Leverage the Power of Guests in Your Membership Site Content Strategy
An excellent membership site content strategy that offers high-value content and extends your reach is to leverage the power of guests. You don’t have to create all your content by yourself. By inviting guest experts to appear in your content, you offer even more for your audience while lessening the burden on yourself.
Why Get Guests Onboard With Your Membership Site Content Creation Strategy?
- By leveraging the combined experience of you and your guest, you offer more value to your audience.
- Your guest can fill in gaps where you’re not an expert in your niche.
- You can gain access to your guest’s audience. Some of their audience will check out your content because they’re there.
- It presents a great opportunity for networking. Invite new people you’ve met to join you in this win-win project.
- It alleviates some of the content creation burdens from your shoulders.
When you’re the single source of information and support in your membership, your members can quickly get demanding.
Shift away from this and you’ll likely notice a positive change in your program dynamic.
How can you do this effectively? Here are some of my top suggestions.
How to Use Guests in Your Content Strategy
One of the easiest ways to incorporate guests into your membership content creation strategy is to interview them. Find an expert in your niche and interview them for your membership, blog, live stream, podcast, or YouTube channel. Ask them questions from your audience or get them to talk about their areas of expertise. You only have to come up with the questions and lead the discussion. Your guest will do the rest.
You can also invite a guest to create content for you. The most common way to do this is by recording a video workshop, presenting a live workshop, or writing content, such as an article or worksheet. Let an expert in your niche publish their own content within your membership and give them the opportunity to interact with your audience. This gives your members some variety and adds to the knowledge you can share.
You can also invite a guest to co-host an event with you. For example, you could hold an online seminar or social media challenge with a guest. With both of you promoting the event together, you’re sure to attract a lot of participants.
Of course, there’s always a chance things will go awry. It’s best to plan for such incidents in advance. Here are ways to circumvent things veering into left field.
Tips When Adding Guests to Your Social Media Strategy
Spend Time Vetting Your Guests. Choose your guests wisely. They should be a respected expert, preferably with a large following. The quality and value they offer will reflect back on you.
A good way to vet is to start following influencers and experts in your niche long before you approach them. Then, when you’re ready to make a proposal, choosing who to contact will be a no-brainer.
Relevancy Beats Follower Counts. While it’s natural that you want a guest with a large number of followers, don’t let audience size be the sole determining factor. If someone’s expertise is relevant to your audience, they’ll offer great value.
Be Transparent. Be genuine and transparent about why you’re reaching out to the person. Explain the reasons why you’d like them on board and the benefits for them.
Create a Winning Proposal. Create a customizable proposal template for current and future guests. Your proposal should explain the project in detail and explain the benefits.
Offer Something in Return. You may want to offer guests something upfront in return for their participation. If you don’t want to offer something specific, leave it open for them to decide. Don’t offer them “exposure” but instead offer something you’ll actually do for them that has value.
Make It Long-Term. Don’t think of this partnership as a one-time event. Guest projects are a great way to kick off a valuable long-term relationship. Think about events or projects you can collaborate on in the future.
Get into the regular routine of networking to seek out potential guests and include them in your membership program content strategy. The work you do finding them and incorporating them into your strategy will pay off.
