Membership Site Tips
Why Do I Want A Membership Site?
I've had the opportunity to speak to many people in my years online and several
times I've brought up the topic of running your own membership site. Whenever
I would suggest the idea, the response I would get would basically border
on the "What are you crazy? Why would I want to do all that work?" Well,
I can't lie. Creating and running a membership site is a lot of hard work.
But after reading this article, you may want to reconsider your opinion on
creating your own membership site if you are dead set against it. The benefits
certainly outweigh the problems.
Probably the biggest advantage of creating and running your own membership
site is that once you have a member, if you treat him or right, you may have
a member for life. What you have now done, is you have done the work one
time, essentially made one sale, the initial sign up, and ultimately get
a residual income for as long as this person remains a member. Imagine that
you have a membership site with 100 paid members at $10 per member. That's
$1,000 income each month without having to do anything other than just maintain
the site.
Another advantage of having a membership site is online presence. With selling
a digital product, most people will buy your product and then pretty much
forget about you. But with a membership site, this is an area that people
have to go to each day in order to get the benefits of their membership.
This builds up an online presence. Gradually, your site will climb up the
search engines and you'll start getting members without having to do much
promotion. Even just article marketing should slowly get people to your site.
This is not to say that running a membership site isn't going to have its
problems, because it will. Unfortunately, there is no perfection on the Internet
and membership sites are no different. One of the problems you're going to
have, and actually the biggest problem, is that as your membership grows,
which is what you want, you are going to have more people to support. Eventually,
the number of emails you're going to receive in a day are going to be more
than you can handle if the site is successful. This will ultimately require
you to either install a help desk or get some outside help through outsourcing.
Another problem you're going to have is bandwidth and disk space. As your
membership grows, you may reach a point where your current hosting service
can't handle the traffic. You may have a monthly cap on bandwidth and limited
disk space. This may require you to either upgrade your package or go to
a completely different hosting company. As you grow, your problems will grow.
Naturally, there is going to be a trade off with anything that you do.
Ultimately, you have to decide if the extra work and customer support is
worth the extra income that comes with it. This is not something I can decide
for you. All I can do is give you an overall picture of what you can expect
from running your own membership site.
Choosing Your Membership Web Site Software
If you've decided to tackle the challenge of running your own membership
site, the first thing you're going to have to do, after you've actually designed
your site, is find some membership web site software to actually get your
site up and running. In this article, we're going to give you some things
to think about when trying to make this decision. Hopefully, after reading
this, you'll have a pretty good idea of what direction you want to go in.
The first thing you need to know is that not all membership web site software
is the same. Some are very basic and will only handle the bare minimum of
things and others are so complex that you literally need a degree in advanced
physics to understand how they work. Which one you choose is going to largely
depend on your specific needs. But there are some basic things that you are
going to want.
For one thing, you are going to need software that has the ability to take
payments and register users. Now, you could just throw a PayPal button up
there and process the payments that way, manually keeping track of your members
and locking people out if their subscription lapses. Honestly, as your membership
grows, you probably don't want to do this. Most membership web site software
will handle this part easily.
Another thing you are going to want in your membership web site software
is the ability to run reports. It will be nice to know how many members you
have. It will also be nice to have reports that show you any unauthorized
access to your site. To do this, you will need software that allows you to
protect certain directories. Most of the better ones will do this.
Another thing that you are going to want in your membership web site software
is the ability to add as many payment processors as you want. Some people
may not have access to a PayPal account or have a credit card. By having
software that allows you to add any payment processors you want to be able
to accept payments from, this increases the potential membership of your
site.
As we move up to more advanced applications, you are going to want to run
an affiliate program to be able to get more members through your existing
members promoting the site. This is where you really have to do some shopping
around. Most of the basic membership software that's out there doesn't have
very powerful affiliate program capability. To get this functionality at
a level where you can really run a great affiliate program, you're going
to have to turn to the more expensive applications.
These few things are only the tip of the iceberg. You're also going to want
to be able to manually manage accounts, send emails to members, be able to
put up a message board or forum and a number of other things that are just
nice to have. As I said at the beginning, what you get will be greatly influenced
by what you want your software to be able to do. So shop around. Most of
the better software out there will have complete specifications that you
can read before purchasing. This way you can make an informed decision on
the software that you ultimately get.
What Type Of Membership Site Do I Want?
If you're thinking of putting up a membership site, it will help to have
some idea of what kind of membership site you want. To just blindly put up
a site with no theme or purpose is simply suicide. Members are going to join
just to hang around and shoot the breeze. They're going to want something
in return for their membership, even if it's free. This article is going
to give you some ideas for membership sites. Maybe you've thought of some
of these. If not, hopefully, you'll find something that interests you.
One of the hottest membership site ideas these days is the PLR content site.
This is a site where each month the members get access to a number of PLR
packages. These are popular because these packages can then be repackaged
and sold by your members. The problem with these kind of sites is getting
the content. There's really only 2 choices to doing this. Either you create
the content yourself, which can be very time consuming, or your purchase
the content from others, which can be very expensive.
The best way to handle this, if a PLR content site is the way you want to
go, is to write up all your content first. Then, when you have enough content
to last for several months membership, you'll be able to keep up with the
demand for it. Then, as your membership grows and you start making some money,
you can afford to go out and get some content from outsourcing.
Another popular kind of membership site is the lead generation site. Marketers
want leads. Without leads there are no sales. So these kind of sites, if
they provide good leads, make a lot of money. Just look at the Veretekk system.
The problem with these kind of sites is that they are very difficult and
expensive to keep running, especially if members are emailing to leads from
your servers. As your membership grows, you'll have to add more and more
servers. Veretekk has gone through many growing pains because of this. And
then of course, there is the problem of getting the leads. This can be a
very expensive thing in itself.
Another popular kind of membership site is safelist site. Even though safelists
are very poor for marketing, people love them and join them everyday. As
a safelist owner, you do have the opportunity to email these members every
so often and make a sales pitch to them. If you sign up with a safelist service,
you can actually do this without even having to get your own software or
web site. Of course a custom made safelist script and domain will work much
better.
The above suggestions don't even scratch the surface as you have membership
sites that provide services like autoresponders, Internet marketing training,
list building services, traffic exchanges and the list just goes on and on.
Each type of membership site has its good and bad. You need to weigh all
factors before deciding which way to go. If you have any questions about
the problems you may run into with a membership site in a certain niche,
simply go to a like site and contact the admin. If you get somebody who is
helpful, they might just give you a few tips.
How To Get Members To Your Membership Site
Okay, you've bit the bullet. You've decided that you are going to create
and run your own membership site. You've bought the software, you've got
everything in place and now all you have to do is go out and get members.
Yeah, you hadn't thought that far ahead yet have you. Let's face it, the
greatest membership site in the world isn't going to get members if nobody
knows that it exists. That's where this article comes in. We're going to
give you some tips on how to build up your membership as quickly as possible.
Put these few things into action and you should do just fine.
The first thing you want to do is come up with a great affiliate program.
That means you have to pay better than 50%. The more you give your affiliates
for each member they bring in, the more incentive they'll have to go out
there and promote your site. A commission of about 60 to 70% should be more
than enough to have an army of affiliates out there promoting your site.
The next thing you want to do is start your own promotional campaign. If
you're short on funds, especially after springing for your membership software,
you may want to start with some free forms of promotion just to get a few
members quickly who you hope will eventually go out on their own and recruit
members.
One great form of free advertising is article writing. Simply write a few
articles on the topic that your membership site covers and submit them to
article directories. Make sure you have a link to your site in the resource
box. With enough article views, you should get quite a few people to actually
check out your site and what it has to offer. If you make the benefits of
membership attractive enough, you should start to slowly build up a membership
base.
Another form of advertising that works very well is to hang out in forums.
Now, while it's true that you can't directly advertise in forums, your
participation should get interest to your site. You simply need to make sure
you join forums in niches that are relevant to the site itself. You also
want to join as many forums as you can. Yes, there are going to be some members
that are cross forum members, but you'll run into a lot of different people
by hanging out at different forums.
You might also want to consider issuing a press release announcing the launch
of your new site. You have to be very careful with press releases as they
are not meant as advertisements. You need to word them in such a way that
they don't come off as promotional in nature. If you can pull this off, a
press release will bring lots of people to at least check out your new site
if nothing else.
These are just a few things you can do to get your membership site off the
ground. By just putting these into action, you will slowly see your membership
base build quite nicely.
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