Membership sites are not a new thing. Way back in 1996, Bill Gates said that he estimated membership sites to be a $20-$30 million dollar per year industry.
Mr Gates has got more things right than wrong in his career, but that wasn't one of them. Just 14 years later and the figure is more like $2 Billion Dollars annually. Membership sites are big business and despite the worldwide recession, continue to grow in importance.
A membership site is, by and large, one that charges subscribers a monthly fee to access its website. But charging a monthly fee isn't the only game in town - another perfectly viable business model is to allow members to join for free, but to monetize the site through special subscriber offers made each time the member logs in.
Whichever membership model you choose, you will need a few things in place:
* A domain and hosting
* An autoresponder
* Membership site software
* Content to regularly post to the site
Domains and hosting, and autoresponders, are beyond the scope of this article. We will consider the membership site software you can use and the content you need to post.
Membership Site Software
There are dozens of options - from the plugins that you can add to a WordPress blog, through newbie-friendly programs like Easy Member Pro, right up to powerful scripts such as Login Frequency Marketing.
There is software available to suit every pocket - even one or two free options.
Why are membership sites so popular?
The Internet has become synonymous with 'free'. People expect information to be available for free and sites like Wikipedia are happy to provide that service. However, people have also come to realize that with free information there is relatively little quality control. If they want good, premium content then they know that they will sometimes have to pay for it.
In addition, people like the idea of belonging to an exclusive club, and online membership sites can offer that kind of exclusivity that they crave.
Of course, no membership site can survive for long if it doesn't provide those things: great, fresh content and a sense of belonging.
The Advantages to Building Membership Websites
One of the problems with Internet marketing as it is generally practiced is that you constantly need to find new customers and make new sales. You can have a great month and sell a lot of the latest big launch product, but what do you do next month? Or the month after? The wheel has to be reinvented over and over again.
With a membership site, you remove most of that ongoing stress. You do your job of selling the memberships and then they pay you month in, month out, automatically. You don't have to ask for the money - your payment processor just takes it - and you never need to remind anyone to pay up.
Although three will be a number of people who will unsubscribe and cancel their subscriptions each month, on the whole most will stay.
The industry average is reckoned to be that members stay for about 4 months, but many of the quality membership sites expect their members to stick around a lot longer than that!
The result is that you work once to set up the site to begin with and then again to attract members in, but after that the financials of your business will be based on residual earnings - in other words, once they've started paying, they'll keep on.
Residual income is the sweetest money of all and can quite literally last for years with no extra effort on your part.
Of course, with a membership site you do have to add new content, or provide some kind of service to keep your members interested.
If you have a site based on the use of a piece of software you've written or had created for you, your ongoing input may be negligible after the initial set up, but if you are providing information, you will need to develop a routine for creating new stuff for your members on a regular basis.
Many people ignore the power of membership sites to build themselves a very useful income, but to do so is a folly. After all, 100 members paying just $9.99 per month amounts to $1000 a month and may only require you to write a new article each week.
Some membership sites are even set up so that the members themselves create the ongoing content. Recipe sites, for example, encourage members to post new recipes for all to see, and to participate in discussion forums that only members can access. The site owners can charge a nice monthly fee, but in actuality don't have to create any content at all!
Whatever your current online marketing business model, consider adding a membership site or two to your stable of Internet properties. Your residual income will skyrocket and your workload may well be lower than you ever imagined possible.
Your Internet lifestyle could be just a membership site away!
Here's an added resource that can help you along the way towards your membership site:
| Membership Gold Rush To Your Evergreen Success RD |
No comments:
Post a Comment