Should I Make My Entire Site A Membership Site?

If I landed on a website, and I knew nothing about it or the person behind it, and it directed me to a page where I was asked to pay, I would hit the back button immediately.

My thoughts...bad idea. A very bad idea.

I think it all depends on exactly what you're trying to accomplish. I would assume you are going to have some information selling them on why they would want to subscribe. You left that out but I'll assume you're going to have that. Very few would buy without more information on what you're writing about and why they should become a member.

You can package your material a variety of ways. If you're offering a paid membership / blog type of site you can offer free information and link to related articles that they will need to be a member for.

Example... ESPN offers a lot of information, articles and videos for free but also has their ESPN Insider to get even more information.

You can also take the route of offering a free optin at first to capture everyone and then sell them on your information and paid system so you don't lose out on as many people as you had mentioned.

I think it's a bad idea. It's not a profit maximizer.

To maximize your profits would be to have a whole load of free and valuable content available on your site and then have a paid section that has premium content only paid subscribers can access. The free content act as lead magnets to draw leads to your site. No one is going to come along to a site that has 100% locked content -- it's offers no value.

What I did was, make a few sample pages completely accessible so they see what they are getting if they sub. For my blog, I have every post accessible up to the first two paragraphs with a "want to see more? Sign in or sign up". I use wishlist member.

Will, I've seen that many a times and thought the same. It's a reason why I never tried a pay more to read more type of marketing strategy. I've always come at it with full informative free to read posts or information with a sell on the more great stuff inside. Or the free opt in approach with the sell on a membership.

Ohh yes that's a great example. I forgot about those solution and answer sites. I agree you just want the answer for that current problem and not the whole website.

One of my sites is "Members Only". I have free member content and premium member content. I don't care about the casual surfer. All of the content is locked down so you have to at least get a free membership to get access to any of the content.

I also have two lists...the free members list and the premium members list. The premium list gets the goods. The free members get the teaser...with the opportunity to get the goods.

Drew,

Short answer: Bad idea.

Long answer: I think you got ahead of yourself a little bit here...

If your entire site is locked down, your content will not be indexed by Google or any of the other search engines. Which means, no one is going to find your site in search results for general or long-tail keywords any time soon :-)

Which means your dilemma is no longer a dilemma to begin with :-)

Which is why, as you have observed, you will see a "Members" section on most sites. That allows you to publish public content to draw SE traffic, and then monetize it further with more specialized content.

With certain membership plugins (like DAP), you can do what we call "Sneak Peek" (or "Read More...") but those too have its advantages and disadvantages, like the others have already mentioned.

If the visitor doesn't already know who you are, then you're going to find it tough to convert cold traffic from SE's into paying members. You're better off offering great free content to draw them in, get their email id's, follow up with great content, "stack the cool", build a lasting relationship and provide a lot of value, and then also offer more exclusive content behind a paywall.

Once you establish yourself as an "expert", converting them is going to be a whole lot easier.

- Ravi Jayagopal

You don't have to like Google or "play Google's game". But if you're thinking you don't care about traffic from the largest search engine in the world, then you're really missing out.

Anyway, it's not about just Google. The only way for people to arrive at your web site through their own devices, is via search engines.

Unless of course, you or your partners/affiliates are specifically driving traffic to your site (through ads, solos, aff promos, etc). In which case, you're definitely not going to want to drive traffic to a totally "closed" site.

So any which way you look at it, getting people to go to a totally locked down site is just not a good idea.

OK. But I am definitely going to run my business how I want. And that does not include Google.

I think you should definitely leave some free content as well. What's more, I think you should always keep adding new free content to the site. For once, it will ensure people that your advice is worth paying for, and second, even the search engines will drive you more traffic which will earn you more customers and more money yin the long run.

If you do NOT have any free content available, the exact contrary will happen: you won't receive and visitors and even if you do, very few of them will subscribe.

Steve

Totally agree, the website should be left open for content search and the content should be valuable... and then when they approach the membership area, they feel more compelled to join because the free material was so enticing.. you always want to keep your audience engaged.

It is a bad idea to do that. Why should you make them leave your site and never return again? If they want to leave your website, at least make sure they will return again someday to become a member to your site.

IMHO, just give them some free valuable content. This will build some trust and make them more eager to join your membership site.

Here's a killer tip for setting up a members section within a blog...

Set up a main WordPress installation in your root directory for your main public facing blog (viewable by search engines).

Add a sub-directory to your main site (call it /members if you like) and install a second installation of WordPress in the sub-directory, and install the Membership plugin on this subdirectory installation. Use this sub-directory installation for all your membership pages (not viewable by search engines if it's protected with a membership plugin)

Voila, an open site for your public pages, a separate site on the same domain for your membership pages.

Hope this helps!

I would hit back on my browser and never look at your site ever again.

You expect me to pay a monthly fee to access information when I don't even know how good that information is?

No way.