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Try Mike Colella AdBeat membership. It's 2012 updated and covers a lot of IM strategies.

The technical aspects are easy to learn. The more important thing is focusing on designing and building your business model for profitability.

I've seen several people do what's called a "fixed-term" membership. It's different from continuity. Continuity typically means people pay a set monthly fee for an ongoing membership. Continuity can be very attractive on the surface, but there are definitely downsides to it:

1. People can come and go at any time. Hence, you'll have people constantly leaving your program and you'll constantly need to be replacing them.

2. You'll be obligated to continue providing MORE content long after you've gotten bored or run out of material. Also, you're constantly competing with all of the free info on the Internet. A fixed-term membership program eliminates that. Like your members, YOU also have a start and stop date.

This is where continuity is different for information marketers than say Proactiv. Teenagers need Proativ every month and have no problem paying $30 (or whatever the price is these days) each and every month, with no end in sight (as long as they continue to suffer from acne that is).

But with information, you're competing with all of the free info on the Internet. At some point, your members are going to feel like 1) they know enough, 2) they can get your info for free elsewhere on the Internet, 3) they just don't want to pay anymore and/or 4) they have some other expense pop up and your membership program (and monthly charge) gets the boot.

3. Continuity also takes more administrative work than you might think at the beginning.

4. To make continuity work, you typically need a large list of at least 5,000.

Fixed-term memberships can be a very attractive alternative. People like being in a program with a specific start and end date. (They often DON'T like paying ongoing fees with no end in sight.) Instead of handing them the course all at once, you can break it down to sections delivered monthly or weekly and then charge on a monthly basis. (You can also offer a discount for paying in full.)

If you've also designed your info in a results-oriented way, your members will stay with the program until it's done.

If you have another program or two that would be a nice complement to your original program, you can set it up so that they're automatically enrolled in the next program unless they say opt out.

For example, let's say you have three programs: "How to Write Your Book", "How to Publish Your Book" and "How to Market Your Book." Each program is 4 months long. They can enroll in the "Write Your Book" program for $50/month (for 4 months). At the end, they're automatically enrolled in the second "Publish Your Book" program and you keep charging their card.

You now have three fixed-term programs giving you monthly income for a full year.

In this example, if a customer stays with you for all three programs for 12 months, you'll get $50/mo = $600/year. That's just for ONE customer.

Customers like it because it has boundaries: specific start and stop dates. When they enroll in one program, you let them know they'll be automatically enrolled in the next program when the current program completes, unless they opt out. There IS an end in sight to the payments.

Then the system runs automatically FOR you. Now, when you get one customer, you've essentially made three sales, instead of getting three customers to make three sales. You eliminate a lot of future marketing effort and expense.

This works best if the programs logically follow each other and are either the same price or have some logic to the price progression.

It's a very, very smart way to do business. Smart marketers know it's a lot easier to get a previous customer to buy from you than it is to chase a new customer and convince them to buy from you. People like doing business with people they already know, like and trust.

On the face of it, fixed-term memberships might seem less exciting than never-ending continuity. But in reality, I think they're a lot better. In reality, you have a LOT of constant drop outs in continuity that you have to constantly replace. It's a constantly-leaking bucket. And people often aren't comfortable with never-ending payments. At some point, they WILL get tired of it.

With fixed-term memberships, you give your customers the comfort of specific start and stop dates. And if you structure a second fixed-term membership program as a logical follow-up, you've still injected a tremendous amount of income certainty into your business instead of constantly chasing new customers and the one-off sale. (That's a never-ending run on the hamster wheel!)

Kathleen Gage offers a course on creating fixed-term membership programs: Fixed Membership Program

I've never taken this course, but I know Kathleen is legit and offers good info.

As for the logistics, figure it out after you've gotten some info (like Kathleen's) to build your program on. You can use Wishlist (the membership plugin for Wordpress) or you can just create new, password-protected pages on your Wordpress site. It doesn't have to be complicated. But you can't know what tools to buy until you know how your programs will be structured.

Hope that helps!

Michelle