Most people who have never made a membership site before, who want one, ask me, “Should I have a form in my membership site?” They have these huge grandiose plans for their membership site and they want things like a community. They want things like a forum, and in my opinion, that’s the wrong thing to be thinking about. A forum is extremely difficult to control for reasons I will explain in a minute.
The first thing you need to consider, however, when having a membership site is how easy is it going to be to deliver the product, how easy is it going to be for people to get access to your information. I don’t know about you, but whenever I try to find any kind of downloadable materials inside a forum, the navigation was clumsy, it was hard to find things, and it was hard to get back to where I was before. So, do yourself a favor, make the delivery easy, have a blog, and provide your downloads on the blog area. I do not like forums inside membership sites, but if you want to add one later on, go for it.
But here’s something else to think about. How well are you going to be able to control the discussion? Every forum I’ve been to falls into one of two categories. Either it’s empty and the last post was made months or years ago and therefore, it looks bad because it looks like it’s a place where nobody posts and no one reads, so therefore, why should I post. The other type of forum is the one that is too successful for its own good. What happens is you have a selected group of people who just completely take over the discussion, who post everywhere, who argue, and nothing you do can tone them down.
So, are you going to be able to control the discussion? Well, the answer on a blog is usually yes but on the forum, it’s usually no, especially because many forum owners create 50 different subsections when really people only hang around to two. So, a lot of posts go unnoticed by the administrator, but these people who take over the forum post everywhere they want to.
So, my solution for this is why not have a blog just a regular blog, and if there are really good comments or if a post kind of goes off-topic, promote that comment into a post. Copy and paste it and make it a new post, change the author of that post to the person leaving the comment, and then use the Move Comment plugin to move all the other comments underneath that post. So that way, the discussion is still kind of like a forum where anybody can create a new discussion topic but you are in control, it has a very clear linear fashion so we can still drip it out, but you organize the way the information is presented. That way, the advanced topics can come later in the membership site and the easy topics can come right away. And then you can also specific these people who regularly contribute good content and change them from subscribers to contributors. That way, they are people who if they want to make a new blog post in your membership site, they can but you have to approve it.
So, instead of creating a forum, what I would do is remove the forum for now and stick with a regular membership site WordPress blog. This keeps the delivery easy, allows you to control the discussion, and gives you a chance to promote good blog comments into full-blown blog posts.
Instead of having a huge crazy idea for a membership site, start with something simple. Start with a one-time membership site, which you can set up in just a few short minutes.