Getting your first 100 paying customers for a membership website is always the hardest part. But once you reach that number, it becomes much easier to attract new members.
Here is your 90-day plan for getting your first 100 paying customers:
Before you launch your membership website
Before diving into marketing and traffic-building, there are a few key things to consider:
Know Your Audience: Understand who they are, what problems they have, and how you can help them. Also, know how to reach them.
Understand Your Competition: Identify both online and offline competitors, know their pricing, and determine how you’ll stand out.
Clarify Your Unique Value: What makes your site different? Why should someone choose you over the competition?
Create a User-Friendly Website: Your site should look professional and clearly communicate what you offer. Remember, every page is a landing page, so ensure visitors can easily navigate your site from any entry point.
Include Free and Member-Only Content: Offer some high-quality free content to build trust, but also have exclusive content for members. Before launching, have at least 90 days’ worth of content ready to free up time for marketing.
Refine Your Offer: Make an offer that’s hard to refuse. Ensure the perceived value is at least three times higher than the membership cost. Consider offering a money-back guarantee and special deals for early sign-ups.
Pre-Launch Marketing Activities
Build Authority: Establish your credibility in the field. Get testimonials, create a social media presence, and engage with relevant groups.
Prepare a Marketing Plan: Outline your marketing activities before the launch so you know exactly what to do each day.
Interviews: Conduct interviews with key figures in your industry. This not only creates valuable content but can also drive traffic to your site if the interviewees share it with their audiences.
90-Day Marketing Plan
Your plan should be divided into two phases:
Phase 1 (80 Days): Focus on driving traffic to your website and building a relationship with visitors who show an interest in the service you are providing. Allow visitors to sign-up to an email newsletter or other services that will enable you to proactively communicate with them.
Phase 2 (10 Days): Shift focus from traffic and relationship-building to converting your most loyal followers into paying members. Build excitement with an irresistible offer which your most loyal followerswon’t be able to resist.
Phase 1 Activities:
Driving Traffic to Your Membership Website
Since you won’t initially get much search engine traffic, you’ll need to rely on other methods to drive visitors to your site. Some ideas include:
Google Ads: A powerful tool if used correctly. Focus on specific keywords relevant to your niche.
Newsletter Ads: Pay to advertise in newsletters that reach your target audience.
Press Coverage: Use free and paid press release services to announce your site’s launch.
Article Syndication: Publish high-quality articles on third-party sites to drive traffic.
Forums: Join relevant forums and participate in discussions. Include a link to your site in your signature.
Collecting Email Addresses
It’s crucial to capture email addresses from your site visitors. Offer something valuable in return. Your offer should have a perceived value that is at least three times greater than the membership price. Some examples are:
Access to a video series
A free course
A popover sign-up box
A downloadable eBook or report
An example offer package could be:
Your Guarantee – The lower the perceived risk the higher your conversion rate. If you can offer a 100%, no questions asked, money-back guarantee it will increase your sign-up rate.
The early bird catches the worm – reward your first members with a special deal. Everyone likes a bargain.
Set-up an affiliate program – an affiliate program is an automated way of paying people who recommend your service to their customers or site visitors a commission for any sales they facilitate. If you want other website owners to help you sell your service this is the best way to get them fired up.
Try to give away something that has zero or near-zero cost to you, but provides your target audience with real value.
Phase 2 – Converting Followers to Paying Members
After 80 days of building excitement and relationships, it’s time to convert your followers into paying members. Here’s how:
Create a Compelling Offer: Give early members extra value rather than just a discount.
Host a Big Event: Consider organizing a webinar with valuable content, but make the full benefits available only to paying members.
Make Signing Up Easy: Clearly communicate the benefits and include a money-back guarantee to reduce perceived risk.
Everything you will have provided so far – the email sign-up giveaway, the content on your site, the email newsletter, Tweets, etc – has been free.
In phase 2 you must turn your attention to packaging up your paid membership service in such a way that your most dedicated followers are very happy to pay.
You want to build excitement and desire over the 80 days. This will get a much higher conversion rate than allowing members to signup whenever they want.
The Offer
You must create a very compelling offer for the first 100 members. I would strongly recommend that the offer is based around giving them downloadable stuff for free rather than a discount on the membership fee.
You should try to preserve your income as much as possible. As mentioned above create a package of services that have a value much greater than the cost of the subscription.
The Big Event
To launch the 10-day sign-up period you should arrange a big event.
A very popular thing to do is have a webinar where prospects can dial into for free and listen to a talk by you, or better still, a really well-known industry personality.
A webinar is easy and cheap to arrange but has a high perceived value to attendees.
The content of the webinar should not be a sales pitch for your membership site. You need to be more subtle than that.
The content should provide really good information about a particular subject, but the information should be incomplete. The additional information should be available within the membership site.
A few examples:
A wine tasting site – the webinar could be hosted by a recognized master of wine and cover how wine tasting is done. The membership area of the website could then reveal their actual tasting notes for dozens of wines
A site about launching an Internet business – the webinar could cover the 15 things you must do before launching an Internet business. The membership area could list all the resources you need for a successful launch
A site about educating children at home – the webinar could cover how to plan a home-based curriculum. The membership website could provide all the templates for the parent to fill in
Make Signing Up Easy:
Clearly communicate the benefits and include a money-back guarantee to reduce perceived risk.
The Sign-Up Process Checklist
Get your site ready with some really excellent content
Create additional content for the first 90 days so you can focus on marketing activities
Create or source some gifts that can be given away to incentivize email sign-up and paid membership sign-up
Focus on driving traffic to the free content on the site and getting visitors to sign-up for the email newsletter (or other communications channel) using a free offer. Keep building interest and momentum for 80 days
Work with other bloggers, online publishers, journalists to get them to drive traffic to your site
Plan a big event such as a webinar to launch the start of membership sign-up
Create a very compelling offer which gives value well beyond the cost of the subscription
Host the big event. Provide real value but give listeners a compelling and irresistible reason to sign-up for your service
Look after the early paying members and they will do a lot of the future selling for you
Conclusion
This technique for getting 100 paying members in 90 days is tried and tested. The skill is building the excitement about your service to the point where your followers can’t wait for it to go live. At all stages, try to put yourself in your prospects' shoes and think about
“what would REALLY make me want to sign up for this service?”.
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This article will list the steps you need to take to start building your membership website.
1. Identify your target audience
Growing an audience of paying users requires creating content tailored to their needs.
It may seem counter-intuitive but by focusing on a specific niche subject you'll be able to more effectively create content that appeals to your target audience.
Knowing the customer persona of your target audience, enables you to identify and create impactful content specific to their needs along with effective marketing strategies to reach and engage them.
A narrow audience allows you to craft targeted marketing messages that will resonate with potential members resulting in successful marketing campaigns.
2. Determine your membership model
Once you identify your audience, you need to decide the content that you plan to offer, how it will be delivered and the sales model. Employing multiple revenue streams will maximise your ability to monetise your content. For example, by providing a visitor, who doesn't intend to sign-up to a membership, the opportunity to purchase a course, digital download or pay-per-view product means you still capture revenue. The SubHub platform gives you the ability to create multiple revenue streams.
Offering membership tiers which unlock more content and perks depending on the level is another upsell option to employ. But remember, too many choices can have a negative impact. According to Hick’s Law, the more choices you present to a user can prolong their decision making process. So limit the membership levels to no more than four.
Membership fees can be set up as a one-time payments or on a recurring basis. Recurring fees have the advantage of providing a steady and reliable income flow. For members that might need a nudge, including free trial days can entice them to sign up.
3. Choosing the best membership platform for your needs
These days there are a wealth of membership models to choose from. They include WordPress, where you can build your site's functionality with plugins, to all-in-one SaaS solutions. Which you select will depend on your budget, tech skills, membership objectives and the content you want to sell.
WordPress offers the most flexibility when it comes to the design and functionality you can achieve with your website. However, those benefits also come with costs and disadvantages. Unless you have technical skills or the budget to hire a developer, a WordPress site can be out of your price range.
The other major downside with WordPress is plug-in maintenance. When you build a website based on the interaction of multiple plugins, you must insure they are all compatible. One incompatible plugin, can break your whole site. This often happens when a plugin needs to be updated. And when it does, you'll need to hire a developer to fix it.
Alternatively, a SaaS solution (Software as a Service) is a complete service that provides you not only with the website but hosting, maintenance and customer support. Popular SaaS examples are Wix, Shopify, Teachable and SubHub. A SaaS solution reduces the stress of running an online knowledge business. If something breaks, you just need to submit a support ticket. And SaaS companies are always working to improve their product offerings.
You'll want to select a platform you can grow with. The design, functionality, and scalability should be flexible enough to modify to meet your target audience’s changing needs.
Many SaaS solutions specialise in the delivery of specific types of content. If you plan to only sell online courses, you might select an eLearning platform like Teachable. If your focus is website membership, but also want the additional revenue stream of selling courses then the SubHub platform is the answer.
Lastly, choose a platform that provides dedicated customer support. When you run a membership website, there will be issues. Read client reviews support by people who really understand both technology and online publishing is vital.
4. Building your website
If you've selected a SaaS solution, you can start right away creating your site with that solution's website builder. Most SaaS solutions are intended to be intuitive enough for a non-techie to easily use.
Your homepage will be the most important page on your site as it will influence whether or not a visitor becomes a member. Be sure to carefully craft the copy of your banner and body text so that it informs and engages with your potential members. Clearly define, the benefits of your membership proposition.
Your homepage must also be SEO optimised with keywords so that your site is found in search results.
Include a testimonial section as client reviews can have a persuasive impact by showing visitors that others value your product, it’s a vote of confidence in your product.
Pay attention to page speed as a slow loading page will cause visitors to bounce.
These are just a few tips to create a converting homepage.
5. Upload initial content
Before launching, you'll need to have uploaded enough content to satisfy your first members. This could be in the form of blog posts, courses, downloads, videos etc. Then you'll need to stay committed to a regular schedule of adding new content.
Make sure your content is meaningful and is of value to your audience.
6. Follow SEO best practices
Just launching a website isn't enough to get found. From the start, be sure to follow SEO best practices when creating your site and adding content. This will improve your chance of getting found in search results. Using keywords, the proper heading format, internal links and requesting backlinks are all necessary to insure that when Google and other search engines index your site that they understand what your site is about, how content relates to each other.
The same focus keyword needs to be present in your meta title, article headline, first sentence and a few times in the article body.
Once you create an article, submit it to Google search so that it is indexed within 24 hours.
Use the proper heading (H1, H2, H3...) format on your pages. H1 must only be used ONCE on any page. Proper headings inform search engines about the structure of your site and the hierarchy of your content.
Internal links are created when you include links of similarly-themed content to each other. Again, this help search engines understand the content on your site and how it relates to each other.
When a site links to your site, this is a backlink. It proves to search engines that your content is relevant and trustworthy.
7. Grow a community on social media
Drive traffic to your website using your social media channels. It's best to select a single social media platform and then dedicate all your efforts to building an audience. Choose the platform where your prospective members will be hanging out.
Conclusion
Membership is one of the most exciting business opportunities on the internet today. It is established enough that you will not have to reinvent the wheel. Everything you need to be successful is available and accessible to novices and experts alike.
