The build-up to the launch of your membership site has got to be one of the most exciting and stressful times of the entire process.

Getting a project of this magnitude off the ground takes a lot of planning, preparation, and hard work.

You’ll likely spend many hours creating content leading up to the launch, from webinars to online courses, articles and everything in-between.

There’s just one nagging question that prevents you from finally opening the doors to your membership…

How much content do you really need to launch your membership site?

And when is enough, enough?

There’s no rulebook or instruction manual for this one.

How much content you need depends on your audience and product.

Technically, you could launch your membership with no content and filter it in real-time.

If that option isn’t for you, don’t worry. I’ve got plenty of advice and tips to help ease this common cause of anxiety as you move closer towards your membership launch day.

So, if you’re dying to find out how much content is enough to launch your membership, keep reading!

1. Change how you think about content

Let’s get one thing straight. As a membership site owner, you’re not selling tools, downloads or resources.

You’re selling solutions to problems.

You need to let go of the idea that your membership is like an online shopping hub packed with content that members have essentially bought.

Instead, think about the problems that your membership solves.

This will help you to figure out how much content you need before you open the doors.

When you think about your membership like this, you can start to break down your members’ problems and come up with a way that you can provide the solution in as few steps as possible.

If your content isn’t solving your members’ problems, the quantity of content is irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter if you have 100 online courses lined up and ready to go if not a single one of them actually provides real solutions and delivers real results.

Nobody expects you to solve every problem.

But they do expect you to solve the important ones.

These “flagship problems” are the ones you need to dig a little deeper into.

Always identify the core problems that your members have and make sure you’ve got either content, a community, a resource or tool in place that tackles those core problems.

2. Identify your member avatars

 Do you know who your member avatar is?

Before you even think about creating content for your membership site, you need to have a clear picture of your member avatars.

Think of it as an ideal member profile.

This is the type of person that would really benefit from joining your membership.

They have a problem. You’ve got the solution.

All you have to do is figure out how you’re going to give it to them.

A lot of new membership site owners fall at the first hurdle, which is analysing your audience and getting to know the main archetype of members you want to attract.

Where are they in their journey and where do they stand in relation to your topic of expertise?

Think about things like the situation they’re in when they join your membership, where they want to go and what milestones they need to reach to go from where they are now, to where they want to be.

Map out your members’ journey from start to finish.

If you want to go even further with this, break your audience into three core groups; beginner, intermediate and advanced.

Then, create a map to help a beginner step up to the intermediate level and then define how an intermediate member can reach the advanced stage.

By doing this and identifying the milestones that each member will go through depending on their core group, you can start creating content designed to provide the necessary steps to move members along from identifying their problem to finding the solution.

3. Creating content for each of your core groups of members

When the Membership Academy was still in its infancy, we never thought about how much content would be enough to launch. Instead, we identified our three core groups of members.

• Planners – People who are planning a membership
• Creators – People who are in the process of building their membership site (and all of the tech stuff that goes with that)
• Growers – People who are trying to grow their membership

Before the launch, we focused on these three groups and made sure that we had something in place for each one.

The content needed to address their most important problem and provide a tangible solution.

No empty promises. No “fluffy” content. Just valuable content catered to each member depending on which group they were in.

The planners need a plan. They have to figure out the specifics that would help them turn their passion into a product, price it correctly and promote it to the right people.

The creators have an idea and a plan in place. But they don’t know what technology to use. So, they need help choosing their membership site plugin and how to market their site.

The growers want to attract new members. They have already launched their membership and now they want to scale.

With all of this in mind, we set out to create content that helped solve the problems of each of our three core member groups.

Sure, we didn’t solve every problem under the sun that each member had. But we did address the main problem that each group faced and that was the important thing.

4. Get real about member expectations

Ah, expectations. We’ve been trying to live up to them since our childhood and for some reason, we’re still trying to climb that pedestal!

It’s important to manage both your own and your members’ expectations.

As membership site owners, we can often fool ourselves into thinking that our members will dedicate their lives to everything we’ve put out.

So, naturally, we break our backs churning out content to feed the beast when in reality, our members are nowhere near as demanding as we think.

If your members are demanding constant content, you need to make sure that you’ve set their expectations.

Your members don’t make the rules, you do.

You don’t have to work yourself to the bone to satisfy them.

Besides, if you create too much content, members will feel overwhelmed and they’ll just give up because they’re too far behind.

Or at least, they’ll feel like they are.

Creating content for your membership isn’t about quantity, it’s about quality.

You don’t have to have all of your content created and readily available from day one.

You just need enough to get started and help members progress towards their goals.

Plus, your membership is never finished.

It'll always be evolving.

Therefore, you’re always going to be creating content for it.

As your membership ages and you get more feedback from members, you’ll have a better idea about what type of content they enjoy consuming the most and what they need more of.

Do you have enough content to launch your membership site?

If you’ve created enough content to get each member of your core groups from where they are now to where they want to be, you’ve probably got enough content to open the doors to your membership.

Remember, you’re not selling content. You’re selling solutions to problems.

So, keep this in mind when you’re working on your membership launch strategy and don’t focus on having as much content as possible.

Focus on having enough high-quality, problem-solving content and when it’s time to officially launch your site, you’ll be more than ready for it.