Are you a thought leader or expert in your field wondering how to get paid for all that knowledge? Are you a consultant successfully charging for one-on-one engagements, but looking to help a larger number of people through an online course or membership site?
We interact with a broad range of membership sites and through these interactions have zeroed in on 3 success factors that thought leaders and subject matter experts specifically should keep in mind while working on their WordPress membership site.
Background: Understand your sales funnel.
A sales funnel is a customer acquisition model. Potential customers enter at the top of the funnel, and paying customers come out the bottom. The concept dates back to the late 19th century with the AIDA model. There are many variations on the sales funnel. Which variation you choose doesn’t matter as much as sticking to one and using it to focus your efforts as you work to acquire paying members.
Here is a simple sales funnel that works extremely well for thought leaders building a membership site with WordPress.
The funnel starts with visitors to your site. Some of those visitors will join your mailing list. Some of those list members will become paying members. Finally some of those members will continue to pay monthly, annually, or will up-sell into high cost products.
The 3 key success factors we want to highlight in this article map to the top 3 levels of this sales funnel. In the beginning, you’ll want to work on your funnel from the top down. There’s no point in working on a retention strategy if you don’t have customers. And there’s no point in working on your conversion strategies if you don’t have visitors coming into the top of your funnel.
Later on, when your funnel is running more or less smoothly, you can analyze the metrics for each level in the funnel to figure out where to most effectively spend your time. Start with a focus on getting visitors to your site—the best way to get visitors is to create lots and lots of high quality content.
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Focus on the (free) content.
The center of any system to build an audience and convert paying members has to be lots and lots of high quality content. You’ve probably heard this advice before. You’re going to hear it from us again and hopefully it will stick.
We put “get traffic” at the top of our sales funnel diagram and maybe you’re hoping to get some tips for marketing on social media or running ads to generate traffic. The reality is that these types of marketing efforts are meaningless without quality content on the other end. Conversely, there are so many cases of people with incredible content and zero outside marketing building lucrative businesses and membership sites.
Let’s break down a bit more what we mean by content.
Lots and Lots
Publish as much as possible. I don’t know how many posts or videos you can produce per week, but produce as many as you can and make sure you are spending as much time as you can writing, recording, editing, and publishing.
Get your ideas written down or recorded. Don’t focus too much on the technology—simple posts and videos will do to get started. Dump content out. Organize it by concept (category) in a way that makes it easy for members to understand and learn, and THEN figure out how best to deliver it. You can always re-purpose your content later. In fact, you definitely should.
The technology you need to get started all sits within your basic WordPress site. Navigate to the WordPress Admin > Posts > Add New. That’s all.
High Quality
Focus on the medium you are best at. If you don’t like the way you look on camera, write. If you can’t write, try video. If you can’t do either, try audio. If you can’t do any of those, reconsider this whole journey because there has to be some way you can share your personality and your thoughts in a format your audience can consume.
Make sure your content is useful. Make sure there is a reason for your readers and viewers to come back for more.
Make sure your content answers real questions. It doesn’t have to answer every question, but it should answer some questions.
Make sure your content solves real problems. It doesn’t have to solve every problem, but it should solve some problems.
If possible, make content that only you can make. You can tackle popular issues and concepts that others are talking about, but make sure your version is better and uniquely you.
Free
Make your best content free. Remember, you are using your content to get as many visitors to your site as possible. Don’t hold back your best stuff. Your best content is going to do the best job to build credibility, attract loyal readers, and get your content shared socially.
Check out Travis’ article on how to improve your sales funnel and grow membership by giving something away for free if you want to explore this concept further.
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Capture Email Addresses to Build Your Mailing List
It’s particularly important for a thought leader-based membership site to capture the contact information of all their loyal readership. Your mailing list serves as a primary component of your sales funnel. Most of your early marketing, once your paid offering is launched, will go through this email list.
Email is still the best way to stay connected to your members. Posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets are not guaranteed to make it through the algorithms that determine what your followers actually see. The only algorithm you need to worry about when sending email is the spam filter algorithm. Use a qualified email marketing platform, and follow their suggestions for avoiding spam filters.
Read our guide on setting up a landing page to capture email addresses »
This guide centers on using PMPro + MailChimp to offer a “premium” piece of content on your site for free in exchange for the visitor’s contact information. As a training site, this premium content could be anything from a video to a download or just a Free level restricted post or page on your site.
Once the mailing list is set up, you can begin thinking about how you want to communicate to your list. An automatic, RSS-based email newsletter takes some of the pain of newsletter creation out of your hands. Let’s face it, when you’re just getting started, one of the most limiting factors of growth is time. While generated newsletters may not be the highest converting campaigns, it is a necessary choice if your schedule demands it. We use an RSS-based email campaign here at PMPro to send a notification for every new article in a specific “newsletter” category. It’s a painless way to keep your mailing list subscribers notified when new content is available.
If you are using another email marketing program, explore our email marketing integrations for the one that fits your needs.
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Make money by charging for access to your training.
You did it. You built an audience by creating loads of great, free content. You have a direct way to market to your loyal followers. Now it’s time to get paid.
Make a Product
Focus on developing the product itself before figuring out how to deliver it to your customers. Listen to your members. At this point, you should have many visitors to your website (top of funnel) and a percentage of those visitors on your mailing list. Read their emails and comments. Find the forums and social media platforms they are on and talk to them. Find their phone numbers and call them. Find out where they are and go meet them. Members will tell you what kind of content and in what formats they are willing to pay for, just listen.
If you’ve been making lots and lots of high quality content, you may find that your product is all of that same content repurposed in a different format. There are many ways to organize content on WordPress, from full blown courseware and learning management platforms to simple collections of posts and pages. Don’t feel the need to clever. What kinds of content do you pay for? What format does that come in? What are you good at creating?
Maybe your training is all text content, delivered through a series of well organized members-only posts or pages. Maybe your training is visual: a 5-part video series you embed on your site and restrict for members-only. Maybe your training is offered via downloadable PDFs. Maybe you’re going to charge for access to a members-only forum? Maybe you’re going to make a course with lessons and modules, quizzes, and certificates.
Get Paid
To get paid, you will need to settle on a membership plugin or some type of ecommerce solution. I’m partial to Paid Memberships Pro, but you should certainly do your research to find the best platform for your desired pricing and content delivery structure. Your specific product and delivery plan should lead you in a particular direction with respect to what WordPress plugins and ecommerce solutions you’ll want to use.
We have lots of content related to pricing and on designing a dashboard page for members. All of these articles will provide more support as you move into this next stage for your membership site.
Technology Recommendations
Here’s a list of some of the technology we recommend for a Thought Leader or Subject Matter Expert WordPress site. This article was focused on helping you create, grow, and convert an audience for your knowledge, but you will certainly need to make some choices about what platform you use to create your site. If you reach out to us via the contact form we can provide more specific solutions that fit your site’s model.
- Paid Memberships Pro to restrict content for members-only.
- User Fields to capture additional unique profile fields.
- Email Marketing integration for the third-party platform of your choice.
- Custom Membership Levels page layout to better fit your design goals.
- Email Templates for default membership communications that you can easily customize in PMPro.
- Code recipe to offer one time use trial memberships.
- Download Monitor Integration if you plan to restrict downloads access to members only. You can also use our built-in methods for file protection.
- If you really need a full courseware plugin, the most popular options that integrate with PMPro include LearnDash, LifterLMS and WP Courseware.
- Deliver your course content according to a schedule using the Series Add On for drip-feed content.
- Sell one-off content to members using the Addon Packages plugin for PMPro.
