I see a lot of membership site creators kind of cross their fingers and hope that their site reaches that critical mass level, the level where their members just start talking amongst each other and they really don’t have to do a lot of the work. If there are questions, the member of the community answers them. If there are new videos that should be made, the member of the community creates them or at least asks those right questions.
So, how do you keep members in your site participating and communicating? How do you get it so that when they join, they don’t feel left out in the cold, they feel like they’re getting their money’s worth, they’re getting this added bonus of the community? We’re going to go over that right now how to get people to not just participate but communicate as well.
So first of, how do you get them to participate? How do you get them to take any kind of action whatsoever? You need to start making it a habit to add what’s called a call-to-action at the end of all your membership blog posts. This means that if you do a video, then at the end of the video, tell them to leave a comment asking another question or tell them to leave a comment thanking you or tell them to leave a comment if you taught something where they set it up. Same thing with written materials or audio materials, ask the questions and encourage the comments.
Another boost that helps me to get some extra participation in my site is don’t give the downloads to everything. I mean that seems kind of silly, but if you have a video and people can watch it directly on your site, there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no reason for you to provide a download version as well, and in fact, it’s better because what usually happens when somebody can download a video? They download it and get started their way on some folder. But if they can watch that video on your blog, they’re already going to be there and they’re going to be in the exact right place to go and leave a blog comment.
Also, run some kind of contest for the first person to respond or the 10th person to respond, or the first person to actually set up what you’ve taught somewhere. So, now that you have them kind of participating, you get the one way, how do you get the two-way communication going? A plugin I use is called “subscribe to comments” that will send – if somebody leaves a blog comment on a particular post, it will send them updates to future comments left on that post. So, if people reply to them, they will get an email and they can go back and respond further. This only gives them the response on that particular thread, not on the entire blog. Also, just respond to them. If somebody leaves you a comment, then respond with another comment. Don’t necessarily email them – because I come across this all the time where if someone has a question or they want to show me something, they email me and I say, “Don’t email me. Go and post it on the blog. Let’s get all the communication on the blog and not on email.” That way, the other members of the community can respond and say “good job,” things of that nature.
So, if they participate, give people a clear call-to-action, ask questions, reduce downloads, and then to get them to communicate, respond to them on the blog, not on email and use the “subscribe to comments” plugin.
I want to give you a membership site of your very own.