Create a membership site

What is a Membership Site?

A membership site is a private website, with exclusive content available only to the signed up members.

It usually provides members with the ability to interact with each other. They pay a monthly fee for being a member of the website.

Suitable For

People who like to interact with, guide and lead a community.

Skills Required

• In-depth knowledge of any particular domain.
• Ability to research new things and constantly generate new and helpful content.

Time Required For Creating A Membership site

Depends on the domain expertise of the creator.

Tips

• In the beginning, keep the fee for joining the membership site ridiculously low. Aim to create a minimum viable product instead of creating a perfect product. You can always improve your site in later stages.
• If you've never been a part of any membership site till now, considerjoining a few related to your domain. Study those sites.
• Find what's working well for you and other members of that site? What's makes it worth the monthly fee and how could you replicate this?
• Interact and engage with members. Your membership site shouldn't be the one that only drip feeds the content, with little or no input from the owner.
• You must provide insider access for your members who want to communicate with you. Even if you're busy, you must spend at least half an hour a day to get involved with your membership site.
• You can do this by many ways, such as you can interact with the members answer their questions or even lead an interaction inside the forum.
• Run group events and challenges to increase members’ engagement with your site. Organize regular events, challenges, or similar.
• Make it easy for members to participate. Offer prizes, display leader boards or similar such things creates a great incentive for members to participate and get involved.
• Periodically review what's working and what isn't. Try to adapt the site based on the member's’ needs.
• For example, if you offer most of your content in text format but your members are engaging more with the video content then shift from text based to video content.
• Try to introduce new initiatives and see how your audience is responding to it. Such as live Q&A calls or similar.
• But be careful, don't overwhelm members with several different initiatives at once. Introduce one thing at a time.

How to Monetize

Monetization is very simple. More members sign up to your website more income you generate from the monthly fees that members pay
For a great example on how to set up, run and maintain a membership site, check out Matthew Woodward's brilliant tutorial.