Do Membership Sites REALLY create stability?

Also, I'd like to send a very special thanks to everyone on the Warrior Forum because I am Set On Success and you guys help me to get there. 2K in a day is awesome.

I believe they are, but only for a certain period of time.

Its like a list. They are responsive for 2 years or so and then they begin to die out.

But membership sites are really cool, I need to start thinking about creating one.

Hello!

Perhaps this could help you out. This course cover everthing you want to know about membership sites. Membership Cube: Setup a Membership Site Using One of Our Six Proven Business Models

This holds many valuable information. And can get you on the road to the stability to strive for.

The secret is in recurring income, hence a subscription and if you can make your members happy and keep them happy... you got a win-win situation.

Cheers,

Steven

PS. Congratz on that 2k.

I would charge a small fee to join the membership area. Just make sure that it's full of information and free products that will convince them to stay for a long period of time.

Have you ever considered creating your own forum? This would be a free model, but sounds like it can accomplish what you're trying to do here.

As someone who has generated a lot of subscriptions as an affiliate over the years, I can tell you a few things I've noticed...

1. Most membership sites that aren't essential to a business or person's life will NOT create stability. Subscriptions will last for a very short time.

2. Membership sites that provide something that a business or person needs in order to keep their business going creates longterm subscriptions that can last for years.

3. Fixed term continuity membership sites normally last longer than open ended ones.

$2k in one day is awesome. How long have you been at this?

Depends on your intended model for back-end/follow-on products and services.

If you want to offer ongoing monthly value, then set it up as a recurring membership site and charge for a combination of the community as well as perhaps 2 QA Teleconferences each month where you answer member questions, give advice or offer a training followed by Q&A - these get recorded and over time you build a good repository of archived calls (transcribed they become additional written content).

Alternatively, perhaps you want to update your content once a month and give them new tools, techniques, training or tips based on what you learn or research.

OR -- if you don't want to be held to new content each month, you make the community free and use that as leverage for new products (follow-on ebook, home study guide, etc...) or offerings (coaching, group calls, etc...) helping you to sell more but not holding you to a monthly content creation schedule.

Typically for a paid membership site you do need more than just a community - but it doesn't have to be massive amounts of information, just a couple of nuggets each month is enough.

Jeff

I have membership sites priced 4.95/ 17/ 27/37/47/97/ & 997.00 monthly. As already mentioned the average stay is 4 months. The little $4.95 sites? Rarely fall off.

Continuity Is King!

Its definitely good to charge an upfront price for a membership site as well as a monthly recurring payement. The recurring payment usually 25-30% of the initial upfront price.
Also keep updating the membership with new material and content to keep it fresh.

In my eyes this question is pretty much common sense.

If you have 100 subscribers paying $20/mo, that's $2,000/mo. As long as your refund rate isn't high, stability is pretty much guaranteed. BUT you must provide some sense of value.

Don't just go out there and be dedicated to making the money. Provide information/knowledge that others are looking for.

That's how you'll be really successful

P.S. You're likely an expert in something. For example if you've been snowboarding for 6 months, you're an expert to me, because I've never been snowboarding. Think about it.

More stability than anything else really, especially if you run a good membership site.

I've run membership sites for years, only thing you have to remember is that not everyone wants (or can) create compelling content each month and would rather run their business on 6-12 month cycles where they release new products.

Running a recurring membership site is a great business model, however the reality is that you either have to add something compelling each month (our outsource content creation) - let it sit dormant and people will not stick around.

Jeff

i will join the site. contact me....or give me 1-1 coaching.
thanks

It wouldn't hurt to create a membership site and maximize your sales.
The only challenge is to keep your site filled with fresh content every month.
Possibly you can get others to contribute to your site, and make your work
a bit easier.

HTH
Vince aka makingiants

There are a lot of free forum softwares out there like this one: phpBB • Free and Open Source Forum Software

I would let people use it for free as a bonus for being a customer. I don't believe people would pay money for a forum unless it already has a lot of perceived value. Or if you can create that value extremely fast.

Know what I mean?!

After listening to an extensive course by Ryan Deiss and Mary-Ellen Tribby, I've found that a great way to keep consistent profits coming in could be to create a membership newsletter. However, if you're going to do this, then you can't charge very much per person if you want to keep them longer term.

So long as you release two newsletters per week to your list subscribers, and the newsletters are actually beneficial to the people who are reading them, then I imagine you could charge between $1 to $3 a month per subscriber.

If you wanted a different approach, you could present your newsletter to prospects who are willing to pay to have their advertisement slipped into your newsletter. It's not recommended that you have more than 3 advertisements per newsletter, and you can charge according to placement and number of subscribers.

According to Mary-Ellen, a subscriber to her newsletter is worth an average of $1 each, though she has many thousands of subscribers, and pulls in more than $10,000 each week because of what she charges people to put their ads in her newsletter.

So, if you charge your subscribers, you'll likely have fewer subscribers overall, but the benefit is that with an incredibly low automatic monthly payment, like $1 to $3, even if they don't get some incredible benefit from your newsletter, there's a good chance that once they're used to receiving it, they won't bother to go into PayPal and cancel their subscription. This is assuming they even remember that it costs anything because of the low price. (I believe they call this "MicroContinuity)

On top of this, you can promote your OWN advertisements to them, but if you do, it's best that you make sure it's very closely related to what the current issue of your newsletter is about. (Though as Mary-Ellen has proven, sometimes some spontaneous "Make Money from Home!" ad can work out really well)

So there's the two main options I can think of. Of course, you could always put out your newsletter for free, and simply put your own ads and affiliate links within, that way you're disguising your marketing efforts as beneficial products that could help your readers.

I hope this was helpful, and I know there's plenty of ways to get creative with this type of approach. Use your imagination, and make yourself a fortune.

What I would suggest is to offer two options:

1) A FREE membership. With limited access.

2) A paid membership. With full access.

There are certain extra's you can throw in to make it interesting, and get everyone involved.

You want to do it right, listen to this guy:

I believe they can, but from my experience, running a membership site takes a lot of content, admin and support to be successful. I did this for a while.

However, now, I have actually achieved a higher level of consistency with much less work just building lists and promoting mostly affiliate programs.

If you also get your list subscribers into reading your blog posts, following your valuable information on social networks, etc. you can actually make a lot more sales.

Memberships sites do create stability but you also need to spend a lot of time on them - first building the content, then attracting and retaining your members. As a result, it could turn out that the time you spend on your membership site earns less than if you spend it on other projects. As for fees, I would definitely recommend to charge - a moderate fee, not a very high one because this will limit your membership.