New Members for Your Membership Site

Five Ways to Rapidly Get New Members for Your Membership Site

I’m going to share five tricks of the trade for rapidly getting new paying members for your site. Remember that procuring new members for your membership site is the goal to focus on as you build your online empire.

Need more members? Check out these ideas…

1. Offer Charter Pricing

The idea behind this strategy is to lock in a low price for life to the first X number of people who purchase within a specific time period.

For example, you might offer the first 150 members who purchase their membership within two weeks after the launch date a low price of $9.99 per month… for life. Even when you raise the price, your charter members will never pay more.

This accomplishes the following:

1. It generates sales, because people don’t want to miss out on the best deal. Why pay more when you can get a discount on the exact same offer?

2. It makes charter members feel special (as they are!). That’s because you’re not just offering them a good deal, you’re also recognizing them as “charter members.” And when people feel special, they tend to be more loyal… which means you’ll retain a good number of your charter members.

Here’s the next strategy for getting more members…

2. Create a $1.00 Trial for New Members for Your Membership Site

You’ve got prospects who are really interested in your membership site offer, but they’re a little skeptical. They’ve been burned before on offers that seemed almost too good to be true. So, how do you get this type of buyer off the fence and clicking your “join now” button?

Answer: offer them a $1 trial.

Most people can afford a dollar really easily, so this is a virtually risk-free way for them to find out what’s actually inside your site. And since charging $1 gets you their payment information, you’re set up to do recurring billing (at the full monthly rate) just as soon as the trial period ends.

End result? You get a flood of new members coming in for a $1… getting impressed by what they see inside… and staying on as fully paying members once the trial is over. It’s a great way to quickly turn prospects into cash-paying customers!

Here’s another way…

3. Splinter Content

The idea behind this strategy is to splinter off a month’s worth of content and sell it as a low-cost tripwire product. You then sell the membership site on the backend of this offer. Naturally, anyone who likes the product is going to be extremely interested in the membership, which makes this an easy sale.

Here’s what you need to do:

• As needed, create a new introduction and conclusion to the content to make it clear that it’s part of a membership site (and that readers can become members).

• Include the benefits of the membership site and a strong call to action at the end of the product.

• If there are any links to other membership resources mentioned in the content, send readers to the membership sales page instead.

• Review the rest of the content to be sure it makes sense as a standalone tripwire offer.

• Attach a low price to the offer, such as $10.

• Promote the membership inside a series of follow-up emails that you send to customers who purchase the splintered offer.

Here’s the next idea…

4. Use Time-Sensitive Incentives for New Members for Your Membership Site

Sometimes prospects are really interested in an offer, but they decide they’ll purchase it later. Maybe “later” is after they sleep on it, after they talk to a partner about it, or even just when they get home.

Except you know the problem: “later” never comes. People get busy. They forget about your offer. And the longer they’re away from your sales page, the less they’re going to feel like buying. All that enthusiasm you generated for your offer just fades away.

Here’s the solution: offer some sort of time-sensitive incentive. This encourages people to buy right now, rather than putting it off for later and forgetting about it. For example, you can offer:

• A discount that’s only available for a limited time or to a limited number of people.

• A bonus offer that’s only available for a limited time or to a limited number of people.

• A combination of a bonus and a discount that’s only available for a limited time or to a limited number of people.

For example:

• The first 100 people to join now will get 50% off their first six months of membership!

• Join now and you’ll get access to a private support group for FREE! Others pay $10 per month for this offer, but it’s yours free if you join by [expiration date].

• Use coupon code [insert coupon code] to take 25% off your monthly membership fee – but hurry, this offer ends [date] or whenever 200 people have taken advantage of the offer, whichever happens first!

And finally…

5. Motivate Marketing Partners: Affiliates Will Help You Get New Members for Your Membership Site

Just because you’ve built an affiliate program or have joint venture partners doesn’t mean those partners are going to promote regularly. That’s why you need to give them a little nudge from time to time to motivate them to promote the offer just as hard as you promote it.

For example:

• Create a launch event. Here’s where you put together an incentive package and the emails and other marketing materials for a launch event that lasts about a week.

• Organize an affiliate contest. For this tactic, you offer your affiliates the chance to win cash prizes if they top your sales leaderboard during a specific time period.

• Give affiliates coupon codes to distribute. This works best if the coupon codes have an expiration date (which motivates your partners to distribute them sooner rather than later).

• Run special offers. For example, you might offer a 36-hour flash sale, and give your partners a heads-up at least a week or two in advance.

• Offer exclusive incentives. Here you give select marketing partners exclusive incentives to pass onto their customers. For example, you might create a unique landing page for the partner and offer a bonus package to their customers.

It’s also a good idea to motivate your partners through regular (weekly) emails which include announcements of sales, events and coupon codes, access to fresh marketing materials, training materials, and even case studies of other successful marketing partners.

Your Turn to Focus on New Members for Your Membership Site

Your assignment for this lesson is to go through each of the five tactics mentioned above and plan how to implement them in your business. Answer these questions:

• What content will you splinter to create a entry-level product?

• What exactly do you plan to do to motivate marketing partners?

• What type of time-sensitive incentives will you offer?

Once you formulate your plan for getting new paying members for your site, you’ll be ready to implement everything you’ve learned.

EXAMPLE: There was a special charter membership price point for this online marketing site when it launched allowing members to lock-in at the best price. Jimmy also regularly offers incentives to get new members … and provides those same incentives for existing members as well so his loyal customers keep getting extra benefits.

Here’s a quick recap of the five essential components that we unpacked about membership sites…

1. Market Criteria. This is where you learned how to pick your target market, your topic, your slant (USP) and your brand.

2. Model Choice. This is where you decided what type of membership model is best for you to set up.

3. Metrics Calculation. This is where you figured out how much you’re going to charge per month and how many members you need to get to your target income.

4. Member Content. This is where you decided what type of deliverables to make available to your members every month.

5. Monthly Calendar. This is where you set a schedule that allows you to manage all of the important pieces of running your membership site.

Plus, we’ve mixed in a lot of other lessons and ideas to further strengthen these core concepts. It’s time for you to get to work!

If you haven’t yet scheduled time to get your membership site up and running, that time has arrived. Because the sooner you do, the sooner you’ll have your own profitable membership site up and running!

I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.