Start Your Membership Site Today!
This blog is created primarily to discover and discuss effective business models that work online this very moment, and today I’ll review membership sites. “Membership sites” is definitely one of the buzz phrases in the marketing world this year. And it definitely deserves a closer look.
There are several benefits that make this model so popular.
The most important benefit is, of course built-in continuity, or in other words, possibility to earn residual income. Even if you only have 1000 members paying you $20 per month, you most likely will be able to completely replace the income from your day job with just one membership site.
And if you provide quality content to your members, the retention rate (the number of subscribers who renew subscription to your membership each month) could be high. Another major benefit is that your members are subscribed to your list, and hence you can communicate with them often, offering upsales, promoting and cross-promoting other products and services. This can certainly add nice additional income streams to your business.
Of course you should provide a lot of valuable free information as well. It’s a proven fact that people who become your members are much more likely to be your subscribers then just people who subscribed to your newsletter. The reason is simple – if they cancel subscription, they cancel access to a membership area as well, and since they value your membership enough to pay for it monthly, they are more likely to stick with you.
There is just one big obstacle you have to overcome if you want to pursue this venture. If you’re not a programmer, membership sites are rather difficult to set up.
At least this was the case until now. I just found something that made me really excited. I found a Wordpress plug-in that quickly sets up a robust membership site, easy to install even a non-technical people: WishList Member Plug-in for Wordpress
It’s not more difficult than just installing any other Wordpress plugin. If you have a Wordpress blog, you probably already installed tons of this little babies that enhance the WP functionality.
And with recent version of Wordpress, installing a plugin is as simple as clicking one button.
Anyway, I was looking for a membership script that gives me the ability to create Free, Trial or Paid membership levels (and any combination of all three).
Plus I wanted to create content modules, but make them available to members sequentially, each month giving access to additional module. I didn’t want to reveal all the content at once.
It does not make any sense since your members will be overwhelmed with all the information, and are not likely to actually follow your advice and implement the system that you provide for your members.
Plus, if you give all the info, you won’t have a residual income, which is one of the biggest reasons to start a membership site in a first place.
Here is additional benefit worth mentioning. Since it’s Wordpress, you have a built-in CRM right of the bat, and since you probably will have a blog as your front, you will enjoy all the available SEO plug-ins and features that make your blog so easy to promote.
And it integrates nicely with all major shopping cards, so you won’t have to bang your head against the wall trying to figure out how to make the payment system actually work.
Usually membership scripts of such quality cost $1000 and up. But you can actually have this plug-in for much less. I would recommend you to get an unlimited license. It costs only a little more than the license for 1 blog. With 1 blog license you’re limiting yourself, and you probably will want to create at least a few memberships as soon as possible.
Now click this link and grab your license before the price is substantially increased: Building Membership Site with Wordpress
If you like this business model but would like to learn more before diving in this arena, take a look at Membership BluePrint. They cover in details how to create membership sites, manage them, monetize different membership areas, improve retention rates, test the offers, etc.
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