Infusionsoft Membership Site Design Recommendations
I've taken over Infusionsoft membership site projects built by people with little membership site building experience. These are built by some sharp people. You don't build an Infusionsoft, Memberium, LearnDash membership site without some decent technical skills. What I've seen happen is that for lack of understanding of best practices, they make design decisions that make things difficult. They also deliver a less than optimal member experience.
Here is the recommendation I'm going to make. You technically need two and possibly three website. "What???" you might be thinking. "Are you nuts?" I know that sounds crazy and complicated, but hear me out.
Every business needs their www site or the primary site you use to promote yourself. It's where you'll have:
- an about us page,
- a contact us page,
- an explanation of your products and services,
- team bios,
- etc.
This site introduces you to the world. People visit the site to learn about you, your business and what it is you have to offer. The site's purpose it to educate and sell. It should be a place where offer a "buy" button so customers can buy from you.
So that's site #1.
You should consider having a second site for your landing pages. I'm a big fan of ThriveThemes and one very nice feature it provides is a way to build opt-in and sales pages. People often use tools like Clickfunnels, LeadPages or some other tool to build their sales and opt-in ages. Infusionsoft now even provides a landing page builder.
If you've already built your www site using ThriveThemes, you can have that site double as both your www and your landing page site. So these provide for two sites in one. Otherwise, we recommend a second site to host your landing pages.
So you need a second site for landing pages or a service like those I mention and that' the one I will count as site #2.
Then, of course, you need your membership site. I HIGHLY recommend this. I can't tell you how often I run into customers that are well along in the development of their site and they have built their www and their membership site as one Wordpress install. There are a lot of technical reasons why building them separate is a good thing. The main reason I recommend this is because your www site is designed to educate and sell. All aspects of the site should be focused on that goal. Your membership site is focused on making content easy to consume for your members. It should then be built for upselling members on additional products and services.
When you build this on one site, those two set of disjointed goals, conflict. That makes growing the site and adding content difficult and even more difficult to scale as you and more and more content.
Your www site will have a button somewhere that says, "Login" or "Member Login." That will provide you members a link they can use to easily login to your membership website. That should land people to where they can immediately log into that site and to the content they purchased. (It could also be to get to content they opt-in in for and are getting for free.)
We recommend installing your membership website at "members.(your domain).com" or something similar.
Now that I've given you a general overview of our recommendation, watch the video below. In it, I review several client examples following this model. A pictures worth a 1,000 words so here we go.
For several examples of this, visit our site at https://members.jorged66.sg-host.com. click on the BIG black button and get free access. You'll get several video tours of sites we have built that illustrate this idea. Take a look so you can appreciate the concept and see how we've used them to build customer solutions that work nicely.