Membership sites are a great source of passive income – once set, they can bring you steady income every month. This guide to building a website will give you a few tips how to choose your membership website software wisely.
Prepare and Plan
It is usually not the membership website software which is the problem. The main challenge is to design and prepare the site so you can manage your subscribers effectively and easily, with minimal interventions.
So first, think about the main questions about your membership software:
- how to integrate it to your existing website?
- how to integrate it to your e autoresponder sequences
- how it should work with your merchant account or how will you get paid
- ho the content should be distributed
- how to organize content for various membership levels (if you need more than one)
All this needs to be clarified before creating the membership site and even before thinking about buying the membership software.Let’s look at some of the questions.
Membership levels
Do you want to have just a member and non member area on your site? Or do you want to have a few levels, e.g. Silver, Bronze, Gold, Platinum. Do you want to have a more complicated structure, e.g. sub-levels or ’special’ levels?
Content distribution
Do you want to have a static content which your subscribers access or do you want to add new content on an ongoing basis? Do you even want to ‘drip content’? This means that the content is available automatically for the user only after some period of time after subscription.
Do you plan to add content on an ongoing basis, so you do not care about the right timing?
Payment processor
Make sure you know what payment processors are supported by the membership software.
Even more, depending on your payment plans and content delivery structure, make sure the payment processor supports different payment plans.
It is not only about recurring payments. There might be different scenarios needed. E.g. you need to charge the one type of the payment in the trial period, and another after the trial period and also some combination of the two.
Make sure your payment processor will support all your business cases. E.g. trial periods might not be supported by all the payment processors.
PayPal is the easiest to use and widely mostly supported by membership sites. And also surprisingly supports many payment plans. The other payment processors are Authorize.Net, 2Checkout, Clickbank, 1ShoppingCart.
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