Intro To Membership Sites
Does this sound like you, or anyone you know?
You’ve taken the plunge, become a blogger, and you are sharing your knowledge. In return, you are earning money from various sources such as Adsense, sponsored ads, and affiliate programs. At some point, you get an email encouraging you to become a member of some site (for a price), with the promise of getting exclusive content in return. You stop to wonder…should I be offering premium membership to my visitors?
The answer is…maybe.
Creating a membership site, or a membership area of your existing site, is certainly one way to monetize your work. It can, in fact, be extremely lucrative. Let’s look at a couple of possible scenarios.
- Members pay a low monthly fee of $10/month. You have 200 members. You make $2000/month.
- Members pay a fairly high fee of $100/month. You have 50 members. You make $5000/month.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? So, wait … what exactly is a membership site again? Essentially, a membership site is when people pay for exclusive or premium content that they can access in a password protected area on your site, usually on a monthly recurring basis (but not necessarily). Only members are allowed access to this content. The content you offer is up to you. It can be information-based (such as articles and ebooks) or service-based (such as tools, software, etc.). Members may receive new, ongoing content on a regular basis as long as they continue to subscribe, or they may sign up for a fixed term that has a set ending date. Membership sites can take various forms, but the premise is generally similar – exclusive access to premium content for a recurring fee.
Of course, the catch is that you have to provide enough premium, quality content, month after month to keep members coming back for more. That isn’t easy. You can of course, make it a time-limited set of materials. For example, you could run it for only 3 months, but then re-run that same 3-month material over and over again, for new members. Old members drop out after their 3 months is up, but new members will theoretically replace them. This would limit the amount of premium content you have to produce, and you could just recycle the content to new members every so often.
There are other ways you can manage a membership site as well. For example, you could offer some content for free to registered members (who trade you their email address for your content), and then upsell them to the extra-special premium content later.
So what do you need to produce a successful membership site? Well, it really boils down to 3 essential things:
- Premium content that people feel is worth paying for
- Software technology to handle the technical aspects, including payments, logins, etc.
- Members
Only you know if you can produce premium content or not. I’ll assume you can (or you can outsource the work). The software to manage the membership site is readily available and can be purchased at various price points. The last part is a little tougher … marketing the site so that you consistently obtain and retain members. The unknown blogger will likely have a more difficult time obtaining members than a well-known blogger will. You’ll need to factor in the time it will take to attract members to the site. Later, we’ll discuss some ways to make that happen more quickly, but you may find that you already have access to a large number of potential members – those who subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter.
If you want to create your own membership site, I’d suggest aMember Pro, as it is the “big daddy” of membership scripts, and has pretty much every feature imaginable, plus a few kitchen sinks thrown in. 
Of course, all those features comes with a slightly steep price.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, I highly recommend waiting until next week before making a decision, because I’ll be posting about a product that is designed just for you, and the price is considerably more affordable.
Disclosure: Affiliate links may be used within this post for products I recommend. They in no way affect my judgement of said products, nor do they affect the price of the product.
Tags: aMember Pro, membership site
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8 Responses to “Intro To Membership Sites”
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An ebusiness coach, web developer, Internet Marketer, SEO, and all around web geek who makes her living from home doing all of the above.
Thanks, Donna! I’m enrolled in Teaching Sells by Brian Clark and Tony Clark and they’re teaching us how to create the premium content.
Thanks for making software suggestions!
Very nice introduction to membership sites.
I believe they should be at the core of any business.
David
I’d be pretty wary of using a 3rd-party script to create a membership site, since you can’t be sure the service is secure, reliable etc.. and you really want full control of your users data, to make sure it’s not abused.
If you’re serious about a membership site, your best options are; 1. Learn PHP/Mysql and code it yourself, or 2. Hire someone to do it for you (to your brief)
It’s also not that easy to start off with a paid membership site unless you’re already offering something for free, so building an active community is an essential 1st step.
Pijoo, I can’t really agree with you on that. If you take that stance, then you’d have to expand it out and say don’t use WordPress for blogs or vBulletin for forums, because they are 3rd-party scripts. I am trying to make things easy for the average person, who is very likely not a programmer, to make a living online. Telling them to learn PHP/Mysql would be like me telling you to grow wings and fly. And as far as hiring someone to do it for you…well…that’s the same thing as buying a script…someone wrote that script.
is there a forum on the site?
@Mayia, there certainly can be, and there often is a forum on membership sites. It’s not a requirement, however, but it makes sense to include one as a means of communication and support.