Creating and growing a successful membership business takes time, effort, and patience. It doesn’t happen overnight. However, if you have the right tools and knowledge, you are well on your way to building a business that will bring you the income you’ve always wanted. Here are the steps to launch your membership site.

Choose Your Niche

Find a niche with enough potential demand. Choosing a niche is essential because there needs to be enough interest and qualified prospects in your desired market to create a sustainable and profitable online business.

The more focused your audience is, the easier it will be to establish yourself as an authority and build relationships within your community.

Know Your Customers

The first step in any customer-focused marketing strategy is research to identify the needs and wants of your customers. You must first determine your customers’ needs and then develop a plan to meet those needs, if not exceed them. 

It’s not enough to have a product or service that you think is great. Instead, use the data you got from your research to understand your target market and deliver a solution to their problem.

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, so understanding their needs and preferences is vital for its success. With this in mind, it’s worth considering the following questions:

• Who are my customers?
• What are their priorities?
• How do I meet their needs?
• How well am I meeting their needs in my current marketing efforts?
• What is stopping them from buying from me in the first place?

Develop your unique selling point 

Every business needs to have an advantage over its competitors, or they won’t last very long. Your unique selling proposition (USP), helps ensure you are more memorable to your clients. 

Through your USP, you will gain more customers over time. Here are three ways to create a USP that will help you with your marketing and business planning activities.

What is a USP

A unique selling point (USP) is an aspect of your business that allows you to stand out in your industry. If done correctly, it will differentiate you from your competitors and give you an edge in every marketing and sales interaction.

You probably already have some great ideas about what makes your brand special. The next step is to collect them, identify their strengths and weaknesses, prioritize them by importance. Finally, come up with a single phrase that captures everything at once.

Why Develop a USP

The importance of having one is enormous. A unique selling proposition (USP) differentiates your business from competitors and communicates what you do that nobody else does to customers. 

Your business may be brand new or have been around for decades, but developing your USP can help attract new clients, reinforce your brand and motivate team members. Here are three ways to create a USP that will set you apart from other businesses in your industry.

Explain the Problem You Solve

To create your USP, you must first identify what problem you’re solving. Sure, you might say that your products or services save people time or money. But why do they matter so much?

At their core, every business solves some problem for their customers. Your job is to figure out what issue your business addresses explicitly and how it does so. 

If you manage an interior design company, you solve clients’ problems about how they want their homes to look. So not only are you making things pretty, but you’re also adding a sense of your client’s personality to their living space.

If you can zero in on one particular pain point—something real, not hypothetical, you can write a compelling USP. Again, focus on benefits over features. After identifying your target customer’s pain point, shift to understanding how well you solve it.

A benefit helps someone get more value from using your product or service while a feature lists out qualities like size, color, packaging style, etc., instead of what they do for someone.

Use Your Customers’ Language

The key is to avoid jargon: Resist using it when writing your USP, even if you think jargon sounds cool. Remember that ultimately you need to communicate with humans, specifically those most likely to buy from you.

Customers often tell us their pain points; we need to listen and ask them what they’re trying to achieve and how we can help. 

For example, if customers always seem unsure about how your product or service fits into their business model, don’t assume they already know. Instead, reach out and ask them. 

If you find that most of your clients spend valuable time on research before making buying decisions, don’t assume they already know about solutions like yours.

Define Your Promise

A USP essentially implies a promise or a pledge you are making to your customers. It’s like saying your product or service will be like no other in its class; there is no substitute for what you offer. 

By creating unique value or solving problems, you can set yourself apart from competitors and entice prospects to buy from you exclusively. 

Answer the following questions in your USP promise:

• What makes your business different?
• What do you uniquely bring to the market?
• How can you solve these problems better than anyone else?

Choose the Right Platform for Your Membership Site

Membership business platforms are a dime a dozen these days. The downside is that they might not have all the features and functionalities you need for your membership site. So it’s essential to do some research and planning before you decide which one to use.

It can be pretty confusing with so many platforms out there. For example, WordPress plugins offer membership functionality, but they aren’t platform tools themselves. Where do you start? Here are four things to consider:

• Is the cost worth the features?
• How easy is it to customize?
• How does it work with other software I use in my business?
• What kind of support does it

The Most Common Membership Site Models

Membership sites are a form of online business in which a set of exclusive, interactive features is offered to the site’s members in return for a regular subscription payment. Here are the most common membership site models:

1) Subscription model – This is a traditional business model in which customers pay a monthly or yearly fee for accessing the website’s content.

2) Membership site by content/product – This type of membership site provides clients with access to specific content or products. Examples include E-Learning platforms and digital magazines like The New York Times.

3) Freemium model – This is usually free for customers but requires payment when you want to unlock extra features (such as more courses).

Share, teach, guide, and most importantly, engage your online community with Wisdome.

Managing an online membership community is a lot of work, and we are here to support you in making your dreams of launching an online business a reality. Believe in your passion! 

Establishing your online membership business is easy with Wisdome. Here are three ways we can support your online business: 

Offer Memberships

Membership models are increasingly popular in the online marketing world. They provide a way for creators to share content with their members at different levels and get paid for it. Online membership sites include communities, subscription markets, and digital libraries.

Teach an online course

Online coaching is now a part of life for many people. People seek lots of advice nowadays for fitness, mental health, relationships, parenting, financial planning, and many more. 

Provide valuable coaching services to help transform lives and earn a living at the same time.

With Wisdome, you can focus on creating courses that contribute to your students’ success.

Our platform helps you build engaging, personalized courses. It’s the only course-building tool that delivers interactive content, social learning, and analytics in one place.

Believe in Your Passion For Transforming Lives

Launching a membership website can be complicated. Costs depend on its features, quality of content, and functionality. As a general rule, you can expect to spend $200 per year for an entry-level platform, while more advanced sites may be well into the thousands of dollars per month.

Launch your membership business in minutes with Wisdome, which takes the hassle out of managing your site. No more coding or technical skills are required, and you will save money on the high licensing fees that other software providers charge.

Wisdome is a powerful tool with many features that give you the best way to interact with your audience. Our services allow you to:

• Upload videos, images, and audio files
• Create a content library with downloadable content.
• Create a membership site
• Host courses and challenges, as well as live events and webinars.
• Use a social wall to engage your members.

Get Paid To Teach What You Know

Limited Time Offer: Click here to Launch Your Memberships For Less Than $10.00/month.

Conclusion

A membership site is an excellent way to generate revenue as you help people reach their goals. In addition, this method makes it easy to prove the value of your services and build a stronger business with a sustainable source of income.

Tune in for part 2 of this series on how to build a membership website. Did you learn something new today? Are there topics that you would like covered? We want to know! Leave your comments below. We will be checking them out.