What Is the Simplest Membership Site Platform Available?

There are lot experts out there with content they want to make into an online course.  They see it as a step they can take to grow their consulting or coaching practice.  There are a lot of good reasons for offering an online course, but then when it gets down to building the physical platform, things can get tricky.  This is especially true if you have limited technical skills.

Our top priority when working with business owners wanting to build a course, and this is the case when people sign up for our Breakthrough Course Building System, is to prove the idea first.  You want to as efficiently as possible confirm that your course will sell.  We don't want our newbie course builders spending a lot of time, effort and money without know if they can sell it.  So investing in a technology platform too soon is a bad move.

To keep the technology platform simple, you'll hear people recommend Memberpress, Thinkific, Udemy, Teachable.  Those are simple solutions many of which we have used because they are simple.  They easy to use for you as a new site builder and the customer experience for you students is good.  But to keep it really simple, here is an idea.  And this is something I recommend even if you are already well funded.

Use a private Facebook group.

The biggest advantage here is it's quick and easy to set up and your students are comfortable using it.  You take your payment using PayPal or Stripe and you have payin students consuming your courses right away.  With your typical course, the content is made up of video recordings and PDF files.  Making those available via a Facebook group is easy.   Keeping it protected and away from non-payers is easy too.  You can then also use the group to interact with your users, answer their questions and have members communicate with each other.

This has on every big important benefit, it enables you to focus 100% of your attention on your content and on teaching your students.  Set up your course, run the course with a set of beta users and confirm it works.  Get feedback from them and I'm sure the feedback will have little to do with Facebook and all to do with your material..  When you have the course vetted and tested, you are in a much better position to decide on a technology platform and your level of investment there given what you learned from your initial experience.

This may sound simple, but simple is best in a situation like this one.