Something that some sites do well is onboard their users. For those not familiar with the term onboarding I’ll define it.
Onboarding: Walking new users through a series of step designed to help them get the most out of your site.
Most membership sites do nothing about user onboarding at all. They don’t spend time identifying what the key things a good long term member has done. Then since they don’t have that information they don’t do anything to make sure that all new users do those same things.
Cushion
I recently got beta access to Cushion and it did a great job of walking you through the 3 steps you need to do to setup your account. You can see the 3 steps below.
One thing that’s not 100% clear in the shots above is that the only thing on the page during the onboarding process is the goal you need to currently accomplish.
Nothing distracts you from the task at hand.
How are you going to figure out what the key things are your long term members have done? How are you going to define your onboarding process?