A Simple Membership Site Model

9 replies
I want to share something with you guys that can be really lucrative yet simple for anyone to get started with. When most people think of a membership site they think of complex membership site creation, scripts, members area, and all the normal complex pieces of creating a membership site.

Well, today I want to share with you a method that involves non of that.

Here is the model in one sentence:

Create a membership community with a free Facebook group as an addition to something you sell.

This works even easier if you already have a simple info product to sell but if not you can easily create one. Here's how it works:

Create or use an existing info product and sell it along with bonus membership access (your Facebook group). So lets use an example:

So lets say you have a $7 ebook or a $17 video course. You could easily turn that into a simple membership site. For this example lets say you have a simple ebook that helps people write their first book. (could be any niche and any product). You could easily turn this into a membership site by adding a community (group component to it.)

The benefits of the group could be ongoing training from you, the community aspect (mastermind/questions/networking), access to ask you questions, etc.

You could base it on one or all of those things.

To start you can charge a low fee until you build up a nice membership base and get a strong community going. Could be something from $7 to $17 a month to start with. You can even give free access to start in exchange for testimonials or just to build the community.

Later you can raise the price of the community and scale things up by promoting your other relevant products/services/affiliate products to your group. Make sure to do it sparingly as they are already paying you and only promote things that make sense to what your membership is about. For example, if there is a new software that makes doing what your teaching easier that would be a good idea to promote to your group.

This is a simple way to create a recurring income without all the headaches of setting up an advanced membership site. Just putting all your focus on this simple model could add up to a nice recurring income quickly.

So that's the model, here is the basic setup:

Create a sales page on your own website. Once people purchase send them to a download page on your website that includes the ebook or video course you created and a link to request access to your Facebook group. As people purchase they will request access to the group and you can let them in/remove them if they cancel.

You could also have links to your main training as a pinned post or in the resources section of your Facebook group.

Make your Facebook group private when you set it up so people can find the group but they can't see the content unless they join.

So thats it guys. Simple yet very effective! Hope this helps someone get started or sparks an idea for building something new.
#membership #model #simple #site
  • Profile picture of the author DesignHackz
    Thats interesting idea, but it would be technically challenging to manually manage people who join and cancel the membership, especially when the numbers grows.
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  • Profile picture of the author SFNY
    Yeah they do this with ASM. There's a few members in here that run Facebook groups to sell. It works!
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  • Profile picture of the author Alex The Lion
    Facebook groups are really hitting it off right now, especially as it pops notifications to your members within the platform they tend to check every day.

    Facebook notifications can easily receive a higher CTR than emails in my experience.
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  • Profile picture of the author JC Web
    I have to disagree with you on this. Facebook is absolutely terrible for a membership site. It is a very customer-unfriendly way to run a membership. It is difficult, if not impossible, for customers to find the actual information. All they can do is endlessly scroll down and spend days reading through posts they have no desire to read in order to find the information they are actually after. It also requires a customer to be constantly checking the group, instead of the work they likely should be doing, if they ever want to actually get the information given in the group.

    Now Facebook has many good uses. And Facebook groups have good uses. But a membership site, which is what you are specifically advocating in this thread, is not one of them. Many marketers do this as a way to make things easy on themselves and get out of doing their own work instead of thinking of what is best, or at least good, for their customers.

    Membership sites should be customer-friendly and structured so that it is clear to the customer what information the site contains and how they can easily access it. It should also be available to members at any time they want to visit the site and not require you to be on the group that day or have the info be out of sight and missed forever. Likewise, for customer interaction with each other, membership site forums are much better than Facebook groups from the customer perspective, where there are threads with titles/subjects and categories, and they can still be easily found and commented on even if you are not on the group the moment it is posted before it goes out of sight.
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    • Profile picture of the author wfletch24
      Originally Posted by JC Web View Post

      I have to disagree with you on this. Facebook is absolutely terrible for a membership site. It is a very customer-unfriendly way to run a membership. It is difficult, if not impossible, for customers to find the actual information. All they can do is endlessly scroll down and spend days reading through posts they have no desire to read in order to find the information they are actually after. It also requires a customer to be constantly checking the group, instead of the work they likely should be doing, if they ever want to actually get the information given in the group.

      Now Facebook has many good uses. And Facebook groups have good uses. But a membership site, which is what you are specifically advocating in this thread, is not one of them. Many marketers do this as a way to make things easy on themselves and get out of doing their own work instead of thinking of what is best, or at least good, for their customers.

      Membership sites should be customer-friendly and structured so that it is clear to the customer what information the site contains and how they can easily access it. It should also be available to members at any time they want to visit the site and not require you to be on the group that day or have the info be out of sight and missed forever. Likewise, for customer interaction with each other, membership site forums are much better than Facebook groups from the customer perspective, where there are threads with titles/subjects and categories, and they can still be easily found and commented on even if you are not on the group the moment it is posted before it goes out of sight.
      I agree with you to an extent. As far as a nice organized content system it can be tough to keep everything organized. However, a training portal is only one type of membership site. As I mentioned in my original post it could be used for many other things such as a mastermind group, Q&A area, networking, coaching, etc.

      A work around for organizing content would be to have a pinned post that organizing links to all training materials or even a shared doc in the files area that has links to all content.

      Sure this wouldn't have all the bells and whistles of a standard membership site but its a way to enter the game if you don't have the know how to create a membership site or the money to have someone build it for you. At the point it becomes a nice money maker you could transition to a stand alone membership site and the Facebook community would be an added bonus.

      As far as your comment about the forums I don't know that I find that true but thats probably a matter of preference. One thing I have noticed in my groups versus a forum is they get a lot more activity (typically). People are already spending a lot of time on Facebook and its one less place for them to log in to and be active. It certainly has its downsides but so do other options.

      Thanks for your feedback!
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      • Profile picture of the author DesignHackz
        Your idea sparked some ideas in my mind. We can just make the fb group as entry point for free members, or low price point lifetime access. Like maybe at $1 - to $7 one time payment.

        Then you can upsell them to subscription based membership site once they are inside the fb group. And use more user friendly platform for the paid subscriber.



        Originally Posted by wfletch24 View Post

        I agree with you to an extent. As far as a nice organized content system it can be tough to keep everything organized. However, a training portal is only one type of membership site. As I mentioned in my original post it could be used for many other things such as a mastermind group, Q&A area, networking, coaching, etc. ........
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