So, you own a membership web site. You’re pouring your heart and soul into it. Business is good, or maybe it’s not so good. You fear that you’re 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’t.
Obviamente, há mais de três coisas que podem acabar com seu site de associação. Após vários anos de experiência ajudando sites de associação a administrar seus negócios, nós da MemberPress percebemos alguns aspectos mais comuns que atrapalham os proprietários de sites.
Some of you won’t be surprised by these problems, and that’s great! That means you aren’t 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’s get started.
1. Precificação
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, “If I get enough users I’ll be OK and I’ll start making money.” That is the general school of thought, but this is a prime example of what a slow death can be like for your business.
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’re successful, but eventually growing your business increases expenses. Any slowdown in user growth or increase in attrition can start to pinch your cash flow and BOOM!, you start sinking. Now what? Raise prices. I probably don’t 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 o que acontece when you try to make sudden, large price increases. It didn’t work out too well for them. People don’t 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.
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’t always entice someone to choose your product — 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 much more complicated than all this — 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 even know it till it’s too late.
2. SEO
A common death for a membership site is taking all of your great, already existing content and putting it behind a paywall. You’ve had a successful site with many people visiting and consuming your content, so you decide it’s time to make money! If you've built up great SEO 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’s as if it disappeared.
Luckily, to make money you don't have to start over on your content! Of course creating new premium content will probably be necessary but re-purposing, expanding and re-organizing your existing content behind a paywall is the best way you can start making money by leveraging all of your hard work. Leave your successful free content where 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.
O MemberPress tem um recurso que pode ajudar a atenuar esse problema. Temos um recurso que permitirá que o Google acesse e indexe seu conteúdo mesmo atrás de um paywall. MemberPress is the only WordPress membership plugin I'm aware of that offers this feature. But it comes at a price — you can't use this feature on pages you're caching … and caching is a critical part of most sites.
Plan carefully when you decide it’s 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.
3. Engajar
No, this is not a Star Trek reference, it’s about Envolvendo seus usuários. Seu site de associação bem-sucedido nunca deve ficar estagnado. É imperativo que você esteja sempre criando novos conteúdos e oferecendo aos seus usuários mais para consumir. Alguns sites obtêm sucesso inicial, reúnem um grupo de usuários pagantes e acham que podem simplesmente continuar cobrando taxas mensais sem fazer mais nada. Isso não poderia estar mais longe da verdade e acabará matando você. Mantenha-se engajado com seus usuários! Continue dando a eles motivos para continuar pagando. Você precisa obter continuamente essa receita recorrente. Quando eles perceberem que o valor que recebem pelo seu dinheiro mudou, eles sairão e você terá uma morte lenta de mil cancelamentos. A receita recorrente é o sangue vital de um site de associação. É muito mais barato manter os clientes pagantes do que atrair novos clientes. Continue criando conteúdo e serviços excelentes e você conseguirá ambos.
Have a user retention strategy 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’s 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.
MemberPress offers a feature that can simulate release of new content to your users. It's called ‘Gotejamento de conteúdo’ 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 ‘drip’ content to them after they have seen or consumed certain levels of content or to ‘drip’ new content after a certain amount of time has passed. This doesn’t 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.
Bônus
In conclusion I’ll leave you with a quick bonus tip: always keep backups of your site and content.
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 ‘delete’ 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. Isso nos dá muita tranquilidade por sabermos que podemos reconstruir se algo acontecer.
Hopefully, at least one of these tips will help you to avoid your business being ‘killed,' 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.
Eu estava prestes a enviar um e-mail para o suporte para saber como fazer com que a área de associação fosse indexada no Google. E acima eu vi isso:
Temos um recurso que permite que o Google acesse e indexe seu conteúdo mesmo atrás de um paywall. Somos o único software de site de associação que oferece esse recurso. A ressalva é que você não poderá usar esse recurso se estiver armazenando seu site em cache.
Você poderia me indicar onde estão essas informações?
Vou pedir que entre em contato com nossos técnicos de suporte. Essa será a melhor maneira de fazer a configuração correta. Lembre-se de que, se você tiver o cache de página ativado, isso interferirá na capacidade do Google de indexar por trás do seu paywall. Obrigado por seu comentário!