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Membership sites can be very profitable indeed; but maintaining them is no walk in the park, especially if you don’t have the proper knowledge or experience.

Here are the most common challenges encountered by membership site owners, and the steps you can take to resolve these issues.

1) You have to provide excellent content or products on a consistent basis.

To keep members happy and satisfied, you have to provide quality content. Unless you’re happy creating the content yourself, you’re better off outsourcing the task to qualified freelancers, so you can focus on the moneymaking aspects of your business.

When you outsource, you may run the risk of hiring incompetent ghostwriters. That’s why you should test them with a small assignment first to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Once you’ve chosen your ideal freelancers, ask them if they can provide the same type of quality content on a consistent basis.

Before you launch your membership site, make sure that you have already found the best freelancers or ghostwriters for the job, and that they are committed to providing their services every month.

Keep the contact details of other good freelancers. In case your main ones fail to deliver due to any reason, you can choose the 2nd or 3rd best to fill in their positions. 

2) Reports indicate that the average member cancels after 3 months. 

Even if you have monthly income coming in, you need to continuously promote your membership sites so that new members can replace the ones who have cancelled. 

However, your ultimate aim is to keep your members from canceling by providing excellent products and services. Overdeliver and strive to exceed their expectations.

As an example, let’s say you’re providing quality PLR products and teaching your members how to make money with them through a step-by-step system. If your techniques and products really work, and their ROI (return on investment) is high, they’d be crazy to cancel their membership.

3) Membership sites have lower conversion rates than other site models.

Since membership sites charge monthly, people are more doubtful of joining because they have to shed out money every month without knowing if it’s truly worth it. So how can you resolve this?

Forced continuity is the answer. You can set up a free trial offer or a special deal such as a “$1 trial for 30 days.” You can then bill them monthly after the trial period, unless they cancel.

Forced continuity has gotten a negative reputation because either some customers are not aware of the monthly charges, or the membership site owner did not make the forced continuity statement clear on his website.

That’s why you should clearly state that your members can cancel anytime, and tell them exactly how to do it. Give them your helpdesk url, email, or phone number as an added assurance that they may contact you if they want to cancel.

If you can set up a system where the members can automatically cancel by themselves, it will be a huge advantage since some members might be too hesitant to ask for a cancellation (hence they won’t join in the first place).

4) Members can’t handle information overload.

Many membership sites simply provide too many materials that tend to get members confused.

Giving enormous amounts of valuable stuffs is an effective strategy to keep members; but it may backfire if the members don’t know what to do with everything you’ve given them.

Consider providing step-by-step, foolproof instructions on how to use the membership products. Unless you know your members’ knowledge or experience level, don’t assume. Ask your members to fill up a survey so you’ll know how to treat the majority of them. If there are many differing opinions or if in doubt, explain everything as if you’re doing it to a 12-year old.

5) You may have to deal with some unethical members (Members using one-time credit cards; those who sign up, download everything, and then cancel immediately; those who share their login info).

What you can do is to blacklist these unethical members so you can avoid having them as your customers in the future.

You may also use a download protection software like DL Guard to prevent members from sharing their download details.

Since we can’t do much about these issues, don’t waste your energy on them; just focus on the more important aspects of your business.

6) Credit card has been declined or has expired.

Use a membership management solution that allows a reminder email to be automatically sent to any member whose card has expired or has been declined.

The way the software works is it will automatically ask members to update their credit card details if it fails to rebill them. Members will regain access once they have given valid credit card information.

If this is not feasible for you, you (or someone you hired) can always contact them to update their information to restore their account access.

Operating and maintaining a membership site can be challenging, but the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages. In this article, you discovered how to handle the most common dilemmas encountered by membership site owners. Are you now ready to cash in on this billion-dollar industry?

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If you’re considering a membership site for your niche, you’ve got a few decisions to make about the nature of your membership site. Not all site models are created equal and some models may be more appropriate for certain types of sites than others.

Here are the membership models to choose from and what type of niches work best with them.

Autoresponder membership site:

This model is all handled through your autoresponder program, like GetResponse.

You set up weekly or monthly training for your members and can have a fixed length of time that the messages will be delivered (like a year or six months). Once the autoresponder is set up, you just have to promote the site.

All the new members come in at the start of the autoresponder sequence and proceed through the lessons.

This membership site type is appropriate if you don’t need to consistently update the content.

You could use this model for something timeless, like parenting or gardening. You wouldn’t want to use it for stock trading or something dealing with the world of high tech.

Your training might be out of date for these niches within six months and you’d have to update it consistently.

Forum-based membership site:

These membership sites are based in forums, primarily. There may be supplementary reports or other training, but a lot of the action takes place in the forum. You’ll need to have a forum platform installed and make sure to moderate posts, or assign moderators.

Forums work best if there is some type of challenge or team effort involved. Group participation can really help add more content to a site and older members can teach younger members.

If your niche would thrive with a group participation element, and you don’t mind being very hands on with your site in its initial stages, a forum-based membership site can be a good fit.

Just make to sure establish clear rules for your forum and keep the content fresh.

Blog-based membership site:

A blog-based membership site is a password protected blog where you make new training posts on a regular basis. Only members can gain access to the posts and they can leave comments on the posts, or you can block comments.

Blogs are easy to update and they can be a good choice if you are intimidated by more complex website building. Unlike forums, blogs allow you to maintain the authority within your website and deliver the majority of the training yourself. You’ll need to be there to post several articles, or pre-load your content for several months at a time.

You can also use the blog as a platform to deliver audio or video training.

These membership site choices are among the most popular out there. Once you decide how involved you want to be and consider the needs of your niche, you’ll be on your way to selecting the right membership site model.

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