Getting your first 100 paying customers for a membership website is always the hardest part. But once you reach that number, it becomes much easier to attract new members.
Here is your 90-day plan for getting your first 100 paying customers:
Before you launch your membership website
Before diving into marketing and traffic-building, there are a few key things to consider:
Know Your Audience: Understand who they are, what problems they have, and how you can help them. Also, know how to reach them.
Understand Your Competition: Identify both online and offline competitors, know their pricing, and determine how you’ll stand out.
Clarify Your Unique Value: What makes your site different? Why should someone choose you over the competition?
Create a User-Friendly Website: Your site should look professional and clearly communicate what you offer. Remember, every page is a landing page, so ensure visitors can easily navigate your site from any entry point.
Include Free and Member-Only Content: Offer some high-quality free content to build trust, but also have exclusive content for members. Before launching, have at least 90 days’ worth of content ready to free up time for marketing.
Refine Your Offer: Make an offer that’s hard to refuse. Ensure the perceived value is at least three times higher than the membership cost. Consider offering a money-back guarantee and special deals for early sign-ups.
Pre-Launch Marketing Activities
- Build Authority: Establish your credibility in the field. Get testimonials, create a social media presence, and engage with relevant groups.
- Prepare a Marketing Plan: Outline your marketing activities before the launch so you know exactly what to do each day.
- Interviews: Conduct interviews with key figures in your industry. This not only creates valuable content but can also drive traffic to your site if the interviewees share it with their audiences.
90-Day Marketing Plan
Your plan should be divided into two phases:
Phase 1 (80 Days): Focus on driving traffic to your website and building a relationship with visitors who show an interest in the service you are providing. Allow visitors to sign-up to an email newsletter or other services that will enable you to proactively communicate with them.
Phase 2 (10 Days): Shift focus from traffic and relationship-building to converting your most loyal followers into paying members. Build excitement with an irresistible offer which your most loyal followerswon’t be able to resist.
Phase 1 Activities:
Driving Traffic to Your Membership Website
Since you won’t initially get much search engine traffic, you’ll need to rely on other methods to drive visitors to your site. Some ideas include:
- Google Ads: A powerful tool if used correctly. Focus on specific keywords relevant to your niche.
- Newsletter Ads: Pay to advertise in newsletters that reach your target audience.
- Press Coverage: Use free and paid press release services to announce your site’s launch.
- Article Syndication: Publish high-quality articles on third-party sites to drive traffic.
- Forums: Join relevant forums and participate in discussions. Include a link to your site in your signature.
Collecting Email Addresses
It’s crucial to capture email addresses from your site visitors. Offer something valuable in return. Your offer should have a perceived value that is at least three times greater than the membership price. Some examples are:
Access to a video series
A free course
A popover sign-up box
A downloadable eBook or report
An example offer package could be:
- Your Guarantee – The lower the perceived risk the higher your conversion rate. If you can offer a 100%, no questions asked, money-back guarantee it will increase your sign-up rate.
- The early bird catches the worm – reward your first members with a special deal. Everyone likes a bargain.
- Set-up an affiliate program – an affiliate program is an automated way of paying people who recommend your service to their customers or site visitors a commission for any sales they facilitate. If you want other website owners to help you sell your service this is the best way to get them fired up.
Try to give away something that has zero or near-zero cost to you, but provides your target audience with real value.
Phase 2 – Converting Followers to Paying Members
After 80 days of building excitement and relationships, it’s time to convert your followers into paying members. Here’s how:
- Create a Compelling Offer: Give early members extra value rather than just a discount.
- Host a Big Event: Consider organizing a webinar with valuable content, but make the full benefits available only to paying members.
- Make Signing Up Easy: Clearly communicate the benefits and include a money-back guarantee to reduce perceived risk.
Everything you will have provided so far – the email sign-up giveaway, the content on your site, the email newsletter, Tweets, etc – has been free.
In phase 2 you must turn your attention to packaging up your paid membership service in such a way that your most dedicated followers are very happy to pay.
You want to build excitement and desire over the 80 days. This will get a much higher conversion rate than allowing members to signup whenever they want.
The Offer
You must create a very compelling offer for the first 100 members. I would strongly recommend that the offer is based around giving them downloadable stuff for free rather than a discount on the membership fee.
You should try to preserve your income as much as possible. As mentioned above create a package of services that have a value much greater than the cost of the subscription.
The Big Event
To launch the 10-day sign-up period you should arrange a big event.
A very popular thing to do is have a webinar where prospects can dial into for free and listen to a talk by you, or better still, a really well-known industry personality.
A webinar is easy and cheap to arrange but has a high perceived value to attendees.
The content of the webinar should not be a sales pitch for your membership site. You need to be more subtle than that.
The content should provide really good information about a particular subject, but the information should be incomplete. The additional information should be available within the membership site.
A few examples:
- A wine tasting site – the webinar could be hosted by a recognized master of wine and cover how wine tasting is done. The membership area of the website could then reveal their actual tasting notes for dozens of wines
- A site about launching an Internet business – the webinar could cover the 15 things you must do before launching an Internet business. The membership area could list all the resources you need for a successful launch
- A site about educating children at home – the webinar could cover how to plan a home-based curriculum. The membership website could provide all the templates for the parent to fill in
Make Signing Up Easy:
Clearly communicate the benefits and include a money-back guarantee to reduce perceived risk.
The Sign-Up Process Checklist
- Get your site ready with some really excellent content
- Create additional content for the first 90 days so you can focus on marketing activities
- Create or source some gifts that can be given away to incentivize email sign-up and paid membership sign-up
- Focus on driving traffic to the free content on the site and getting visitors to sign-up for the email newsletter (or other communications channel) using a free offer. Keep building interest and momentum for 80 days
- Work with other bloggers, online publishers, journalists to get them to drive traffic to your site
- Plan a big event such as a webinar to launch the start of membership sign-up
- Create a very compelling offer which gives value well beyond the cost of the subscription
- Host the big event. Provide real value but give listeners a compelling and irresistible reason to sign-up for your service
- Look after the early paying members and they will do a lot of the future selling for you
Conclusion
This technique for getting 100 paying members in 90 days is tried and tested. The skill is building the excitement about your service to the point where your followers can’t wait for it to go live. At all stages, try to put yourself in your prospects' shoes and think about
“what would REALLY make me want to sign up for this service?”.
Ready to start your membership website?
To get the maximum out of your marketing budget using Google Analytics, you need to know which strategies do and which don’t work. Once you know what does work, you can invest more time and money into it for a maximum Return On Investment.
Now here are some ideas how this can be changed…
Questions: Look at the following email from 
Catchy headlines: I love this headline – “Man Bites Dog” – from Business Applications Digest (TechTarget again). Although there is no continuance in the body of the story, the headline is good enough to get a click. Think of catchy headlines as your favorite crostini or meatballs. Do you like them mushy or soggy? Apply the same rules to your email headlines.
Storytelling: Using storytelling in your emails is better than click-baiting – it doesn’t just attract readers but also keeps them hooked. It encourages recall too. Everyone loves a good story; it’s 
A lot of these tips aren’t new, but what I am trying to prove here is that even boring software businesses can turn their brand around with the help of crisp and catchy content.
Layout
What I always fail to understand is why tech emails have to be so colorless. Blues and whites seem to be their only choices of colors. I love what CyberLink has tried here. It uses bold pictures and colors, and the layout is incredibly clean and user-friendly.
If however, you want to send strictly text emails and still want them to make them more aesthetically pleasing, here are some layout styles you can follow. These layouts are designed to provide enough breathing space between each section and allow you to categorize news/stories in a hierarchy of importance. This not only makes them easy on the eyes but also ensures your most important messages are not missed.
It is about time technology sites and software providers started making their emails a little more pleasing to the eye rather than those immensely cluttered and randomly thrown-together lists of links. Apart from a few forward-thinking startups, no one seems to have mastered the art of aesthetic email marketing.
That said, well-designed emails need not be expensive or resource-intensive. An uncomplicated email marketing suite such as 
As they say, strike the iron while it is hot – send newsletters more frequently in the first two months after people sign up for your emails.
In the next 2 months, reduce the frequency to 2 a week or less, so as to not annoy people. If you still see people unsubscribing from your mailing lists, reduce the frequency even further.
If you provide SaaS-based or similar services with annual (or periodic) renewals, start increasing the frequency of your emails after 10 months or so, as the renewal date draws near.
Takeaway Tactics
The days of “spray and pray” marketing are long over. In the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, a lot of ideas on content, layout and frequency were discussed; give this 
DIY Content Based On Your Experiences
You may not be about to write the next New York Times bestseller anytime soon, but that does not stop you from sharing your thoughts and experiences with your audiences in a simple yet lucid fashion.
Since you and your target audience presumably share at least one common area of interest – your product category – share your expertise in the area via simple blog posts, tips via social media or even articles in magazines and journals in your niche. When it comes to content, the more heartfelt it is, the higher the likelihood that your users will connect with it. If writing is not your thing, try your hand at alternate platforms like video content or creating infographics. Devote at least an hour every day to putting your thoughts together. With time, you’ll get better at expressing yourself in words and content creation won’t seem like such a punishment.
Think you need some help before you venture into creating content by yourself? Check out this great listing of 75 resources that help you get started on the “write” track.
Invite Users to Share Their Content
Research has repeatedly proven that users trust the word of other users, even if they’re strangers, over the marketing communication that a brand may put out there for public consumption. This explains why a large majority of users seek out product or service reviews before making a purchase. Sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon owe their very existence to user recommendations.
Use this fact to your advantage by inviting users to share their self-generated content with you. This does not have to be reviews alone. You could host a contest among your target audience asking them to send in their best pieces of art or an article or even a video or photograph around a topic relevant to your brand. The entries you receive can be published on your blog or social media driving conversation and engagement, while costing you absolutely nothing by way of content creation costs.
Participate in Trade Events as a Speaker
While any publicity is good publicity, it does not hurt you to seek out opportunities for great publicity for your brand and yourself, respectively. A good way to become well-known as well as well-liked is by participating in flagship industry events and making your own mark at the event.
Industry events get written about in category specific publications on a near real-time basis. This means that by merely speaking at an industry event or by presenting a paper, you automatically get talked about. Articles, blog posts, or other forms of content created by industry journalists that reference your talk, will carry a link back to your site or the particular piece of advice you shared. So not only do you get mentioned in the right forums, you also stand a chance to earn some free links back to your site!
Build A Content Marketing War Chest
The content that you curate, create and collect from users, family and friends can be used in multiple ways across the platforms where your brand operates. However, you’ll soon realize that once you begin down this path of sourcing awesome content that resonates with your brand and its users, you’ll end up with a ton of ideas. Keeping track and finding specific pieces from this treasure trove can become difficult and messy.
This is why you must invest in a task management and scheduling tool like Grexit, which lets your teams collaborate on concepts and campaigns, share notes, assign and delegate content creation, and get notifications, all from the convenience of their Gmail inbox. Use it in conjunction with Google Drive, which makes it simple for you to classify your content with labels based on factors like source, topic, recency, and so on, and also create and manage content calendars.
Build a content publishing plan with clear timelines using the scheduling function that these tools typically have. No need to take the trouble of going it all by your lonesome self; collaborate with your coworkers and make the entire process of content marketing an in-house project, not one that you need to throw large sums of money at.
Wrapping Up
Some of the most widely read corporate content comes from people who are not writers or content creators by profession – Sir Richard Branson, Bill Marriott, the Google corporate blog, to mention a few. So stop worrying so much about how much content marketing is going to cost you. All it will really cost you is some time and persistence to put together good content and the will to see it all through.
