Setting Up a Membership Site

Creating a successful membership site isn’t something you just do haphazardly and then wait for the money to roll in. If you are serious about creating your own successful membership site the first thing you need to do is figure out your audience is going to be and then create a market for your site. 

Putting together your membership site is going to involve the investment of many hours, especially if you are serious about getting it right. Make sure you are up for the challenge!

Currently, what is the size of your audience? While you don’t have to have an audience when you first build your membership website, it really helps, and it’s a good idea. There is tons of stuff out there, and people are getting leery about parting with their money. The larger and the more passionate your user base (list) is when you start, the easier is going to be for you to have a successful membership site. 

Here are some excellent ways you can test your market.

1. Survey the readers you have – Surveying these readers can lead to valuable feedback that helps you define the market for your new membership site. You could be surprised – often what you think your readers want to see more of isn’t what they want at all. You can use this information to create a more useful product offering for your readers. 
2. Buy traffic – If you have a limited audience or you aren’t ready to tell your audience what you are up to think about purchasing $100 or so of Adword traffic and see how well it converts. If you find you have a bunch of fake sales or opt ins it’s very likely that you have a nice size market to draw from for your membership site. 
3. Split test – If you have a pretty good size market and you have a pretty good idea what your product is going to be then you can think about doing a split test. Create at least two different sales pages with variations. Try setting up different copy, features, etc. Then you use Google Website Optimizer to do your split test. This is an excellent tool that lets you show different users various variations of your site and it lets you see which ones are converting the highest by judging the number of email opt in and the number of people that click your faux checkout page. 

Ready – set – go – you have the information you need to do this!
