It seems like a good idea to operate a membership-based business online. Picture yourself seeing outstanding amounts flowing into your business while you take pleasure in the fact that revenue is expected to continue in the future. However, setting up shop, achieving business success, and staying at this level of satisfaction is tricky.
Test Your Business Idea
The first thing you should do is test the membership website idea. Have you gained supporters, members and/or a committed audience? You perhaps work for a networking group, a non-profit organization, club, chamber of commerce or association. If this is the situation, you have gained members and could just afford not to perform the test. Otherwise, you may be a creative person with interesting work or thoughts to share. Else, you are likely a domain expert or career coach looking to earn income with minimal effort through this kind of business.
How to Test It
- Create and market a blog through social networking websites and groups as well as a mailing list. You have to let individuals sign up for updates in order to find out the interest level among the audience.
- Make your own list servers, groups and so forth on social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Consider creating a group where individuals can share anything concerning the specific problems they go through. In the event you can gain a decent following for this online group, you can sell your idea to interested parties in the future.
- Make profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and/or Twitter. Create profiles on any of these social media channels, on which you feel that people may spend time, and start to share their insights there without charging money. At first, you could just market your wisdom to those who follow you on that group. When your followers continue to share whatever you post there, this is a sign that your content is valuable.
Create Value
When it comes to a conventional business, you may consider a single sale to each customer and then expect more businesses to come through word of mouth. In the case of a membership business, you would continue to give information, products or service to customers. The good thing with a membership-based business is that revenue will keep coming into it. You would still have to keep creating, supporting and giving value to customers for a number of years.
For writers who expect to market their skills, this activity may be to create content that will be delivered to the audience via their blog, newsletters and social networking platforms for some years. If you start to doubt whether you could come up with fresh content for a long period, you might want to think about creating fixed memberships. The negative aspect of that move is that you will only get money from people until their term of membership.
Opt For the Appropriate Platform
You won’t have to keep producing something fresh or seek the services of programmers for membership management applications. You could find software with the combination of features that are appropriate for the kind of site you plan to launch. You might require a subscription management platform such as WordPress which is a membership plugin or learning management system.
Discovering the most suitable application is difficult. You need to think about several factors, like the following.
- Operating costs and setup expenses.
- Features you would ideally have and must have.
- In what way these will fit in with your processes. Consider these thoroughly together with all the possible effects.
Make a matrix in an Excel form in which you will be able to note down things when you are doing research.
Gauge and React
Add analytics to your website to gauge traffic to it and the actions of those who come to it. Using Google Analytics, it is possible to set objectives and recognize patterns to discover important details concerning your website visitors and which information they like the most.
There will be measurement tools on the application you use. On the program, you’ll be able to see who the new members are, who have changed their membership status, etc.
Think about what would be appropriate to communicate to members during every single membership phase. For instance, you might want to consider doing more than just sending welcome messages to fresh subscribers. Think about incorporating personal outreach from anyone in the business. In the event an ongoing activity does not seem so easy, create an auto responder to make members more aware of the advantages you offer and help them use their membership to their maximum advantage. This way, you will be able to retain more members than you otherwise would.
Another important metric is the attrition rate. Keep track of the number of subscribers you had at the start of any given month and those who continue to be your member throughout the whole month.
