Archives: Content

Video Content Is Easy With MemberDev

Want to host videos in your Library? No problem!

With the MemberDev platform, hosting videos is a simple cut/paste of the embed code from Vimeo, YouTube, or Wistia. Rather than host videos on your own site, and bog down load times that are sure to bore your members, we’ve made it easy to showcase your videos front and center on our platform.

All you have to do grab a handy little piece of code from you video host, which usually looks like this:

From there, just toss it into Content Video Code field in WordPress, which looks like this:

And viola! Your streaming video is showcased at the top of the post, so all your members can absorb your content!
Here’s a diagram showing how to evaluate the relationships.

MemberDev CRT Answer Framework

If a feature lands in the center of the diagram, meaning it answers “yes” to all three questions, then it’s a no brainer. You should always do these features immediately.
If a features answers “yes” to two of the three questions, it’s something you should probably prioritize.
If a feature answers “yes” to one of the three questions, it’s something you should do WHEN the business is focused on that circle. For example, add revenue features if you’re struggling to drive cash flow. Or take on time saving features when cash flow is strong and your team is fatigued from intense work cycles.

The framework is the easy part. Using it effectively is the key.

To elaborate on that – most features won’t fall into the center, so it’s your job to decide when to tackle the items that check one or two circles. There will likely always be requests for customers… and most businesses can generally always benefit from more revenue. So again, the power of the framework comes from knowing when to work on which features.

The Value of Authenticity

This is a quick video on the value and importance of authenticity.

Now, more than ever, it’s essential to be authentic with your membership site. Customers are looking for real, authentic content, which is a reflection of you and your unique value prop.

Some of the key insights in this video include:
  • Why it’s important to stay authentic.
  • Keep things simple in the beginning – i.e. don’t worry about “flashy” production value.
  • Establish a linear flow where authenticity comes off in everything you do, from ads to final content.

Key Tip
The best version of yourself and your business is a reflection of you, not a version of someone or something else. Stop imitating and stay authentic.

Hope you enjoy!

Give it a quick and easy subheader summarizing the post!

This is where the body of the post goes. Lorem Ipsum Is Simply Dummy Text Of The Printing. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

Might even get a little crazy and throw in an image!

Whatever you do, make sure you’re contributing content to your Library that your members will get value from!

Example Post: MemberMouse Intro

Teaser text….

MemberMouse gives you everything you need to easily manage a successful online business. No matter if you sell digital products, subscription content, software as a service, or ship physical goods, MemberMouse provides a flexible platform that you can quickly shape to your business, with absolutely no programming required.

MemberMouse gets you up and running quickly, and handles many of the common tasks in your business, freeing you to focus on your value proposition. Without a doubt, MemberMouse is one of the easiest ways to start your own online business.

MemberMouse is a WordPress membership plugin. Simply download the plugin and upload it to your WordPress installation, and you instantly get a flexible and feature-rich platform to grow almost any type of business.
The obvious advantage of using WordPress, is that it’s a reliable, proven, and easy to use content management system. So much so, it’s estimated that WordPress powers roughly 16% of the web.

MemberMouse makes it easy to deliver your product and customize its delivery based on membership level, duration of membership, referring affiliate and more. Selling one-off products and setting up “time-release” drip content schedules is a breeze. We also have a content “widget” that you can drop into your theme that will display what content is available to your members and what content will be released in the future. No other WordPress membership plugin even comes close.

Closing paragraph.

1-Click buying makes additional purchases a no-brainer
With each member’s credit card saved to their account, all it takes is a single click to purchase additional products when logged in. Plus you can recommend products in their Member’s Dashboard, based on their membership level or purchase history.

What’s the ROI of a new membership website?

This is a common question that comes up when membership site owners are entertaining the thought of a re-design or significant new development.

With most complex questions in life, the answer is “it depends.” However, we can isolate a few things to help you evaluate the general answer.

There are 3 core considerations for any membership website:

  1. Content
  2. UX
  3. Performance

Let’s break each one down.

1) Content

In most cases, the content of a membership site is the core product offering. Your content is why people are paying you money for membership access. So in that regard, the presentation and accessibility of your content is key. Your members want to feel proud and delighed when they access your content. They want premium content.

To provide premium content, it’s essential to use the right tools and medium. For example, your videos should be delivered via Vimeo or Wistia, not YouTube. Your articles should be presented with proper layout and typography. The categorization of your content should be clear and useful.

These subtle improvements from standard blog/website content go a long way. They reinforce why users are paying for your content and allow you to market your content in a premium lens. Your premium content ultimately sets you apart and provides greater sales and revenue potential.

Potential ROI of improved content

Greater sales/revenue opportunities

2) UX

User experience is more important than every today. Look around you – everyone is on their devices all the time. From news sites to gaming apps, we’re consuming digital experiences at higher rates than ever. For that reason, the UX of your membership site is critical. Your members will expect an intuitive and optimized experience that matches your membership offering. If you don’t deliver on this, they will get confused and leave. Period.

So take the time to think about your target demographic. Who are they, how do they consume media, what devices are they primarily using, etc. Then craft the appropriate user experience to match these users’ needs. This extra thought and effort into UX will help you onboard members quickly and keep them engaged.

Potential ROI of improved UX

Better onboarding and engagement

3) Performance

We live in an age where the internet provides instant access to virtually any kind of information. That standard has been set for all websites, and applies even more to membership websites. Why? Because people paid you money to access your site. Imagine logging into Netflix and the video takes forever to load… and then once loaded, pauses randomly throughout the streaming experience. You can imagine and empathize the user frustration.

Membership sites hold the same type of expectations. If you’re asking people for money you should deliver the content, and you shoud deliver it at similar or greater speeds than average. Don’t let this [performance] metric hold you back from establishing a loyal and satisfied user base.

Potential ROI of improved performance

Increased loyalty and less churn

In summary, there’s no finite ROI on a new membership site (or redesign). However, there are potential ROI levers around the 3 core considerations:

  • Improved Content
  • Improved UX
  • Improved performance

So make sure you evaluate these when considering your next project.

How should I price my membership subscriptions?

This is one of the most commonly asked questions we get from new membership site owners. How should I price my membership subscriptions, and why?

I like to answer this with 3 major factors:

1) What kind of content schedule are you committing to?

If you plan to create/offer content with no consistency you should consider annual subscriptions. For example, you may build out various content each quarter in batches. This kind of content schedule is most compatible with an annual subscription so customers know NOT to expect weekly or monthly updates.

Whereas, if you plan to create/offer content every month you should consider monthly subscriptions. Consistent content is the main driver for most purchase decisions and your members will come to expect this.

We’ve seen the most success with monthly subscriptions from MemberDev clients who put out new content every week. Period. You can’t fake this til you make this. Members who purchase a monthly subscription will see the monthly charge on their statement and correlate that with whether or not they saw any updates from you.

2) What are the supply/demand economics for your product offering?

The next factor is supply and demand for content you’re creating. This plays into the relative price points you can demand based on TAM (total addressable market) and supply. This is important because there is an inverse relationship between TAM and supply. Larger TAM and more supply results in lower membership prices. Whereas smaller TAM and low supply results in higher membership prices.

For example, there is a BIG variation in an online yoga membership vs a bitcoin investment membership. Let’s compare the differences:

TAM
  • Online yoga is huge with low demand.
  • Bitcoin investment is still small with high demand.
Supply
  • Online yoga has many providers with high competition.
  • Bitcoin investment has few providers with low competition.

Given these basic factors, an online yoga membership should be priced much lower (ex: $10/month) than a bitcoin investment membership (ex: $100/month).

3) What kind of member do you want to attract?

Lastly, it’s important to set your prices at levels that attract your ideal customer. Your price points essentially serve as your filter.

For example, MemberDev doesn’t offer any platform subscriptions for less than $99/month. This immediately filters out the “price shoppers” and/or people with extremely low budgets. We set this minimum price point intentionally to make sure we’re only working with serious customers who have some means to invest in a membership platform. Our prices allow us to target and cater to small businesses and startups.

That said, if we were to raise our minimum subscription to $999/month, we’d be targeting a whole new [enterprise] demographic, since small businesses typcially can’t afford this price point.

So it’s essential to figure out who your target customer is, and what price points would appeal to them.

In summary, here are your key takeaways for how to price your membership subscriptions:
  1. Figure out the content schedule you can commit to.
  2. Determine where your product offering lies in the suppply/demand curve.
  3. And then narrow in on the type of customer demographic you want to target.

The Anatomy of a Membership Site Special Sale Offer

This video dives into a simple and effective strategy for structuring membership site “special sale” offers.

We’ll cover a 3-point framework that we use at member(dev) to help our customers and clients launch and promote special deals.

1. Compelling Offer

First, the offer has to be compelling. This means positioning the price at something that will truly attract attention and stick out amongst the common “special” deal pricing.

We suggest you go beyond the 50% off mark and choose a unique number that feels like a great deal. For example, 57%, 63%, 72%, etc. These are all unique numbers that grab attention AND offer more than half off the ticket value. This type of discount is compelling.

2. Scarcity

To run an effective special you have to establish scarcity – which means limiting the quantity available. Do not try to fake this! Set a fixed amount of your product/subscription and hold to it until people buy out. We generally recommend starting with 100. This is easy to communicate and checks the criteria of staying scarce.

If the first 100 units sell out within hours open up some more! That’s the beauty of running a membership site – your inventory is virtually limitless. So increment another 100 to keep control of your demand and scarcity.

3. Time Restriction

The last rule is to create some time restriction around your special. In other words, establish a start and end date for the sale with clear communication and “expiration” terms. People are generally lazy and likely to put things off. That’s just our nature. So you have to provide healthy incentive if you want action.

We suggest a 3-4 day window towards the end of the week. For example – a Thursday through Saturday window. This gives people enough time to consider the special while not letting them sit on it for too long. It also gives them a weekend day to use if their work week is too hectic.

*Important – do not start your deal on a Monday! People are getting into their week on Monday and less likely to focus on your special. Wait until later in the week when things have calmed down and their thinking towards the weekend (rest).

And that’s all there is to it. If you follow this framework you’ll see sales.

Sales Funnel Overview

This is a quick overview on sales funnel basics. It talks about how we view and manage our sales funnel at member(dev).

**Please forgive the terrible background noise 🙂

This video provides an overview of how we define a sales funnel at member(dev).

Sales funnels are a critical piece of any membership site. A proper sales funnel is distinguished by different stages, which make up a full customer lifecycle. These stages will be used to guide the customer lifecycle and inform your sales strategy. So it’s essential to make sure you define each stage of your funnel.

Here’s how we break down our sales funnel –

A = Audience
Your audience is the top layer of users who watch or follow you. These can be social media followers, people who show up to hear you speak, etc. They are aware of you.

S = Subscriber
Your subscribers are the top middle layer of users who have subscribed to your content. This means they’ve given you an email and are subsequently on your mailing list. You can communicate with these users regularly via email blast/automations.

M = Member
Your members are the bottom middle layer of users who have created a [free] account with you. They’ve established membership by having a deeper level of commitment – i.e. login or access to something exclusive to members only. This may include membership in the form of a free trial – or – simply free access to limited resources. Regardless, these users are prime for the final level of becoming a customer.

C = Customer
Your customers are the bottom layer of users who have purchased something from you. This is the end goal of the funnel and highest level of trust in the customer lifecycle.

Users who have purchased something from you have made their way through the funnel and should now be nurtured into repeat customers and/or advocates, which we’ll cover in another post!

How to Plan a Membership Site Launch

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Where does it come from?

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

Why do we use it?

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English.

Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).