As a membership site owner, producing a continuous stream of high-quality membership content to serve your members is one of your most important tasks.

It’s also one of the most time-consuming, especially if you’re a “one-man band,” solely responsible for delivering content.

It’s not just the content creation that drains your time either, you’ve also got to plan the content, manage it and update it regularly.

Continuously turning the content production wheel can be exhausting, which is why you need a content production strategy that streamlines the creation of your membership content without draining your time.

As I’ve said many times before:

If you’re billing people on a recurring basis, you need to deliver value on a recurring basis.

In this article, I explain the steps you need to take to streamline your content production so you can deliver constant value to your members, while reducing your workload and time spent on content creation.

1. Reframe the purpose and role of your membership content

What is the role of your membership?

Without considering specifics, virtually every membership exists for the sole purpose of solving a problem.

This can be one single problem or a host of issues under the same umbrella. Nonetheless, your membership is here to offer a solution.

You’ve got to keep the main purpose of your membership at the forefront of your mind when it comes to planning and producing content.

Don’t let yourself get caught up with the numbers.

Churning out courses, training tutorials and so on just because you want to have the biggest library of content in your market is nothing but a waste of time.

Having the largest amount of content doesn’t make your membership better than your competitors.

People join a membership because they hope it will help them to solve a problem.

So, as long as your content can do that and do it well, there’s no need to bombard your members with content they don’t need.

Think about the way your content is structured. Can members navigate the content journey with ease?

Or, do they spend a ridiculous amount of time browsing through your content trying to find a sequence that makes sense?

Avoid overwhelming your members by showing them what content to consume first.

So… where do I start?!

Make sure the pathway is laid out for them and don’t overcomplicate things.

Consider the role your content plays in the grand scheme of things.

If you can get a problem resolved in a 10-minute lesson, don’t drag it out just to satisfy “the numbers game.”

To streamline content production and save yourself time creating unnecessary content, think about the role your content plays.

2. Get realistic about your members' expectations

Do you feel pressure to constantly churn out new membership content?

Ask yourself what is the source of that pressure?

Is it coming from you or is it your members' unrealistic expectations that have you churning out content like your life depends on it?

All of that built-up pressure can weigh heavy on your shoulders.

Often, we’re the ones putting pressure on ourselves.

Despite what we might think, our members don’t expect us to release hours after hours of new content each week.

And, if your members do expect mountains of new content each week or even each day, it’s up to you to shape their expectations.

Running a membership site takes a lot of work and if you don’t have the time, energy or mind to release a new course each week or each month, make your members aware of that.

Be transparent about what you can realistically deliver, when you can deliver it and communicate those expectations to your members.

3. Establish multiple membership content streams

Next up on my menu of tips is what I like to call… the Neapolitan Ice Cream Strategy.

For this one, I want you to think about each flavor of ice cream as a different form of content to satisfy a different taste.

Not everybody has the same taste in ice cream and the same applies to content.

People learn in different ways and they join your membership for different reasons.

For example, a member might join without having any interest in training courses.

So, if you’re continuously producing training courses and neglecting other areas, you’re not delivering value to the people who have no intention of participating in your courses.

Having three or four different content streams that offer various forms of content helps to ensure that your content appeals to more people.

In addition to your training courses, you could also offer a webinar, informative articles or downloadable checklists.

Don’t spread your content too thin and don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

Spend time working on content that speaks to visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners because each one responds best to different types of content.

4. Embrace live delivery and low friction content

How much time does it take you to create your membership content?

If it’s taking you countless hours, something’s got to change.

If you’re solely focused on releasing tutorials, for example, you’re likely spending hours planning, recording and editing each tutorial before you’re ready to hit publish.

It’s exhausting and putting yourself in that constant ‘grind mode’ makes it very difficult to streamline content production because you’re always working.

A great way to get out of the grind is to embrace live content.

Think live training sessions, monthly mastermind calls, Q&A’s and other types of low friction content.

This can be one of the additional content streams that you offer members who love interacting with people in the moment.

The live element brings your members closer to the mind behind the membership.

They can interact with you in real-time and you can also upload the recording of your live video inside your membership for anyone who missed it.

Producing live content, whether that’s a webinar or a live training session, eases your workload.

Yes, you still need to do some preparation, but it’s minimal and nothing compared to all of the work you put into a training course.

One idea is to release one of your content streams each week.

For example, you could release a course in week one, followed by a live training session in week two, a webinar in week three and perhaps a Q&A video in week four.

Although the training course requires a lot of work and preparation, the other three are low friction and take less time while still providing value to your members.

5. Expose your members to a variety of opinions and expertise

Another way to streamline the production of your membership content is to invite third-party experts to feature in some of your live video sessions or workshops.

Having someone else in your corner can not only lighten your workload, but it also exposes your members to a greater variety of expertise.

Influencers and people who have established themselves as experts in a particular topic or industry will bring a lot of value to your content.

Reaching out to potential guests and setting up a time and day that suits both parties will fall on your lap.

However, the actual work behind creating the material to deliver during that strategy or training session will be your guest’s responsibility.

This means that your workload is reduced and even if it’s a Q&A style interview, coming up with relevant questions that provoke engaging answers from the guest will be the height of your prep-work.

Don’t forget that you can also tap into your membership base to produce content like case studies to share with other members.

A one-on-one consultation with a member of your site where you help coach them through an issue or problem makes for great content to share with the rest of your members.

Get Organized, Get Streamlined

The key to developing a streamlined content production process is to systemize it.

For each piece of content you need to create, think about all of the actions and tasks that need to happen to plan, produce and deliver that content on time.

Ask yourself:

• Which tasks can be outsourced?
• What can be cut?
• Are there areas that could be adapted to make the production process more efficient?

Creating a standard operating procedure where each step of the content production process is streamlined will make things so much easier for yourself over time.

Get ahead with your content production, plan it and give yourself space to breathe.

Running a membership site isn’t easy and the demand for valuable content won’t ever go away.

But that doesn’t mean you have to work hours upon hours to deliver high-quality membership content.

I hope these tips help you to make your content production process more manageable, so that you can spend less time churning out unnecessary content and more time focusing on delivering valuable content that your members can’t wait to consume.