Verifying the Market so Your Membership Blog Simply Cannot Fail
One very important tip when creating any digital product, service or anything else is to verify the market before you invest too much time or money. In other words, make sure that someone is out there who wants to buy what you’re selling before you spend a thousand dollars building it! This sounds like obvious advice but it’s something that 90% of bloggers and creators don’t think to do. The problem here is that they assume that if they think something is a good idea, so too will everyone else. Sadly, it doesn’t quite work like that.
So what you need to do instead is test that people would buy your membership package if you had made it. There are a couple of ways you can do this but one of the most popular is to start selling your package before you’ve finished it.
Creating an MVP
One way to do this is to create the basic blog and sales page but then simply inform people who try to buy that the product isn’t yet available but they’ll be notified when it is. Make sure they have to go all the way through the process before you inform them of this. That way, you can safely make the assumption that anyone who tried to buy it now would really have bought it if you had made it. This should then provide enough encouragement for you to go ahead and get creating!
Another option is to invite your members to subscribe while there’s only a scant amount of content there. You can get around this seeming downside though by telling your visitors that they’re getting exclusive ‘early access’ and that much more is on the way soon. You can even charge less and potentially call them something like ‘early adopters’ to make the concept sound more inviting. You could also call this a ‘beta test’ or something to that effect and in reality the business model is very similar to creating an ‘MVP’ or a ‘Minimum Viable Product’. This means trying to sell the most basic version of what you’re going to offer and then developing it further if and when you find an audience is interested. This lets you use the ‘fail fast’ approach to business, which means that your aim is to succeed or fail as quickly as possible, just so you know!
More Methods
More conventional methods of testing the market though include looking how successful other products are that are like yours and also just surveying people to see if they would potentially be interested. The best way of all though is still always to get your visitors to put their money where their mouths are!
