People are going to pay to be members on your membership site, so you need to put a great deal of thought and effort into creating and distributing content that is valuable enough for the fees they are paying. 

It is important for you to map out your website right from the start. You need to know what pages you plan to have, how they are all going to fit together and how members are going to able to navigate your website easily. This is specific to the kind of site you create. 

Creating Your Membership Tiers and Your Content Drip

One thing that’s great with both Amember and Wishlist is that both of these will let you create any number of membership tiers. So you could easily have 4 different pricing tiers – Platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. This can really help to increase your sales and it also allows your members to find a program that is tailored to their needs. 

Perhaps they are just beginning and you don’t need a lot of advanced features, so you can move them into the bronze package and then later on they can upgrade to the silver or gold, perhaps even the platinum. This is a really easy setup if you use plugins and when that user tries to access content that is above their tier they get a message that offers an opportunity to upgrade. 

Another possible distribution model is called the ‘content drip’ and this is effective at making sure that members actually follow the program and aren’t able to jump ahead. They cannot gather all the information and then take advantage of your return policy. It protects your membership site’s integrity. 

Another option is the $1 trial or making use of the preview tool to give visitors an opportunity to access the first couple of paragraphs of your content before they sign up. 

Before you dig into your setup make sure you know what your membership tiers are going to be and how you would like to create and distribute the content for your membership site. It’s much easier to do things correctly to begin with, rather than attempting to work backwards. Always keep in mind the importance of creating strong content. Having great distribution channels won’t be of much value unless you have good content that is worthy of being distributed.