So, you own a membership web site. You\u2019re pouring your heart and soul into it. Business is good, or maybe it\u2019s not so good. You fear that you\u2019re not doing all the right things to help your business grow. You hope you have all your bases covered, but you're constantly worried that maybe you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Obviously, there are more than 3 things that can kill your membership site. After several years of experience helping membership sites run their businesses, we at MemberPress have noticed a few things that are most common in tripping up site owners.<\/p>\n
Some of you won\u2019t be surprised by these problems, and that\u2019s great! That means you aren\u2019t ignoring some things that could sneak up and kill you. This may be just a good reminder for you all. For the rest of you, learning about these problems and taking steps to avoid them may save your business or increase your success! Let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n
Too many businesses make mistakes pricing their products. When starting a membership site it is tempting to set prices low in an attempt to attract customers. You may think, \u201cIf I get enough users I\u2019ll be OK and I\u2019ll start making money.\u201d That is the general school of thought, but this is a prime example of what a slow death can be like for your business.<\/p>\n
It takes time to grow a membership site and setting the right price will help you survive long enough to be able to continue growing your business. You may think you\u2019re successful, but eventually growing your business increases expenses. Any slowdown in user growth or increase in attrition\u00a0can\u00a0start to pinch your cash flow and BOOM!, you start sinking. Now what? Raise prices. I probably don\u2019t need to go through explaining the difficulties of significantly raising prices and what that can do to your business. Small, incremental price increases can be necessary and healthy but just ask companies like Netflix and Spotify what happens<\/a> when you try to make sudden,\u00a0large\u00a0price increases. It didn\u2019t work out too well for them. People don\u2019t like to pay much more than what they were initially paying. Starting out at a reasonable price will allow you to grow and keep growing without running the risk of pissing off existing users because you have no choice but to increase prices to survive.<\/p>\n When making your initial business plan, analyze your competitors for help in deciding how to price your product or service. Setting prices lower than your competitors doesn\u2019t always entice someone to choose your product \u2014 it can actually de-value your offering and drive customers to your competitors. Many people make their decisions based on what they perceive the value will be in choosing one product or service over another. A higher price than a competitor could even work to help potential customers choose you. Of course, pricing can be\u00a0much more complicated<\/a> than all this \u2014 so it's important to have a plan and do the math before setting prices. The bottom line is that if your pricing that is too low it can kill your business by starvation and you may not\u00a0even know it till it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n A common death for a membership site is taking all of your great, already existing content and putting it behind a paywall. You\u2019ve had a successful site with many people visiting and consuming your content, so you decide it\u2019s time to make money! If you've built up great\u00a0SEO rankings with Google over time, suddenly taking all of your content and putting it behind a paywall will kill your Google love. There are examples of companies that have lost all of their Google mojo literally overnight by doing this. All that great SEO work will have been for naught. Putting your content behind a paywall keeps Google from being able to index your content. It\u2019s as if it disappeared.<\/p>\n Luckily, to make money you don't have to start over on your content! Of course\u00a0creating new premium content will probably be necessary but re-purposing, expanding and re-organizing your existing\u00a0content behind a paywall is the best way\u00a0you can start making money by leveraging\u00a0all of your hard work. Leave your\u00a0successful free content\u00a0where it is and keep the SEO rankings that will keep bringing people to your site. Then make a compelling argument for them to pay to have access to your premium stuff.<\/p>\n MemberPress does have a feature that may help mitigate this problem. We have a feature that will allow Google to access and index your content even behind a paywall.\u00a0<\/strong>MemberPress is the only WordPress membership plugin\u00a0I'm aware of that offers this feature.\u00a0But it comes at a price \u2014 you\u00a0can't use this feature on pages you're caching \u2026 and caching is a critical part of most sites.<\/p>\n Plan carefully when you decide it\u2019s time to start a membership site based on your content\/service. If done correctly, it can set you up for a successful launch and consistent growth.<\/p>\n No, this is not a Star Trek reference, it\u2019s about engaging your users<\/a>. Your successful membership site must never get stagnant. It is imperative that you are always creating new content and offering your users more to consume. Some sites have initial success and gather a bunch of paying users and think they can just coast along collecting monthly fees without doing any more work. This couldn't be further from the truth and will sneak up and kill you. Stay engaged with your users! Keep giving them reasons to keep paying you. You have to continually earn that recurring revenue. Once they perceive the value they get for their money has changed they will leave and you will die a slow death of a thousand cancellations. Recurring revenue is the life blood of a membership site. It is much cheaper to keep paying customers than it is to attract new ones. Keep creating great content and services and you'll do both.<\/p>\n Have a member retention strategy<\/a> built into your business plan from day one. If you want an example of a site that does this extremely well look at Lynda.com. Its almost mind boggling how they keep producing and releasing great content week after week, month after month, year after year. It\u2019s a lot of work but it is the only way to keep a membership site growing. Keep it simple: too many membership options and too many upgrade\/downgrade paths can confuse your users and can also be a support nightmare.<\/p>\n MemberPress offers a feature that can simulate release of new content to your users. It's called\u00a0\u2018Content Dripping<\/a>\u2019 and it allows you to set timed release or content access expiration around when certain users will be served up certain content. It can be set to \u2018drip\u2019 content to them after they have seen or consumed certain levels of content or to \u2018drip\u2019 new content after a certain amount of time has passed. This doesn\u2019t absolve you of creating new content, however! Users will eventually reach the end of your content if they stay a member on your site long enough.<\/p>\n In conclusion I\u2019ll leave you with a quick bonus tip: always keep backups of your site and content.<\/p>\n Not having a good backup strategy can kill your business dead in one fell swoop. Getting hacked, a catastrophic hardware failure, or software mistake can effectively \u2018delete\u2019 your entire site. Everything is gone. Your content, your user database, your email lists, everything just gone. It is virtually impossible for you to recover from this without a competent backup. At MemberPress we have tried a few backup solutions and we are very happy with our current provider, VaultPress<\/a>. It gives us great peace of mind to know we can rebuild if something should ever happen.<\/p>\n Hopefully, at least one of these tips will help you to avoid your business being \u2018killed,' slowed down, or hurt. We at MemberPress are proud to say we are helping thousands of membership sites find their way to success! There's a lot to keep track of as a membership site owner. We wish you good luck in your efforts! We'd love to hear your thoughts on this post and other things you've learned that can kill your site that we may not know about. Let us know in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, you own a membership web site. You\u2019re pouring your heart and soul into it. Business is good, or maybe it\u2019s not so good. You fear that you\u2019re not doing all the right things to help your business grow. You hope you have all your bases covered, but you\u2019re constantly worried that maybe you don\u2019t. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2474,"featured_media":15175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_strive_editorial_status":"not-started","_strive_copy_of":0,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"content-sidebar","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_strive_checklists":"\"\"","_strive_active_checklist":"62291e2bb2422","_strive_post_notes":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[263,26,70,182],"class_list":{"0":"post-6923","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advice","8":"tag-engaging-customers","9":"tag-membership","10":"tag-membership-site","11":"tag-seo","12":"entry"},"acf":{"plans":["scale"],"is_featured":false,"download_source":"none","mothership_slug":"","download_url":""},"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t2. SEO<\/h4>\n
3. Engage<\/h4>\n
Bonus<\/h4>\n