earn money from your expertise by tomorrow. But that is when the challenges really start.
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Dealing with Members Dropping Out
The attrition rate for membership sites is three months. That means that most of your members are going to drop out within three months of joining your membership. Knowing this in advance can help you design some safeguards. For example, you can start creating buzz for your next addition to the site happening soon to keep people involved.
Creating a Continual Flow of Valuable Content
When you first start a membership site, it seems simple enough to create content for them for every single month or whatever period you’ve promised. However, after a year or two, it will start getting slightly more laborious. However, if you find out that most people drop out after three months, one way to overcome this issue is to provide only a year’s worth of new content on a drip basis, and then make them permanent members after a year.
Convincing Prospects That Membership is Worth the Investment
Just getting people to sign up for memberships is difficult because most people don’t like the idea of making a long-term monthly commitment. Offering free trials, or one-time payment options, and incentivizing people with extra value usually is what is required to get people to sign up for a membership.
Spammers, Product Theft, and Problem Members
The other issue with membership sites is that sometimes you’ll end up with members who aren’t honest and who steal your products and turn around and sell them for themselves. Or worse, you’ll get a dissatisfied person who is always dissatisfied, causing issues in your group chat or message board. However, having good community managers in place can prevent some of these issues.
Finding Good Help
While running a membership site might seem like it’s not that much work, you will be dealing with technical issues, people issues, and production issues. To ensure everything works together, you need to find good help such as community managers (some people love volunteering for this), content writers to keep content in the hopper, a place to buy amazing PLR, so you never run out of content, and someone to deal with the tech issues.
Don’t allow any of these problems to stop you from setting up a membership site. They are outstanding business models that have enormous profit potential. Just go in being aware that much of human nature is set; your job is to practice overcoming their objections and moving them forward to reach their goals.
