Starting a membership site on WordPress is like planting a seed.
With time, care, and the right strategies, that seed can grow into a revenue-generating giant that cultivates a community and opens up streams of recurring income.
But how do you harness this power and learn how to boost WordPress membership site revenue?
And what if we told you there’s a new tool on the block that can greatly accelerate this process? Intrigued?
Well, put on your entrepreneurial jetpacks and explore with us the path to maximizing your membership site’s potential.
Buckle up, we’re about to take off!
But First…Why Opt for a Membership Business Model?
Are you an entrepreneur in the online or ecommerce world? If you haven’t thought about adopting a membership model, it might be time to consider it.
But why, you may ask? First, let’s talk numbers.
- Over 70% of businesses are using some form of membership model.
- The global e-learning market is expected to reach $325 billion by 2025
- The average lifetime value (LTV) of a customer on a membership site is $120
- The average retention rate for membership sites is about 75%.
- Over 70% of businesses that use membership models for their products or services report an increase in their annual revenue
A membership site business model, when done right and with the right tools like MemberPress, can significantly raise your revenue compared to regular ecommerce models.
Think of it like this: Which would you rather have?
- A loyal community of folks, who return to your site month after month, paying you a fee on a recurring basis
OR - A one time customer.
We’re banking on number one. And that’s the power of the membership model.
The proof is in the pudding
Think of all the incredibly successful companies thriving with the membership business model – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify… the list is long.
Their success highlights the potential waiting for any entrepreneur willing to embrace this model.
In any case, whether your membership site is new or you’ve been at it for a while, it’s smart to think about making more money from it.
The goal is to get your site to earn money for you, even when you’re not actively working on it. And there’s no need to start over to do this.
You just have to make smart moves!
In this post, we’ll talk about a few of those moves and how they can help you bring in more cash with what you’ve already got.
Plus, we’ll explore various methods to diversify your income streams, so your membership site can really pay off.
Factors to Consider Before Trying to Maximize Membership Revenue
Before you dive into making big changes to boost your membership site’s revenue, keep a few key things in mind:
Understand Your Audience
Understanding your audience is key to success.
Know what they need, what troubles them, and what they expect.
This knowledge helps you focus on what matters most to them. That way, you can offer more value and, in turn, increase your revenue.
Put Your Customers First
Always think about your members and clients first.
Any changes you make – whether to your prices, offers, or the site itself – should keep your current users happy and engaged.
Make use of some of Google’s free marketing tools to be sure your search engine optimization (SEO) and landing pages are up to snuff.
Assess Your Pricing Structure
Check your pricing plans. Make sure they fit different budgets and needs.
Tiered pricing is a must on any membership site. That’s because it’s the best way to make sure you cater to people at more than one economic level.
You could be missing out on customers who think your subscription is too costly, and losing out on extra revenue from those willing to pay more for bonus content.
Review Your Pricing
Ask yourself a few questions about potentials.
Would it be a good idea to offer a premium membership tier with exclusive perks?
Or maybe your audience would respond well to discounted annual memberships or regular promotional campaigns.
Thinking about these sorts of things can reveal hidden revenue opportunities in your current offerings.
Importantly, it might also be time to revisit your prices if it’s been a while. You may have added features or improved your offering since you set your fees. And, of course, there’s always inflation to think about.
For these reasons, raising your prices can be critical to maintaining success.
Start with Easy Fixes
Tackling simple improvements first is a great idea for a couple of reasons:
- When you’re looking at a mountain of improvements, getting any checked off your list will boost morale and keep you pressing on.
- Those small changes can make a massive difference in revenue!
So consider: Can you tweak your homepage SEO? Or maybe you’ve got some outdated landing pages that could use a refresh. Look for the little stuff that packs a big punch.
The Common Challenges in Maximizing Membership Revenue Growth
Operating a membership site comes with unique challenges. But there’s good news: Those challenges are no big deal for gritty and dedicated entrepreneurs (like you!).
Plus, we all know knowledge is power.
So knowing in advance what those challenges are will help you find your way through the maze of increased membership revenue.
That said, here are some of the common difficulties site owners tackle:
- Getting New Members: Continually attracting new members keeps the income flowing.
However, without proper marketing strategies or clear unique selling propositions, this can be harder than it seems. - Keeping Members: Keeping members on board is just as important, if not more so, than picking up new ones.
Ensuring your site offers value on a continual basis is key to minimizing membership cancellations.
Make sure your site offers ongoing value, and you’ll enjoy the ongoing revenue of clients who keep coming back. - Pricing Strategy: Striking the ideal balance to please members without undermining your profit margin can be tricky.
You need a pricing strategy that offers value and stimulates growth. - Engagement: Convincing members to remain active and engaged takes effort.
While it’s key to impress your members and maintain your income, effective strategies can sometimes be pricey and demand a lot of time.
Regular, high-quality content, community interaction, and responsive customer service can help maintain member activity. - Time Management: A membership site requires regular content updates, software tweaks, and member support, among other tasks.
Juggling these duties can be daunting, especially for small businesses. - Tech Troubles: Technical difficulties, such as billing issues or site glitches, can frustrate members.
Prompt attention to these problems is vital to avoid losing members. - High Churn Rate: A high churn rate, the rate at which members cancel their subscriptions, can significantly compromise your revenue growth.
It is often cheaper and more efficient to retain existing members than to acquire new ones. - Competition: In a world filled with membership sites, it’s not always easy to make yours unique and appealing to potential members.
Understanding your competition and staying ahead with innovative offerings is fundamental. - Content Quality: Serving high-quality, relevant, and ever-green content is key to maintaining member interest and reducing churn.
Regularly updating and adding fresh content can be an overwhelming task.
Now that we’ve covered these challenges, we want you to breathe easy knowing there are effective solutions to tackle them.
Here’s more good news: we’re going to walk you through it.
Let’s focus on how the latest addition to MemberPress, CoachKit™, can significantly boost your revenue game.
What is CoachKit™?
Built with the needs of educators and entrepreneurs in mind, CoachKit™ is a smart solution that plays a pivotal role in membership site management.
CoachKit is packed with many compelling features. Harnessing these can greatly enhance your site, draw in more members, and significantly elevate your income.
Want to know how it does this? Let us break it down.
Customize Lessons with Bookmarking
With the power of bookmarking, you can now allow your members to place a bookmark on your course resources.
It’s detailed, targeted, and allows your members to catch right back up from where they left off, effectively enhancing their learning experience.
Offering Choices with Multiple Course Display Options
Flexibility is key to attracting and keeping members. CoachKit™ knows this well and offers multiple course display options.
Courses can be showcased as a grid or list, adjusting to the member’s preference or the course’s content and style.
Schedule Your Course: Plan Like a Pro
The course scheduling feature in CoachKit™ allows you to plan, organize, and manage your course activities effectively.
By keeping your content organized, you can keep a handle on your offerings, ensuring you deliver consistently high-quality content.
This can lead to higher member satisfaction, encourage renewals, and attract new potential members.
Engage with Alerts: Keep Your Members Posted
Notifications are a great way to flag important information or updates.
With CoachKit™’s notification feature, you can send automated reminders and notifications about course schedules, new content, membership renewals, or exclusive promotions.
You not only save time but also make the users feel valued and engaged, impacting membership retention and growth positively.
Deliver Value Over Time: The Power of Drip Content
MemberPress’ CoachKit™ includes a drip content feature.
This feature allows you to control the pace at which your members access your content.
This helps in maintaining the irresistible suspense and ensuring the continuous engagement of your members.
It’s a great way to keep your membership fresh, retain long-term members, and steadily boost conversion rates.
Combining this with exclusive or high-value content can drastically increase perceived value and result in higher revenue.
Track Progress: A Valuable Feedback Loop
Understanding your members’ needs and preferences is vital to retaining them.
The progress tracking feature in CoachKit™ enables you to monitor your students’ engagement, assessing how well they are coping with the lessons.
This provides valuable insight into making necessary improvements or additions to your content.
Doing this boosts the chances that your members will appreciate, and continue to pay for your educational content.
Maximize Content with Completion Tracking
With CoachKit™’s feature of completion tracking, members can track their progress as they move progressively through your course.
On the other side of things, this feature grants you real-time insights regarding how members are interacting with your content.
Other Features of CoachKit™ that Set It Apart
- Interactive Quizzes: CoachKit™ allows you to create quizzes that offer an interactive learning experience to your users.
- Public and Private Comments: This conversation feature assists in creating a community feeling on your site, encouraging users to participate more and stick around your content for longer.
- Notice Boards: You can use this feature to convey important information to your members.
Announce your new product launch, or simply share some motivational thoughts for the day.
The latest addition to MemberPress’ toolbox, the CoachKit™ add-on, possesses powerful features that significantly boost the performance of your course delivery.
It simultaneously encourages member growth and retention, thereby playing a crucial role in optimizing your membership site’s revenue.
How to Maximize Membership Revenue (4 Ways)
If you’ve taken all the factors above into account and still aren’t satisfied with your site’s revenue, there’s plenty more you can do to maximize your profits. Here are four that we’ve found to be particularly effective.
1. Engage in Affiliate Marketing
To boost your membership site’s revenue, consider engaging in affiliate marketing.
This involves incorporating links to products or services within your site’s content.
When a member clicks one of these links and makes a purchase, you earn a commission.
This approach is a straightforward way to monetize your site and can be quite effective in generating additional income.
Affiliate marketing is a great fit for your membership site. It’s pretty easy to do, too.
Just join an affiliate program, then pop some links into your content.
If you’ve got a lot of members, this can really pay off. And don’t just stick to your member area. Spread the word through your blog, emails, and social media.
Share stuff from brands you like, and it could mean extra cash in your pocket.
When using affiliate marketing, choose products that your audience will value.
For example, if your site is about fitness, share links to workout gear you like. Another cool idea is to start your own affiliate program.
With a plugin like Easy Affiliate, your happy members can tell others about your site. You just pay them a bit for each new sign-up they bring.
This way, you spend less and still get new customers. It’s a win-win!
2. Upsell Complementary Services and Products
Another good idea to make more money is to sell things that go well with your business.
If your site focuses on a special topic, you’ve got chances to offer extra stuff.
Think about what your members already like about your service and offer them even more.
For example, if you teach cooking, you might sell kitchen tools. It’s about finding things that make sense with what you’re already doing.
If your members are plant lovers, think about selling things they would like, like unique flower pots or a basic botany class.
The key is to offer stuff that matches their interests. This could really boost your sales.
Plus, with MemberPress’s new Order Bumps add-on, it’s super easy to offer these extra products or services right when folks are buying something else.
It’s a smooth way to add more to what you’re selling.
Upsell with Order Bumps Ad
Available to those with a MemberPress Pro license, Order Bumps allows you to showcase your other products and services during the checkout process.
Some examples of the products you can promote include:
- Memberships or membership upgrades
- Courses
- Ebooks
- Sessions (such as coaching or consultations)
- Product bundles
- Virtually anything you can imagine!
By offering a seamless 1-click experience, customers will find it hard to resist adding more of your products and services to their cart.
3. Teach an Online Course
Teaching an online course is another great way to earn more from your membership site.
Online learning is huge these days, and you can teach pretty much anything.
To make it easier, consider using a Learning Management System (LMS) like MemberPress Courses.
An LMS takes care of the hard work involved in setting up and running an online class.
This means you can focus on teaching and sharing your knowledge, without getting bogged down in the technical stuff.
Adding an online course to your site is a smart move.
It isn’t about selling something new. Instead, it’s also about keeping your current members interested.
Think about releasing your course bit by bit, maybe over weeks or months.
This way, members have a reason to stay with you longer, waiting for each new lesson. It’s just like a TV series. People stick around to see what happens next.
Adding an online course to your site is also an effective way to retain existing customers.
Once you’ve created the course, you might want to use a drip model to release the lessons over a period of weeks or months.
This could entice members to stick around for the entire experience.
4. Start a Podcast or YouTube Channel
Starting a podcast or YouTube channel is a fresh way to spice up your content. Instead of just writing, try sharing your ideas through audio and video.
This can be a new way to make money, either by charging for this content or using it to attract new members.
Podcasts are getting more popular, and you can join in.
Use services like Blubrry for hosting, and share your podcast on platforms like Spotify and Stitcher. It’s a cool way to reach more people and add something different to your site.
When starting your podcast, focus on what your members are into.
Say your site’s about baseball card collecting – a sports podcast would be a great fit.
You could even record videos while podcasting and put together a YouTube channel with weekly highlights.
YouTube’s a big deal too. This platform has over two billion users and accounts for more than 90 percent of online video viewing.
It’s also very easy to monetize your channel and to embed videos on your WordPress site.
Conclusion
As we wrap up, remember these key tips to maximize your membership revenue:
- Do affiliate marketing for extra income.
- Upsell products that complement your main offering.
- Create and drip-feed online courses to keep members engaged.
- Start a podcast or YouTube channel for diverse content.
CoachKit™ is a great asset for these strategies. It lets you customize lessons, manage course schedules, keep users engaged with alerts, and track their progress.
These features enhance the user experience, which can boost your revenue.
Get MemberPress Now
…and start boosting your recurring revenue today!
Using CoachKit™ can transform your membership site into a thriving venture that outperforms the competition.
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