Building a Successful Membership Site
Published September 04, 2010
Building a good membership website is a solid income generation strategy, but one which must be done right in order to produce desirable results. When you have a good membership site, you have a chance at building a strong relationship with a select group of loyal followers who you can market your products and services to for life. A membership site also gives you the option of gleaning information from your customer interactions which will provide you with valuable insight for future product creation and future marketing efforts.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the basic approach to building and marketing a strong membership site.
Laying the Foundation of Your Membership Site
When building a membership site, you need a highly targeted and specific theme for your site. The more targeted your theme is, the more focused your efforts for content/product creation and marketing will be. You can select this theme using the same keyword research strategies which you would use for creating a site. However, it’s also a good idea to check trade journals, magazines, forums and even sites like Amazon to make sure that your site theme already has a healthy number of interested customers. Once you have a specific them for your site, you can start creating a marketing funnel for monetizing your site.
Your Income Generation Strategy
Your site monetization strategy will depend on the type of membership site that you start. For example, there are membership sites which require a monthly payment in order to remain a member and to gain access to the members only content. Some examples of these types of site are:
Affilorama: a monthly membership site which contains detailed instructions on how to succeed as a marketer of affiliate products.
Dan Kennedy.com: a monthly membership site for people who are interested in learning about online and offline marketing strategies and principles of copywriting.
Authentic Man Program: a monthly membership site for men who are interested in learning to attract and to build more meaningful relationships with the opposite sex.
If you choose to have a membership site which requires a monthly payment, it’s essential that you have a good ecommerce platform which can handle recurring payments and also a website which can protect areas of content so that only members can have access to it. Two such programs which can integrate with Wordpress blogging software are: WP eMember and Wordpress Wishlist.
With both of these solutions, you can set up different levels of membership (i.e. Bronze, Gold and Platinum level) each of which have varying monthly payments and access to different levels of content depending on their membership level. It’s also absolutely crucial that you continue to add fresh and valuable content on a consistent basis for the sake of retaining members and getting them to spread the word about the value of your site and to help you attract new members.
Other membership sites offer either free membership or lifetime access in exchange for a one-time payment. These types of membership sites generate their income by product and service sales which are made to their members and the site serves the purpose of attracting members to promote those products to. Some examples of these types of sites are:
Warrior Forum: a membership site with free membership access and but the option of paying a one-time fee for 20 year membership. Revenues for the site come from members who pay for space to advertise their services and products within the site itself.
Directory of Ezines: a member’s only site which requires a one-time payment for lifetime access. Revenues for this site are generated by affiliate product offers made within the site.
With these types of membership sites, you need a solid strategy for marketing future products to your members while also adding enough fresh content to keep them coming back so that you can continue to market to them.
Content Creation and Monetization of Membership Sites
The biggest ongoing challenge for membership site owners is to keep delivering valuable content for their visitors. There are a few ways to accomplish this:
#1: Member Generated Content
Your membership site absolutely should have a forum, this way your members can help you to add social value to your membership site. Having a lot of fresh content for your site which is user generated eliminates a lot of work for you while still building perpetual value for your site. However, you also need to make sure you’re adding value to the site yourself.
#2: Polling Your Members
A great thing about having a membership site is that you can interact with your members and gather information from them about what kinds of content and products they’re most interested in. By gathering this information from your users, you’ll have 100% certainty that the new content you add to your site will be valuable enough to keep them around.
#3: Marketing Affiliate Products
When you gather information from your subscribers about what type of content they’re most interested in, you don’t have to use that information to create the content yourself. You can also find JV Partners who might be willing to contribute valuable content to your membership site in exchange for the chance to market their products to your visitors. Then, you simply make an arrangement to promote these products using an affiliate link and you can make a profit from the sales which are made to your members.
Conclusion
As you can see, a well built membership site with a good monetization strategy can prove to be very profitable. The first step is finding your specific theme and creating a monetization strategy. With the right membership site technology and a little persistence, you can create a healthy stream of income using membership sites.
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