Organize and Set Up Your Membership Site Properly

When you’re thinking about what content you’re going to add to your one month, six month, twelve month, or even longer membership site, you might be wondering how are you going to keep it all organized and how is anyone going to be able to find the information they’re looking for when they login to your site and see all the content you have added. That’s why I want to share three easy tips you can apply to any present or future membership site, right now, to make it more organized and easier to access.

First, group your content into modules. Label them for example 101, 102, 103 and so on. Cross reference your content by having posts in multiple categories at the same time. Create a dashboard page and have a search widget so anyone can access all the information at any time.

One of the first things I do in a membership site is I will name the different categories or modules. For example, I might have a membership site that teaches list building, product creation and membership sites. What I will do is create a category called 101: List Building. Another category called 102: Product Creation. A third category called 101: Membership Sites. When I group my content into these categories and someone joins the site they can easily jump to the list building, product creation or membership site categories, but they can also see that I’ve managed to group them in a logical, step by step, order.

It’s not enough to just assign your post to a 101, 102, 103 category, we also need to make it easy for people to jump to various assignments, bonuses or core training. That’s when I will create categories called training, bonus and assignment. When I make a new post I usually assign it to two categories or more. I’ll make a post and I’ll say this belongs to the 102: Product Creation category and it also belongs to the Assignment category. This way anyone who logs into the site can view just one module at a time or view all the assignments in all the modules. That way the site is cross referenced.

One other thing that’s easy to do is create a page that links to every single post and page in your site. You can get creative with this, I prefer to create graphical icons for each of my posts or categories and create a table in the page that links to the various parts of the site. This makes it easy for anyone to jump to any part of the site.

Finally, one final finishing touch, is to go into the appearance widgets menu in the WordPress dashboard and add a search box. That way if someone doesn’t understand the organization of the site they can type their question in the search box and usually find the content they’re looking for.

Take Control of Your Content

One of the big issues I’ve had with owning sites and blogs is continually adding content and keeping it fresh.

First I’d create my own posts but my publishing was quite erratic. I’d post a few things one day then nothing for a few days and then eventually nothing for weeks on end. My blog effectively ‘died’.

I then tried a few different automated content fillers. Ones where the tool would grab content from other sites and post it to my site. That worked in keeping fresh content coming to my blog. What I found though was the feeds were unreliable in terms of the type of information they would post.

Next I tried joining SEOLinkvine – you sign up, tell it the kind of topics you want articles on. Other people write articles on their topics and SEOLinkine basically matches what you want with what others are writing.

Again that worked for a while in filling my blog with content but I found the main issue was the articles had text links within the article which again took people to sometimes totally unrelated topics areas.

I came to the conclusion that I wanted more control over the content that was appearing on my site than was occurring through automated submission from outside sources.

I decided I had to create the content if I wanted uniqueness, highly appropriate topic content and to keep my site sticky.

Back to the original problem – inconsistent posting.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create your content in batches and with one click have it publish when you want it to, how you want it to? While it’s doing that, you can kick back on the beach!

Well, you can. And more. Drop by tomorrow for the solution! Until then, start putting together a batch of posts on a favourite topic. I’m about to show you how you can post that content automatically to drip out when you want it to AND have a corresponding email automatically generated to let your readers know to check out your post. And that’s not all.

See you tomorrow!

Membership Sites – Learning Set 2

Ok, so I’m now into a few weeks of my course on learning to set up member sites.

I have fallen into the trap many of us do and set up a few but perfected none. So when setting up a site, here’s my suggestion:

1. work out what you want the site for – who are the audience, what are you providing and what’s the overall purpose.

2. decide on some details such as how often you will post, what you will post, where you will get your posts from

3. set up some basic icons or graphics if you want to use them eg for downloads, commenting etc

4. set up a schedule, especially if others are posting, so you have it all covered.

Here’s something else I’ve learned.

Teaching software installation and configuration is not as easy as proviidng the sftware and showing how to do it on a video. Things can go wrong and I’d recommend that you provide a personal service option for phone consults or video reviews of your install so people can get it done and are satisfied rather than giving up in frustration and badmouthing your product.

Membership Sites – Learning Set 1

I’ve been focusing on building membership sites lately. They serve a real purpose for my offline businesses. Not knowing much about them I enrolled in a program with a couple of young guns who have a good handle on this space. The course is great I’ve learned a lot already but I’ve also noted some issues that come with running these sites.

In this case, the guys put the course together from a live class which was conducted over a period. Now they have reopened the course to (what’s the opposite to ‘live? not appealing!) … let’s say a canned class. That is our program is not live but we use the same material that was derived for the original group. No issue with that – leveraging product for income is perfectly fine.

But here are the things that, as a consumer, I notice. Continue reading →

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Category Archives: Membership Sites

Organize and Set Up Your Membership Site Properly

Take Control of Your Content

Membership Sites – Learning Set 2

Membership Sites – Learning Set 1