Allow Your Members To Interact

Having a membership site can be a pretty cool thing and having a place where your community, where your buyers can talk amongst each other is cool as well because it means that your site becomes self-sustaining. It means that if you will have problems, there is a whole group of free support that can help them before you even get a chance to look at the membership site, and it means that they can all work together and build stuff and add their own 2 cents to the conversation as much as they want.

Now the question becomes should you allow this or is it too risky because members can take over and be overbearing and be more troubled than they were? How do you decide if you should allow your members to comment on your blog and interact? Well, this depends based on if you’re running a small live class, a monthly membership, or a low-ticket membership.

If you’re running a small live class and that means that people pay upfront $200 or more to get trained live on a subject, then you should allow comments without moderation. This means somebody pays you 200 bucks to get access to a membership site and you offer videos that get dripped out or maybe live webinars that get dripped out, teleseminars, call-in days, some way of them to talk to you live as you create the content. Because you’re giving them a lot of stuff in a shorter amount of time, you might not have the extra time to go and monitor the membership site 24 hours a day. You would want to leave comments unmoderated, and if somebody becomes a hassle, simply kick them out of the membership site. You’re just talking about a small pilot group who pays one single payment for you to run a class. That’s good for starting the class, but what if you turn that later on into a monthly membership site.

All those recordings you made, all the webinar recordings, and the videos, you can now put them into a site where people get the videos maybe at a slower rate – they get maybe one video a month instead of one a week or maybe a few a month, but they pay on a monthly basis and it’s probably much lower, say 50 bucks or $100 a month instead of several hundred dollars one time. Now you have a lower quality of subscribers. They didn’t jump on the class early. They might have a smaller budget because they’re only paying per month, you don’t necessarily want them to be able to comment on every single thing. I would still allow comments but turn on comment in moderation. If somebody leaves a comment, it gets put in the moderation area, then you have to log in and approve the comment, say the comment is okay, and then it will be appear to everyone else.

Finally, if you are just running a very low-ticket membership site, I’m talking $20 or cheaper, I would not allow comments because you don’t want to have just one membership site, you’re not going to get reached off just one membership site, and you also don’t want to train your subscribers that 20 bucks a month gives them unlimited access to you. For a $20 or less membership site, turn off the comments. And then if you ever create a $50 or a $100 membership site in the future, then you can turn on comments and use that as a selling point to justify the higher price because they can leave comments, they can ask questions, and you will respond.