Using Membership Sites With or Without Community
If you’ve decided to take a leap and create a membership site, the next big decision you need to make is whether or not you should include a community. In most cases, a community is a great idea, but there are a few things you need to consider before making a final decision. Here are the pros and cons:
Pro: A community benefits you.
- Increase retention and earning potential. A community will improve the retention rate of your members, thus earning you more money. Members will likely join for the expertise or content you provide, but will stay longer to reap the benefits of being in a community of like-minded individuals.
- Reduce time spent on customer service. When a member of your community asks a question, you won’t have 100 percent of the pressure on you to answer. Your community will become a group of experts on the subject and will provide a variety of answers and perspectives.
- Market research done for you. Your community will serve as an idea mill for future content. Your members’ posts will show you what your audience needs and wants, so that you can continue to develop and deliver valuable content to them.
Con: If your community isn’t active, it makes you look bad.
When a client pays to join your community and sees that it’s a virtual ghost town, it’s going to make you look bad. Really bad. Your community needs to provide value to your clients, so that means that you need to invest time (and possibly money) into creating that value and then continue to add more value as time goes on in order to encourage engagement.
Pro: A community benefits your members.
- Support. Your community’s main purpose is to offer support and feedback to your members.
- Improved learning experiences. Your membership site will teach your clients about the product or skill you are selling, but a community will reinforce the skills and improve learning by offering its members a place to discuss what they’ve learned in-depth, ask questions and share experiences.
- Connection. Your community will provide connection, networking opportunities, friendship building and more to its members, which will increase its value to those members.
Con: Communities are time-consuming.
If you are currently a one-man show working 90 hours a week, then you probably don’t have time to create and run a community for your membership site. Remember, an inactive community looks bad. So, you need to have the time and resources to ensure that the community you create thrives. However, how much time you need to dedicate to a community depends on how it’s structured, and we’ve seen many different approaches. If time is a big concern for you, feel free to set up a call and we can discuss the structure that might work best for your needs.
In our experience, every business owner can benefit from a membership site and communities are a great complement to them. We have worked with numerous clients to help build a membership program or website that best suits their needs, while offering the greatest value to their customers. If you are willing and ready to put the time and effort into building a community for your membership site, it is a win-win situation for both you and your clients. Good luck!