The Advantages Of Membership Sites

Membership sites continue to flourish across the Internet, as there are many membership sites that have been around for years. More membership sites continue to pop up every week and month, so it's obvious the membership site model is a profitable and popular business model to incorporate into your business. Why are so many people going into opening their own membership sites? Because there are many advantages to having your own membership site.

One advantage is that you can earn recurring or residual profits from having your own membership site. People are willing to pay for premium, updated information on a topic or niche that is related to their business. You are essentially helping their businesses to thrive online, which will boost your own profits.

A second advantage related to the first one is that, by providing products and information that help your customers boost the profitability of their own businesses, you are increasing your reputation as an expert in your industry as well. This will open up new avenues of profit for you, including joint ventures, exclusive access to elite affiliate programs, and more.

A third advantage is that you can boost your opt-in list by having a membership site. Members will give you their contact information, and provided you have their explicit permission to email them regarding other offers, you can market your other products and services to them as well. That can greatly increase your profits on the back-end.

7 Different Membership Website and Continuity Income Models:

The Freebie: You join a forum or email newsletter.  You didn�t pay anything, but a product is delivered to you weekly, monthly or you have continual access to content such as inside a forum.

The Internet Service Providers: Providers of autoresponders, hosting, ad and url tracking, training etc. where the client pays for the services on a monthly basis and you gain a residual commission each month for as long as they continue to use the service. These are all essential marketing services and retention of clients is high hence the stable residuals

The eNewsletter: This is much like the Newspaper and there is even an off-line version called (you guessed it) The Newsletter.  This is a periodical on a specific topic (niche) such as investing where you get timely information that you pay either monthly, bi-annually or annually.  There most likely is an auto-renew component to your subscription.

The eCourse: Similar to the eNewsletter, but the scope is greatly reduced to a single topic and typically only a few months in duration.  This could be training on how to raise urban chickens or how to use a software or do email marketing�I think you get the picture.  This is also one of the easiest continuity programs to set up.  You need a sales page and an autoresponder such as 12SecondCommute or Aweber,  All your content is delivered by email and you can take payment by Paypal.  This tends to work best as a one-time payment instead of a monthly subscription.

The Online Course: A variation of the eCourse except this time the content is password protected on a website instead of delivered to the subscriber.  A simple way to do this is use the password protection built in to WordPress and the Read More tag.  Or you can use a membership management software to automate the whole thing.  This is very close to a Membership site.

The Publisher: This is similar to the Online Course and the Newsletter.  The subscribers get access to member-only periodical content. 

This is just an overview.  There are a bunch of different ways to tweak each one of these models and mix-and-match them.  Look at your niche and think up ways you can use one or more of the above models for your online business.