Add Value to Your Membership Site

If you can elevate your training and add value, then it’s going to help both you and your members in multiple ways. Your members will get “top shelf” solutions to their problems, which improves retention. 

And your site will get a really good reputation in your niche, which helps you establish your authority, become a dominant force in your niche, and allow you to charge premium prices for your membership.

With this in mind, let’s quickly talk about how to add value to your membership…

Provide One-On-One Help

If you’re offering training to students, then in most cases you’re likely offering “one size fits all” training. That is, you offer solutions, and you can even tell your audience how to customize those solutions to meet their needs, but ultimately your students need to do the work of customizing solutions.

Let’s take weight loss as an example. You can hand over a set of meal plans to people and give them all sorts of instruction on nutrition and exercise to help enable weight loss.

And yet your members will still need to do some customizations. Everyone will need to figure out how many calories to eat per day. And everyone will need to customize their meal plans to suit their individual needs and preferences. For example, someone with celiac disease will need to know how to customize a meal plan to be gluten-free. Likewise, a vegetarian may need some custom help if a lot of recipes are meat based.

So, you can add a lot of value to your membership by providing this custom help in the form of coaching or consulting. For example, you can provide one-on-one help to members of a weight loss site to assist them in creating custom meal plans.

Or maybe you have a copywriting training site. Here you can offer one-on-one help in the form of sales letter critiques designed to improve a sales letter.

Or let’s say you have a dog-training membership site. Your members can submit videos of specific problem behaviors to you, and you can offer custom advice that’s specific to their unique situation.

Now this almost goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway. Obviously, you should reserve this sort of one-on-one help for your premium memberships. Offering one-on-one help can be quite time-intensive, so you want to make sure you get paid well for your time.

If creating a premium membership doesn’t fit in with your funnel plans, then you can offer one-on-one coaching as a premium upgrade/upsell.

Offer Advanced Solutions

If you want to boost the perceived value of your membership site, then offer solutions for intermediate or advanced people in your niche.

See, a lot of membership marketers go straight to creating memberships for niche beginners. And that’s great, because beginners tend to be a hungry market who gobble up every bit of information they can get their hands on. So, creating a membership for beginners is a good idea.

But the point here is that you don’t want to appeal to beginners ONLY. You want to create content and memberships for intermediate and advanced level folks too. Two things happen when you do this:

#1 - You’ll have a built-in audience for your advanced membership if you’re already serving beginners. You can just add advanced information into your funnel, and the beginners who’ve been purchasing all your beginner-level information will start purchasing your advanced level information too.

#2 - You can charge a premium. As mentioned, advanced information has a higher perceived value, which means you can charge a premium for it.

Distribute Content in High-Value Formats

The way you format your content will affect the perceived value. Indeed, the exact same content that’s simply formatted in different ways will carry different values.

Text-based products generally tend to have the lowest perceived value, followed by audio content, video content, live group events (like a webinar), and one-on-one coaching. Secondly, courses tend to have higher perceived values than plain guides or reports.

So, for example, let’s suppose you’re thinking of creating some sort of text guide and adding it to your membership site. If you turn the content into a multimodule course instead – such as turning each chapter into a module – this course will carry a higher perceived value than the original guide. And if you take it one step further and convert the text course into a video course, you’ll further increase the value. The end result is that you can charge more for this video course than you can for the exact same content that’s packaged as an ebook.

Which brings us to the next point…

Another thing you’ll want to consider are the labels you attach to the content inside your membership site, as some labels can lower or raise the perceived value of the information.

The big example here is the word “ebook,” which tends to carry a low perceived value. Everyone and their uncle seem to be putting out ebooks. Your audience has downloaded tons of both free and paid ebooks. You can’t peek around a single corner of the internet without seeing something about ebooks.

The problem here is that since it’s so easy to create and distribute ebooks, everyone and anyone can do it. And the end result is that plenty of these ebooks end up being very low quality. They’re poorly written, they’re riddled with factual errors, they’re full of fluff, and overall, they’re just not very good quality.

As a result, people tend to associate the word “ebook” with something of low quality. And that’s why you don’t want to have “ebooks” inside your membership site. Instead, just refer to any ebooks by another name, such as “guides” or “systems” or “blueprints.” Even using the word “report” will carry a higher connotation.

Provide Additional Tools and Information

The idea here for adding value is to simply stock your membership site with additional tools and information to help your members solve their problems or achieve their goals.

Let’s suppose your membership site revolves around training, such as a multimodule course that you drip to your members over time. What you want to do is think about else you can offer to your members to help them achieve their goals.

For example, maybe your membership site is designed to help people lose weight, so you send out a new module every week or so that helps your members achieve their weight goals. Now you want to think about what else you can offer your members to make it faster, easier, and/or more affordable to meet their goals while adding value to your site.

For instance, here are ideas of resources to include that are just related to the exercise component of weight loss:

·         A video exercise library, so that people can follow along with workouts.

·         Information about high-intensity interval training, which allows people to burn more calories while spending less time exercising.

·         Bodyweight exercises, so that people can save money since they don’t to purchase gym memberships or weight equipment for a home gym.

·         An app to help people plan and track their exercise routines.

And similar. Likewise, you can add the same sorts of tools and information and tools for the nutrition component of a membership site. Anything you can provide to make it easier for members to achieve their goals will be well-received by members and boost the overall value of your membership.

The point is, you can add value to your site by adding actual products, as well as providing advanced information, sharing content in a high-value format, and providing one-on-one help.