3 Mistakes to Avoid When Building Your First Memberium Site – Part 2

This is part 2 of a 3-part series.  You can click here to get to part 1 of the article.

Mistake Number 2 - Building Membership Site in Your Wordpress Install

BIG MISTAKE!!!!

In the past 6 months, we have had one instance where building a small business owner’s Memberium membership site and their www site was the right idea.  In this case, it was magazine site that has FREE articles and paid articles to different members.  It’s not the typical situation required by an online course builder and that’s the main scenario where a single Wordpress site works well.

My reason for this is that the purpose of your www site and your membership site is different. The purpose of your www site is to:

• promote your business,
• educate people on what you do, and
• establish you as the credible expert.

The www site usually includes a list of your service or product offerings, an About Us and a Contact Us.  They are all aimed at getting a visitor to evaluate you and contact you as part of the sales journey.

A membership site serves a different role.  It:

• delivers the content the member requested from you, and
• upsell members on additional services you offer.

When members use your membership site, you don't have to build credibility.  You have enough credibility with them which is what got them to sign up as members.  So you can eliminate an About Us page on this site.  If they are consuming your content, they start learning more and more about your expertise.  So the site contains the educational information and explanations of other things you can provide them.

When you try and build the sites as using a single Wordpress install, you get conflicting goals.  Overcoming those makes setting up your site navigation complicated.  You have to coordinate and often compromise between a site feature for wooing customers and delivering content.  You end up needing to overcome issues that don't ever come up if you had used two Wordpress installs.

So avoid that single Wordpress install approach and save your self a lot of unnecessary work in the short and long term.

The final mistake to avoid is in part 3 of this article. BTW, this is the best of the three.  Do this one and you are off to a great start. So stay tuned!