How to Plan the Content in Your Membership Site

Do you have a membership site or you are thinking about creating one? Then you know that scheduling the content for your membership site can get complicated and requires significant early planning.

In today's article, we will share our tips on how to successfully plan the content for a membership site so everything will go smoothly in your launch!

Before we dive into the content planning process, let's review what a membership site is and why it is important to plan your content in advance:

What is a Membership Site?

In the world of online courses, a membership site is a learning program that offers gated, exclusive content to its members.

You can charge your members a monthly or annual fee for them to join your space and get access to the membership content.

The content delivered inside a membership site can vary depending on the nature of your business: from online courses to digital products, live events, community space and so on... You can treat an online course as a membership site simply by setting a monthly fee, or create a whole membership ecosystem where members who join get access to a collection of courses, digital products, live events, a chat or community and more.

If you want to learn more about what membership sites are, check out this article from our blog: How to Create a Membership Site and Generate Recurring Revenue

Why You Should Plan Your Membership Site Content in Advance?

Now let’s cover why it is important to prepare your membership site's content schedule in advance.

Preplanning the content for your site has many benefits:

• Easier planning: a reason why a lot of creators choose to plan their membership site's content in advance is simply that it is much easier to do so when you are starting out and your ideas and goals are fresh in your mind.
• Keeps you focused on the result: your customers buy from you because you are helping them reach a specific goal or result. Planning your content in advance can help you see the bigger picture and make sure that your content is aimed toward a specific end goal.
• Maps your customers' journey: if you plan most or all of your content before the launch of your membership, it will help you understand what the customers' journey looks like within your site.
• Better for the long run: planning your content in advance will also save you a lot of time in the long run, since you are doing all the work now.
• Increases sales and conversions: potential customers who want to buy your membership site want to know what to expect from it, so it is good to show them a content calendar of what they will get if they purchase access to your site!

So is it important that you start planning the kind of content you are going to release on your membership site right now.

That said, you don't necessarily have to create every piece of content in detail ahead of time - especially if you plan to update your membership site with additional private content for many years to come. As long as you have an idea of what kind of content you are going to produce, when you are going to publish it and how frequently, this will be enough for you to take advantage of the benefits listed above.

If you need help with planning you membership site content, consider hiring a virtual assistant!

Tips on How to Plan your Membership Site's Content

Now that you learned all about the benefits of planning your membership site's content in advance, let's see our tips to help you do it.

Keep the Result in Mind

The content you plan for your membership site should be aligned with the end result, the benefits and the goals your students will achieve if they enroll in your program.

Structuring content around a specific result is especially important with online courses: while an online course aims to help students reach a certain result in the fastest way possible so at the end of the program they will not need the course anymore, a membership site aims to retain its students and should help them achieve and maintain a result (or series of results), without them leaving the program.

Fitness courses are a great example of this: students who join a fitness membership site do it to achieve a result (i.e. losing weight or becoming healthier). Assuming they enjoy the content of the site and receive value from it, they will not stop accessing the course simply because they have reached their result, as their goal is also to keep being healthy or keep their ideal weight.

So try to align your membership site content with the result of your program. Why do your customers purchase your membership site? And does your content help them reach their goals?

Keep Your Audience in Mind

Your membership site content should also be tailored to your audience and their needs. So while you are planning, keep in mind what your audience wants to see, what kind of content they resonate better to and want to consume.

If you have no idea where to start, then try to carry out market research to understand who your target market is and how you can serve them better. Learn all about this here: Why You Should Do Market Research Before Starting an Online Course Business + How to Do it

Be Consistent in Frequency and Delivery

Another important tip on how to plan the content for your membership site is to ensure that you are delivering new lessons on a schedule and you stay consistent with the frequency of your content releases.

Students who join your membership site will expect to receive new content on a set time basis unless you offer all the content upfront.

The frequency with which you deliver new content can be established before a new student join your membership, so it is important to make sure that your customers are aware of what they will get once they buy your program to avoid bad surprises!

Use Heights Platform's Climb Outline

The Climb Outline is a feature that lets creators create a visual map of their online course, by dragging and dropping content and structuring it into different sections (courses, modules, lessons). This feature is especially useful for new creators who have many different ideas, as it enables you to clearly visualize the path of your lessons.

In the early stages of planning the content for your membership site, the Climb Outline can help you come up with lesson ideas that you can develop and organize later.