What’s all the Great Buzz about Membership Sites?

January 9, 2008

So just what is all the buzz about membership sites? It seems to be flavour of the month to start your own membership site.

Well I suppose you could be easily convinced by the numbers 100 members all paying $67.00 a month is I’m sure you would agree a nice little earner. Sounds good doesn’t it, just what could you do with $6,700 a month or even $80,400 per year. Easy Money! you might think that but………any real and honest marketer will tell you the truth. Running a membership site is darned hard work, either before launch or whilst the site is ongoing. 

1. You have to have work hard for the benefit of your members.
2. Membership sites based on content need to be constantly updated.
3. New members have to be constantly brought in to replace members who decide to leave. Even if you decide to limit the number of members let’s say to just 100 you still have to provide your service to those members with fresh content articles, products or new material on whatever your chosen site is about. 

I am not saying that to frighten you off the idea, because to be honest I really wouldn’t mind that kind of income.  So how can you easily set up and run your very own membership site?

One way to make it easier for yourself is to make sure that you have a solid membership script to use.  A good membership script will make running the site and delivery of the content so it is only available to your paying members so much easier for you.

A decent membership script should have without a doubt :-

1. A secure “login area”  for you as Admin and a seperate secure “login area” for your members.
2. Each seperate member has their own Username and Password. Not just one protected folder relying on one .htacess file.
3. A choice of payment processor to take your subscriptions from your loving members.
4. A secure method of product delivery so that only your members have access to the goods they have paid the fee for.
5. An autoresponder or mail system built in so you can communicate with your members directly from the site or through your third party autoresponder service, choice here is up to the individual site owner.
6. Ideally a built in way to offer your members “member only specials”, call them whatever you like, upsells, downsells, OTO’s I much prefer to refer to them as “member only specials”.
7. A way for your members to upgrade to the next level of membership i.e. if they joined as a free member to upgrade to the next level of membership and it’s relevant benefits.
8. Although not always required, a script that integrates with a forum for your members always provides added “value”.
9. Again if the script you choose includes it’s own affiliate program inbuilt, you then would have the ability to allow your members to make affiliate fees by promoting your site. This of course would not be applicable if you have chosen the capped member limit type of site.

Obviously the script you choose will depend on the budget you have to work with. Do it right and do it well and you will soon be on your way to that $80,400.oo  or even more!

Let’s just do the math :-

• 100 members @ $5.00 month =  $6,000.00 per annum
• 100 members @ $27.00 month = $32,400.00 per annum
• 100 members @ $47.00 month = $56,400.00 per annum
• 100 members @ $97.00 month = $116,400.00 per annum – now do you fancy doing a bit of hard work?

My own personal choice of script, all singing, dancing complete with bells and whistles – and a monthly payment plan added to help ease the pain on your wallet, nothing beats this for it’s built in features take a look at Memberspeed. 

Posted in Internet