I’ve seen many membership site marketers make the same mistakes over and over and I want to make sure that you learn from their mistakes before you make them and avoid them completely. That way, you can save yourself time and shortcut your way to success instead of fumbling around in the dark like most of your competition is. What important mistakes can you avoid today? You could avoid split calls to action, cheesiness and unclear navigation.
What is split call to action? First of all, a call to action is where you tell your website visitors what to do. If you’re on an opt-in page the call to action says, “Go ahead and enter your name and email address in the form below.” On a sales letter the call to action is, “Go ahead and click the button, make your payment and get access to the membership site.”
Inside the membership site, a call to action would be, “Watch the video below, leave a comment below.” It seems kind of silly to have a video on a page and it has to say, “Watch the video below.” But you will be surprised at how many people simply will only take certain steps when you tell them to.
That’s what a call to action is but a lot of people split it up and that’s a big mistake. They will have a sales letter that has a payment button and an email opt-in form. Which am I supposed to do, sign-up for the newsletter or purchase? Or even when there is a purchase button they put two buttons that says, “Click this button to buy it outright or click this button to get on the payment plan.” Don’t offer me when on the other just give me the best one. If you want to offer the payment plan only then great.
Another easy membership site mistake to avoid is the cheesy factor. We’ve all seen cheesy sales letters. They have pictures of palm trees, Ferraris. They have tables about, “Oh, if only you had 1,000 members in your membership site you’d have this amount of money. If only you referred three or four people then it would multiply out to this giant number.” The problem with that is that it’s been so overused, it’s become such a clich that everyone is used to seeing it and it’s now meaningless and in fact counts against you.
If you have something to say, just type out how you talk. If you want to explain to someone what problem they come across without you, just explain it in your own words. You don’t have to look in the thesaurus, you don’t have to use any fancy phrases, just write the way you talk. The same goes for when you’re presenting your solutions. The same goes when you’re telling your story. You don’t need to lie. You don’t need to embellish. Just be honest.
The final membership site mistake is unclear navigation. I’ve been on sales letters where there is a bunch of links to click to go to all these different pages. Don’t you want me to buy? Then make it very clear what you want me to do. If I’m on a page, you want me to read what’s on the page and at the bottom “buy” and that’s the only thing I can do is buy or leave.
Likewise, when someone is inside of your membership site is it easy for them to figure where to go without being told what to do? Are the most recent post on the top? Are they able to click on certain categories on top and the side bar? Are they able to search easily, leave a comment easily? If not, make your navigation more easier to navigate without any extra instructions.