THINKING OF CREATING A MEMBERSHIP WEBSITE 1

The Idea

So, around August 2013 I decided that I would create a membership website. I've been playing guitar professionally for around thirty years...wow, where did the time go! Anyway, I have worked in just about every sphere of music that is open to musicians. From touring with bands, to working in pit bands, playing with major orchestras to part running a record company, putting on exhibitions etc.

I started doing some preliminary research around the aforementioned date and decided that I wanted a website that was not just a rehash of everything that is already out there. Here is a list of my criteria that I drew up around that time:

• I didn't just want a guitar site. 
• I didn't want a guitar site that just helped people play riffs.
• I did want a website that helped musicians in their careers re getting better paid work that was meaningful.
• I also wanted a website where I could teach people about all the things I had learned about online promotion.
• I wanted a meaningful learning experience that I could share a lifetime of playing and teaching experience through and pull other musicians in to help them gain exposure etc. 

Initial Contact With Blogs Describing Membership Websites

So, now that I had scoped out some of what I wanted and didn't want, I then turned my attention to both looking at what was already out there and learning a bit about creating a membership website. 

The first thing to say is that for the most part, there are great website already up and running which deal with a huge amount of guitar related material but I felt that what I wanted was a little more bespoke and not just aimed at the bottom of the pyramid where the vast amount of users are based. So far so good, however, when I turned my attention to actually reading about membership website creation and how they work, well, let's just say that you should probably take the promises made out there with a large bucket of salt. Here is a website that makes big claims about how you can make money through membership websites. Now this may be true for them, but it's not how I have found it in my two years so far.

For a start, there are hugely inflated ideas all over the web about how you can make a massive amount of money with membership sites. Basically, a lot of these help blogs on the subject say you only need to get two people signed up. If these two people enroll (through an affiliate scheme) another two people and they enroll two people each etc. etc. Within a short space of time, your making thousands of dollars a month just like that. I also found that a lot of membership sites subject matter was not about my niche, learn to play guitar but on how to make money online. Basically, there is a huge industry on the web telling people how to make money through the Internet by selling courses which explain how people can make money through the Internet. 

It's All About The Membership Software

Another area I found odd was that the emphasis on so many websites and blogs was about the purchasing of membership website software; as if this in itself would create the site. Buy this software and get your membership website up and running. Call me old fashioned, but just having a nice site with no content in it is not going to have customers banging down your doors. 

Worse still, there were and probably still are lots of websites which say you should rehash old material to create the one thing that takes an age to create....content! In future posts I'm going to talk about the software I chose and why I chose it. About content creation and one of the hardest things of all; traffic sources and driving it to your site...not any old traffic, but targeted traffic. 

In the meantime, here is a video from the GMI Youtube channel. It's one from a playlist of ten for complete beginners to the guitar by a brilliant guitarist called Gary Clinton who creates work for GMI. I hope you enjoy it and come back to hear the next installment in membership websites. I'm sure I can give you some insight into this whole area through my own (at times) hard earned experience.