Membership Site Tips

Decided to start a membership site and are plain confused with all your options? How important are all the different features? What should you have in your site? To help you get going, here are a 7 key features that you should look for.

Automated member management.
Any membership manager will sign people up, collect payment and allow access to private areas. But a good membership manager will do all that and also revoke or suspend access automatically when payments do not come through or the subscription is canceled.

Affiliate system
Happy members are the best sales force you can ever ask for. Why not take advantage of that? Look for a system that will allow you to make members into affiliates automatically and the flexibility to sign up non-member affiliates if you choose to.

Choice of payment processors
You’ll often find low priced membership site managers that will work well but will only take PayPal. When it comes to payment, you should always give people a choice. Though PayPal works well, some people do not like it. Also, despite their large network, people in certain countries still do not have access to PayPal. This unnecessarily limits your distribution.

Easy content management
This is perhaps the most important outside of member management. You shouldn’t be locked into one way of managing your premium content. There are some systems that have built in content management systems. This is good if you are very new to website building.

The down side is, you’re locked into one way of managing your content. When you outgrow the system or would simply like to move on, you’ll have a huge task at hand moving your premium content.

Ideally, you should look for a system that allows you to use:
1.Popular site building tools like FrontPage or Dreamweaver
2.A popular third party content management system of your choice

Different membership levels
This is one area where many systems are lacking. Having different membership levels is just smart marketing. Even if your current plan is a single level membership, a system that can handle different levels will ensure it’ll be able to grow with you.

Customizable
Who wants a site that is just the same as the other? Choose a membership manager that will allow you to customize the look and feel. And I don’t mean just customize the header graphics and colors only. You should be able to build your own design from the ground up.

Extend-able
Many membership managers are all-in-one built in systems. They cannot communicate with other software like forums, mailing list managers and help desks. This can severely limit what you can offer your members. An extend-able system can help you make your membership site more attractive, valuable or easy to manage.

So far, we’ve only covered short list of features. For some sites, certain things in this list may not be all that important. One thing is sure, membership sites are not like one time purchase products. They are dynamic and ever changing because members will constantly suggest new things. So you really want a membership manager that’s scalable. Choose one that’s flexible enough to allow you to add on, remove and shape your member’s area as you go along.

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This is a common question and the answer really depends on your business goals.

Your Membership Site can really benefit from a partnership when you need the skills, experience or available time of another on an ongoing basis.   If you just need some assistance for a short time while you’re getting started, you would probably be better off just hiring some help for the start up.

I personally love partnering with Lynette at Mom Masterminds and Easy Internet Survey.  Not just for her tech knowledge but also for the fresh view that she brings to most situations.  Two minds are better than one.

From what I’ve been hearing, a high percentage of people interested in launching a membership site would like to partner with someone, but they’re not sure who that should be.

Who knows, maybe we’ll see the birth of some new JVs at our first Membership Site Intensive.

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There is a lot to consider before launching a membership site. The first step for any potential membership site owner is to find out what you need to consider.

Take the time to ASK your target market what they want or need in a membership site. A simple survey will help you to measure the need for what you have to offer and give you an edge in making your decisions.

We’re using Easy Internet Survey (one of our paid membership sites) to accept questions from our target market and it’s going to give us direction for our entire product.

Think about how you can use a poll or survey to empower you to create the best membership site possible.

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