The next step is to decide what kind of content you’re going to offer on your membership site. You should avoid overwhelming your members and choose only the types of content that meet your targets’ needs. It’s good to have a variety of formats but stick to those that are most appropriate and don’t include everything.

Content Formats Include:

• Step-by-step guides. These are guides that lead your audience through one specific project or task step by step.
• Workbooks and action plans. This is content that your members can work through and as they work through it, they start actually performing the task at hand.
• This is an easy list of things to do or check off when performing a certain task.
• A template might be appropriate for offering things like websites, blogs, invoices, or other documents your members need to create easily.
• Swipe files. A swipe file is a collection of examples, sort of like templates. They’re especially common for advertisers, who use swipe file ads to get ideas.
• Videos can include screen shares, face-to-face videos, recorded webinars, interviews with experts, and so on.
• Audio recordings. These can also be interviews, podcasts, music files (stock music), or sound effects.
• eBooks and reports. You can package content into ebooks or reports on a common topic or task.
• Mastermind or coaching calls. Through your membership site, you can offer one-on-one calls for mentoring.
• You can host webinars through your membership site available only to members, including access to recordings.

• Create a regular newsletter with helpful tips, news from your industry, or anything else your target market would find helpful.
• Hold contests for your members where you give them a challenge and reward the one who does it best.
• Content Archives. Take content from your site or blog and put it together in a searchable archive for your members to find.
• Community Forum. Offer an exclusive community forum for your members where they can talk and share ideas with other members.
• Access to influencers. If you have relationships with industry experts or influencers, give your members a chance to interact with them. Hold a webinar where they answer your members’ questions.

How to Organize Your Content

According to your topic and membership model, identify the key steps, categories and subcategories, and topics and subtopics that you’ll create content for. This also provides the structure for your site when you go to set it up.

Consider the core problems your members join your site in order to solve. How do you best create solutions for those problems through your content? What point are members at when they join? Where do they want to go from here and where do they want to eventually reach? What do they want to know?

If you have a step-by-step membership site that drip-feeds information or a fixed-term course with a beginning and end, you should have all of the steps broken down and the content identified for each step. You should also include the timing for your members to move through the steps.

An all-in buffet membership site that offers a library of information needs to be easy to search. Your members should be able to easily find the information they need. For this reason, break the content into sub-categories and/or format types. Brainstorm the type of content items that would go into each.

If members will be joining at different levels, help them find where they need to start. One way to do this is to break down your content into levels of competence or progress through your topic. You may want to create sub-categories from beginner to advanced, in addition to topic sub-categories.

For a newsletter-based or community-based site, you’ll need categories and topics identified so that members know where to look for the information they need. On a community-based site, each member will have their favorite discussion sub-topics. You might include a general forum as well as specific sub-categories.

Determining Content Formats

Your specific topic will in some ways determine the content formats you’ll offer. Considering your topic and audience, how will your members best consume your content? For example:

• If you’re teaching people how to build websites or blogs, you might offer templates and cheat sheets.
• A fitness blog might have audio content people can use while they’re working out.
• Computer-related tasks would include screenshots and other visual how-to’s.
• A coaching membership site would naturally have some interaction with the coach through webinars or one-on-one sessions.

Put yourself in the shoes of your members and try to imagine what content formats would best suit their needs.

Repurposing Existing Content

Before you start creating new content, look at the content you already have and see if there’s anything you can use. Usable content could include blog posts, eBooks, reports, videos, coaching content, podcasts, webinars, email templates, swipe files, or checklists. This is a shortcut that helps you get started quickly.

The best membership sites offer content that’s exclusive and only available to members. You can create new content from your old content by repurposing it. This means altering it in some way, such as adding new information, or changing it to another format.

For example, you can take a tips blog post and turn it into a checklist or cheat sheet. You can transcribe videos or podcasts to create articles or blog posts. Blog posts can be bundled together and put in step-by-step order to create eBooks and reports.

Once you’ve gathered all the existing content you can use, you can then figure out how much you need to create. You don’t need to create everything in advance.

How much you need to create depends on several factors:

• What you need before you open the doors of your site depends on its membership site model
• What content will people need to access straightaway and what will be drip-fed over time? You don’t need to create every issue of your newsletter right now. If you have a six-month course, it doesn’t need to be completely finished when a new member joins. Naturally, if you have a library-type site, you’ll need a great deal more content upfront.
• How much time will you have for content creation once the site is launched? If you’re not anticipating having much time, you should create more of the content now. If you’ll be adding as you go, determine how much time you need on an ongoing basis.
• Consider what content is time sensitive. If you’re offering a newsletter with up-to-the-minute information, obviously this will need to be created after the site is launched.
• Consider how long the content will take to create and decide when and how often you’ll work on it. Make it a regular part of your working schedule.
• Will you create this content, or will you outsource or delegate content creation to someone else? If you’re delegating or outsourcing, determine exactly how you’re going to do this, including the timeframe.