Memberium Membership Sites: Three Key Ingredients for Success

Customers looking to put Memberium membership sites to work for their business must have the following three key ingredients fully addressed.  Otherwise, they could be putting the results they want from their solution at risk.  The three ingredients every membership site solution must have are:

1. A Sales Funnel / Traffic Source,
2. Content That Delivers, and
3. A Wordpress / Memberium Website.

These may be obvious to those that have been building membership sites a while, but discussions we have with new membership site customers typically reveal shortcomings in one or more of these.  And this is my warning to you.  If you fall short in any one of these areas, you're building a one or two legged stool and expecting it to stand up straight.  Don't be surprised when your solution isn't getting you the results you wanted.

Let me review these so you understand how these come together to provide a complete Memberium membership site solution.

Ingredient #1 - A Sales Funnel / Traffic Source

I've written a lot of articles on sales funnel designs involving membership site solutions.  These articles cover delivering lead magnets and tripwires via your membership site.  The following two articles describe my recommendations for getting better results than what you might bet using standard approaches.  Read over these two articles if you haven't already.

• Membership Sites: It’s Like Steroids for Lead Magnets
• Membership Site Designs That Work Much Better Than Others

With this in mind, you have to consider what you want to accomplish and this can be different things for different businesses. For example, if you already have a tribe of members that follow you via social media and / or email, you may have a built in traffic source for getting members.   Your way to get members for your a new membership site can be to build a sales funnel introducing this better way of delivering your content.

If you're an in-person speaker, you understand your target market well.  Proof of that is you can fill your time with paying clients that will attend your presentations or get coaching directly from you.  Now the challenge is how to get those same attendees or potential attendees that prefer an online option to latch onto your nw approach.  You need to introduce them to the membership site approach to your in-person presentations or coaching.

If you are working to build a new program, your sales funnel should be your top priority.  Before you build your membership site, you should testing your concept to confirm the demand you can expect for it.  Avoid spending  too much time on Ingredients #2 and #3 below until you have investigated how best to find potential customers.   The last thing you want to do is build this monumental solutions costing you a lot of time and resources only to realize you don't have a solution that sells.

Ingredient #2 - Content That Delivers

Experience working with Memberium membership site customers has clearly revealed to me that business owners often underestimate the work required to get their content completed.  Be it:

• course materials,
• video content,
• newsletters,
• blog articles, or
• one of many other options,

more times than not, we find that customers struggle with this.

There are several reasons. In many cases, we find it's the business owner's inexperienced writing content for a membership audience.  Content that may work well in-person doesn't always work well online.

Some clients haven't visualized how an online video of them giving a live presentation will come across online.  Can they captivate an online audience for extended periods of time like they can in person?  I recently wrote The Trainer’s Challenge: Making Your In-Person Content Great Online which goes into these issues more thoroughly.

A more common problem is the business owner can't carve out enough time to write or record their content. They have their regular day job.  They can't put their other responsibilities on hold and to take time out to get it done. So the project stalls.

Considering the use of a paid content writer, which is more than a copy editor or copy writer, might be what's required to get it done and to get it done right. We have a number of resources we can recommend for getting business owners through this efficiently.

Ingredient #3 - A Wordpress / Memberium  Website

I'll be upfront telling you that this our firm's specialty.  We build 3 to 4 memberships sites a month and 80% plus of these are Memberium sites.

I'll be honest.  Building a Memberium membership site "isn't rocket science."  Then again, it's what we do day in and day out.  Building your first membership site can feels like splitting atoms, cutting diamonds or doing rocket science difficult stuff because of the details and the many steps it requires to do right.   Leveraging the talents of a team that's done it before for getting the best results is definitely a worthwhile investment.  This will enable you to:

• bypass first timer mistakes that are going to cost you one way or another,
• avoid the learning curve, trial and error, and time investment you or someone else on your team will face, and
• make use of proven best practices you can only get from building sites like these on a daily basis.

Hope this helps!