The Benefits of Launching Your Own Membership Site

The idea of launching your own membership site is something many successful brands, professionals and authorities often think about. Before you start thinking about starting your own membership site, there is a lot more to it than just throwing up a new site and charging for access. In this post I’m going to break down the many variables of what it takes to create a successful membership site while also giving you some great resources and things to consider along the way.

Here are a few reasons why membership sites are great.

• Residual revenue through monthly/annual subscriptions.
• Constantly building our your own following and brand with new members.
• You own the community and are the product. People are investing in your service.
• Once you find success with one community, it can be replicated or improved upon.

For these reasons and many more a membership might be a great investment for your business.

Now let’s talk about some of the important factors that make up a successful membership site.

Creating a Killer Product

Creating an online membership site is actually much easier than you might think, but pulling everything together and actually providing something of value is what matters most. Products like WishListMember, aMember, InfusionSoft and OptimizePress are all useful solutions to build the backend of your site.

The foundation is always important, but the end user experience and what they have access to is crucial. Find what your audience wants and over deliver.

Growing Your Brand and Following

If you already have a blog, social following or an established brand than you are already a step a head. With a loyal following it will be much easier for you to contact your existing audience and introduce them to your membership site. When people are already listening to what you have to say, there is a much greater chance that they will invest their money in your premium services as well.

Make Sure the Price is Right

Just as important as your product and branding is how much you are going to charge for access to your site. Many membership sites offer different pricing options such as monthly, annual and lifetime plans. These three options will fit with almost any membership site, but putting a dollar amount to each is where it could get tricky. If possible look at your competition within the same niche and maybe even survey your audience to see what they would be willing to pay.

Longterm Value for the User

Where many membership sites fail is that they will spend a lot of time to get users signed up, then will forget about the long term relationship. A good example of this would be paying for monthly access to content, but it never gets updated. To improve continued subscriptions and billings, be sure to add new content each month and make people want to stick around for the next month or billing cycle.

Excellent Membership Site Guides

The concept of a membership site is nothing new and many of the top bloggers and internet marketers in the world already have subscription based sites of their own. Below I’ve listed some great resources and guides from other top marketers in our space.

• How to Launch a Membership Site Series – An insanely long and indepth 6-part series from Yaro Starak on everything you need to know about launching a new membership site.
• How to Start a Profitable Membership Site Step by Step – Matthew walks through the whole process of choosing a domain, installing membership software and finally launching your membership site. A very detailed and useful post.
• 7 Tips for Creating and Running Your First Membership Site – CopyBlogger is always a great source for information and this article is no exception. Before starting your first membership site, run through these seven tips and see how you can improve your business model.
• From Product Idea to Launch in 24 Hours – One of the biggest problems many of us have is not coming up with creative new ideas to make money, but how to actually get them implemented and going. This is a great article for all of us suffering from this same issue.

There are many ways to make money online, but when you jump from campaign to campaign you are starting back at zero again. Through the use of a membership site you can invest in yourself and your business, while also seeing new subscribers and increase revenue month after month.