Subscriptions: Transform Your Business with a Membership Website

Connect more deeply with your audience.

Want to build a loyal community, generate recurring revenue, and share your expertise with the world? A membership site might be the perfect solution. Let’s explore the incredible benefits they offer.

In today’s digital landscape, membership sites are booming. From exclusive content and online courses to supportive communities and direct interaction, membership websites present a unique value proposition for both creators and members.

Create a sustainable income stream while doing what you love. Build a dedicated community of people who are passionate about your work and establish yourself as a leader in your field.

In this post, we’ll dive into the many advantages of creating a membership site and how it can transform your business.

If you are just beginning your membership site, one of the most important decisions you can make about it is how to structure your subscriptions.

This type of pricing structure would entail only offering one type of subscription with no other levels. An example of this type of pricing would be to provide a monthly subscription membership for $19 a month for access to a personal fitness website.

To keep your subscribers interested, returning to your site, and continuing to pay for your membership, you would need to update your content on a periodic basis. You can decide whether that would be occasionally, weekly, or on a monthly basis. You can explain this to your members so they know exactly what they’re going to receive after they become a member.

With a single-tier subscription membership, offered monthly or annually, you could provide member perks:

• a personal-type interaction such as a webinar
• a one-on-one chat with individual members included
• a video with relevant and timely content pertaining to current trends
• a podcast with the same as the above
• goal PDFs that are printable downloads

For this type of membership I would recommend adding a forum, such as bbPress or wpForo, and potentially a social networking plugin like BuddyPress, so that members can interact with each other. If you have a forum, be sure to check it and post on it from time to time to keep your members engaged.

The possibilities are endless with this, but – as with all membership sites – determine how you can best showcase your unique skillset and keep your members involved with your website.

Popular and universal naming conventions follow:

• Bronze, Silver, and Gold memberships
• Basic, Standard, and Premium
• Free, Pro, and Elite

MemberMouse has an in-depth article about creating membership levels that make sense for your subscribers. They discuss news-type sites, including print and digital materials, and give some ideas for more brand-centric naming. A quick example of this, created around a yoga website, might be the 3 tiers: Yoga Hobbyist, Yoga Enthusiast, Yoga Guru. They also mention time-delimited memberships that expire after 6 months or a year, usually on a news or magazine site, at which point the member can decide whether to resubscribe.

You could ask AI to assist you with creative naming ideas around your brand, the types of services, or the content you have on the site.

You can see an example of tiered pricing at our website.

Until MemberPress issues more shortcodes for creating the Courses on theme builder pages, you mostly have to let the Ready Launch pages form the Course content. This, at the moment, doesn’t offer options for navigation besides custom-coding the Ready Launch templates and overriding them in a child theme. However, this is obviously a know-how-to-code implementation.

Having developed with WP Courseware, LearnDash, and MemberPress Courses, I like MemberPress for their relative ease of use.

However, if you’re going to offer quizzes and certificates, items that are usually innate to a course environment, then WP Courseware and LearnDash are currently more cost-effective choices. With both WP Courseware and LearnDash, you can create memberships and offer your courses.

The membership plugin developers decided to branch out and create courses. The course plugin developers did the same and added memberships and subscriptions.

However you decide to create your membership website, start today!

Much success to you!