How do you migrate your membership site?

Hello again,

How are you?

You will never guess what happened to me recently, my vision board membership site asked me to upgrade to a paid plan!

And the issue is that I chose a site offering paid plans that are not really cheap, so eleven months after creating it and promoting my vision board workshops for approximately six months, I was asked to upgrade from a free plan to a paying one.

The big problem was, that between that period, I had spent money on my Instagram strategy by subscribing for a social media marketing mentor and also for an expensive business strategy coach. So by then my pockets were empty.

Moreover, I had left aside my site for a while and stopped creating blog posts on it because I was busy working on how to attract clients to my offers.

In addition, I noticed by leaving it aside, a funny thing occurred, my site changed here and there without updating it myself... It was wild...so when I attended to it after the notification to upgrade, I saw that it was in need for serious H.E.L:P: thank goodness I got that email to upgrade it to a paid plan!!!

For the little story about why I chose a website with membership creation capacity, it is because when I started offering online workshops, I noticed to be profitable, I needed recurring sales and I knew that memberships and subscriptions were a very good way to do this, as I had already tested a subscription box model.

In those days, I wanted to sell office supplies and other items with a subscription per trimester but the starting costs were too high and shipping worldwide, every three months boxes, meant I had to increase their price, which I did not want to do, so I left that business and moved on.

This is how the vision board club membership started. Now eleven months after, I needed to migrate my website. The difficult part of it was to find a website builder that offered free membership creation in their basic plan. Therefore, I went on the Internet to find a new one, I thought it would be easy-peasy, well it was not.

I searched Google and found many articles and blog posts about the best cheap or affordable website builder, and I even searched videos on Youtube.com, however nothing seemed to fit. I had 30 days to upgrade my website to a 38 USD per month plan and I thought about doing so, but felt it was not the moment at all, as I had not yet introduced the vision board club on my Instagram, nor on my Facebook and I felt I would be wasting my money for at least the next six months, unless I found clients immediately which seemed quite difficult.

I felt upset, and after several days of searching the internet and testing different sites, I concluded that maybe I do not need a membership site. I could simply create a website for my vision board workshops, explaining who I am, what I do and why, and sell my digital products and share my freebies there. I was quite sad about it.

The membership site I chose at first was a relatively straight forward one to use, but had some little work arounds at times, like updating the price of a plan, if I wanted to do so, I had to create a whole new product and include it after. Instead of simply correcting the price I wanted. It was also a dynamic one, when I first registered it was known for its membership and website building capacity, however by the time I left they had created a blog option. Which for a second made me question why did I use the membership option to create my vision board blog, of course the reason was because only two or three posts were available for the non-members and the others were for the paying customers as it went into detail about certain topics and to separate them a membership access, was the best option.

After all this, I eventually chose a website that has a membership option, however only for the paying plan !!!!😅🤔😶‍🌫️🥹

Now why that choice after all the havoc of searching, feeling upset because I needed to change site, get out of my comfy website builder zone? Well because I could not find another free membership website builder for businesses. I did find one that could apply to organisations and other non-profits but none for businesses and the site I use now offers a paying option that is far cheaper than the one I left, so when I am ready I will use it as a membership site.

What I gathered of this experience is:

The difficult part of migrating my membership website was :

• Finding an appropriate website.

• Putting all my data in a safe place to keep for the new site.

• Updating all the ads and information posted on social media with my new website address.

The good side of having to migrate the website was:

• I found a new layout I liked a lot, that I am looking forward to try.

• I now have digital products and freebies to sell and share on my site, which I did not have at first, and I am looking forward to add them to it.

• I took the time to update my website that had become like a messy storage room that needs arranging, and I am happy I did it.

• I discovered that some website builders paying plans are quite affordable compared to the one I chose first.

• I took the opportunity to update my business logo and create one that I can add on all my social media accounts.

• Last but not least, I met a person who made my new logo, and if required, she can help me to create my upcoming website too.

At this date, I have not yet finished my new website, before I migrated the old one to my new website address, I deleted all the information on it and left a message saying we are closing our website for the moment, and on the new one I added a note saying "coming soon OFERA Services and Workshops". I have not yet attended to changing my Pinterest pins with the new website address and I am wondering if I will because I have quite a bit of them.

To summarise, migrating your website to a new service provider can be a pain and also a great moment to renew your business. In my case, since I was using a free plan, I did not yet have an official domain name, so I could not take my website to wherever I wanted and I had to redo it from scratch.

Although, I still have quite a bit of work to do on it, I think it was a good thing and a reminder to keep an eye on my websites as well as my landing pages, because you never know if a typo was missed or other. Moreover, I tell myself when I will be hiring personnel for my business, I am looking forward to get a person to check my websites and content as well as create them because all this takes quite a bit of time to do.

Should you want to join the vision board club, please let me know by sending a message with the contact form.

Wishing you a wonderful day (or evening) and I am looking forward to share more of my daily cuts with you.

S. Cutie ( not giving up on this yet 🤣😅)