This article was originally published on Restrict Content Pro. 

Building a successful membership website doesn’t have to be a wild, pie-in-the-sky dream. With a little thought and planning, you can build a membership website that will set a firm foundation for your business goals.

All membership sites have some things in common that have allowed them to achieve success in their industry or niche. In this article, we’ll discuss eight key elements you need to build a successful membership site, including:

1. Consistently provide what is promised
2. Create quality content
3. Learn from your members
4. Use free trials 
5. Value members at all levels
6. Measure and analyze
7. Create engagement 
8. Encourage interaction 

Let’s take a look.

1. Consistently provide what is promised

Members join sites for specific reasons, such as knowledge, a product, or belonging to a community of like-minded people. If you aren’t giving your visitors what they signed up to get, you will see them leaving to go find it somewhere else.

When it comes to free or paid membership sites, consistently providing what is promised is the number one key for success.

For example, let’s say you decide to build a membership site as a tool for education.

DON’T: Spend the next two months blogging about your family and the vacation you took. Or only post one resource a month when you promised at least three. 

DO: Blog about the news of education, tips for education, and the tools for education you are providing to our users.

Be sure to focus on initiatives that align with the purpose of your membership website. If not, or if you don’t consistently deliver, you may lose members. 

2. Create quality content

No matter what subjects you cover on your membership, or what your focus is, as long as you continue to deliver quality content to members, they’ll feel like your membership fees are money well spent.

DON’T: Rush to churn out as much content as you possibly can. Remember that your members actually prefer to wait a bit longer for new content that’s high in quality.

DO: Invest your resources into creating quality content that informs, entertains, or engages the members.

One extremely well-articulated post each month is better received by your audience than daily updates that never seem to go anywhere.

3. Learn from your members

Your subscribers in your membership website are your best resource. You can learn what they like or don’t like, which helps you refine your content and offerings. 

Polling is the perfect place to begin.

Ask your members exactly what they prefer. Ask positive questions that lead to more people answering with an honest response.

In other words, asking your members, “What do you enjoy most about my live streams?” will generate a host of more honest replies than, “What are the reasons you’re ignoring my podcasts?”

4. Use free trials

If you’re currently providing free access to some of your content, and a membership tier that’s free for more, it might not seem necessary to offer free trials of your full membership features.

But the reality is that the major hurdle for anyone considering joining a membership site is not knowing if a paid membership will actually be worth it.

When you offer a free trial that features all of your paid membership benefits, it will allow new members to experience exactly what they’ll get for the money. It’s also important that you don’t require a user’s payment information to sign up for a free trial. For many, this will immediately cause them to turn away from your free trial offer.

If you demand payment info to access a free trial, it often stops users from signing up and discovering what your premium area offers. And this defeats the entire purpose of offering a free trial.

5. Value members at all levels

The ultimate goal of your membership is to funnel as many people as possible to join your highest membership tier. You encourage the up-sale by valuing the lowest-tier and showing their value as much as possible.

Every level of membership in a successful membership website should target retaining existing members, then work to convert them into becoming higher-tier members. Your lowest-level site members have already gone through most of your sales funnel. Because of this, they’re the most likely people to convert to higher membership levels.

This is why it’s so important to make sure they feel valued and get a lot of quality content from you.

6. Measure and analyze

There are a number of ways to get quality feedback from members. But don’t only rely on what subscribers or paid members have to say.

Say you’re running a site that’s built around yourself and the products you offer. Your members might not feel right if they tell you something that you’re doing doesn’t work for them. Rather, they’ll most likely vote with their time or wallets by not showing up as often or leaving the memberships completely.

Every time you upload a new piece of content, closely review how it performs. Of course, different content formats tend to have varying interaction and viewing rates. Videos will normally outperform written posts, for example. And in these instances, you should review how the content performs against other similar content, as well as site-wide.

When elements of your website are consistently underperforming, it may be time to cut ties and abandon that type of content in favor of the content that members are actually looking for.

7. Create engagement

On successful elearning membership sites, members typically join to gain more direct access to an educator who is an ultimate source of the knowledge they’re looking for.

When you make yourself available to members, you take a huge step toward encouraging new people to sign up. And you also keep your existing members more satisfied.

This doesn’t mean that you need to be at everyone’s beck and call 24/7. A simple monthly Zoom conference, making comments in the forums, or joining in on conversations keeps people happy and engaged without taking too much of your valuable time.

What’s most important here is to make sure that none of your members feel like they’re ignored or alone on your site. If you want to build a successful membership website, remember that it needs to first be built around you and engagement with your members.

Never underestimate how much value your members put on being able to communicate directly with you.

8. Encourage interaction

What exactly makes membership sites stand out from typical logs or other types of elearning platforms? The interaction that happens between members. 

While it’s definitely another step to take with your site that some site owners omit entirely, it’s one that you cannot overlook. Send members to a Facebook group or add your own membership area. WordPress offers a wide variety of free and premium plugins that can turn your site into a fully-functioning social media site.

Unfortunately, if you’re just starting off your site and you don’t have many members, it may be difficult to encourage social participation. It may even feel like you’re mostly talking to yourself.

To overcome this, host some Q&As to start building up the social elements of your site and encourage people to engage. Doing so will pay big dividends down the road, as your site grows and organic interaction between members and users begins to take form.

You Can Have a Successful Membership Site

Membership websites are incredibly valuable assets to many different types of businesses. By incorporating the elements we’ve listed, you’ll be well on your way toward success.

Ready to start building your own membership website? Check out MemberDash. It’s a flexible membership plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily restrict content, create different membership tiers, and more. Explore the demo to see it for yourself.