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[Example] Audio

Gingerbread halvah lemon drops topping dessert dragée. Oat cake toffee tiramisu muffin topping ice cream gingerbread. Pastry dessert pie dragée sweet chocolate cake shortbread marzipan. Tiramisu gummies cupcake sweet roll powder jelly apple pie caramels.

Bear claw macaroon caramels biscuit ice cream oat cake. Cheesecake danish chocolate cake liquorice candy canes jelly beans candy canes liquorice marshmallow. Sugar plum bonbon caramels tootsie roll sweet tiramisu oat cake.

Jelly beans tart soufflé cake gingerbread croissant cheesecake jelly-o sesame snaps. Toffee toffee shortbread brownie toffee halvah oat cake tiramisu jelly. Cupcake dragée fruitcake biscuit cookie danish cupcake gummies. Cotton candy lemon drops cookie pastry halvah candy muffin powder.

Gingerbread icing croissant donut cake sweet chocolate. Sweet roll sweet chocolate brownie apple pie tootsie roll jelly beans biscuit. Wafer chocolate bar cake liquorice jujubes oat cake halvah.

Gummi bears carrot cake muffin jelly brownie fruitcake. Cake oat cake ice cream cake chocolate cake cake cake jujubes pie. Fruitcake cotton candy sweet ice cream ice cream candy biscuit sweet roll donut.

Membership Platform Checklist

Choosing a membership platform for your business can be a daunting task. It involves heavy planning, research and execution.

We’ve created a simple and effective checklist to help you choose the right membership platform for your business.

Looking for more?

Check out our complete guide on How to Choose a Membership Platform for your Business. This guide goes in depth on how to plan, what to consider, and ultimately which kind of platform will work best for you.

We have a decision framework at MemberDev that we use in our own business and with clients we coach. This framework aims to help you decide on what features to build or include in your membership site.

The framework takes 3 core inputs (below), which can be resolved by answering simple questions.

1) Customer UX
Is the feature good for your customer experience?

2) Revenue
Does the feature create or drive revenue?

3) Time Savings
Does the feature save you time as a business?

How To Plan Course Content

We’ve helped many first-time entrepreneurs create and launch their course offerings over the years. This includes millions in sales and hundreds of thousands of customers!

However, none of our clients did this overnight. In fact, it took most of them years to reach meaningful sales. And to do that they started with a plan. A solid plan is essential for any project, and this applies even more for courses.

Here’s our recipe for a successful jump start to selling courses.

Establish the WHY

First, you need to establish why this course is needed. This exercise helps you validate the reason, and customer demand, for why the course should be created.

Here are some steps to follow in your WHY planning:
  1. Create the course title, which usually reflects why this course is needed. This often begins with a “How to…” or specific skillset. For example, “How to create a membership site.”
  2. List the questions or challenges that someone taking this course might want to answer.
  3. List the high level learning points and objectives of the course.
  4. List the target demographic for your course (who needs this)
**See our sample [template] in the attachments below for an example of how to formulate these ideas.

Create Your Outline

Your course outline provides a list of modules to serve as your course curriculum. This is very similar to a table of contents, just like you would find in a typical book.

Each module should contain:
  1. A short description of the module content
  2. What we’ll accomplish
    • 1-3 bullet points that summarize the points of learning
  3. The medium that this module will be delivered in:
    • Video
    • Audio
    • Text (article format)
  4. Module resources
    • Templates / Downloads
    • Online links or references
    • etc.

And that’s how you plan!

**See our sample [template] in the attachments below for an example of how to structure your modules.

JP – Our New Team Player

We’re thrilled to introduce JP, the newest addition to our MemberDev family. As our Customer Support Engineer, JP’s passion for helping others make him a fantastic fit for our team.

JP’s Background

JP’s journey into tech started a couple of years ago, and he’s been dedicated to learning and problem-solving ever since. With a background in the web hosting industry, he’s well-equipped to assist our members.

What JP Brings

Exceptional Service: JP is committed to providing top-tier customer support.
Technical Expertise: His background ensures he can tackle complex issues.
Innovation: JP brings fresh ideas to improve our support processes.

JP Beyond Work

When not assisting our members, JP enjoys hiking, traveling, lifting weights, martial arts and riding his bike. His adventurous spirit adds positivity to our team.

Please join us in welcoming JP to MemberDev. His skills and enthusiasm will enhance our support and benefit our members. Stay tuned for more updates!

How to Transition Your Membership Business Online

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has left many brick and mortar businesses in a scramble. This article will help you think about ways to transition to an online membership model.

You can start by leveraging your current products and service offerings. Think about how you can meet your customers’ needs in our current marketplace and virtual environment.

Now is a great time to transition to an online membership model
For some readers, you may already operate an in-person membership business. But for some of you, your current business may not have a membership component. So to level set, let’s go over a few basics.

With a membership website, a portion of the website or the entire website is only accessible to members who pay a monthly subscription fee to gain access to exclusive, premium content.

If you have been thinking about starting an online membership business, now is a great time. In September 2020, only 38% of business owners said their companies were operating as normal since COVID-19 shutdowns.

No one knows if or when things will go back to “normal.” So transitioning entirely to an online membership model or even just some aspects of your business could help you thrive during the pandemic and onwards.

With most people spending more time at home, the demand for online content is higher than ever. In a membership model, you can create a membership community built around your products or services. Launching a membership site is a great way to build an online community, sell products, provide a service, and generate a recurring income.

30+ Things to Know About Starting a Subscription SaaS Business

The demand for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is growing. So is the consumer desire for subscription-based pricing models.

Not only does subscription pricing make expensive software affordable for the end-user, but it also helps generate more income for the business. This dynamic allows many companies to create sustainable growth with their product MVPs, whether they’re creating those products as a relatively new startup or as market-dominating behemoth (looking at you, Amazon!).

If you’ve ever dreamed of starting a subscription SaaS business or moving your products to the subscription model, now is the time. Here’s a look a the stats behind the rising SaaS subscription economy.

The subscription model is nothing new. The idea of recurring revenue is as old as newspapers and periodicals. But if you feel like you’re seeing subscription pricing everywhere these days… you’d be right.

From multivitamins to home maintenance, snacks to shaving kits, workout programs to wine-of-the-month clubs, many businesses are capitalizing on the subscription boom. Even using a word processing program or ordering groceries can cost you a monthly fee now.

The beauty of the Subscription Economy (a fitting phrase coined by Zuora) — and the reason the model is becoming so popular among businesses of every industry — is that it opens the doors for accelerated growth and revenue while still providing convenient and often necessary services for customers. In other words, it’s a win-win.

Here’s a look at the stats behind the current Subscription Economy and why it’s a good idea to get in on it any way you can.

The New Member Onboarding Guide for Better Retention

There’s no doubt that it takes effort to turn a site visitor into a customer.

It can be even trickier for subscription or membership businesses because the one-time sale or lead capture isn’t the “end game” the same way it is in a more traditional ecommerce model.

You have to convince customers to buy into your product every day, every month, and every year — for the long haul.
And a simple “thank you for your purchase” email won’t be enough. You need to consistently engage and educate members, both immediately after sign-up and every day after, if you want to succeed.

You need a member onboarding process.

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The Membership Welcome Email Series Walkthrough

Why You Need a Member Onboarding Process
Think of a new member sign-up as inviting a guest over to your house for the first time.

You wouldn’t expect them to know where you keep the glasses in your cupboard, or where to find the bathroom, or whether or not it’s okay to put their coat on your bed. You have to show them what to do. You have to play host.

As Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos puts it:

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

An onboarding process is designed to educate members on where to go, what to do, how to interact with your team, and, in the meantime, give them enough positive reasons to come back and hang out with you again.

According to Len Markidan, head of marketing at Groove, there are two major milestones in the life of any customer:

When they sign up for your product, and
When they achieve their first “success” with your product.

An onboarding process helps guide members to their second milestone: success with your product or service. That success can be a major factor in reducing churn over time.

As Neil Patel says, “Churn is a reflection of customer satisfaction. Customers may lose interest because they get confused on how to actually use your services.”
Good onboarding processes help you sell faster, retain and engage better, and understand the needs of your customers on a deeper level.

But good “hosting” — successful onboarding — shouldn’t be left up to chance. You have to be intentional about what you do and what you don’t do when bringing your members up to speed.

Here are the top five components of a successful member onboarding process.

3 Essential WordPress Plugins for Membership Sites

What are the best WordPress membership plugins for creating and running a membership site?
Whether you’re developing your WordPress membership site yourself or you’re sourcing it through another developer or agency, it’s crucial that you choose the right plugins to give you the best support and functionality.

The good news is that we’ve put together a quick list of the top three membership plugins we use and recommend, all of which are user-friendly (for the DIYers) and robust in features for maximum usability.

Here are our recommendations for the best WordPress membership plugins.

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The Basic Membership Toolkit for WordPress Users

1. MemberMouse
WordPress is a fairly robust tool all on its own, but most membership sites require functionality and features that don’t come out-of-the-box.

You’ll need to sell membership and subscriptions, for one, as well as create member sign-in pages and members-only areas, produce various forms of content (that may or may not be member-specific), and in some cases sell products or other services.

Even the most experienced developers might struggle to incorporate these features in WordPress, even if they’ve been building traditional sites for years. It’s a lot to do.

That’s where a plugin like MemberMouse comes in.

What to Know About Creating Online Courses for Your Membership Site

There has never been a better time to create online courses.

With traditional tuition costs at an all-time high and the increasing availability of high-speed internet, high-quality video, and instant streaming, online education is revolutionizing the way we learn. In fact, the EdTech industry is predicted to grow to $325 billion by 2025.

For membership and subscription businesses — a $400+ billion industry in itself — the pairing of online courses is a match made in heaven. Subscription-based online education providers like Coursera are now worth billions, and smaller EdTech startups like Khan Academy still boast over 12 million monthly users with annual revenue of almost $28 million.

Of course, designing an online course is no easy feat. There are hours of planning, implementation, and marketing involved with building a single profitable course, much less an entire online empire. But the good news for even the smallest membership site is that it’s not impossible to create a high-performing course (or courses) for your members in a relatively short time.

In fact, many membership sites are finding great success with online education, and with the right knowledge and resources, you can too. Here’s what to know.

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Sell Better! 9 Pricing Strategies for Your Online Courses

Planning and Financing Your Online Courses
So, how much time, money, and commitment does it take to build a great course, exactly? According to the EdTech experts over at Racoon Gang, there are three elements to consider:

Research and analytical expenses
Time and money invested in online course design
Time and money invested in content development and implementation.
You may also need the services of subject matter experts (SMEs), a graphic designer and/or videographer, a project manager, and a technical or DevOps person.

All-in-all, you could be looking at roughly 100-160 hours for production and a $7,000-$40,000 investment for 1 hour of online learning.

Membership Site SEO 102: A Guide for WordPress Optimization

How do you optimize your WordPress site for SEO?

In our last post, we covered the basics of SEO for membership sites, including what search engines like Google look for when crawling your pages and what it means to optimize for searcher intent. If you’re not familiar with these SEO best practices, take a few minutes to read that post first, then come on back!

In part two, we’re diving into the nitty-gritty of WordPress SEO to ensure your landing pages are Google-ready. This is by no means a comprehensive guide, but it should give you a launching point to boost your organic traffic.

We have a lot to go over, so let’s get started…

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The SEO Guide for WordPress Blog Posts

Step 1: Benchmark Your WordPress Site Metrics
The first step in the process starts with metric tracking. By setting up tracking before you optimize WordPress, you’ll be able to see and measure changes in real time and adjust your strategy on the fly.

Once your site is being tracked, the first thing you want to do is pull some metrics. The exact metrics will depend on your specific site and business goals, but as a general rule you’ll want to benchmark stats for the following:

Page Speed
Mobile-Friendliness
SERP rankings (for your top keywords)
Click-through rate (for your top keywords)
Goal conversion rate
We highly recommend using Google Analytics to measure the bulk of your metrics. It’s free and it already knows what Google looks for in terms of SEO. If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up in WordPress, here’s a short how-to guide.

Aside from Google Analytics, there are some other tools you can use for tracking and measuring. We’ll cover some of them here, but if you want a full list of free and paid SEO tools, be sure to check out our previous post.

Page Speed
Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your pages load. Google has considered page speed a factor for SERP rankings since 2010, so improving your page speed is important. We’ve covered this topic before in this blog post, but we’ll go over it here too.

First, test your loading speed in person. Because your browser caches your site, you want to test with and without caching. You can disable caching in your browser settings. It’s a good idea to test it out several times using different browsers to get the average loading speed.

Then, use tools like Google Pagespeed Insights (recommended), Pingdom Tools, or GTMetrix to get a rating for your site loading speeds.

For Pagespeed Insights, a “good” score is around 85% or higher.

Gather your speed scores and put them into a spreadsheet or document so you can monitor your improvement over time.

Test your site on multiple speed tools to get a second opinion. One tool might not give you the whole picture.
Keep in mind that speed tests aren’t a perfect reflection of performance, which is why you want to use other metrics to measure SEO improvements as well. Many site speed tests bypass caching, and like we said earlier, most browsers cache sites by default.