Keep It Simple (Your Members Will Thank You!)
You have a plan, you have a purpose, you even have the membership site…
So how do you provide your knowledge to your members in a way that benefits and inspires them to keep going?
It’s a little bit daunting and overwhelming. What do I do?
Keep it simple (and your members will thank you).
There are only two types of content that you need to provide inside of a membership site.
1. Core Content
Core content is the first thing your members will interact with when they enter your site.
It establishes the foundation for your whole membership, putting members on the same page when it comes to terms to use or skills to have, or goals to share.
The most successful core content comes from what we call The Success Path™.
Every great membership has one.
Your Success Path™ is essentially your vision of getting the audience from where they are to where they want to be—and the steps and stages it takes to get there.
You can’t skip this step, because your core content grows out of each step of the process. The core material creates a vision to where this is all going. People need to know how the content fits and how it’s going to help them make progress towards the end result they’re looking for.
Determine your Success Path™ and you’ll find your core content.
What you want is a baseline, language, structure, and vision for where your membership is going.
That way when you begin delivering monthly content, people can easily understand whether or not the content is relevant for them based on the stage that they’re in.
That may seem counterintuitive with people coming in at different levels at all different places.
So you might think, “Wait a minute, if the content isn’t relevant for people, does that mean that they’re going to leave?”
No. What it means is that they can spend more time focusing on the specific things that are relevant to them and will help move them forward.
An informed member is a confident member.
Cast that vision and talk about the journey that you plan to make together.
No one hops on a plane or train without a clear idea of where it’s headed.
(Unless you’re in a Journey song.)
People buy in when they know where you’re headed and how you plan to get them there—and that’s why core content is so valuable.
2. Monthly Deliverables
Aside from your core content (or foundational content) you will need to provide something fresh on a regular basis to help people make progress toward their desired result.
Like core content, your monthly deliverables shouldn’t be overwhelming in succession, but not so far apart that your members get bored.
We like to stick with four deliverables a month, which is basically one a week.
To get started, let’s go through a few deliverable ideas—some classic, some creative—that we’ve seen do very well on membership sites.
- Patty Palmer’s successful membership provides monthly lesson plans for art teachers. Her package is a beautiful collection of PDF print-out lessons as well as informative and interesting history videos. You’ve got to get clear on your package. Whether it’s digital or physical, you need to figure out what the components are and how you will deliver it to your members.
- Some memberships curate a collection of resources, becoming the go-to place where people can quickly get the information they need— without hours of sifting and searching through pages and pages of content. A great example of this is Andrew Krauksts in Australia. He serves the real estate market and financial advisors by providing Facebook and marketing campaigns. Members know exactly where to go for new campaign templates. Every single month Andrew provides new campaigns—and they love him!
- You can create and serve up useful tools and software. A.J. Brown had a membership site for men and women in the financial investment arena. As a deliverable, he taught them a process that saved them time and money on the job. It turned a 20-minute task into 20 seconds! It saved people so much in resources that they stuck around for more.
- Deliverables can even be as simple as the presence of people. Our friend Rachel Miller hosts a regular Zoom meeting for all of her members. With the click of a button, she can send everybody out into break-out groups. It’s a great way for your members to be able to interact and share with each other. Live and/or interactive deliverables are generally key for coaching and community-based memberships.
The point is, no membership should ever feel or look the same as another because you can really mix it up by changing what your monthly deliverables are, and in the format of which you deliver them.
Bottom line is this: When you’re thinking about your monthly deliverables, you want to think about content that’s going to help move your members forward and help them achieve a result.
You want to be thinking about implementation—can your member take what you’re offering them and make progress on their own?
Membership growth is directly dependent on membership morale. Members are far happier when they’re making progress.
Listen to your customers, work from their stories and problems to create relevant content.
Don’t be afraid to get creative—especially with monthly deliverables. In the end, your core content makes up the strong body of the membership site. Weekly deliverables keep it alive and fresh. Members will want to keep coming back for more!
The key thing is that you’re clear on which is which, and you’ve got both.
Now go have some fun creating awesome content!
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