Creating a website with a membership subscription is becoming more and more trendy in today’s day and age. Businesses nowadays create a membership website with hopes of skyrocketing their income stream solely through this income channel. And the best part about it is that it works too! That is because subscription websites are a very clever yet transparent way to generate revenue for your businesses and grow your brand.
A subscription website draws in people completely with their own consent, so no customer can blame your businesses for anything negative like fraudulent behavior. When you create a membership website, you are taking a very safe route towards fueling your income stream. If you know how to start a membership site, practically nothing can come in the way of you gaining success through this method.
However, before we talk more on this topic, we think you should know what a membership subscription is. Continue reading below to find out!
What is a Membership Website?
A subscription website or a website with a membership subscription is a website whose content can only be accessed after gaining membership. Usually, this membership comes at a small fee, and that is how businesses plan to earn money when they create a membership website. Subscription websites often have an automated login page pop up whenever you visit them, which helps keep their content gated and exclusive.
Other than increasing revenue towards your business, businesses have another purpose when they create a membership website is to increase the value of their content. The membership subscription basically acts as a placebo for viewers to make the content on the website seem more valuable than they would otherwise think. A subscription site uses a customer or viewer's login information as the key or passes to let them into the site.
Why Does Your Business Need a Membership Site?
The most simple answer to the question stated above is that it is a way to get closer and more personal with your customers. When you create a membership website, and people sign up for it, especially to view content created by you - in whatever form it may be - it inevitably forms a special bond between the customer and the brand. In addition to that, when you create a membership website, you create a substantial revenue stream for your business that is completely separated from any revenue streams you might already have in place.
If you fully utilize the potential of a membership subscription site, you can provide special offers and deals to drive customers to spend more and more on your brand. This additionally also builds customer loyalty. Customer loyalty leads to customer retention and proves to be extremely useful for any business in the long run. So, you might not think that you need to create a membership website for your business, but the truth is that it will prove to be nothing but beneficial to you if you do create a membership website.
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7 Tips on Making a Membership Website Work
Listed and explained below you may find some tips to keep in mind when you decide to create a membership website for your business:
1. Decide the Target Audience
Many people assume that if they target a wider range of people with their content, it will bring in more subscriptions. However, this plan often backfires, and it has been proven that it is better to decide on a very specific target audience for your subscription site. That makes it easier to focus and create content in accordance with them.
2. Craft a Unique Membership Model
Of course, you can just put up a subscription box on your landing page when you create a membership website and call it a day saying you wanted to create a membership website, and so you did. But that would be too mundane and probably will not help you skyrocket your income stream. If you want to skyrocket your income stream, you will have to be innovative with how you plan to get customers to sign up to your membership site. You need to craft a unique membership model for your site.
3. Create Content That is Worth it
Make sure not to disappoint anyone when they sign up for your site and start viewing the content they paid for. If they get disappointed then the power of word of mouth will prove to be very detrimental for your brand. You might even be called out for fraudulent behavior even though that may never have been your intention. Thus when you create a membership website, be sure to create content worthy of being gated and exclusive.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Come up with a Marketing Strategy
If you create a membership website, you definitely have to market it separately from the rest of the aspects of your business as well. You cannot expect people to care about your subscription site without you telling them that it is something worth caring about. That is why you need to dedicate special effort to marketing your membership website.
5. Focus on the User Interface of Your Website
Be sure to remember that your marketing strategy can be perfect, along with the content you offer on your site. Still, if the user interface is bad, everything else will become useless. You definitely have to ensure that anyone using your site can navigate through it with ease and without any confusion. This is imperative if you want to create a membership website that is successful.
6. Connect the Content
This is a very useful tactic when you create a membership website. Make sure whatever content you offer your members leads them to some other part of the website as a never-ending cycle. This will increase engagement, traffic, and interest in your site.
7. Track Your Website’s Performance
This is important because it helps you improve on what is not working and emphasize what is working. If you create a membership website, be sure to keep up with the performance of your website if you want to aggravate its success day by day. This means you must have a basic understanding of your site’s search engine optimization. Try different techniques to keep its loading speed fast enough. Work on the on-site SEO of your web pages' on-site SEO and promote it through social media and other popular channels.
Create a Membership Website on Strikingly
If you want to build a professional subscription website easily and quickly, you will have to do a little bit of research on finding the most suitable website builder. Website builders save you the time and cost of hiring a professional website developer or doing all of the programming work yourself. Most platforms for website development also provide ready-to-use templates that save you further the effort of having to create a web design from scratch.
Strikingly is one of the website-building platforms that offer the features mentioned above. It has a membership feature as well in its Pro and VIP plans. Using this feature and working on the user-friendly Strikingly editor lets you build a subscription section on your brand website. This means your site visitors will have the option to become a member by registering on your site. You can set up this feature to provide free or paid membership to users.
If you turn this into a paid membership feature, the users’ will key in their payment or card details to enable you to accept payments from them every month. If your business is successful, this is a fantastic way of building a sustainable, steady, and reliable income stream.
Image taken from Strikingly
Here are the steps you need to take to create a membership website on Strikingly.
- Look for ‘Audience’ on the left black panel of your Strikingly editor.
- Select ‘Membership’, and click the ‘Activate Membership’ button.
- Choose the registration method that you want to offer. The options given are free membership, paid membership, and getting membership upon making a purchase.
Image taken from Strikingly
Once you have set this up, you can choose to allocate the membership feature to only a section or a few sections of the website.
To do this, you will need to set up your members-only pages. This means only your site’s members will be able to access the pages that are hidden behind the membership feature.
Once you are through these steps, you can test the feature by signing up as a member on your website yourself. You will be amazed at how professional and precious it looks. It will appear that some expert programmer has spent months designing your site.
Many businesses create a membership website these days to streamline their income and payments from their users. The trend does not seem to slow down any time soon. But now you know that you do not require a huge budget to have your own subscription website. You can make it with just a few clicks and use it as a complete source of revenue for your brand. Of course, you would need a sufficiently proficient skill set for digitally marketing your products and services. But with Strikingly, one part of your burden can be settled easily and cost-effectively.
Register for a free account on Strikingly today to familiarize yourself with the tools and services of our platform.
