Membership Website Lab Done For Your Membership Websites
Membership Website Ideas can be anything you want them to be. Literally anything, as long as it’s not illegal that is.
Every single membership website is different. Each site has a variety of different things on them. These can be:
- blog posts
- Courses
- Resources
- User navigation
- Videos
- Courses
- The way you distribute your content
- Having free content or a free trial
- Forums
- Members area’s
Every entrepreneur we speak to has a couple of membership site ideas.
There are a lot of different things you can do on your site to set you apart from your competitors. Make sure to do your research before you get your website developer to start developing.
The reason we’ve decided to publish this post is to give you an idea of where to start. Where some of our clients have gone wrong and a little insight on how to create a membership site.
Our title says 5 Awesome Membership website ideas where going to be digging a little deeper on each idea so you get the full picture.
Idea 1 – Fitness Membership Website Ideas
A Fitness membership website can be successful with the right idea and client base.
A couple of wildly successful fitness sites have learnt to niche down and have thought about the long term benefits of a membership and how to keep membership retention at an all time high.
Do you have any fitness membership website ideas? Are they niche enough?
A fitness membership could focus on a specific niche within the industry, a wildly successful site that we’ve developed recently has been for The Cycling Coach.
He is a coach and consultant that focuses on strength training within the cycling industry. This has allowed The Cycling Coach to niche down and specifically target his ideal customers.
Personal trainers could also offer a membership service and the creation of these sorts of sites has almost doubled in the last year.
The reason for the mass creation of Fitness memberships is that coaches and consultants are realising they’re at capacity and want to be able to reach more people.
Teaching one to many instead of one to one is a good idea. It allows you to scale your business and build a community around what you love best.
A fitness membership site could have live learning sessions that allow the members to join and interact with each other as well as yourself. This works especially well for Yoga enthusiasts.
You could set up a resource library to teach members specific exercises, techniques, warm-ups and warm downs.
Joining a fitness membership website is a big investment for members and I’m not only talking about the monetary side of things.
The people who join a fitness membership are looking to improve themselves, they need to be able to trust you, your process and your results.
Along with The Cycling Coach we have also developed other fitness membership websites such as Nick Ruddock Gymnastics Growth Academy, Gumption Coaching and Key5 Coaching.
Idea 2 – Tutoring Memberships
During the COVID-19 pandemic school teachers all around the world adapted and overcame the unprecedented times they faced.
While we were in the thick of it teachers took teaching online and changed the game forever, because they had too. They adapted well and some saw a bright future where they could tutor people all around the world.
Tutoring or teaching online doesn’t have to be complicated.
All you need to do is find which subject you’d like to teach and be able to communicate that information effectively in bite sized chunks.
We custom developed a credits system for a maths tutoring membership called Maths Unlocked with Mr Adams.
The credit system allowed for a cost effective and more manageable bite sized chunks for members, allowing them to purchase only what they need.
A lot of memberships have too much content that overwhelms 80% of their users and just causes confusion. Using a credits based system or drip feeding content helps negate that.
Finding a niche and diving full force into it is great, just remember you need to make sure ALL of your content is on point not just a little bit of it.
Once you’ve got your tutoring membership up and running it’d be a good idea to set up a school or college wide subscription package.
This would mean that you could offer a certain amount of memberships to your site for a discounted price.
You could use direct mail to reach out to schools by sending leaflets to all of the known schools in your area, then providing that brings in some members to expand to your county and so on.
Direct Mail is often an overlooked side of marketing for membership websites, just because something is online based doesn’t mean you can’t acquire customers in real life using tangible methods.
Our favourite direct mail provider is The Mailing People
Do you have any tutoring membership website ideas?
Idea 3 – Online Universities
Online universities are becoming more and more popular and have an abundance of paying members that are taking online courses.
Online Universities such as U.C.E or The University of Consciousness Education have built a huge following and tap into people’s inherent want to learn and self improve.
U.C.E have multiple membership levels and utilize email marketing with a CRM integration for their membership website
Any online university membership should be run with LearnDashLMS as standard. LearnDash LMS makes it easy to create prerequisite courses at the click of a button.
This allows any team at an online university to easily update courses or create new ones.
When creating an online university we recommend getting your developer to createWe also custom post types and advanced filtering to help break down the material into the relevant sections that are searchable and easier to find.
Having a Membership plugin that allows you to create quizzes at the end of a course or module will help cement peoples learning and lends itself to any membership model.
If you’d like to find out more about membership models click here to download our free eBook ‘Which Membership Model is right for you?’
Some membership websites allow you to track users progress and which content they’ve downloaded and viewed.
We use the User Insights plugin to track our clients members for them.
User Insights is functional, easy to use and has a lot of integrations for things like WooCommerce, MemberPress, Buddy Press, LearnDash, Gravity Forms and more.
The best way to start to build an online university is to contact a developer and create an awesome social media presence.
You could build an awesome social media presence by creating targeted ads and posts for the topic you want to educate people about.
Idea 4 – Monthly Content Downloads
Monthly content downloads can be a great way to get people interested in your membership website.
Making a monthly content marketing membership website can lead to great success.
There is a catch though. Keeping members interested and delivering great value month after month can be difficult at times.
A vital part of any monthly content download membership is access to a library, which is updated every month containing the content to re-purpose, rebrand and consume.
You could run a library three ways.
- Have only the content available for a specific month at any given time, after that it’s gone forever unless someone downloads it.
- Content available from the month they’ve joined onwards and is kept for them on your site ready to use
- All content available and is updated each month
Additionally you could set up a content request section for when a member is desperate for a specific piece of content.
You could custom develop the library section so your team can easily add and manage this content with WordPress whilst the members can easily download and access the content on the front end.
Custom post types would be a great idea to implement on any membership website but particularly for a monthly content membership site.
Your searchable post types could consist of:
- Captions
- Guides
- Newsletters
- Pictures
- Story templates
- Templates
- Video Templates
- Stock video
Depending on how you want your monthly content membership website set up the sales and content access could be powered by Woocommerce and ActiveMeber360.
WooCommerce and ActiveMember 360 allows the creation of multiple membership levels and billing in various different currencies, making a membership website accessible to all.
Affiliate Marketing is a great way to bring in new members month after month.
Affiliate marketing has been known to help bring membership numbers up by a third. Members can share a sign-up link and get a percentage of money back for every person who signs up!
Idea 5 – Food Glorious Food
Food Membership sites have been a game changer for the industry, you can now learn patisserie, Japanese Cooking and Baking all from the comfort of your own home.
You need to niche yourself down to be successful within the food membership sector, that could be things like budget food recipes for families, Food for Adverts, Cake decorating or more.
Almost every food membership contains a long list of exciting recipes to try.
It can be difficult to cater for everyone when it comes to food and allergies.
To put your best foot forward you’ll need to make sure you highlight all allergens in each recipe.
Each recipe should contain different variations of the methods such as “Vegan” or “Low Carb” along with all the ingredients and nutritional information for each variation.
You could supply your member with step by step video instructions and the ability to add the items recipe to a shopping list.
The recipes might even be able to be printed to prevent sticky screens!
You could even offer a free membership where they get a certain amount of recipes each month for free.
A membership site should put its users first and should be easy to navigate.
If you decide to create the shopping list function you would be able to add recipes to the list, and it sorts the ingredients into categories on a printable checklist, which takes some of the hassles out of planning the weekly shop for your members.
Conclusion
Successful membership sites should be thought of as an online business, rather than a side hustle.
A membership website can be a great way to create recurring revenue for your business, or as your only business.
Depending on your content they can be infinitely scalable.
The majority of people we get through our virtual doors are people that have a team behind them or after they’ve launched they hire content managers, graphic designers and member managers.
Do you have any membership website ideas that we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
