Are you all set to start a membership site? However, when we get hit by some inspiration, and we come up with an idea for a membership website, or some service that you’re sure is going to be a showstopper, we all too often get carried away in just making it happen by all means without giving ample time to analyze the idea creating a solid plan for it. Well, that’s human nature. So before investing everything from your time, sweat to money, it becomes crucial to validate your big idea. So come, let us take a look at all things to consider.
What is a membership site?
A membership portal is just a site that protects and places links to unique content on a member’s login page. To access the contents on these protected sites, customers need an active member account on your site. If they do, they can log in and access the content behind the login page in the member section of your site.
Membership sites are available in a wide range of varieties. A membership site can offer both free, as well as paid membership to its customers. There can also be various levels of members, all of whom have their exclusive access privileges to their membership levels. The power of a membership website is to charge people for access to your protected material regularly (monthly, semesterly, annually, etc.).
Thus, members would have to pay to keep their accounts active and therefore get continued access to your protected content when you have a paid membership website.
1. Examine the Competition:
Unlike what some people think, a lot of competition isn’t wrong. If others succeed with the “your” concept, it indicates that people are prepared to spend money. Perhaps you can win a piece of the pie for yourself.
If similar ideas are available, take a closer look at what they offer. Register or buy if you need to know precisely what you must provide to compete with them. Suppose it is out of reach, then it’s time to look for a new idea.
While a lack of competition could sound good, as it may be a green flag that no one else thought of your idea.
2. You need to engage members and create an interactive Platform:
Interaction and engagement can prove to be the key. When running a membership platform, you can’t behave as a silent creator. It would be best if you are involved, be active and live in the present. Get to know what people think, answer their remarks. Keep daily polling and surveys so that your customers know what they feel is important to you.
You should also allow members to communicate. Membership sites also develop around a shared community, just like online communities. Inside jokes, label standards, and other cultural norms will be developed over time. You need to pay attention to what the customer wants and try to improve accordingly.
3. Run a Pre-Launch Offer:
If your targeted audience has a positive response to your idea, then it’s time to proceed with a pre-start offer. You can start working on implementing your opinion at this point and build your membership site to a landing page. You can collect the email addresses of interested members during this process in return for freebies or collect pre-payments when it is launched to access your site. This is a more reliable way to validate the concept but has additional obligations since you need to make sure that you will deliver the products on time.
4. You can choose to Test the market with a ‘minimum viable product’.
One move towards validating your membership by simply gathering results in establishing that there are potentially excited customers to buy, which you are going to sell, is to get people to buy something in the same ballpark by selling them a ‘minimally viable product.’
A ‘minimum viable product’ or “MVP” is an offer in the same vein to the same audience, but it doesn’t take too much uptime, time, and financial commitment to get going. In this way, you would be able to offer the final product to the targeting audience.
5. Partnerships:
By collaborating with other online entrepreneurs, you can expand your membership list. You expose yourself to the audiences of each other, which can lead to membership increase for you both. Consider working with someone in the same industry but offering a different niche. We recommend you to surely try this can result to be quite effective invalidating your membership site.
Conclusion:
By validating the idea of your membership platform, you are sure your project is a success. Nothing is assured, but the longer you spend validating your idea and seeing whether there is a real need in the market for what you propose, the more excellent the opportunity of your success.
None of us wants to waste our valuable time working on something that people do not want to pay for or even use for free, so be sure to follow and confirm before giving your idea a start.
Interesting Read :
Best Website Ideas to Launch an Online Side Business in 2021
