Is this a good idea for a membership site?

Hey there,

Your idea is absolutely not a Dream! If any one can find anything on the internet then why they want to join your membership site? It's because and when you can deliver something different from market which helps others to overcome their problems. Try to deliver valuable information who are looking for that!

Hope this helps you out!

Thank you.

If you are offering a product that saves time for people then there will be a market for it. But the trick is in collating something that people will really want and pricing it right.

"I only need 300 people to pay $10 a month or 600 people to pay $5 a month"

There is your first problem. Do you know how hard it will be to get 300 people paying monthly?

Set up retainers with clients that are for bigger amounts of money

Think about a magazine in a niche. When it becomes popular many people don't mind paying. It's about what are you offering is it going to benefit a group of people in any way? Will it help them stay healthy or make money?

You'd need a niche where people are already frustrated finding good quality content.

If you go to any old niche where people might benefit from curated content, but aren't feeling the frustration of trying to find the right content, then you are not likely to convince anybody to sign up.

I read about somebody (I think it was in the book 4-hour work week) who set up an online library of sound clips, and sold those in one place - and became thousands of people's go-to place to pick up sound clips.

Do some research - find a 'starving market', and a frustrated market, and you'll have a chance.

Just be careful of letting the numbers make you fantasize about how easy it is. We can play games with percentages - 'if only 1% of people are interested, I'll be a millionaire' - and then you realize that 1% is a heck of a lot of people in a world of overwhelming disinterest.

Good luck, but look really really hard for the right thing to curate.

Oh - and don't compete with bigger companies that are already doing it - find UNIQUE.

Hey,

In order to make a membership site successful, you can't just put content and information like that. You have to bring more value to it,
As a first step, you have to structure in a logic way (like a step by step course for example) FRESH and valuable information that will the customer in your market. You have to find a common problem and resolve it with a guide.
Then, Very Important, you want to build a community. You can add as a bonus a private facebook group where members can help each other, where you can get some interaction with them.
Also, if you have the time, you can give, once a month, a live Q&A webinar, record the replay and put it in the membership area.


I hope this will be helpful to you.

I may be wrong but since you love to research and curate content, you might be better off starting a blog on one of the big niches like the weight loss niche.

In this you can write about fitness and health also, while creating lists that deal with the top 10 best foods for weight loss, etc. or the top five foods you should eat after your workout.

Yes, this has been and is being done, but since it is such a big niche, you should be able to grab some of this traffic.

As far as making money, once you are getting good traffic you can have banners for clickbank products or you can rent space on the site.

Doing something similar (writing plr articles) is how I got my start back in 2008. This is a really great idea! I have to pay someone to get me curated content. Why not pay you less?

My advice is to focus on creating VALUE (whatever the product or service ends up being). And then focus on communicating that value to prospects. The focus on a specific number of people may yet serve you, and if you can allow yourself to think even bigger, you might open yourself up to real opportunity here, but a big thing I recommend is making sure you can easily convert one person. Once you figure out how to make that first sale, the rest will likely (and hopefully) come easier for you.

People like that are oblivious to the real world.

Walk into any major bookstore in the US and you'll find a large percentage of what's for sale originated from public domain (free).

Dover Publications is one example of a multi-million dollar business that sells rehashed books based on public domain (free) content.

There will be always have people do not know where and how to get the 'free' content. Besides, there are always have people want to buy time rather than spend time doing own
research. So, the membership site is not a dream. But, the challenges are the content you post. Hope this help.

I think almost anything can be a membership site. Here's the thing - it's all in the details. First you have to build a brand and attract your ideal customer in a niche that has a good track record of being lucrative. Personally I always look to see if competition is quite good. Otherwise you are going to have uphill battle. I have no doubt this particular plan would work for you IF - you can... a) Engage and inspire a tribe of fans b) create a super salespage that converts (you know - have all of the necessary elements and c) show me why a membership site is absolutely necessary for me and d) have a launch - you know, build excitement and interest and maybe even kick off the launch with a live event or just Facebook Live. Up to you. Lastly I think for a membership site I guess again if you can show me how much I am making a month by paying X per month for your site's benefits - if I am going to possibly gain 1K a month by accessing the benefits of your site, then 200 a month is a no brainer. Its all in the presentation and how well your copy is laid out. And give me a 1 dollar trial to test the site out. Just a thought I know the other Warriors are probably conflicted on this but If you get excited and can transfer that excitement to a group of engaged fans that keep wanting more and more from you - I think you could sell them virtually any kind of higher ticket product and you will get plenty of buyers. People want value and they want most bang for their buck so make sure its looking quite awesome.

Another way to bring value to a membership site are exclusive interviews with experts. You can contact them online and they can promote their product in return.

You can offer them as audios and do 1 or 2 a month. Start with other people at your level in the same niche and work from there.

Mike Dillard uses this model with financial education and brings in 7 figures a year (or more). He wasn't an expert in that field so interviewing other experts made perfect sense.

Not saying you or I could duplicate his success but you only need a fraction of that to make a good income. In fact, I have a friend who makes his living with a martial arts membership site.

He just hit 300 members which is his goal this year. He charges $47 a month.

Do the math. And don't sell yourself short.

Charge whatever the market will bear.

Your idea is not bad but For monthly subscription people will want more new per month.
One of my friends only upload the new image every week & he charges $3 per month. He collects all them free.

Most training can be found for free, but if you make it unique, people cant tell if its something that can be found for free. People love to pay so they dont have to find it themselves.



You can create memberships about list building, blogging, email marketing ect.

Try to give your membership an end date like a fixedterm membership running 4-6 months.

Remember in memberships you can upsell members on programs with recurring payments, like aweber, hostgator, jaaxy as a keyword tool and so on. Thats why you dont need to let it run forever. Members only stay in memberships for around 3 months anyway. Thats why you need to promote your membership all the time. I would go for a $9.97/mo membership at a minimum or sell a membership training for $97 one time fee, if i make a paid membership. I do that in different niches.

Even with free memberships you can bank big. Free memberships are in my opinion even better, because you can recommend your members products for even faster results, expecially products where you earn recurring commisssions, and people will flock to your training in droves when its free.. My biggest successes are free memberships. They are so easy to maintain and do they are not stressful make content for. .

Hope it was helpful

Going back to your first post, I'm going to suggest a little change in how you view your offer.

Don't try to sell "curated content."

Sell TIME. Time spent haplessly searching for reliable information, sorting out the fluff and clickbait and "fake news" (hot topic as I write this).

Another suggestion is to make each "issue" topic specific. Go to Quora or Reddit, and pick a popular question and use that as the base for your curated collection.

A paid FB group would let the more serious members of your audience discuss topics/articles, suggest their own, and access archives of past curated lists. I think it would make a good upsell.

With a good niche topic, I could see at least three layers, all dependent on the same work/content.

> Main product - a weekly collection of articles/videos/podcasts, etc.
> Downsell - a monthly digest with a taster of what's in the weekly, say the top 10 for the month.
> Upsell - the private FB group with archives.

Just remember, you aren't selling "stuff they could have found for free", you are selling them back a piece of their life - time.

Bingo...Most people are lazy and would prefer to pay someone for information and services that would take them time to research and perform.

You have to find a niche you are interested in where you can offer original content.

I have been spending the entire day researching membership site platforms, and I cannot believe how expensive they all are! I can't afford any of them! I really liked how Livebinders works, it's not a membership site but it's a site where you organize information then create an access key so only certain people can view your stuff, so i would charge money for access. I spent a few hours writing up content and copying links to the websites, etc. but then I realized...I will be having TONS of links, and I know that is good for a website to have those, it helps get you ranked (especially when those sites link back to you)...and then i thought i wonder if i will be better off just having a normal site, so the public can find it, and I could get a lot more traffic that way? but i probably wouldn't make much money from ads and affiliate links (tried that before). My niche is very small though so maybe I should stick with the membership idea, I just cant afford to use those platforms so i'm gonna have to find a way to make it work through Livebinder although I have no idea how to accept payments, especially recurring ones.

Teachable is free to use.

Haven't used it myself, but it's a another option.

I am sure the word 'internet' translates from the word fee so as no-one wants to pay anything as they just keep looking for free alternatives.

I'm not arguing that recurring income isn't the way for you to go. I just meant that you don't always need a full-blown, all-the-bells-and-whistles enterprise-level solution to a relatively simple set of requirements.

It's kind of like spending months learning every nook and cranny of MS Word when all you want to do is write a few reports. You can do that with about 5% of Word's capability.

Last time I looked, S2 Member had a free option that would do everything you described.

If you keep it simple, WP isn't that hard, at least not the WP.org self-hosted version. Rather than investing in a platform that has way more features than you plan to use, invest in having someone install and set up a simple WP site and a simplified editor. If you can use a word processor, you can use the simple version of the WP editor.

As far as affiliate links go, you may be confusing Wordpress.com (similar to Blogger and other third party platforms) with Wordpress.org, which provides the free WP you have installed on your hosting plan.

I know a lot of people who dislike WP because they make it more complicated than it has to be, and the more research they do, the more content they run into aimed at techies and developers rather than everyday users. If you can find a way to make peace with WP (or some other self hosted platform), you'll make your life easier.

If you have a PayPal business account, you can take credit cards as well as PP payments. Take some of the research time you've been spending on "membership platforms" and dig around in PP's excellent support pages.

One more thing in favor of WP - password protecting single posts or pages is very simple - Just click the option when you publish and provide a password. And it's free, too.

This is exactly right. When I create a WSO or other product, I like to think of it as a product of convenience.

There is so much information out there, but where do I find the answer to my specific problem? By doing the research and creating a product, I can provide people with proven solutions. They don't need to crawl 100 crappy sites just trying to get you on their list, they can find the actual solution in the product I offer.

The key is to PROVIDE REAL VALUE to your customers. Don't just throw something together that someone can easily find. Put together a comprehensive product that make people say, "wow, he really went the extra mile to deliver value on this." If you take the time to create a product, with the benefit of the customer in mind, you will be successful. If your goal is to make money and put the customer second, you will fail. Do unto others...

Natural law applies to internet marketing too!

I have decided to go with Ning, and create a membership site community. I can do everything i want through there for only $25 a month. I have already been gathering up my content (organizing it in Livebinder) so i already know I need more than just content, cuz really it's kinda sucky, lol i mean I just type one paragraph about each thing and that's all i got, then I copy and paste links to each thing. The whole thing took me about 4 hours. So that's why i like Ning because you can add a forum to your site, which will definitely help my community, you can add any features you want on your page. It will focus more on community interaction rather than me having to come up with all this content. I will have contests, interviews, member of the week, polls, surveys, and just really interact with them through the forum and the private FB group i'll create. Engaging with a community is more up my alley than creating content anyway.

What is your niche? And is this the kind of niche where people have the money to pay a monthly membership fee.or see the value in doing so if this is information they can get elsewhere? How will you be creating a community or providing access that is worth the value of paying for the group membership? I belong to many groups through Facebook and LinkedIn that are all free.

dont listen to your friend


you are not only providing information


...but you are also providing convenience, structure and sequence of information.

best of luck,
Ike Paz