Very underrated, but membership sites can be really profitable if done right.
Building a community or membership portal can help you interact with your audience and open a stream of recurring income that grows year by year.
If you have a product that can be supplied monthly, for example, a fitness program, a singing course, or just about anything that people can learn over a period of time, then you can do a successful business out of it.
A couple of examples of membership sites that make a killing periodically are KetoConnect and Lady Boss Weight Loss. Both of them have raving reviews and keeps the customers glued to the program to achieve their goals, and it’s something from which we all can take inspiration in terms of how to deliver your product the right way.
But the real question is, how do you build a community or membership site? Well, it’s not that difficult, at least not with the tools and platforms that I am going to mention below.
If that sounds interesting, then let’s check them out. 🙂
BuddyBoss
BuddyBoss is built on WordPress and is trusted by over 50,000 businesses, including ProBlogger, InfusionSoft, and Foundr. Like other solutions in this list, it lets you build community sites, membership sites and sell courses with utmost freedom and flexibility.
You can use it for a variety of purposes, but if you’re using it for teaching purposes, then you’re in for a treat. The reason being, BuddyBoss allows you to create your own White label app within the platform, which your users can download on their mobile and learn your materials on the go. This is an absolute game-changer for your business.
Here are some main features that are worth mentioning:
- Integrate with other WordPress plugins, like LearnDash
- Create interactive quizzes
- Drop feed content
- Enable rewards, points, ranks, and achievements for people to engage on your site continually.
- Flexible layouts and highly customizable elements
- Multiple languages support
When you create a community using this solution, users will be able to make interest groups of their own, attend events, create their personalized profiles, share media, send private messages, and so much more.
Tribe
Mostly used to build a community platform or a knowledge base, Tribe can help you increase customer lifetime value by providing them a hub for all their doubts and discussions. They can create posts, follow people, comment, upvote, and even share content from the community.
You can utilize their ready-to-use widgets to make things more interesting and interactive, such as shopping windows and polls. It also lets you embed iFrame widgets and integrate the platform with other apps like Google Translate, Google Analytics, Messenger, and Zapier.
Tribe is used by companies like IBM, Decathlon, and ConvertKit. You can get started using their free plan and take it ahead from there.
Circle
Trusted by some great companies out there, such as Teachable and Forte Labs, Circle can help you bring discussions, memberships, and amazing content in one place for your audience to interact and consume.
You can create a community for nearly every purpose, such of which include:
- Membership
- Course
- Coaching
- Podcast
- Microschools
- Newsletter
- Startup
This solution can be white-labeled, which means you can slap your brand into it and make it your own to keep the professionalism intact in front of your audience.
Besides that, you can organize discussions into different categories, offer premium content for pro members and create clubs as per people’s interests so that they can join the discussions based on what they like.
It’s built to make real connections with your audience and allow member profiles, rich posts, direct messaging, and other features that would keep them glued to the platform.
Circle can be integrated with a ton of third-party apps to enhance further and automate your workflows.
MemberPress
Very easy to set up, MemberPress is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to build membership sites, sell courses, and other digital downloads with full control.
It’s a powerful solution that also hands you the option to manage subscriptions, grant/revoke access to specific content for users based on their plan, and integrate with third-party apps like PayPal, ConvertKit, HelpScout.
Sites like WP Engine and WPbeginner have recommended MemberPress, and you can get started with the basic plan priced at $149/year. All of the plans include priority support, affiliate program, content dripping, content protection, and other fantastic features.
Mighty Networks
With a 14-day free trial, Mighty Networks is a community platform but does a lot more than just that. In fact, you can use it to build a website, sell online courses and create a membership model, among various other possibilities, all under your own brand.
It’s powerful and can handle your audience’s heavy-work to create a space where your business works for you rather than you working on it 24/7. It has a free plan to get started with, and that’s not bad at all, but the paid plans open a lot of doors for you, including integrations, premium analytics, moderators, etc.
However, all the plans are ad-free and come with smartphone apps to use on the go.
BuddyPress
Another brilliant WordPress plugin, BuddyPress, is made for building community websites easily. It offers a bunch of cool features, some of which you won’t find elsewhere, such as:
- Individual member profiles
- Direct messaging
- Micro-communities or groups for people with similar interests
- Instant notifications and read/unread signals
- Ability to add members as friends
This plugin is flexible and can be connected to other third-party apps to extend the functionality further. However, the best thing is that BuddyPress is completely free to use. There are no hidden costs involved. Just download, install and start assembling your own community website within minutes.
Disciple
Easily sell courses, memberships and build a passionate community with Disciple. You can fully brand it as your own and even opt for the mobile app to explore millions of users from the app stores. It gives you total control over the content that you publish and as well as the members that you let into the community.
Apart from the usual features, here are some unique ones you should know about:
- Ability to live stream
- Utilize event calendar
- Member moderation
- Detailed analytics
- Content reporting
Disciple is 100% secure, GDPR-compliant, and receives updates regularly with new features. Another good thing is that you can utilize their public API to integrate the community platform with your existing tools.
Conclusion
The above solutions will help you keep your audience engaged and retained by providing them a space to interact with you and other like-minded people who’re on the same page as them.
