When I explain to people about the idea of membership site where you control access to a download area, it pretty much makes sense for everybody. But membership levels are slightly more difficult to grasp and I want to make sure that you understand them right here and right now.
Membership levels basically allow you to take the same membership site and give different users different access to parts of it. Here is where I can explain it – is you might have a silver and a gold level and you could see the silver post, if you are silver, but if you’re gold, you can see even more extra content. So maybe you posted as the membership creator, you post one silver and one gold video every week. If somebody was on your silver level for say 10 bucks a month, they would see one video a week. If they were on your gold level, then they would see two videos per week. Does that make sense? I hope so. So, you could create the cheap level maybe for beginners and then the more involved level, which costs a little bit more but is for the more advanced people.
What’s really cool about membership software, especially the software that I use is that you can partially protect posts. For example, let’s say that you want to not only do the two videos per week idea but silver members cannot download the video. So, what you would do is you would make a post and paste on that post the streaming version plus the download link but protect just that download link for gold members. So, silver members would see one streaming video per week, and gold members would see that streaming video plus a special one just for them, and the gold members could download both of those videos. So, even though they get double the videos and the cost is double, it seems like they might be triple or even quadruple the amount of value, and you didn’t have to do any extra work.
So when you create your membership levels, what should you name them? Well I always start with the level called “full” just out of habit because we don’t want to create a fancy membership site out of the game. Create an average membership site now and add to it later. So, set up your membership site, create a level called “full,” and put all the stuff you want to put on to it for your single payment site. Then if you want to go and add information later, create a level called “monthly” and then that will be the level that your monthly users can join and get the content dripped out for them in that fashion.
The key to this is not to think of a bunch of extra membership levels just because only add to them as you need them. So in that example, we started off with the “full” and then later on added the monthly.
So, if you have a different group of members that you want to see more or less videos, create a membership site group. If you want to charge a little bit more to give different kinds of access to the site, have a different membership level. But other than that, I hope that you understood the idea behind membership levels and that you can take some of your posts and make them visible only to certain levels and obscure only parts of your posts, for example, make the download link itself protected. Once you have this membership level concept completely understood, you can have a lot of fun with different levels of access, live and monthly levels, leading offers all within the same membership site.
Now you understand the why of membership sites, do you want to know the how? Find out exactly how to apply what we learned today in your membership site.