March 31, 2008 
If you look around on the Net these days, you'll see more and more membership sites popping up.
It seems that people are increasingly willing to pay for online content. And that's why pay-for-content is rapidly turning into a hot revenue model.
Have you ever considered setting up your own membership sites?
A huge advantage doing so is that you will be able to turn your hobby, profession, specific knowledge or skills into a profitable business.
Your main challenge will be:
delivering more value each month than
the price of your membership site.
the price of your membership site.
That's the only reason members will stay with you. If you can have them earn substantially more than they have to pay you, they will never have any reason to leave.
Achieving that is simply a matter of coming up with valuable and exclusive content, but as long as the membership site is about your hobby, profession or skills, that shouldn't be too hard.
The easiest membership site format is a free one. It can be as simple as having people login at your wordpress blog.
The value of a free membership site is often regarded upon as rather worthless, but you shouldn't underestimate this format. And that's just because people with common needs or common interests just LOVE to be part of a community.
Photo credit: NatalInfo.com
Forums are a great example. You can browse most forums, but you have to register
and login before you can post. If you can setup such a forum and turn it into
a great community, you have a valuable asset. Because, in most forums, the owner
can send Private Messages (PM's) to any member with the click of a mouse!Paid membership sites vary from very easy to complex.
It depends on the value inside the membership: low prices for less value, high tickets for high value memberships. The technique to establish such sites often is in proportion to the value of the membership site.
For low prices memberships, there's an Easy Membership Creator product available all over the Net. Google the term and you'll find one.
But for higher value inside the site, you'll need more sophisticated software, depending on the strategies that you implement.
For example, if someone joins your 2-year old membership site, will she receive the same valuable content as the person who joined when you started out and paid 24 terms already? That wouldn't be fair, would it?
Now, you could hide the content history and have them buy it, but I prefer to have new members walk the same path as the senior ones. It's kind of an autoresponder within the membership script, slowly unveiling the URL's to the content as the months go by. There are many membership scripts available on the Net, from cheap to expensive, but I know of only ONE script that can do just that. By the way, it also has an autoresponder system build in.
Of course you should have an automated sign up procedure in place, as well as payment processing, automated cancellations and autoresponder follow up series.
Remember that your payments are recurring and not all payment processing systems can handle recurring payments. PayPal and Clickbank can, so you should check them out.
If you run a low priced membership site, I wouldn't bother too much about cancellations, but for higher prices sites it's an important issue. Instead of deleting members manually, you should automate the whole process as much as possible. Again, PayPal and Clickbank let you do just that, but your membership software should be able to handle that too, impeccable. The script I talked about above can.
As you can expect, lower priced membership sites are the easiest to sell. Anything under $17 a month goes, as long as you give value in return. You can try to attract members on your own.
But prices above that are more difficult to sell, so you may want to use an affiliate program to set up an army of sales people and pay commissions to anyone referring members to your site.
Commissions should at least be above $9 a month, or no affiliate will be interested to promote your membership site. Anything above that makes it more interesting, certainly because it's recurring income. In other words, sell once, get paid every month. For affiliates, that's the most interesting part of the deal.
So, your membership software better have a great affiliate management section! By the way, the script I talked about above happen to have that build in.
A combination of free and paid memberships can be a great one. The free is there just to test the waters, build up of enticing content having member long for more. Therefore, upgrades to paid memberships should be easy and smoothly.
You can even split up paid memberships into several content quality levels. You'll often see bronze, silver and gold membership sites.
If you have this kind of sites, you should make it as easy as possible for members to upgrade. And if they don't, maybe a well placed, highly effective One-Time-Offer (OTO) can lead to a sale.
Oh yeah, my script can do several membership offers as well as OTO's.
Finally, if you have an expensive membership site, you better protect your content. Of course, there's nothing you can do against straight theft, but you really should make it as hard as possible to run away with your content.
Nevertheless, your software should be very easy and highly flexible to use, so that you don't have to spend a lot of time adding, editing or updating your pages.
Consider starting your own membership site. Make sure that you have enough valuable content for a couple of months ahead and that you always can get more.
Think about the membership model that you want to use and if you're not sure, start with a simple site. You can always extend to more complex models later.
If you got it all set up, test the whole procedure, from beginning to start to see if there are any errors along the process. It's better to detect them before you open up for the public and get negative comments because of some flaws that you could have prevented.
Membership sites are hot and can be very profitable! Think about it.
Wishing you success,
PS
Almost forgot....
Here's that superb membership site script that I talked about and personally use.
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