How long did it take you to get your first member? I'm worried thinking of different strategy

You can't make a premium membership from the start. Nobody will buy it as nobody knows what does it offer. Never mind what you say about premium. Until you have enough content then start a premium membership.

Then how about this as an idea.

Start by making the membership site free to join to get members. Call it the "silver" membership level.

BUT take five or at most ten of the very best pieces of content and put some super low price on them (7 bucks maybe or 4.95). Make sure to put a really killer sales letter for them. This will condition your users to expect to pay for your best stuff.

Now, as you add content to the site, make that only available to "gold" members. AND, people that have purchased even just one of the previous reports get the membership for some super good discount (good enough that it will be cheaper to go buy one of those other reports before upgrading).

Again, it's conditioning people to EXPECT to pay for your information beyond a certain point.

Not only that, but with a silver and gold membership levels, at some point later you could start a mastermind group and call that the "platinum" level and charge a BUNCH for access to that. With a user community that is expecting to pay for your information that should work out well for you.

HTH

To answer your question... how long did it take to get our first members... A matter of minutes.

We focused years of effort towards building a platform and a modest email subscriber list with the givers gain method harrydog mentioned.

Stay focused on giving as much value as you can to as many people as possible and things will continue to fall into place.

I and a friend created a membership site with a 10 day free trial and had members in a few minutes after posting it on our social networks, at that time, we had no real email list for this.

Once they were on the free trial, we sent them a welcome email pointing them to the most unique features and explaining why it was not like anything else.

We had 3 levels of membership for every budget, too.

90% of the free members signed up for some level of membership.

One thing I would strongly suggest to you, is small tweaks and not radical changes.

In the member site project, as with my smaller squeeze page projects, I have found that some very small tweaks to headlines or even subject lines in emails made a big difference.

I would give it a good month with some minor tweaks and some serious targeted traffic before I would ever think of any major changes.

Good luck.

HTH has a great idea

It is hard to get people to pay for registering to something when they are the first ones there, regardless of how good the content on your site is

Either they need to experience it firsthand or hear about it from someone else. Either way, your best bet is to either let some selected people in for free, at least to a limited portion of your website.

It's always tough in the start. I recommend you give people a chance to have let's say a trial run. The trial would go on for 1 week or so and they will have access to a partial part of your site's content. Once the trial is over, if they like your site, they'll upgrade to premium. Another good way is to give people a chance to earn as well. Make it an affiliate thing. Get people to sign up in your site, the referrer gets a cut. This way people will get enticed to get more members.