Everyone needs a membership site. Why?

There are the obvious reasons - to collect money and to create a community. Ah, but it goes much deeper than that.

I provide web and email marketing for my international clients and for many years have recommended that they offer a membership component in their website for exposure, value, and insurance. But before we get deeper into why…let’s be sure that we are all speaking the same language. Then I’ll give you 10 reasons why to add membership to your site.

We all know that Joomla accommodates users that can log into the website’s front end and/or back end. However, while many people create their websites in Joomla, most only have one or two users for site maintenance. If that’s what you are doing, you are missing a huge opportunity!

I’m talking about specifically uploading and updating material or resources that someone sees only if they have a login to the site. This makes your site much more powerful. And it applies to both business (large or small) and personal sites.

This membership access can be free or paid or a combination, and with Joomla’s powerful User Groups and Access Levels it is very easy to set up multiple membership levels for different groups or price points.

Now to the 10 reasons why that I promised you…

1. As my long time mentor Dan S. Kennedy says, “It helps build an iron fence around your herd.” Give them compelling reasons to stay close to you.

2. Build tighter relationships with your clients, patients, prospects, or just followers.

3. Keep them engaged with you.

4. Give them a sense of being special and valued.

5. At some level, they feel that they are a member of an exclusive club. You can go a long way to make that impression stronger with the way information is presented to the members.

6. Give them a sense of community (most everyone wants to be part of a community. Just look at the success of social media). With the great community extensions such as Community Builder, JomSocial and others building a community is a no-brainer..

7. Create member-only special deals such as discounts, members-only items, early-bird specials, etc.

8. Track the engagement of your members a lot easier than you can track how people who visit your site are engaging.

9. Give your members bragging rights that they are members of an elite club and give you bragging rights that you have so many members to your site.

10. Decrease attrition…or shrinking of your herd.

In conjunction with the functionality of the community extensions, there are some great membership extensions (such as MembershipPro, and JoomFuse for Infusionsoft users) available in the JED that can be used to create a powerful membership site by leveraging Joomla.

After you identify the reasons why adding membership will benefit you, the next step is how to use it to leverage your business. In my article next month, I’ll talk about creative and unique ways to use a membership site and share some case studies of how people are using them successfully.