(For more resources on WordPress, see here.)
Although you can dissect a successful membership-based site into pieces, there are three vital elements. What do I get out of registering for this site? Why should I register now? How will this site impact me two weeks from now? These are all simple and fair enough questions. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.
Creating membership-based sites is tricky, because there is a natural expectation that a visitor or customer will receive something of value by registering for a site. If there is a low incentive for registering for your site, don’t expect too many signups. The opposite is true, as well. A site that offers a full album in exchange for site registration will fare better than a site that only offers one song from the same album. Customer Value Proposition (CVP) is not rocket science, but it’s a concept that you need to grasp to grow your site. What you perceive as great value might not necessarily be in line with what your prospective members expect. CVP also doesn’t dictate that you need to put a price tag on the value that you’re proposing; it merely suggests that what you are proposing will be useful and relevant to your site visitors. If you are unsure whether you are proposing something valuable on your site, in exchange for the time and effort it takes to complete a site registration, ask a neighbour, co- worker, or other acquaintance some of these questions:
Regardless of what people say, you have to be open to constructive criticism. Throwing all feedback by the wayside typically means that you are not prepared to embark on what you are doing. Last, be honest with yourself and try not to ask your parents, best friend, or spouse for this type of critical feedback, unless you’re certain they won’t be shy in trying to poke holes at your ideas. The more uncensored, truthful opinions you can collect, the more your site and membership will be polished.
Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca is often quoted as saying, Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. While you don’t have to be lucky to offer memberships, you do have to be strategic in how you open up site registrations. For example, you wouldn’t suddenly offer a VIP membership in the form of a paywall, if there weren’t any significant differences in your own freely available content or that of a competitor. You would, however, open limited VIP membership registrations on December 12, 2012 that offered premium content such as videos, downloads, and other goodies. In this example, the advantages are two-fold:
Again, it’s not rocket science per se, but you do have to take the opportunity and be prepared with a plan of action. You only get one first impression when you pitch your membership to your visitors, so try to schedule the registration period during a time when there is a significant change on your site—a site launch, re-design, newly added section, partnership, or any other big announcement. This way, it appears more like a bonus feature than a gateway to profile your users. If you plan on keeping membership registrations open indefinitely, be sure to keep the content fresh on the page that outlines the benefits of registering for your site. Some sites update rotating testimonials whereas others may feature recently registered users to prevent the membership opportunity from looking stale.
Holidays and other celebratory days are extremely helpful when it comes to timing, as they allow you to spotlight your membership section. If you charge for a premium membership, for example, you can always promote discounted specials through Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media networking site. Pairing Earth Day with news that your sites are running on energy efficient servers, for instance, would allow you to advertise something like Our community is all about green energy. You could even build a whole green campaign around membership signups, utilizing videos (http://www.youtube.com) and photo galleries (http://www.flickr.com) to paint a more telling story.
We’ve figured out a way to entice your prospective customers to register with our site, but what now? When it comes to site memberships, sustainability is a blanket term that incorporates long-term growth coupled with loyalty marketing—the practice in which you retain your customers, or site members, by focusing and delivering customer satisfaction, which, in turn, leads to an increased ROI.
We come full-circle, now that we’re honing in on building site memberships. Sustainability, at this juncture, means repetition. It means that we cannot rely on a one-off piece of content, an interesting blog post, a great album, or an amazing product to engage our members. It means that we cannot procrastinate on our content, if we want people to actively talk about it. The web works at warp speed, so it’s imperative that we churn out good content on a regular basis. It can be absolutely time-consuming. But that’s also why we’ve learned how to automate a lot processes to dedicate more resources to content. Good content will always remain at the forefront of sustaining your user retention.
For this activity, we will start off by using WordPress’ official Twenty Eleven theme and four plugins—HeadSpace2 SEO, WP Show IDs, S2 Member, and Cube Points:
In this part, we will configure the S2 Member plugin to block content for site visitors that have not registered with the site yet:
Everything still remains customizable, so if you change your page titles, post contents, category labels, or slugs, just be sure to update your settings accordingly under the General Options and Restriction Options sections in S2 Member.
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