3 Things Silently Killing Your Membership Site
It's true that you have an online membership site. It's your passion to pour your heart and soul into it. It's a good business, or perhaps it's not as good. There's a sense that you're not doing the things you should be doing in order to make your company grow. You hope you have all your bases covered, yet you're constantly worried that maybe there's something you're not doing.
Obviously, there are three or more aspects that can destroy the membership website. With years of experience aiding membership websites run their business, we have noticed a few things that are most common in tripping up site owners.
You might not be astonished by these issues This is great! This means that you're not ignoring some things that could sneak in and end your life. This may be just an opportunity to remind you all. To the rest of you, learning about these problems and taking action to prevent they could help your business or help you achieve more chances of success! Let's get started.
1. Pricing
Too many businesses make mistakes pricing their goods. If you are launching a membership website, it's easy to put prices low in an attempt to make it more appealing to customers. One might think "If I can get enough customers I'll be fine and be able to make profits." This is the common belief However, this is an excellent illustration of what an unending death could look as for your business.
It can take time to develop an online membership website. Setting the appropriate prices will ensure that your business survive to be able to continue growing your business. Although you may believe that your business is successful, but eventually growing the business will result in higher costs. Any slowdown in user growth or a rise in the number of attrition cases could begin to affect your cash flow, and boom it's sinking. So what do you do? Raise prices. It is probably not necessary to go through explaining the difficulties of significantly raising prices, and what it can do to your business. The small, gradual price increase can be necessary and healthy but just ask companies like Netflix as well as Spotify what happens when you try to make sudden, large price increases. The plan didn't end up working out good for the two companies. Most people aren't interested in paying significantly more than they originally paid. Start at a low price will allow you to grow and keep growing without risking making existing customers feel like there's no alternative but to increase prices to survive.
2. SEO
The common demise of the membership site is by taking every single one of your fantastic, already existing content and putting it behind an unaffordable price. It's been a great site that has a lot of visitors consume your content. So, you've decided it's time to generate income! If you've earned high ranking on SEO with Google in the past, then suddenly taking all of your content and placing the content on a paywall can kill your Google love. There are a few examples of companies who have lost their Google popularity in just a few hours of making this decision. All the great SEO efforts will now be wasted. By putting your website's content behind a paywall stops Google from being able to crawl your website. It's as if it disappeared.
In order to earn money, you don't have to start all over again with your content! Sure, creating new quality content may be required, but repurposing, expanding and re-organizing your existing content with a paywall is your best option to begin earning money through leveraging the hard work you've put into it. Keep your free content that is successful in its current location and maintain your SEO ranking that will keep bringing people to your website. Make a convincing case for them to spend to access your premium stuff.
Does have a feature that may help mitigate the issue. The feature we have will allow Google to index and access the content of your site even when it's behind a payment wall. is the sole WordPress membership plugin that I'm aware of that has this function. However, it comes with cost. You can't use this feature for pages that you're caching ... or caching is a critical part of most sites.
Be careful when deciding that it's the right time to launch an online membership website based on your content/service. If done correctly this can set you on the right path for success and consistent development.
3. Engage
Have a user retention strategy integrated into your plan of action right from day one. If you want some examples of a site that excels at this, look at Lynda.com. It's amazing the way they continue to produce and releasing great content each week, every month after month, year after year. It's a lot of work but it is the only method to keep a growth of a membership website. Keep it simple: Too many options for membership and too many upgrade/downgrade routes can confuse your users and can also be a problem with support.
Bonus
In conclusion I'll leave you with a helpful tip: always keep backups of your website and the content.
Not having a good backup strategy can kill your business in a single swoop. Being hacked, having a devastating hardware failure, or software mistake can effectively 'delete the entire website. All your data is gone. Your content, your databases of users, your email lists, everything just gone. It is virtually impossible for you to recover without an effective backup. We have tested a few backup solutions and we're very pleased with the one we currently use, VaultPress. It gives us great peace of mind to know you can restore your backup if anything happens to us.
We hope that at least one of these strategies will help you to avoid your business from being "killed," reduced, or hurt. We are proud to say we are helping thousands of membership sites get their sites on the right track to the top of their game! There's a lot to keep track of as the owner of a membership site. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts! We'd like to hear your comments on this piece along with other lessons you've learned that can kill your website that we might not know about. Please let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment.
K.G. Carter Kevin is the Partner and Affiliate Manager of the entire range of Caseproof products.