Membership Sites: What Model Best Suits You?

Posted on 26. Dec, 2009 by Charly Leetham in Membership Sites

When creating a membership website, choosing the right membership model is one of the keys to its success.

If you don’t choose the right model you could be creating a lot of extra work for yourself or, worse, you may not deliver what your members expect.  Neither of these situations are desirable, and taking the time to decide exactly what you want to deliver with your membership site and how you want to deliver it, is essential.

This article assumes that, by now, you’ve completed the basic research required before starting any business (online or offline):

1. Identifying your niche
2. Finding a need in that niche (a problem that needs solving)
3. Determining whether it will be profitable
4. Deciding on what are you going to sell
5. Determining how you will deliver the product or service to your customer

If you can’t provide answers to the five points above, you can’t even be certain whether a membership site is the right way to go.

If you do have the answers though, the next step is to ask yourself the following questions, and write your answers down:

• What type of content will be delivered to your customers – text, video, audio?
• How often will you be delivering that content?
  • Will it be all at once?
  • Will you be adding content over time
  • Have you created all the content but want to drip feed it to members?
• Do you only want members to have access to the current months content?
• Is the membership for a fixed period only?
• Do you want all new members to start at the first piece of content, or do you want to bring them in to your membership at current piece of content?
• Are you creating a community where you and your members can interact with each other?
• Are you coaching clients and want to share specific information with each client and keep that hidden from your other clients?

Once you have this information, it is possible to decide on the type of membership model to best suit your needs.

If you are unsure of how to answer these questions, you can work with someone like myself to gain clarity and a better understanding.

I will be discussing some the membership model types you can implement in coming articles.

Please share your insights, successes and challenges about choosing your membership model below…

Related Articles

1. Membership Models: Publisher Site
2. Wordpress Membership Sites: Wishlist Enhancements
3. Wordpress As A Membership Site

Tags: Featured Services, Membership Sites, online business models, wishlist membership, wordpress membership

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Charly Leetham is a Small Business Coach and Online Business Implementation Expert and I help small businesses take their business online. I provide services to solopreneurs and small business who wish to sell or promote their products and services online.
Online Business Implementation Expert