A membership site can be a smart idea to put together, depending on your niche. People pay great deals of money up front to join membership sites or they pay a monthly fee to remain a member of that site and keep access to whatever perks or services which that site offers.
How to Make a Membership Site
It also makes for an effective backend sale if you combine it with your front end offer effectively. I’ve been creating a membership site to go with my songwriting eBook which I recently released, so while that’s not yet complete let’s talk about how to make a membership site.
One of the most important things when it comes to making your membership site is to offer lots and lots of extremely unique content which is difficult to find elsewhere. Having a lot content is essential to offer if you expect people to pay you any kind of fee (let alone a monthly fee) to become or remain members of your site.
How to Make a Membership Site
When it’s comes to actually making your membership site, we can again look to WordPress to save the day and simplify things. The easiest way which I recommend that you do it is through Optimize Press – my vote for the best WordPress theme when it comes to marketing. With Optimize Press you have push button ease for creating customized pages whether that’s a sales page/letter, normal content blog, squeeze pages, and of course membership site pages.
Optimize Press won’t get you there alone, however. OP can be used to create the look, pages, and content set up for your membership site again with just a handful of clicks; but you’ll need third party software to handle the logistics of your membership site. These are things like handling payment, granting/denying access to members and non members, respectively,
I recommend Wishlist as they are the best in the business. There are free options out there but in my experience the free options will run you into technical problems and you’ll find minimal or no support to go with them. This can be a nightmare when you’ve got dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of paying members of your site who can’t get access to what they’ve already paid for coming angrily after you.
If you’re looking to monetize your membership site (which is the whole point of this), then you’ll easily be able to make back the $97 one time charge associated with Wishlist to know that you’ve got the best membership site software and support to go with it on the net. Plus you don’t want to be charging people money for a half decent and buggy product which you’ll get with the freebies.
I’ll be doing a complete Wishlist review tomorrow, so check back for everything you need to know about the best membership software available online and most importantly WHAT makes it the best software online.