When you are putting together your membership site and hushing out the exact solution you’re going to provide, you’re probably confused about should you cover everything or should you cover only one specific problem. In other words, should you create one huge membership site or should you put out lots of little ones.
Now, normally when I create one-off products, I just like to say one problem, one solution. But when you’re making a membership site, it can get really crazy, especially if you offer things like upsells and different extra offers. People have to log in to these different membership sites.
The cool thing about a lot of membership software, such as Wishlist member, is that if somebody already has an account and they purchase access to an additional membership level, like an extra product, they can click on a special link and have that extra level applied to their existing account. For that reason, I would recommend to you that for a recurring membership site, I would only create one membership site per sub-niche.
Now, what’s a sub-niche? A sub-niche is a niche within a niche. This means that I would never have a membership site just on internet marketing. That’s too big of a space. But I would have a membership site covering everything I know about list building. That way, if I have upsells about list building, people use the same exact membership site. That way, I have enough content to charge up to $97 per month for access to that. Have one membership site per sub-niche.
But the problem with having one membership site for all of your information is that it will be hard to navigate. Another example, I am also in the programming niche that includes things such as PHP, WordPress, JavaScript. Would I have one membership site for all things in programming? No way. I would have one membership site for PHP, one membership site for WordPress, and one membership site for JavaScript. You kind of have to have a membership site that’s not so big, that you can’t explain it, you can’t give an elevator pitch for. These would be small enough that you can give an elevator pitch, but big enough that you can store multiple products and charge a recurring monthly fee.
Now, think about this. Think about the drip content. If you give a product that has extra bonuses, extra lessons dripped out, think about how confusing that would be if somebody joined the site about internet marketing, which again is far too big of area for you to have a site about and for the first, where they got list building week one, they got product creation week one, they got article writing week one, they got site building week one, they got AdSense week one – all the stuff that’s flooding into that, it would be very confusing. But if you had a site just about site building, then you could very easily give them week one, week two, and week three lessons.
Keep those rules in mind when deciding if you want to have one huge membership site or lots of little ones. Pick a niche and then for each sub-niche within that, create a membership site but don’t go too small or too big – because if you make a site too small, people will have to join multiple sites, and if you make it too big, people won’t be able to find anything once they joined your site.