Four shapes, four promises
Before any question about platforms or categories, decide which of these you are running. The answer sets your workload for years.
The library
Everything is available from day one. The member browses and takes what they need. The promise is breadth, and it is renewed by additions.
Suits reference subjects and experienced members who already know what they are looking for. Hard on beginners, who see a wall and choose a random brick.
The course
An ordered path with a beginning and an end. The promise is arrival: do this and you will be able to do that.
Strong retention while somebody is working through it, and a cliff at the end. If you run a course, the honest question is what a member is for once they finish, and that question belongs in your pricing thinking as much as your content plan.
The drip
New work released on a rhythm, each piece available when it arrives. The promise is company: keep turning up and so will I.
The best fit for monthly billing, because the member is renewing a rhythm. The cost is that you have signed up to publish on a schedule, forever, and the schedule is the product.
The archive
A drip that has aged into a body of work, where old material is as valuable as new. The promise is depth. Most long running sites end up here whether they planned to or not.
The problem is that an archive built from a drip is organised by date, which is the least useful order for anyone who arrives later.
From practice
By year six my own site was a drip pretending to be a library. There were hundreds of pieces, all sorted by when I happened to make them. Re organising that archive into eleven plain topics took me two months and did more for retention than anything I published in the following year.
The one thing every shape needs
A place to start. One named entry point that a new member is pointed at and can finish.
In a course this is free. In a drip it is the current week. In a library or an archive you have to build it deliberately, and it is the single most valuable page on the site. It is also the hinge of onboarding a new member well.
Members do not abandon sites because there is too little. They abandon them because there is too much and no obvious first step.
Organising an archive people can use
Three rules that have held on every site I have worked on.
- Sort by problem, not by date or format. Members arrive with a question. They do not arrive wanting your March material.
- Keep the number of top level groups under about a dozen. Beyond that people stop scanning and start guessing.
- Say how long each thing takes. A member with twenty minutes will not open something that might take two hours.
Add one more if you publish regularly: mark what has been revised and when. An old piece that has been checked recently reads as maintained rather than stale, and it saves a support question.
How much is enough
A question I get constantly, and the honest answer is that it depends on the promise rather than the volume.
A drip needs a rhythm you can keep in a bad month. Pick the frequency you can hold when you are ill, busy and uninspired, then hold it. Members forgive a smaller piece far more readily than a missing week.
A library needs enough that any reasonable question has an answer. That is a coverage test, not a count. Write down the twenty questions your members actually ask and see how many you have covered.
Neither needs more for its own sake. Adding material is the most common response to a retention problem and one of the least effective, as reducing member churn sets out.
Moving from one shape to another
You will want to at some point, usually from drip towards library or archive. It is doable, and the sequence matters.
- Keep publishing at the old rhythm while you restructure. Do not go quiet to reorganise.
- Group the existing material by problem before you touch navigation.
- Build the start here page first, using existing material.
- Tell members what changed and where their favourite things went. Nothing generates support notes like a silent reorganisation.
- Leave old links working. A member who bookmarked something in 2019 should still land on it.
What to keep out of the members area
Two things, and both are counterintuitive.
First, anything that is genuinely better in public. Work that shows what you know is doing a job out in the open, and locking it away costs you more than it protects.
Second, the community, if you have one, should not be the only way to reach the content. A member who wants the material but not the conversation is a normal member, not a failed one. That separation also makes moderation easier, and moderating a members community explains why.
What I would do first
- Name your shape: library, course, drip or archive. Just one.
- Write the promise it makes in a single sentence and put it on the sales page.
- Build one start here page and name one finishable first thing.
- Regroup the archive by problem, keeping the top level under a dozen.
- Add a time estimate to everything.
