Membership Sites as a Way to Grow Your Online Community

By D’vorah Lansky

I’d like to thank Kristen for hosting me as a guest on her blog, as part of my new book’s virtual blog tour. Today I’d like to share with you some thoughts regarding creating a membership community for your audience.

Providing your customers, prospects and networking connections an easy way to connect with you and interact with one another will help you to build a strong foundation of ongoing customers, future clients, and raving fans.

Your membership site can be a place for you to share both free and paid for content, display articles and downloadable resources for easy consumption, host and house your audio and video recordings.

A membership site provides your members with a central location for accessing their content and serves as an online “community center”, if you will. Your membership site also provides you with ongoing passive income.

There are several popular membership site software programs and models available today. You can turn your WordPress blog into a membership site or you can create a free standing membership site. You can charge a fixed rate or you can charge customers a monthly access fee. You can also choose whether to have all of the content available from day one, or whether you’d prefer to have new content added weekly, for example.

Your membership site can offer a general members’ area where members can access the content you’ve promised them. One model is where you program your email auto-responder system to deliver a weekly notification inviting your members to access new content in the members’ area.

You only need to program this type of membership site and auto-responder once. You just “set it and forget it.” The exact content any one member is receiving during a specific week is dependent on where he or she is in the auto-responder series. This is simple, easy and very profitable way to deliver content to your members.

Another popular model is where you deliver a live, online, weekly course via your membership site. Members login to access new content each week. If you are delivering your course via audio or video, posting the replays along with the transcripts makes for rich content that your students will benefit from.

Regardless of the membership software or the membership model you use, having a way for your members to connect with you and access the content you’ve promised them is a powerful way to build online community as well as ongoing students and clients.

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To learn more about online book marketing and to view D’vorah’s book blog visit:
http://BookMarketingMadeEasy.com

To access the full virtual tour schedule click here.

D’vorah’s book is available on Amazon.

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