Looking to start a subscription website? These are the main things you should consider.
Subscription websites can help any business to attract potential clients. This way, customers can be charged a monthly fee to ensure access to the content and provide in such a way a stable and recurring income.
Most of us have joined a membership site at some point. It might have been a career website, a professional network, or even a baking class. We usually offer leveraged monthly subscriptions to choose from depending on what we want to learn or achieve. This is how the business behind it benefits from the content it sells.
It is important to remember that content should be limited to the members paying for it instead of random site visitors. There will be several gated pages to create which cannot be accessed by search engines. To do that, however, you should be experienced in it. Building a community of loyal members may take a while, but it will be worth it. The first step is to have the best WordPress membership plugin for you.
Which are the compulsory elements of a subscription site?
In essence, any membership site should focus on two main things: its content and the community it wants to attract.
Content
Choose a subject that you are interested in and is in high demand. The more people are passionate about it, the higher the chance of your site being a success.
By content, we mean:
- Posts and articles
- Courses and video tutorials
- Podcasts
- Lectures and webinars
- Coaching sessions and counseling
- A combination of the above-mentioned things
Next, you’ll need to decide which portion of the content will be paid for and what monthly plans you want to offer. In such a way, the most valuable content you have will only be available to paying customers.
Community
Subscription sites are most recommended to businesses with a strong community component. They will be considered online libraries and a place where customers go to discuss products and ask for advice. They don’t only interact with you but also with other members of the website. It’s not a long way from building a loyal group of followers.
These sites bring together people with similar interests. It also attracts those who want to direct their questions to a small, more experienced crowd. Think, for instance, of online support groups that motivate each other and share their life stories.
A community is quickly built around these topics:
- Fitness and medicine
- Career and professional advice
- Counseling and life coaching
- Startups and business expert groups
In most cases, the community platforms also offer content to paying customers. In such a way, they allow them to ask for solutions or search for those themselves and do so at any time.
And yet, content and community are not all there is to a membership website. There are some other things to consider to make optimal use of its capacity.
Here is what you should know:
The primary purpose of a membership site is to create a stable and recurring income stream
While there are many reasons for running a subscription site, it all comes down to the main benefit: generating recurring revenue.
Direct access to valuable content is only enabled against payments in monthly or yearly installments. Each time a new member joins, you’ve secured additional income. You can even plan the pricing model in a way that part of the best part about this model, as mentioned above, is that you get recurring revenue with it. This enables you to forecast your subscription revenue in advance and plan out your future expenses accordingly. The content is offered for free. Freemium subscriptions give potential members insight into the content. They also help them choose the most appropriate plan to meet their needs.
Membership websites build loyalty, relationships, and a loyal community
Does this sound like something your business would need? You are bringing lots of people with shared interests under one roof, and you should give them a sense of community.
There are many reasons new members would join a community, the main among those being the quality of the content or the access to a large community. The choice of an appropriate niche is only limited by imagination – everything from entertainment to education could work.
Good membership sites provide you with the groundwork for upselling and marketing
Another distinctive advantage of membership sites is that they assemble a pre-qualified audience. This audience can then be used for upselling and marketing campaigns.
As every business owner would agree, a great marketing plan is a key to the success of their work. Most of them hire experienced experts to research, experiment and align the plan with their financial capacity.
Having a pre-qualified audience takes most of the heavy lifting away: it shows you whom you should market and sell your services.
Membership sites provide exponential growth possibilities
As a business owner, you must also ensure that your services allow for exponential growth. This should ideally happen without you investing plenty of time and resources.
A smart way to do this is to run a membership site, as this will provide your business vertical scalability. You only need the infrastructure and the content – thanks to your audience, the site may grow to proportions you could never have imagined.
True, you can’t have an unlimited number of members. However, the more exclusive and limited the access is, the more you can charge for it. This may as well be the most lucrative business model in the world of eCommerce.
Thanks to quality content, you can become a leader in your niche
The choice of a good niche is the essential choice you will make. You want to build a site around a subject people are interested in. At the same time, you should be confident and knowledgeable so that the world perceives you as a specialist.
The appropriate behavior must accompany that.
Think about your memberships: Why did you join a website? How big of a role did the band play? Would you still stick around if you knew experts did not run the site?
And most importantly, how does this apply to your business?
Most probably, you already have a topic for your subscription website. If that is the case, focus on preparing the unique content you can come up with. Members will only stick around if they get their money’s worth, which is your job. They will invite other members to join and soon build a knowledgeable and well-informed society if satisfied.
As you see, there are many ways in which a membership website can leverage your business. Even if you are not confident in your content, you can promote it and make it exclusive by simply not offering it to anyone. This will be the main incentive guiding people towards your services.
