[This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Membership Site Design.]
There are a number of questions you should ask yourself as you begin to jot your design ideas down. The very first one is: Should I be using a membership site at all? There are options for simpler systems, like putting your content in a password protected directory and giving out the one password to as many people as there are who want to access that information. I have a client who does that with the presentations from their annual conference.
If you’re putting together a number of courses, or you want several courses created and taught by different instructors, a more robust teaching platform, like Moodle, might be appropriate. It’s designed to offer different types of content, administer quizzes, and produces number or letter grades for each student on completion of a course.
Another consideration is time. Do you want to give start a bunch of students at the same time, or can a student start whenever they want? Can they access all course materials at once, and complete it at their own pace, or will you drip content out at certain intervals?
What do you want to teach? If this knowledge is something only you know, then you’re stuck having to come up with the course contents on your own. Maybe you’ve already written a book, or series of articles. Maybe you created a video program. You can re-craft the information into different lessons, different courses. Or you may pull information from other sources, other authors or creators. A text file from one person, an audio interview with another one.
You also need a target market. This is the group of people to whom you want to advertise your membership site, people who might be interested in joining. If you know the type of content you want to offer, this should give you a good idea of the target market. Advanced skateboarding lessons aren’t likely a good fit for most senior financial analysts, while most tween girls aren’t interested in a course about applying horror movie special effects make-up.
You should begin making a list of the general and specific content you want on the site, and how you’re going to structure it, by lessons and by courses. How will this content be presented? Will it be text-based? On-line only? Or will you allow members to download files like PDFs, and audio or video files? Do you have all the hardware and software you need to generate this content, and to make it available to your members?
Do you have the time and experience to administer all the lessons, courses, and levels on your own? If not, you can either recruit or hire one or more people to help you. I help run a (non-membership) WordPress-based restaurant review site that has several people logging in to write reviews, a couple editors who can proofread the text reviewers leave, and two administrators who can push the button to publish the content on the site.
You also need to decide if you will charge for access to the membership area. I know there are several dozen books out there claiming you can make a million dollars with a membership site while sitting back and doing nothing. This is not one of those books! However, you can charge for access and make some coin if you successfully reach the correct target market. You can have a mix of membership levels; the first level may give some general information for free (in exchange for valid contact information, which can be worth more than what you’d charge for access to the information), and the higher levels give more specialized information in exchange for payment.
As far as taking payment, there are many credit card processors out there you can sign up with. Many charge a percentage of each transaction, plus a small set fee per transaction. Some even levy a monthly charge to process your payments. Then there are others like PayPal and Stripe that charge you per transaction, and that’s it. Even Amazon has opened their own on-line payment service. [NOTE: not all membership site software programs hook into all payment processors. You’ll need to check with each one and see if it can handle your processor of choice.]