What is the best way to select and verify your idea for your membership site

Set yourself and your audience to be successful with your membership website. Follow these 5 steps to select and confirm your membership plan.

You can only hope they'll.

If you fail to create something that solves a real problem to your target audience, your new membership will never get from the beginning.

The good news is: You can make the process easier for creating your membership site by validating your product idea before you start.

Validating your product idea might seem like an unnecessary long-winded process. Since creating something new and exciting is what makes being a designer. Testing, research and analyses? Not so much.

However, validating your idea for a product isn't a requirement to invest thousands of dollars in focus groups and studies of statistical significance.

It could be as simple as following this step-by-step guide.

In these steps, you'll learn how to set your site to succeed long before launching -- and you'll save yourself a whole lot of time, money and frustration down the road.

Let's begin by introducing the primary element in any business's success your customers.

Step One: Get know your the people in your

To succeed, your website for membership must help your members achieve their goals or overcome the real obstacles. 30% of startups do not succeed due to the lack of a market to sell their product or services.

In other words, there's no fit between your product and market. Your product's market-fit is the measure of how well your product meets the needs of your customers.

Explore forums, online communities and read reviews on products that are in your field. Consider:

What is my target audience talking about online?

What obstacles do they face?

What are the questions they're talking about?

What skills would people want to acquire?

What is their value?

Following some preliminary research, you may think you know exactly what your website for members should be as. Don't jump into creating a solution before asking real customers about their opinions.

This is what happened to John D. Saunders when he launched his first course online. A new entrepreneur, and course designer He assumed that he knew what his customers wanted.

Today, John talks to his group of customers to confirm his ideas, and to get feedback before making a fresh product.

This Twitter thread , John explains how he involves his audience during the validation of ideas as well as the creation process.

Validating his product idea through his followers resulted in the tune of $10,000 in course sales on John's launch day.

If you already have an audience or an online community, don't be shy to inquire directly about what they're looking to get from a membership.

Send an email to your group and your social media users and ask them to contribute your thoughts. Talk to them about their pain concerns and what they're looking for in a solution.

Include surveys that ask about your audience's problems and needs such as:

What are your biggest challenges in relation to the [topic]?What are your biggest challenges when it comes to [topic]?

What are you looking to learn more about?

What do success means to you? What can I do to help you achieve success?

Tools like Typeform , SurveyMonkey  tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform along with Google Forms help you create and send out surveys.

Utilize the data you gather during this process to begin planning your membership content, as well. What tools can you develop for your members to succeed?

If you're looking for ideas creation and validation, your target audience could be an excellent source of knowledge -- just like your competition. The next stage is all about.

Step 2 2. Conduct competitor and market study

If you take a look at other products and memberships that are relevant to your area it becomes apparent that there is already a bunch of products geared toward your target market.

What do you do?

Revert back to where you started and try to find the most unique concept.

Begin to develop your concept and make it your own.

Instead of viewing competition as something to avoid, think of it as an indicator that your idea merits further exploration -- and that there's a healthy market for the idea.

A busy market can mean a large number of clients.

As a creator or solopreneur, you are your brand. That's especially true when you own an educational, coach or lifestyle-related business. Your personal style, expertise, and unique outlook differentiate you from the competition.

They want your genuine viewpoint. Eighty percent of customers believe that authenticity is the most important element in deciding on the brands they prefer and which ones to support.

Therefore, competition could be the signpost of success, and not a sign of the end of the world.

To help you think about this, here are some tried-and-true methods for conducting competitor research

Check out your competition's websites to know more about their capabilities as well as pricing.

Find out what topics they're discussing with their articles. What topics do they create the most content on?

Check out their reviews to see what your audience likes about their products. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses?

Join their email list to find out more about their methods to address their customers' problems as well as upcoming updates or releases.

Make use of Social listening to monitor keywords and phrases relevant to your brand. This can help you learn more about your customers as well as gather data on your competition, and stay ahead of the latest trends in your niche.

After you've done your research about your market and competitors After that, you'll already have an idea of what your ideal members want, need, and are willing to spend money on.

If you're struggling to decide from a handful of ideas, use the Passion/Profit Matrix to figure out which one to run with.

The Passion/Profit Matrix helps you answer two of the following questions:

passion:How passionate are you in this subject? A concept could be extremely successful, but if the idea isn't arousing for you then it's probably not the best choice for your membership site.

Possibilities for profitWill customers pay for a service to solve this problem? We've already mentioned that a competitive niche means that there's already a market for products like your membership site.

Your ideal membership website falls in the upper left quadrant: The one that you're passionate about and that you'll be capable of selling.

Now that you've chosen an idea to create a membership website, it's time to share the idea with your followers and get their buy-in.

Step 3: Design an landing page. Then, start collecting registrations

One of the most effective ways to gauge interest in your group is through an online landing page.

Pre-launching your membership has two major benefits:

Validating your product idea.

Your landing page should include a short overview of your subscription, and explain to visitors the reasons why you should have them join.

If your membership sounds like the perfect fit to them, they'll send your email address which validates your product idea andgives prospective members who whom you may contact when you have a product to try or to purchase.

Here are some essential landing pages to keep in mind:

Make use of your findings from step one to write content that is resonant with your target audience. Highlight how your membership will assist them in achieving the goals they have set or resolve the issues they face.

Maintain your landing pages easily readable and adhere to a single call-to-action (CTA). If you're in this situation, your CTA is email signups.

Over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so make sure that your landing page is mobile-friendly.

For example, Ryan of Signature Edits offers templates, presets, and a marketing membership for photographers. Ryan provides two lead magnets to collect email signups for his customers: a guide to candid posing as well as a free pack of photo editing presets .

When a user downloads one of the leads magnets Ryan is aware that the person has been interested in his niche. They can receive follow-up messages to inform them of information about new products and share more about the products he offers.

( facilitates creators such as Ryan to sell memberships and host lead magnets and create email campaigns -using a simple dashboard. Try it yourself with an initial 14-day trial. )

Sign-up for email newsletters is an excellent option to identify the beta testers of your membership, which will be developed in our next stage.

Step #4: Create a minimum viable product (MVP)

Once you've completed your research and potential members signed in, you're now ready to build your minimum viable products (MVP). The MVP is the simplified trial version of your service. You share your MVP with beta testers as well as the early members. Then, you use the feedback from them to create the full site for membership.

Gartner has found more than two-thirds of firms compete primarily based on customer experience, up from only 36% in 2010. In addition, 86% of customers would pay more to have an experience that is better for them.

Offering an MVP of your membership to beta testers helps to create a great user experience. It also helps to validate the business plan. The test participants will be able to gauge whether people are willing to pay for your membership and receive valuable feedback.

Imagine that you want to build a content cache membership. The signing up process gives customers convenient access to all your content libraries.

You can take Whistle or Ivy's Endless Bundle  as an example.

For a fixed price of $87/year, Whistle and Ivy's "All-Access Crochet Pattern Pass" offers subscribers:

The entire Whistle and Ivy pattern library

Full video pattern tutorials

Worksheets and graphics

An online community of crocheters who are like-minded.

Private VIP Facebook group

Content caches are designed to make it easy for users to access an already-published collection of content.

A MVP on Whistle and Ivy may include some of their top crochet patterns with their accompanying video tutorials. New members will get a feel for their teaching method, the content and the way that the membership website functions.

When you've built your MVP, you can share it with the people who signed up in the third step, and invite for them to visit your membership site to a test drive. Now, it's time to move on to our fifth step, which is obtaining feedback from the feedback of your members.

Step #5: Get (and take action on) feedback

Do you feel a bit deja vu? Like in the first step, getting your membership site up to be successful requires you to listen to the needs of your customers.

Your audience wants to give feedback to your. 90percent of customers have a more favorable opinion of businesses who seek feedback.

Stopping to ask for and incorporate feedback might seem like slowing you down, but it's essential to make your membership website the most effective it can be.

If you don't have a lot of users you can contact for feedback, don't worry. As per Jeff Sauro of MeasuringU, only five people can turn up 85% of the issues with usability in a product.

This means that the process can be as simple as asking 5 people to test out your bare-bones membership. While they are doing this, you can ask them to document how they are using your account and provide thoughts on the visual design as well as the content and usability.

For gathering feedback, you can use similar survey tools as step one, or ask your clients to join a five-minute phone call for feedback.

Ask questions like:

Does everything make sense and to navigate?

Do you find the content useful for you?

What do you want to see added or changed?

What do you like the most about your Membership? Which is the worst?

And then, incorporate that feedback to the following iteration of your MVP. There's a good chance that you'll have to publish several versions of your MVP in order to provide the best possible user experience for your customers.

Bottom line:

Making a product new is an endless cycle. The more you collaborate with your users, the more you can iterate on your membership site until you're ready for launching something your customers -- - and sales figures -- will love.

Make yourself available for and site growth

It's possible that you have an excellent idea of a membership website however, you'll never know for sure until you have validated the membership concept.

For a recap, here are five steps you can take to select and confirm your membership concept:

Set your goals for the audience you want to target and get to know them. What are their biggest issues and objectives? If you are unsure, talk to them directly.

Be prepared for a competitive market. There is a demand for services similar to your membership, and you can learn a lot about your target audience and the opportunities in the market through the analysis of competitors.

Build a landing page and begin collecting sign-ups for email to join your subscription. You can even offer the subscribers free content in order to offer them the first taste of what's about coming.

Create a minimum viable product (MVP) for your customers to use as a beta test. Your MVP should contain only the essential content and features of your full membership.

Get your beta users to provide their feedback about your MVP. Integrate their feedback into new iterations of your members. Keep in mind that the process of developing products is linear, so there are always opportunities to gain knowledge from your members and enhance the quality of your membership.

When you put in your time and energy to test and validate your membership idea the hard work you put into it will pay off in the form of regular income as well as a member community your audience will love.

Now get out there and make that membership dream into reality.