How to Add a Membership Program to Your Health Coaching Business

Melissa, integrative nutrition health coach and founder, Four Wellness Co. // Four Wellness Co. for health coaches: business tips and resources for health and wellness coaches, fitness instructors, personal trainers and other wellness professionals

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With the release of the Membership Lab, my web design agency’s new training on building online membership programs, I’ve been getting more questions than usual on online membership programs, what they are, and how to use them in your health coaching business. (Yes, how to build an online course or resource library—both examples of online membership programs—is one of the most common questions I get from health coaches!)

I’ve shared before the four different types of membership programs we commonly see in health coaching businesses, and examples of how they can be set up to help grow your own health coaching business.

To elaborate on that, here are some more details on how to add a membership program to your health coaching business, and the exact tools and technology needed to do that:

How to create a membership program for your health coaching business

Membership programs and membership-protected content are increasingly popular in online health coaching, both as paid products in and of themselves, as well as free opt-in gifts used as a strategy for growing your business’ email list.

Why membership programs are so beneficial for your health coaching business

Before we dive in to the set-up options, let’s first be really clear about why “membership programs” are so great for your biz—how do they help you as a health coach?

Well, for 1:1 service providers (like us health coaches), membership programs are a form of passive income that helps:

scale your health coaching business to reach more people than you can serve 1:1
sell your expertise any day of the week, any time of day or night (regardless if your schedule happens to match up with a client’s!)
dramatically increase your income potential (because you’re no longer limiting dollars to hours in a day)
free up more time to work on your business rather than in it
free up time for personal life—things like spending time with family, traveling, taking a mid-day yoga class, etc.!

Types of online membership programs for health coaches

Here are some of the (many!) ways health coaches can use online membership programs in your business:

Online courses
Resource libraries
Video archives
Interactive membership groups
Health coaching client portals
E-books, guides & other downloadable materials

Almost any area of wellness expertise you have can somehow be packaged into an online membership program (and a new income stream!) for your health coaching business.

Some wellness topics better lend themselves to certain formats (for example, a fitness tutorial would more likely be a video, and a healthy recipe ebook would more likely be a PDF download)—so it’s helpful to do a little brainstorming regarding your particular areas of expertise as a health coach and how they could potentially be shared at a larger scale.

If you need some inspiration, here are examples of the best online membership program types for health coaches.

Then, once you have your own lovely wellness membership program idea, we’ll need a way to set that up online!

The best membership-protection tools for health coaches

It’s no secret, I use and love Squarespace for health coaching websites. We use it ourselves here, and I recommend it to other health coaches and wellness professionals as the best platform to DIY your own beautiful and professional website (or, to easily use and maintain the beautiful and professional website you hired a web designer to create for you).

If you’re looking to start a wellness website, I highly recommend going with Squarespace. And, if you’re looking to build and grow an online membership program for your health coaching business, I recommend Squarespace for that as well (running an online membership program means lots more interaction with your website, so you’ll want that all to be built on a platform that’s simple and easy to use!).

Use code PARTNER10 to take 10% off your Squarespace website. 💃

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All Squarespace websites come with a free 14-day trial.

So, I recommend Squarespace for your health coaching website in general, and your wellness membership program specifically.

But, if you already have your health coaching website built elsewhere, I’ll chat through the options for creating an online membership program for your health coaching business, regardless which website platform you’re using.

The best options for creating membership-protected content for your health coaching business:

Squarespace Member Areas

Squarespace recently launched Member Areas, their new commerce feature that allows you to create and sell members-only content directly on your Squarespace website. This is definitely a possible option to consider for your membership program set-up if you’re a Squarespace user… though there’s also another option to be aware of too!

MemberSpace

Until recently, Squarespace didn’t have a native option to membership-protect content on their platform. So, MemberSpace, a third-party tool that membership-protects specific pages on your website, was the primary workaround.

MemberSpace can be used to create a wide range of membership-protected content on almost any website platform—including Squarespace, WordPress, Weebly, Wix and others.

I’ve used MemberSpace for years and have designed or consulted on dozens of online membership programs including online courses, resource libraries, membership groups, health coaching client portals, e-books, wellness guides and other downloadable materials relevant to a health coach’s particular health coaching clients and audience.

It’s also what our own Wellness Library is built with, and what the Membership Lab mentioned above was originally created to teach people to use (the Membership Lab now also includes info on Squarespace Member Areas, and how to know which of the platforms is best for you).

Course creators like Teachable, Kajabi, Podia, etc.

There are several popular course creation platforms (like Teachable, Kajabi and Podia, to name a few) that can be used to easily create and sell an online course on a particular area of your wellness expertise. In this case, your course is actually hosted on the course creator platform itself, which you can use if you don’t have your own website, or you can link to it there from your existing health coaching website.

These are all lovely tools, but there are a few reasons I rarely recommend them to health coaches:

Though they’re great at what they do (make online course creation really easy), I prefer the versatility of MemberSpace or Squarespace Member Areas, which have more flexibility in offering other types of online membership programs in addition to online courses—things like resource libraries, membership communities, health coaching client portals, etc. Many health coaches actually run multiple membership programs in our businesses, and it works best to get them all set up and functioning through one tool rather than several.
It’s ideal that you have a professional website and a wellness blog for your health coaching business, and that you put some effort into your search engine optimization (SEO), which helps get you valuable website traffic. So, it’s generally best to host your wellness programs and corresponding sales pages on your own website rather than elsewhere.
As a web designer, I care a lot about branding! It really does make or break an online business (and that’s true for online health coaching businesses too). Because Squarespace Member Areas and MemberSpace are simply protecting content that’s on your own website (rather than hosting your content elsewhere), you’re able to construct your membership programs within your existing website itself—which also means you get to maintain your site’s existing branding and create a more seamless user experience for your clients/members.

So, no knock on course creators like Teachable, etc… they’re just not what I use or tend to recommend to our clients, for those reasons above.

Building an online membership program for your health coaching business

Though the membership programs in my own businesses (both Four Wellness Co. and Five Design Co.) are all built with MemberSpace (because, full disclosure, I do like it better 😁), Squarespace Member Areas may be an option for some health coaches as well.

Below, we’ll chat through these two options for setting up a membership program for your health coaching business, and in which cases each of them may be the best bet for you.

As I mention like a broken record: We use Squarespace websites, and that’s what I recommend for health coaches.

Squarespace Member Areas is a Squarespace product, so only available with Squarespace websites.

MemberSpace, on the other hand, integrates with Squarespace, as well as WordPress, Wix, Weebly and other website platforms—so it can be used to membership-protect content on almost any website platform.

Here’s what to know about these options for building members-only content on your health coaching website:

How Squarespace Member Areas membership-protects your wellness program

If your health coaching website is built on Squarespace, Squarespace Member Areas is arguably the simplest way to add members-only content to your health coaching business, as it’s all done right from the back-end of your existing website.

You simply add on the new Member Areas feature to your website subscription (it’s an additional monthly fee) and you can get started building out your membership-protected pages right away. There’s not much set-up to it other than defining the structure of your program and building out your page content!

Member Areas allows you to offer free, one-time payment, or subscription (recurring payment) programs. All billing (and the associated Customer Accounts) is done directly through your Squarespace website.

Member Areas is a great option for simple, more basic wellness programs—but it doesn’t have the full functionality that MemberSpace offers, and there are a few details/limitations to be aware of if you’ll be hosting multiple membership programs in your health coaching business (for example, a health coaching client portal and a healthy recipe resource library), or if you’ll be using multiple payment options for the same program (for example, a one-time payment and a payment plan).

Here’s a more detailed comparison of the difference between Member Areas and MemberSpace and how to know which would be the best fit for your particular health coaching business and needs.

Quick summary: If your health coaching website is built on Squarespace and you will not be needing the additional features of MemberSpace (more on those below), then Squarespace Member Areas is likely the simplest and best option for you!

Both Squarespace Member Areas & MemberSpace offer a free 14-day trial, so you can try them each to see which works best for you! 🙌

How MemberSpace membership-protects your wellness program

MemberSpace integrates with your health coaching website to membership-protect specific pages or content on your site so those pages/materials are only available to users who’ve become part of your membership program.

So, this makes it a great option for creating sections of your website that are only accessible to your health coaching clients—or, building and launching any other type of members-only content.

MemberSpace works with all the major website platforms, including Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Weebly and others. With it, you can create free or paid membership programs, and select from multiple billing options like one-time payments, recurring subscription payments, payment plans, coupons, etc.

Though it’s a third-party tool, MemberSpace offers easy styling customization so your sign-up process can fit the branding of your business (and the rest of your website), creating a more seamless user experience for your customers and clients.

MemberSpace is great for both simple and more advanced membership programs, and is especially good at handling multiple different membership program types (super important if you plan to offer multiple membership types in your business—for example, a resource library and online courses).

They also offer single sign-on capability with other popular membership tools and software, like members-only discussion forums and directories, if those happen to be part of your membership program. Single sign-on means that members only need to log in once and will immediately have access to the integrated tool (rather than logging in to your membership protected pages, and then needing to log in to the members-only forum there separately).

MemberSpace does involve some more back-end set-up than Squarespace Member Areas—you’ll need to “install” it on your website, but they have helpful instructions to walk you through each step of the process.

Quick summary: Overall, MemberSpace is a more robust and flexible membership-protection tool, and is compatible with multiple website platforms (not just Squarespace).

Like I mentioned before, it’s what we use for our membership programs (at both Four Wellness Co. and Five Design Co.), and also what I tend to recommend for the majority of the membership programs I consult on for health coaches.

Try MemberSpace free for 14 days →

Both MemberSpace & Squarespace Member Areas offer a free 14-day trial, so you can try them each to see which works best for you! 🙌

Here’s a more detailed comparison of MemberSpace vs. Squarespace Member Areas and how they stack up along different measures.