Now, in this series, we’re going to be mostly talking about the mechanics of building your membership site. But I wanted to touch on a little bit of the bird’s-eye view of things before we drop in. Some of the planning aspects of the membership site. We’re not going to spend too much time on this because we can talk about this stuff in other videos, and I’ve definitely talked about it on courses and various articles over at blogmarketingacademy. Com. But let me share a few words here about planning out your membership site. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about planning out your membership site. Now, a membership site can have a lot of different purposes. A lot of people just get stuck in this mindset that everything has to be about online courses, but it doesn’t all have to be about online courses. And in fact, I actually think that most sites these days should probably be membership sites, because when you realize what a membership site actually is, there’s a lot more possibilities that you can bring to the table with this. It doesn’t even need to offer subscriptions. Membership sites, typically people want to do it because I want to charge monthly or I want to charge an annual membership.

But keep in mind, that’s not even the only way that you can do this. And in fact, you can come up with any pricing setup that you want. It could even be free, and it would totally work out. So a membership site is really just about logging in to access stuff. That’s all that it is. Now, what that stuff is, is going to be dependent on your business. Are you selling information? Are you selling services? Do you need to have a community set up where you have a cohort set up, where people are implementing things together? Whatever your strategy is, your membership site can be built in order to actually do that. But basically, at the base level, all a membership site is, is something where people create an account, and they log in, and they get stuff. Simple as that. So let’s look at some of the things that you can actually do with your membership site just to get the juices flowing here. Obviously, you can sell online courses. People think of this stuff all the time, right? You can also sell simpler classes and just workshops and things like that, or potentially even do them live inside the membership site and then archive them for future purposes.

Now, keep in mind, these can be two different things. A lot of people, when they do online courses, they get into this mindset of creating these multi-module, big many parts to it with progress tracking and quizzes. I want to just say here at the very beginning, just strategically, that that stuff is in the past. It’s not as if there’s no place for big online courses anymore, but I just want to let you know that people don’t want them as much as you may think anymore. And don’t get stuck just following the ass in in front of you because, oh, everybody does online courses, so I need to. We have shorter attention spans than we used to these days. Social media has really changed the game. This platform that you’re likely on right now with YouTube has definitely changed the game because so many things are available here for free. You’ve got things like Udemy and skillshare that offer entire libraries of online courses for very low subscription fees. So I just want to point out that there’s It’s definitely a place for selling of information, but you might want to not necessarily think that you have to create these large online courses because sometimes shorter is definitely better.

Take whatever your clients or your students, whatever you want to call them, whatever they’re trying to accomplish, whatever they want. How can you take the shortest path from where they are to where they want to be? The shortest path. Remove the time, take out all the fluff, and just get them to where they want to be as short as you can possibly make it. Sometimes that’s not an online course. That’s something much, much smaller. And so that can be simpler classes, workshops, maybe smaller videos put into a video library, something like that. You can also look into having client logins. And basically, if you are offering a service of any way, or maybe even a library of services, have your clients have the ability to log into your site, maybe access their account, do stuff in there, enroll in other services, exchange information with you so that you can perform the service that they’ve just purchased. Maybe there is a support system in there. Maybe there’s content in there that’s specific to your clients, things that could help automate aspects of your business because that content has been created one time and your clients can all access it inside of their member account.

Lots of There are different ways that you can do this on a website. You can also allow your clients to control their billing on a WordPress website. Even for local businesses, there’s lots of options here where you can build a membership site that just basically is for people to control their accounts. It doesn’t have to be about a whole bunch of protected content. Of course, there’s the aspect of community, whether it be forums or whether you want to put something like Buddy Boss on there and have groups and the whole thing. You can obviously do that type of thing on a membership site. You could do it in combination with the other stuff, too, by the way. You can also do content upgrades where you have free content on your blog, and then basically, you offer upgrades for your members where they get some extra piece. So like an example in my world of development and that type of stuff is that you could have a whole how-to article, and then if you’re a member of that website, you could actually offer the actual code where you could just copy and paste it and give people a massive shortcut.

That idea of giving them a shortcut, like here’s the how to, but here’s the shortcut, as an upgrade for members can work really well. And that’s Just what I thought of in terms of development and that type of stuff. But in your niche, you probably have similar things where you can offer the how to completely out in the open and yet have an upgrade on it specifically for your members. And that could either be something where you are charging them for it or you are not. It really depends on your strategy. You can also offer custom software, web applications, things like that. That gets a little bit more nerdy. You might need to have somebody develop that stuff for you, but you could put that stuff behind the login on a membership site and allow them to have their solutions that way. It could work out quite nicely. Now, there’s a lot of various options that you can also do with your membership. For example, free memberships. Now, that one is one that I encourage you to make sure that you’ve got a really good strategy for before you start doing it. It can work really well.

You can build your list with free memberships, but you also can get a whole lot of tire kickers. In my experience, you get a lot of people who will sign up to get some free thing, and then they literally never, ever log into the thing ever again. And so what happens is you end up with a user database that’s just cluttered up with a bunch of bull crap. And it’s just not worth it in a in a lot of cases. So if you’re going to have a free membership, make sure you know why you’re offering a free membership, that it’s not just a way to get them onto the list, because there are other ways of getting them access to bonus content without the free membership and the payload that goes with that. Of course, you can offer different membership types, different membership levels with access to various things at different pricing points. You’ve seen that many, many times. You can do subscription billing, you can do one-time billing, lifetime billing, payment plans, pay what you want, free trials, anything that you can think of, you can do on a membership site. It really just depends on your particular strategy.

And then you can also just sell access to specific upgrades across your site with one-click purchases, where they have an account, they may have payment information on file, and they want a particular upgrade, and it might be a micro purchase where they just spend five bucks on it, they just grab it. There’s lots of different things that you can with this site. Now, I definitely encourage you overall, even though there’s so many options out there, I encourage you to keep things simple, all right? Because I’ve seen a lot of people that just drowned themselves in trying to create the world’s fanciest membership site, and they haven’t even gotten that many members yet. And so it’s not really worth it to spend that much time creating that type of stuff until you prove that what you’re doing is actually needed and wanted by your marketplace. And so I always encourage you to build to a minimum viable product, to put only the core features in there, and purposely lean in to keeping things simple with your membership site. Do not go and do all the fancy stuff with the progress tracking and fancy quizzes and gamification and giving people points for finishing things.

That stuff adds extra payload. In a lot of cases, the member base just doesn’t give a wrap. And so why are you wasting your time trying to build that type of stuff? So go for minimum viable product, just something that gets them to a solution and gives you something that you can offer. Then test it out, and then test it out. And then you can build your site out further when you actually have actual people in there and they’re telling you and they’re showing you what they need and want. And then you build out to those. You build out to what the market is basically telling you that they want. I will say, as I said, again, I personally think that most sites today should be membership sites. It’s because, really, there are so many different reasons to have one. It gives your site a reason to exist in a lot of cases. Here’s the thing. It’s great to have a blog, but the thing is that blog just sits there with a bunch of articles. But if you can provide stuff in there for people to want to have a user account on your site and to access that stuff.

It gives your site some life. It also turns your site into an actual business platform because you can actually run billing through it and you sell things to it and all that type of stuff. Whereas otherwise, it’s just a bunch of articles and you sit there and you wait for Google to bless you with some traffic. And there’s not a lot of reason for it to exist other than just having traffic for traffic’s sake. And that’s not something that I would want to spend my time on, and you probably shouldn’t either. So I do think I think that the membership model for a website is super, super flexible. There’s lots of different strategies you can implement all within a membership site, and that’s why I put so much time on to build them. Now, if you want a little bit more help with planning out your membership site, I actually do have a planner for that, and I call it the Membership Site Planner. This has been available at blogmarketingacademy. Com for a long time. And as part of this series that I’m doing on YouTube, I’m actually going to go back and it because a site like mine has been around a long time.

Sometimes I create these things, and then my viewpoint shifts a little bit over the years. And so I’m going to go and update it. And long story short, you can now go over to blogmarketingacademy. Com. The link will be below where you can go and you can grab this lead magnet completely and totally free. Plus, when you subscribe to that, you’ll get subscribed to my weekly newsletter called the Morning WP. It goes out every Monday morning. I think you’re going to dig that one. But this membership site planner will help you with some of the brainstorming process with actually planning out what you’re going to put into your membership site. So that’s about it for today. In the next video, we’ll start talking about the tools, because, again, the primary purpose of this particular series right now is to talk about the mechanics of making your membership site work and actually building it. And so with the next one, we’re going to get into the actual tools that I’ve chosen to use for this, and we’ll get into that soon. All right, I’ll see you on the next video.