5 Tips to Create Membership, Subscription Sites Using WordPress

It might sound very difficult to create a successful WordPress membership site but since so many webmasters manage to achieve it, it obviously isn’t impossible to do.

Of course, success doesn’t come overnight and very often it takes time and effort to launch and maintain a WordPress membership site that has hundreds and thousands of subscribers. Here are some tips to help you make your WordPress membership site a successful one.

1. A Good WordPress Plugin

The first thing you can’t go without if you want to make a successful WordPress membership site is a plugin that handles all or most of the tasks around building a membership site. There are several WordPress plugins, such as WPMU DEV Membership or WishList Member, to name a few that deserve attention and if you want to learn more about them, have a look at this review of WordPress membership solutions.

2. Remarkable Content

Obviously, the centerpiece of your WordPress membership site is the content you offer. You can’t afford to offer sub-par content because if you do, your subscribers will soon leave you. A strategy that works great for many webmasters is called drip-feeding. With drip-feeding you publish series of articles that are closely related one to the other and this serves as the bait to retain your users.

However, not only the content you offer to your members must be remarkable. You will also need lots of free content with great quality to promote your site and raise your rankings with search engines. You can’t go without a good free content section on your site and you also may want to submit articles for free to other reputable blogs in your niche.

3. Affordable Fees

If your fees are outrageous, even the best content won’t help you retain most of you subscribers. The trick here is to offer good value for the money. You need to try what works for you. For instance, if you charge $5 a month and you provide 1 or 2 articles only, this can make you more money than if you charge $25 and offer 10 articles because more people will be willing to sign for a $5 fee and your expenses to produce content are lower.

A flexible payment policy is also recommendable. You can offer monthly, quarterly, and annual subscriptions. Since you are getting money in advance, offer generous discounts for the annual subscription. You also need to have a free trial because users love it and if you live to their expectations during the free trial, you will certainly see an increase in membership.

4. Active Promotion

With so many free and paid blogs around, you need to spread the word for you. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all other social media you can think of to actively build yourself as an expert and promote your blog. Comments on other blogs and guest posts also do a good job to promote your site.

5. Ease of Use

Finally, if you care about your members, you need to make it easy and effortless to use your site. Ease of use starts with registration (no long forms with tons of data), goes through site navigation, and ends with payment options. Most likely the majority of your members will pay via PayPal and/or credit card but there will always be members who favor other payment processors, so offer as many ways to accept payments as possible.

Running a successful membership site has its intricacies but once you learn the basics and keep to high standards, sooner or later success will come.

Guest Post Ada who is the Blogger Relations Manager at WinkPress, which is a web resource about leveraging WordPress, its themes, and plugins to create versatile and unusual websites.

Also See : Create Question Answer Website in WordPress: Best Q&A Themes, Plugins

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