Memberium Consultant on 3 Stupid Mistakes to Avoid for the First Time Memberium Site Builders

As a Memberium Consultant, my team and I have worked with a lot of business owners building their first membership or online course site. Many times when they reach out to us looking for a qualified Memberium consultant, they've already spent a lot of time and money on it and they fall into one of the following three.

• They hit a wall and are stuck.
• They learned the job is much bigger than expected.
• They were able to launch their site, but it falls short in some way.

As a Memberium Consultant, I'm sharing with you here three mistakes I see first time membership builders make over and over again. My hope is you can go through these and avoid these common pitfalls.

Memberium Consultant on Mistake #1 to Avoid: Offering Something That's Too Big or Complicated

When you're an expert in your field, there is so much you have to share. I've seen many business owners create a course that piles it all in looking like two semester college textbook. I've seen some with footnotes and references to source materials making it even more overwhelming.

You have to remember that customers are rarely looking to buy a comprehensive guide for learning everything there is to know about your topic. They are typically looking to solve a specific problem. The information they want from you is a bridge. It fills in a gap in their knowledge they hope can be used solve their problem. They are looking to make use of your expertise to find shortcuts to speed up the process and pick up best practices they could not learn on their own.

You could create a massive library of content, if that's what you want, with everything you know about your topic.  By itself, it would be overwhelming. With a guide from you, they get a map that shows them how to get through the parts of your massive library they need. If you can create that guide, then why not start with content that covers what they guide addresses.

If the customer wants, they could spend hours and hours researching to piece together the solution to their problem using all the available information out there. Your are most valuable to them because you can sift through all the available information, discard the information that's unnecessary and highlight the material they most need.

One approach to consider is to publish content that covers the solutions most people coming to you need addressed. You could publish is as a part 1 to something larger. It could be a released as a free offer that showcases what you know introducing them to your larger library.

Why not pick the sexiest part of your content and position it so it:

• draws potential customers to you,
• gives them something valuable to sample,
• establishes you as the expert, and
• starts them down a path to solving the problem the want solved and the bigger one you as the expert knows they need to solve.

Memberium Consultant on Mistake #2 to Avoid: Creating a Lot of Content Without First Confirming the Demand

I attended a mastermind group years ago with a fellow member that hired a crew and went on location to a dude ranch with horses, stables and everything. They filmed for a few days. I saw the final edited videos. The guy would present while walking through the stables. There were some of him on horseback. Other times he would be pretending to do chores as a part of the lesson.  It was Hollywood quality film production and them some.

The mentors of the mastermind recommended he NOT do that. They recommended he start simple with lessons that were simple to shoot and were "good enough."  He ignored their advice and spent tens of thousands of dollars on his content.

His program never sold.

When building a membership or an online course, start with providing a lesson to one problem. Select the one you find most people need to solve first. Then work at selling that. Confirm that it will sell and just as importantly, confirm you can sell it. Then grow your content using what you learn and the feedback you get from your students.

Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

Memberium Consultant on Mistake #3 to Avoid: Missing Out on Technical Best Practices

We get called upon by first time online course builders that spent a lot of time and money to get a less than idea final solution. I recently worked with a first timer that had more than 115 Wordpress plugins. That's a lot when a well built site has plugins in the range of 20 to 30. I had another than had patched together many different plugins to get a final solution that worked poorly.

In both cases, my team and I stepped in with our knowledge and got the site and the online courses on it working, The results is not only a working site, but one that is easy to manage, filled with features the first timer was unable to finish and is simple to enhance using know methods.

What can easily happen when you've never built one of these is you encounter a problem and find a solution. You encounter a problem and you find a solution. Because you were building the site addressing issues as they came up, you did your best to address the next problem in isolation. The end result is typically a solution that is much more complicated than necessary and one that misses out one known best practices. You miss out on a way of addressing the entire solution using knowledge accumulated from years building sites.

The top priority is to build as simple a site as possible and then to prove it will sell. You keep the site technically simple so it doesn't require any more expertise than necessary. That enables you to fully focused on selling of it. Once you prove that, you find ways to invest in better approaches that will likely require more expenses, but they are justified because you have assurances that the revenue will come based on what you learned.