Community Zen

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So you’re starting a membership site and you want to know what the best software for managing membership sites should include.  Today’s web is social and you want to make sure that your community has all the bells and whistles you need to make your membership pop with excitement.  You also need the best admin management back end to make your job easier.

Here are the components of an ideal membership site in 2008

Getting Social

Members should be allowed to grow the content inside and outside your members area well beyond just the obligatory forum.  People are used to having control on the social web and the inside of your site should look and feel like what they are used to outside.

The software you run your membership site with should have tagging, blogging, and other content submission areas so that members can navigate and contribute to the growth of the community in many different ways.

Members should be able to organize groups within the membership and work with each other, or just socialize, to build a more solid relationship with each other and your service.

Administration

Membership software in 2008 should allow you to do all kinds of things with your membership from easily taking all kinds of payment processing, to managing members and membership levels, to polling and collaboration with the membership.

For many it is no longer an option to just use membership software that simply password protects a few areas on a domain.  Nor is it enough these days to have content and a forum to be seen as a professional membership site.

You need the power to run a real paid community.  Anything less puts you at the mercy of your competition.  And competition in many niches for membership sites can be fierce.

Designing Your Membership Site on Paper

It is good to lay out exactly what you want to accomplish and provide with your membership.  From different levels of membership to all the components you want to include to empower your members to engage frequently with the site and other members to bond them to you and keep member retention as high as possible.

• The core needs for membership sites today are:
• Multiple social components
• Ability for members to add content in many ways
• Ability for members to groups up and organize within the membership
• Ability to tag everything so people can simply click on keywords and go direct to the best content from anywhere within the site
• Be able to poll members easily and develop additional products from their input (products they tell you they’d buy if you created them!)
• A lively, active forum
• What kind of blogging and profile components you want to give members

That last point is a doozy.  Old membership sites never got much into member profiles.  Now, with the social web, everyone expects to have a profile others can check out that is robust, interesting, and full of features to engage members.  Before, the site owner would present content and the members would consume.  It was a one-way street.

Most membership software out there follows this old model.  You don’t want that kind of one-way street in your membership site.  Members of free communities have learned that it is way more fun to engage than it is to simply consume.  Your software solution needs to make that possible for you and your members.

I have run several membership sites in the past on several platforms and our most successful membership site is running on VTribes membership software.

It offers us everything above and much more.  It is well worth a moment of your time to check it out for your membership idea to see if it is right for you.  The nice thing is it scales to meet your needs.  If you don’t want to start with too much in the beginning and just add components and features later, no problem.

Whatever you decide to use, make sure you take the time to design your site on paper.  It really gives you insight into what it is you are creating and how you want the community to feel and perform for members and for you as the administrator.

Compare what you map out to the membership software available today, and I bet you end up looking really hard at VTribes!

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