Once you set up your membership site, it’s highly unlikely that people will naturally stumble upon it and sign up. You need to proactively attract the right people to your new site.

In this course, we’re not going to go into extensive detail on each method of marketing your membership since each one can be a course all on its own.

But here are some proven ways to promote your new membership site:

Email Your List. Contact your current email list and tell them about the site, emphasizing the benefits. Offer a special sign-up deal or early bird special to entice them. Your current list will be your easiest source of new members and should be your first marketing method.

In fact, you can test out your membership site with your current customers before you invest your time and money in other marketing strategies. That way, you’ll get immediate feedback from people who already know you. And you’ll get the bonus of being able to ask for testimonials you can use on your sales page.

Create an Affiliate Program. Create an affiliate program and have your affiliates promote your membership site. If you don’t currently have affiliates, you can approach people who have a similar audience who you already know. Otherwise, start building relationships with potential affiliates now.

There are various options for affiliate software, but your easiest route is to use a membership platform that has an affiliate program built in. If you do decide to go this direction, go back and reassess the membership platform you picked and see if you want to change it before you set everything up!

With an affiliate program, you’ll need to set the commission percentage you’ll pay. And you’ll do best if you provide your affiliates with tools to help promote you, such as email swipe files and graphics.

Create a Referral Program. Encourage existing members to tell others about your site by offering a discount or a free month as a reward for referrals. You can set up a point system where members win points by referring new sign-ups.

Create simple content that existing members can use to promote your site to others, and provide them with easy access to it. Word of mouth goes a long way, and giving them the materials to back that up will help a lot.

Joint Promotions. Create joint promotional campaigns with people in your niche or those who share your market. You promote their product or service and, in exchange, they promote your membership site.

Leveraging the presence of others in your niche means that you can take advantage of a ready-made audience that you can guarantee will have some interest in what you have to offer. You’ll be repaying the favor with a new stream of incoming potential customers.

Advertising. You can use advertising platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, or ad networks on sites specific to your niche.

It’s important to have a good idea of where your target audience might be before investing in advertising. Create promotional content that speaks directly to them to ensure that you have the best chance of encouraging sign-ups.

Social Media. There are many ways to promote your membership site on social media. In addition to announcing its launch and emphasizing the benefits, you could offer a special $1 trial or deep discount for your social media followers only.

Set up social groups to strengthen relationships with your customers, create contests on social media to increase engagement, and respond promptly and appropriately to comments to increase customer satisfaction.

Host a Free Webinar. Create a free webinar where you tell people about your membership site. A clever way to do this is to offer information related to your membership site through the webinar. Help people solve some related problem, and then use that as an example of the value they can expect from joining your site.

At the end of your webinar, offer your viewers a special deal for watching to encourage them to sign up right away.

Blog. Write about your new membership site on your blog. Again, in addition to just telling people about it, you might also offer a taste of the valuable content your readers can expect if they join, or share a review or testimonial.

Write regular blog posts that have some relevance to your site topic so that you can promote it consistently through informative content.

Guest Blog. Do the same as above but as a guest blog post. Find a blog related to your topic and offer a piece of free content. In your author bio, include a pitch for your membership site and a link where readers can sign up, or link to some free sample content from your membership. Be sure to get people’s email address before giving away the free content, so that you can follow up with information about your membership site.

Just as with joint promotions, make sure you repay the favor by inviting others within your niche to write for your blog. You’ll also have the benefit of appealing directly to their established readership.

Create a Lead Magnet. Create a free report or other piece of free content that offers a taste of your site’s value. Somewhere in the content, pitch your site and offer a sign-up link.

Use this opportunity to solve a problem for your audience within your lead magnet. Not only will you impress them with the quality of your content, it will serve as a boost to your reputation that will leave a long-lasting impression.

Creating Your Sales Page

Like any other digital product, you should have a dedicated sales page for your membership site. This is a simple page you can drive traffic to where people can sign up directly. There are many tools available for creating sales pages and your hosting platform probably offers one. Sales pages are often built into existing platforms.

Here are the elements of an effective sales page:

• The name of your site and a catchy subheading that explains who it’s for and how it will help them.
• A rundown of the benefits people will get from your site. This is often listed as bullet points as this makes the benefits easy to read.
• Specifics on what content people will find at your membership site. These would be actual categories, topics, or lessons among your content there.
• Social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials, or case studies. The purpose is to show the results you’ve already gotten for other people. It gives a realistic idea but also builds credibility. Wherever possible, include photos of people and links to their websites so visitors know they’re real.
• Who you are and why people should listen to you. Include your elevator speech and whatever qualifications, industry accreditation, or companies you’ve worked for, along with a good photo. Make sure everything here is completely relevant to your membership site’s topic.
• It’s good to add some form of FAQ even if it’s small. Include questions people have asked you previously and anticipate questions they might ask, such as, “How long do I have to access the materials?”
• What people need to know about your money-back guarantee and cancellation policy.

If you don’t already have a sales page plugin or platform built into your site, a few good software programs include:

LeadPages. Leadpages has a huge variety of templates, ranked by how well they convert. You can also host your pages directly on LeadPage, on a WordPress site, or in an html page. They even have ways to integrate your own checkout and payment processor, as well as many other integrations.

OptimizePress. OptimizePress is a WordPress plugin and theme that has a variety of templates as well as its own membership site option. OptimizePress is incredibly simple to use, utilizing a drag-and-drop element method to make creating pages quick and easy.

InstaPage. Instapage is great for collaborative page construction. Their templates are designed with conversions in mind, and they offer an excellent analytics dashboard for sales page performance tracking.

Lander. Lander uses categories to define their templates, making it even simpler to pick the right one for your audience. They also offer lots of great extra features such as Facebook integration and a dynamic text replacement tool to match your ads to your landing page copy.

Compare the different options based on your own technical skill, since it’s often easiest to go with a tool that has easy-to-use templates and which will host the page for you. Alternatively, you can just use whatever options are offered in your membership site platform.