How Do I Know If I Have Too Much Membership Content?

Most marketers don’t realize it’s very easy and very dangerous to have too much stuff in your membership site, especially when it is dripped out too fast. If you drip out your content too fast, people will be overwhelmed and they will always be behind in your content, they will never get caught up because you’re simply giving them information at such a fast rate. And the big problem with this is that the people who actually want to consume your content will drop out, but those people who like to collect and never watch your content will stay in forever. You want to have the people who are fans of you, who consume your content, and to do that, you need to drip your content out at a much slower rate than you would probably like.

How do you find out if you have too much? Well, the first give-away sign is if people are dropping out. If you seriously have good content that is helpful, that is easy to understand, that is exactly what they need, but people are still dropping out, then the problem might be that there’s too much content. Ask them. If they say that they’re overwhelmed, if they don’t know where to start, if there’s too much stuff, that means you need to deliver your content at a slower pace. Good content but low retention rate is a dead give-away of having too much content.

The next thing I would do is join yourself. Add a new member as yourself and see what somebody who just came in has access to. If you just joined and there’s access to pages and pages and pages of content, it might be too much. If there is too much stuff, then that could be a sign that you have too much content. And a way that I like to tell this is if somebody came on the site and they only had one to two hours per week, could they reasonably go through all of your videos, all of your articles, all of your content, or would it take them more like five or more hours per week. I mean the average person really works 20 to 40 hours but in reality, they really only 5 to 10 hours of real work time and then when they join your site, they’re only in it for a fraction of that as well. One to two hours per week of consumption is about what you should be aiming for.

And above all, just use common sense. Be aware that it is possible to have too much membership site content, it is possible to overload your members, so you’re not necessarily doing people a favor by giving them tons of information upfront, but you can be doing them a favor by dripping out or scheduling out much of your content and splitting up the payment. That is one more reason to create a membership site.