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The Pathway to Phenomenal Membership Sites

Creating your own membership site is never an easy feat, but it can certainly yield incredible results. Membership sites can serve several purposes depending on your circumstances, from generating additional revenue streams to elevating your interaction and foresight with your audience.

But what exactly does it take to create a thriving online membership community? Here’s an ultimate guide to follow that touches upon all the key aspects of launching and maintaining mesmerizing membership sites.

Research, Research, Research

The first step towards membership site excellence is paying close attention to your research. Identify your areas of strength and make sure they stand out as the main focus of your site. Looking at the scope of other membership sites, investigate their offerings to understand what may work for you and what restrictions exist. It can also be worth deciphering what people within your industry typically prioritize, along with topics that stand unanswered.

Prioritize Quality over Quantity

You’ll never serve or address every industry topic with your membership site (unfortunately), so it’s vital to curate your content in a way that excites your membership base, and that potentially your competitors are missing. Members seek exclusivity and distinct experiences with membership-based websites, so carrying a surplus of sub-par information or repeating the already available data will only produce poor results.

When emphasizing quality, this also means prioritizing a seamless user experience (UX). Diverse sources note that excellent UX habits such as simpler navigation, insightful buttons/instructions, and prompt time-to-page-load foster ongoing use rates, inspire actions, and eventually commitments of purchase.

Pricing Can Make or Break You

This is the most-complicated aspect and challenging decision to make since it revolves in part around a balance between how much of your content you feel is valuable, what fair costs look like, offering plans that work for different customer segments, and avoiding misguided price floors.

Begin with a straightforward model that includes perhaps monthly, quarterly and yearly pricing option to account for any disparities between preferences. Brainstorm various combinations of plans and discount options which appeal to multiple members from all professional background/architectures women/men will allow for clarity and most importantly offer options.

Customizability and Flexibility

Irrespective of which membership site template provider and tools one intends to utilize, keeping in mind an adjustable and adaptable system from early-development stage is essential. While there is by no means going over each to function and design different from one community-member volume varies, it is mostly helpful to make intentional choices that line up with established branding ideas of what makes a memership community ‘their’ community. In this area, sincerity, creativity, and freedom can amplify features and provide members, meaningful custom experiences.

As the internet becomes increasingly crowded with the arrival of more sites to an ever-growing repository of product or service features, offering a sweet spot user-centric, quality, pricing package with flexibility and tailored-design will make all the difference in crafting an enchanting and flourishing membership site.