membership site content – Membership Site Podcast

How Do I Know If I Have Too Much Membership Content?

Most marketers don’t realize it’s very easy and very dangerous to have too much stuff in your membership site, especially when it is dripped out too fast. If you drip out your content too fast, people will be overwhelmed and they will always be behind in your content, they will never get caught up because you’re simply giving them information at such a fast rate. And the big problem with this is that the people who actually want to consume your content will drop out, but those people who like to collect and never watch your content will stay in forever. You want to have the people who are fans of you, who consume your content, and to do that, you need to drip your content out at a much slower rate than you would probably like.

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How do you find out if you have too much? Well, the first give-away sign is if people are dropping out. If you seriously have good content that is helpful, that is easy to understand, that is exactly what they need, but people are still dropping out, then the problem might be that there’s too much content. Ask them. If they say that they’re overwhelmed, if they don’t know where to start, if there’s too much stuff, that means you need to deliver your content at a slower pace. Good content but low retention rate is a dead give-away of having too much content.

The next thing I would do is join yourself. Add a new member as yourself and see what somebody who just came in has access to. If you just joined and there’s access to pages and pages and pages of content, it might be too much. If there is too much stuff, then that could be a sign that you have too much content. And a way that I like to tell this is if somebody came on the site and they only had one to two hours per week, could they reasonably go through all of your videos, all of your articles, all of your content, or would it take them more like five or more hours per week. I mean the average person really works 20 to 40 hours but in reality, they really only 5 to 10 hours of real work time and then when they join your site, they’re only in it for a fraction of that as well. One to two hours per week of consumption is about what you should be aiming for.

And above all, just use common sense. So, be aware that it is possible to have too much membership site content, it is possible to overload your members, so you’re not necessarily doing people a favor by giving them tons of information upfront, but you can be doing them a favor by dripping out or scheduling out much of your content and splitting up the payment. So, that is one more reason to create a membership site.

Duplicate my success. I want to show you exactly how I set up a membership site of my very own and how you can too in a very short amount of time. Go to www.membershipcube.com to claim your 100% free details right now.

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What Do I Do If I Don’t Have Enough Membership Content?

The content you have in your membership site should be one of the least of your worries. Let’s get your content problem solved and out of the way, so that we can focus on marketing that membership site and getting new people into your membership site and keeping them into your membership site. To create membership content, I usually use Private Label Rights materials, interviews and webinars, and videos that I’ve made myself. Those are the only sources of content you really need.

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First, what the heck are Private Label Rights materials? These are books, reports, videos, software, even articles that you can purchase the rights to and either use as is or re-write in your own words or maybe some kind of a combination of the two. If you purchase some articles that aren’t really so great, go ahead and edit them yourself to make them as good as you want them. I have also done more creative things, fore example, take Private Label Rights articles and record them as a video, but the thing to remember about this is that if the original source material sucks, then your videos are going to suck too.

Next, interviews and webinars. If you know how to have a conversation, then you can create a membership site content. What I like to do is find someone who’s an expert in a certain area and schedule about 20 minutes with them and think of four questions I’m going to be asking them throughout the conversation. These might be questions such as “where did you get started,” “what’s your big idea right now,” “what’s your next project going to be,” and “what’s your biggest mistake and how can we avoid it,” things like that. And if you don’t get to all the questions, that’s fine. If you run 25 minutes or 15 minutes instead of 20 minutes, that’s fine. The important thing is that you have a conversation, you take a couple of notes, so that when you end the conversation, you can kind of tell people what to do next and wrap up the conversation and say, “We covered this, this and this…”

Webinars are the same idea where you talk to someone, but in a webinar, you show the screen instead of just interview. So, in an interview, it will be audio only but in a webinar, you might actually be demonstrating the thing that you’re talking about. If you’re talking to an expert about how to post a listing on eBay, you could open up your browser and tell the person, “Tell me exactly what to do to post a killer popular listing on eBay.” And finally, make videos on your own. Use a software called Camtasia and show, demonstrate things in a browser, demonstrate things using a software, create Powerpoints and show those in full screen, and that is a great way of creating some bonus content that maybe even just recap things that happened in your PLR materials, your interviews, and your webinar. If you don’t have enough membership site content, use PLR materials, make videos of your own, anything about audio interviews and video webinars.

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How Much Content Should I Really Provide Per Day Inside A Membership Site?

Chances are if you are thinking about creating a membership site, you probably have the idea for two or three articles in your head. Maybe you already have a good chunk of the membership site content written but if you have 5 or 10 articles, how much time does it really buy you in the membership site? I am here to clear that issue up for you because a lot of people get it wrong.

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There are three things to think about when creating membership site content. First, you want to combat both overload and boredom, you want to offer one big thing per week, and just give them one week of content upfront immediately when they join.

Combattng overload and boredom. Most people only think of this from one direction. They think, “I want to combat boredom. I don’t want somebody to join my site and only get one post a month. So, I’m going to give them one post every single day.” So, they combat boredom, but they don’t think about the overload. They don’t think that if somebody joins the site, leaves for a week then comes back, they’re going to be so behind that they will never get caught up and then they were left wondering why everybody dropped out of their membership site because they all became overloaded. I prefer to post less than once per day, but more than once per week. Somewhere in that range is good because if you post once per day, it’s too much, if you post less than once a week, it’s not enough.

That brings me to how much you post exactly. Well, here’s what you do. Post one big thing per week, and by big thing, it could just be one 15-minute video, one 15-minute audio, or a download or a piece of software or something like that. Have one big thing a week, but in the meantime, offer reminders. Have a post or an email message, saying, “This post is coming tomorrow.” Have a thread the next day where they can ask a question or leave a comment. Have it next day where they just watch the video stream on your site that the day after that, they can download it. Deliver one big thing a week but then have reminders afterwards. So, maybe you posted a 15-minute video but then later in the week, offer a 3-minute recap audio, so that if they press for time, they can just listen to the audio.

And the final thing you should know about providing content is give people one week’s worth of content at the start. I used to provide only one day’s worth of content at the start when I first joined, but the problem with this is that when somebody first buys from you, they are the most excited, they are the most interested. They’re not going to be okay with just waiting around because they just thought they want that instant gratification. When somebody buys, give them at least one week’s worth of content at the start and then start dripping out your content from that.

When you’re thinking about how much content you should provide per day, how to schedule or stretch out the content you already have, combat not just boredom but overload as well. Post a few times per week but not once a day. When you post, post one big thing a week, like one video and in the meantime, have reminders, have recaps, ask questions, offer the download to kind of keep people busy but not overwhelmed. And when they first join, give them one entire week’s worth of content upfront.

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How Do I Get Others to Write Content for Me?

Let’s face it. A lot of people simply are not writers, and even the people who are writers, even the best writers get writer’s block from time to time. So, how do you create enough content to fill up a membership site without getting stuck, without getting bored, or without getting frustrated? I have three simple solutions for you.

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First, promote user comments into full posts, look for a columnist and outsource your writing, outsource your content creation. The easiest way I create membership site content that’s free is to simply look at user comments. I host membership sites inside of blogs. I make a post, you just can comment. If a user leaves a particularly good comment or an important question or even if I post a video and they take notes in the form of a comment, I will copy their comment, paste it as a new post and set the author of that post to that person who left the comment.

What do I end up with? I end up with a review post that somebody else wrote, that I did not have to pay any money for, that someone else will probably find useful. I only do this sparingly, but every now and then, if you have a blog in a membership site and it usually leaves a really video response or takes really good notes or leaves a very insightful comment, consider molding that comment into an entire post. Now, if that person leaves you lots of content over time and they become a trust source of authority for you, consider making them a columnist, the person who leaves multiple posts on your blog. The cool thing about WordPress that a lot of people are not aware of is that you can set user access levels – meaning you can set some of your regular subscribers to be what are called “contributors.” If they want to make a new post, they go and they submit it for approval, you approve it, it becomes live. It’s a very easy way to allow users to write their own post on your blog, but they do not become live until maybe after you’ve edited them and finally put a stamp on it for approval.

And finally, if you’re really stuck for ways of getting content, simply outsource it. Hire an article writer if you found someone who’s writing they like, but what I prefer to do is record an audio about what I want to say, hand it off to a transcriptionist, and then they create the article for me. Not everybody can write but everybody knows how to at least talk on the telephone. If you can talk, you can write.

And those are my three favorite ways of getting other people to write membership site content or me. First, promote user comments in the posts. If there is a repeat user who leaves a lot of good comments, make him a columnist using the user access levels in WordPress. And finally, outsource your content into article writing or transcribing.

Go ahead and create your membership site content right now, then pilot into a membership site using this training at www.membershipcube.com.