Tutorial Membership Sites: 3 Reasons Tutorial Creators Should Sell Memberships
Have you considered building a tutorial membership site? Do you possess knowledge on a subject that other people could benefit from? Can you translate your knowledge into straightforward, teachable tutorials and courses?
Building up a paid membership site can create a sustainable, long-term revenue stream that rewards you for your time, knowledge, and experience.
Rather than teaching a single set of curriculum, with a tutorial membership site, you can create a fresh curriculum on an ongoing basis that will keep your loyal members coming back month after month and year after year.
How a Tutorial Site Can Build a Career
A tutorial membership site will give you the opportunity to teach:
- High-yield courses as live workshops
- Self-paced courses
- Drip training courses
- And a lot more
You can also create a community for your students to interact with you and each other whenever they’d like.
And you can do it all within the same platform.
Your membership site is like having an inner circle of like-minded people who gather, share, learn, and get inspired. As an instructor, it’s where you can teach, lead, and learn from your students while building a platform that empowers you to levels of success that you’ve only imagined.
Sound exciting?
Let’s take a look at exactly how you can get started building your own membership community right now (for less than a few hundred dollars).
3 Reasons Tutorial Creators Should Sell Memberships
Still not convinced that a paid membership site is the solution you’re looking for? Here are three points to consider that may convince you.
1. Memberships Increase Your Income
It’s safe to say that most of us want to make more money. A membership site is a sustainable way to do it.
And even if you’re already making a good living as a tutorial instructor, a community membership site can quickly turn into an added stream of income that you can rely on now and in the future.
Successful people know how to diversify income streams to remain successful. After all, any single source of revenue could dry up without notice. By diversifying where your income is earned, you’ll find that you’re much more financially secure.
2. Membership Sites Build Trust and Loyalty
The best way for any entrepreneur to succeed is by building trust and loyalty in the customers they serve.
If people trust you to bring them valuable, accurate information within your educational niche, they won’t have a reason to seek out that information anywhere else. And when they take the next step by giving you their hard-earned money to become a paying member of your online community, they become even more loyal.
As long as they continue getting value from their membership with you, they’ll continue to pay for it. And there’s a good chance they’ll talk about what they’ve learned from you with the people they know.
3. A Membership Site Helps You Develop Better Relationships
It’s difficult to stress how important it is to build and develop strong relationships with your students. Starting a membership site will allow you to build your own 100% exclusive community with them. Only the people who pay to become members will have access to all of your content and the rest of the people in the community.
This makes your members feel much more connected with you and with one another. And that’s extremely powerful.
People who sign up for your membership site are probably just as interested in your area of expertise as you are. They’re looking for knowledge and solutions that can help them further develop within their areas of interest.
You may even meet a future influencer or partner that can help you grow your online brand.
The fact is every single person who joins your community can start working together to achieve common goals. And, for you, this alone can be the most rewarding aspect of owning a tutorial membership site.
Building a Tutorial Membership Site on WordPress
In 2021, nearly 40% of the Internet is powered by the WordPress CMS (content management system). And with good reason:
- WordPress is 100% free and open source
- There are thousands of free and premium plugins and themes that can help you turn your site into almost anything you can imagine, including a custom tutorial membership site
- Anyone, even someone who lacks basic CSS or HTML knowledge, can easily build a WordPress website within minutes
- WordPress website security is simple when you use a plugin such as iThemes Security Pro
- WordPress is incredibly versatile
- Google gives WordPress a 99% rating for SEO-friendliness
These are many of the reasons that WordPress is the best website builder for memberships. To start building your site, all you need to do is secure your own domain name, download the free WordPress open-source software, sign up to a reliable WordPress website host, and run their one-click WordPress installation.
Building On Other Platforms
Membership sites have been given instructors, teachers, and content creators the opportunity to earn a substantial living by building a paid membership audience. Patreon was one of those platforms.
They’ve promised tutorial creators:
- A way of expanding earning potential by receiving monthly (or yearly) membership fees in exchange for sharing your knowledge with students
- An opportunity to be more independent by not relying on advertising and clicks to earn online income
- A way to get to know their community of students directly and personally
But despite the Patreon membership model and other platforms have had their limitations. It might be difficult to break out on the platforms because of the crowded environment.
In addition, by relying on Patreon or other similar platforms for membership income, educators put their own success into the hands of a third-party entity rather than themselves. This means that you’re subject to all of their Terms and Conditions, even if you don’t know exactly what they say, don’t care to study the terminology to figure it out, or don’t want to pay someone to figure it out for you.
But beyond that, it’s not easy to brand yourself properly when working under the limitations set by other platforms. Generally speaking, you are stuck looking like others with limited branding abilities.
To build your branded success, you need more freedom in the development of your site. It’s also important to maintain ownership of the content you create for your site – including posts, courses, and other downloadables.
Developing financial success is easier on your site because you don’t have to share the income with the platforms. Most membership platforms, including Patreon, will take a percentage of all the fees you receive. More income allows you to expand your business.
The right platform for creating your membership site should be easy to use and also simple to customize. It’s also good to be able to interact with your members in real-time. Most importantly, you want to be able to use your voice free from the limitations of the rules of others.
The best news is that the tool you need to start your membership site is only a click away.
How To Launch a Tutorial Membership Website
Once you settle on WordPress for building your tutorial membership site, you can begin searching for a free or premium theme that fits the desired mood of your membership site. You’ll find hundreds of free and premium themes that are tailored toward education.
And while there are literally thousands of themes to choose from, Kadence Theme is currently one of the best options on the WordPress theme market. It gives you a ton of premium theme features, all within a free solution.
With Kadence Theme, you’ll be effortlessly building out the design of your own new membership site within minutes.
8 Reasons to Build a Tutorial Membership Site
Restrict Content Pro is that one easy-to-use plugin that allows you to transform your site into a professional membership site.
You don’t need to code all of the operational details required to turn a standard WordPress site into a membership site. After your WordPress site is set up, all you need to do is download and install the Restrict Content Pro plugin.
Immediately, you’ll have a full-featured, powerful membership site that’s ready for you to customize in any way you see fit. What’s best, it will integrate seamlessly with almost any WordPress theme.
Restrict Content Pro built on a WordPress platform is your best option for building a membership website for several reasons:
1. Lock Away Content
Being able to set levels of membership will allow you to provide certain content to those different levels.
2. Provide Discounts
Restrict Content Pro allows you to create codes for a percentage discount or for a flat rate discount.
3. Automate Communications
Set up email communications with your members that go out at set times.
4. Create Packages
You can set up as many subscription packages as your business lends towards.
5. Manage Memberships
Manage your memberships with ease.
6. Measure Results
Create reports that can help you grow your memberships.
7. Brand Yourself With Your Own Domain
When you promote your paid membership area, would you rather send your fans to patreon.com/mytutorial or mytutorial.com?
8. It’s Actually Really Simple
WordPress was created to be simple for novices to use, while robust enough to give web design professionals more tools than they could ever use.
For the most part, you’ll find that developing a website using WordPress is almost as easy as using a word processing program. And even if you get stuck, there are countless subjects covered in the WordPress Help Forums that will answer your simplest or toughest questions.
Which one do you think better establishes you as an authoritative instructor? Which gives you the most credibility and will most impress the people looking to learn from you?
The answer is simple: Your own domain name. And a WordPress membership site will give you exactly that. With this plugin, your WordPress tutorial membership site can become your main source of income.
Keys to Success for Tutorial Membership Sites
Keep these principles at the forefront of your mind as you begin to grow your paid membership numbers using WordPress and the Restrict Content Pro plugin:
- Offer tutorials that are exclusive to paying members only
- Be authentic and use a consistent voice
- Use community building features that members can use to interact with each other, such as private messaging, member tagging, member profiles, and status updates. You’ll find several WordPress plugins that provide these community features
- Paid members are always looking for new content from you (blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc.). Make sure you let them know when they can expect it (i.e. daily at 8am, every tuesday at 5pm, every first of the month at midnight)
- Routinely interact directly with your paid members. It means more to them than you may realize
- Invite members to exclusive Q&As and other events where you’ll be live, on camera, and present
- Don’t charge too much or too little for a membership. Research what other similar tutorial membership sites are charging to find the sweet spot
- Act big. Think bigger
- Utilize email drip campaigns to keep in close touch with your community members
- Be in it for the long haul
Start Your Own Tutorial Membership Site Today
There has never been a better time than now to capitalize on the popularity of membership websites. And when you consider that you can get yours started for only a few hundred dollars, it becomes obvious that the benefits far outweigh the risks.
Start earning a substantial new income stream by launching your own tutorial membership site. It may be one of the most rewarding and profitable decisions you’ll ever make.
