The 6 step guide to setting up your membership business

A step by step guide to setting up your membership business

1.Develop what your course is about.
You have an idea and know what you want to offer now you need to get down to filing in some of the detail.
What are the objectives of what you plan to offer?
Is the subject in demand in the market place, do your own search to see what’s out there. Make sure you have an audience before you commit your energies.
What is your unique selling point, why will people come to you instead of the competition?
Define who your target market is. Understand your customers and you have a better chance of successfully pitching to his or her wants and needs.
Update your objective now you know a bit more about your strengths, customer and where you are positioning your business.

2.Decide on the business model
Is a Memberships Site business model is most appropriate for your enterprise?
You can also consider;

• Products and e-Books
• Tele-seminars and Workshops

Or indeed a combination of all three supporting the main membership site.
At this point you should be developing a structure or workflow of how the business should operate.

3.Develop the content
Do some in depth research into your subject.
Identify the main topics you intend to cover.
How are these topics going to be broken down into manageable chunks, look at how a book is broken into chapters for instance.
What course materials are you going to provide. Written is easier with the benefit that you could sell e-book, with the rise in popularity of youtube video is becoming more popular with the potential of DVD sales.
What tools are you going to need to create your content? In the main you will have something to create documents and slide with, but do you have setup to produce your very own video series.

4.Build your site
Decide on your site name, the look and feel.
What system are you going to use.

• Choosing between a bespoke pre-packaged system, typical one of those offered by one of the many internet gurus.
• Building your own for free, based on one of the popular content management offerings, of course my preference.
• Or the long route of getting someone to write you a bespoke system, something that will undoubtedly cost you an arm and a leg.

Choose your ISP host.
Load your software and get it going.
Load your content.

5.Market and launch
Decide on how you are going build your launch.
What marketing you are going to use.
Are you going to call on any affiliates to help you launch.
Get your advertising in place, such as Google adwords.
Launch it.

Of course this is an idealised situation, reality is not so sequential. At each stage you will likely do something and have to go back and revise something you did earlier, but that is in the nature of things, incremental development as they say. Undoubtedly this is not a definitive exhaustive list but rather a framework on which to build.
Each section warrants its own course of study, should you be so inclined. But with a bit of experience and knowledge under your belt you should be able to cope with the basics of each of these topics admirably.