What Does It Take To Develop A Successful Membership Site?

Developing a successful membership site is not simply a matter of setting up the membership manager, and adding your content, although these are important too. You should keep in mind that a membership site still needs the same sales and marketing material that a website selling regular information products does. And these will have a big impact on your ability to sign up new members.

The Sales Letter

The prospect of writing a sales letter is enough to strike fear into the hearts of most non-copywriters. Luckily, it's not some arcane art, but a skill that can be mastered, with a little practice.

If you have no idea at all how to craft a sales letter, and don't have the money to hire a copywriter, it might be worth looking at some of the 'instant' sales letter tools. They generally provide blank boxes that you fill in, and the good ones can be really useful in helping you craft a sales letter that builds the case for the sale, whilst eliminating mistakes.

For example, they will tell you when to use bullet points, and ask you questions that you need to answer in those points. They'll also insert the 'call to action', guarantee, and other elements of a successful sales letter in the right places.

Whilst they aren't perfect, they can provide a good starting point, and are certainly an improvement on 'Please come and join my site - it's great'!

You can also look at the sales letters for other products selling similar things in your niche. Use these as a guide to get an idea of what makes your target market buy. They can provide inspiration for headlines, and the content of the sales letter itself.

Follow-Up Email

Given that it takes most people seeing your product anywhere from 7 to 20 times to close the sale, it's important to create a follow-up email series. You'll load these into your autoresponder at pre-set intervals, and they provide a way of developing a relationship with your prospects.

Your follow-up email series should be more than simply a sales message. It should provide valuable information to establish credibility for your product.

Opt-In Newsletter

An opt-in newsletter can be sent at intervals with your follow-up email series. Here you can really focus on providing good content for your readers. You can also sprinkle in other offers, either to products you have, or are affiliated to. But your advertising should not exceed 20% of your newsletter.

These can be delivered using the broadcast feature of your autoresponder. And you can also load a copy onto your website - which will give prospective customers another way to learn about your membership site. The extra content will also give search engines more of a reason to send you some free traffic!

Free Report, Video, Or Other Incentive

In order to build a list of prospects top market your membership site to, you generally need to offer people an incentive to join. An on-topic, free report is enough, though you could also offer a video or audio. Even though you are giving this away free, it should be of good quality. After all, if people aren't impressed by your free offerings, they are not likely to bother subscribing to your membership.

The Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is simply a short page that sells your ezine or free report, and provides a way for people to subscribe. Its' purpose is to get your prospect's email address. It needs to be benefit rich to persuade your visitors to part with their email address. Make sure it answers the question, 'what's in it for me', in the most niche-specific way possible.

The content of your membership site will keep your members as active subscribers. Your sales and marketing material will persuade them to become members in the first place. Even if you're offering a free trial membership, you must still persuade your prospect to give up her time to check out your site.

Thus, it's important to spend some time improving the quality of both. Whilst you may not have the skills of sales and marketing to the same degree that you do in content development, they are still skills worth developing. Fortunately, there is a lot of help available on the internet, and your conversion rates will tell you when you've done it right!

Get your free report and e-course on how membership sites can help you create a lucrative online business - that allows you to spend less time in front of the computer, and more living your life. Download your report here: http://www.membership.pickthebusiness.com/free-report.html You can find more information on creating a membership site here.