In truth, when designing your membership website, there are literally hundreds of membership topics to choose from based on your own experience and skills or your personal interest.
What we want to do however is focus on selectively choosing our topics based on current demand and overall profitability.
It’s one thing to be passionate about the subject of your site, but you also need to ensure that the topic you are considering is one that people are willing to pay for.
Dont Forget Your Market Research?
Conducting market research is a critical step in increasing the chances that your membership website will be a successful one. Thankfully, even if you are brand new to the idea of market research you can quickly evaluate potential markets just by following a simple series of steps.
Market research enables you to…
- Evaluate current demand for potential topics.
- Evaluate existing products for potential topics.
- Evaluate current competition for potential topics.
These three elements are very important when choosing your membership site’s theme, because:
a) You want to make sure that there is an existing customer base for your memberships’ topic.
b) You want to build a membership website around a topic that is scalable, so that you can create additional products, services and upgrades later on, consistently working towards extending your sales funnel.
c) You want to make sure that the market you are considering isn’t overly competitive, or difficult to penetrate.
What Is Your Niche?
In order to quickly determine what topics are likely to be strong ones worth building a membership website around, you need to conduct niche research. A niche is simply a specific topic or subject matter. For example, weight loss is a niche market, so is golf training.
You can then take it a step further and dissect that niche market into a sub niche, which is often a more strict, specific focus, such as:
Main Niche: Golf
Sub Niche: Golf Clubs
Main Niche: Weight Loss
Sub Niche: Weight Loss Supplements
The more you chisel down into a niche market the smaller the market gets, however the easier it often is to target because you have a specific customer base in mind.