Running a membership site can be a little hard particularly if it appears that your members are leaving faster than they are coming in. However, while this is certainly one of your key issues, your members have a different focus and that is, quite frankly a perception of value for their time and or money.
Giving the impression of value is very important if you want to get members and keep those members. People want to feel like they have received significantly more than they paid for. It’s true that some may not gripe about getting fundamentally good information, however this should not stop you from attempting to raise the perception bar significantly. Word of mouth is the most powerful advertising medium.
One of the easiest ways you can do this is to offer special bonuses. Try making a few of these surprises and others predetermined. Pleasant surprise offerings can be a way of letting your members know that you care. These bonuses can be resell rights or PLR products that you picked up on the side (hand’s off for you!). These can be for you to purchase and the perceived increased value can be quite high!
Other things one might do is offer multiple forms of content. That doesn’t mean you need to create new information for each form of content. You might do an audio interview with an industry luminary or you might be a trade show with your camera and simply capture 10 seconds of opinions from the public or well known speakers. This is a good thing to do because you’ll be hitting on a variety of different learning styles. Member A might like to watch videos, while Member B Prefers to read text. You’ll be satisfying more members without having to do much additional work.
A great way to make this as easy as possible is to start with video. From there, you can extract the audio. It is also possible to get a rentacoder or guru.com writer to transcribe the audio track into text and now you have 3 different medium forms from the one source!
Another thing you can do is make sure your site looks professional. While you might be able to get away with a very basic site, doing simple things like adding graphics and having a nice layout can go a long way to giving a great impression of value.The old saying goes that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” but we all know that people end up doing that anyway! A great looking site is always a joy to explore.
Try to do all of the above mentioned tips. A rule of thumb is give 10 times the monthly value and your clients won’t leave.The first 60 days are the most critical, this is when more than eighty percent of your members typically re-question whether they are getting value of their money. Soon enough you’ll have built this into a wonderful membership site that people are proud to be a part of.

June 15th, 2009
Trevor weir
Posted in
Tags: 




New blog post: Membership Site Retention – Why Are They Leaving ? http://bit.ly/FmTNr