Key Sections for a Membership Site

A membership website can be a valuable tool for a business owner to use in creating not only a reliable income, but also a huge following of people that will help you to establish yourself as an expert in your field and help you to become the go-to guy or gal for the services or products that you are providing.

When creating a membership site, however, there are some key sections or areas that are crucial to the success of the site itself.  You want your members to feel valued and to get the most value from the membership as well.

The key areas for a membership site include:

• Forum
• Learning center
• Help section or service center
• Affiliate center.

These areas are just the beginning of what you can offer, but are some essentials.  The forum allows the members a place to interact not only with you, but with each other, posting their questions and concerns, which will help you to know not only their needs and desires, but also what they are benefiting from and what you can scrap.

The learning center is the meat of the matter.  This is where the real focus should be given, and where you will provide good quality content for your members, whether it be in the form of valuable information in articles, ebooks, special reports, video tutorials, step by step screen captures with detailed notes or audio learning tutorials. Whatever the case, this is what your members are truly paying for.

Another important section to have in a membership site is a help desk  or service center.  The last thing you want is for your members to get stuck and not be able to find what they need.  You will want to provide good quality customer service through a help desk, whether you do this yourself or outsource it.

Finally, an affiliate center, though optional, is a good option to have in a membership site.  Why wouldn’t you want your members to refer others to you? It will certainly be worth sharing commissions with them in order to gain more members in the long run.

These are the key areas of a membership website and though there are other areas that could be included, these key areas will help you to create a successful membership site if done well. If you still need to determine what you need to use to create your membership website, then I would suggest that you use WordPress and WishList membership plugin. Many people have tried to turn WordPress into a membership site but in the past it’s been quite tricky.

There are some fabulous plugins out there, but you had to “tweak this” and “tweak that” and if you aren’t technical, it becomes very frustrating. That’s why I was very excited when I saw WishList Member. It’s a membership solution that was specifically built for WordPress.