I make around $4900p/month from membership site, you should too

I would love to have a membership site that I make monthly income from.

A membership site is something that I have been thinking about for a long time. I guess the reason I keep putting it off is because I wonder whether people really ever stay with membership sites.

When you say your site has been around for 12 months, are your members sticking around or are you continually promoting to get new members to keep up the income.

Then the other thing is keeping the content going and good enough for people to really want to stick to it.

It certainly is something to think about though, thanks for your post.

Our membership site has over 10K members and we charge $49.95 a year! Before we changed over to paid we polled out members and asked for their input. What they would like to see, how much they thought it would be worth to them etc.

The response back said the majority was willing to pay upwards of $50.00 a month and some even said $200.00

So we bucked the odds and gave them the current pricing. Works for us! In addition to a forum we also have tons of articles and 275 videos that we produced. We add to the videos whenever we get a request for something specific that we haven't covered - and there's not much that we left out, but we are always asking the question...what would YOU like to see!

chuck

I appreciate your asking but it wouldn't be cool to insert in a post...but it is in my sig line

chuck

the reason for this post is motivation for others. people need reassurance.
i am often at multi-speaker event seminars and some of you might actually know me. just want to be a real example of someone who went from zero to something in making money online.

there is not a lot of information on the membership site process step by step, so i am actually putting a website right now to cover that.

anyone interested?

keeping it updated isnt hard either. you just have to be passionate on the topic or be smart about it.

some ideas for content:
if you dont know a lot on the topic approach article writers in article directories for more content.

buy sites with good content that do not have much traffic.

approach and interview experts (face-to-face and over the phone). dont forget to record that.

do camtasia how-to videos

those are just some of my strategies. i am sure you will hear plenty more

its really all about mindset. as humans we look for excuses not to do something rather then do it. try doing something, just understand what you are doing and you will succeed.

i was amazed how easy it was to setup a membership site, just took me a while to put my act together. wish i did it earlier.

so if you have been thinking about something for a while and havent done a thing, get off your bum and do it. stop dreaming and finding excuses not to do it.

Membership is coool, but still not yet for me. I should build up my strong foundation in my other areas and proceed on the membership revenue in the future

Alexei, first of all congrats on your smart move.

May i ask what script do you use to run your membership site?

I am very interested cause i am starting some free coaching sessions and i will try to put up a Membership site focused on more advanced techniques, a paid one, giving them weekly updates on seo, new tips, new techniques, etc

Cheers!

I guess the main stumbling block stopping folks from creating a membership site is coming up with monthly content.

I ran a 'membership' site for a while that had absolutely 0 content on it. What it did offer were tools
SE submittals
page rank checkers
site verifying/checking..etc.

Stuff that the average newbie would need, but may not know where to find.

The 'price' was an email address. These email addresses were then used in conjunction with a mailer site that was in the same network of sites.

on the mailer site you could send to 10/20/50k people for 9.95/19.95/29.95

a little more extended way to make the money, but the point is offer people something they want, just like building a list. If its worth paying for, get money, if what your offering isnt necessarily worth paying for, get email addresses, build a list and get your money from there.

I belong to a membership site that is $9.95 a month - but it is a Forum and the majority of content is created by the members. The site owner writes a daily blog which is open to anyone to read - but often the subject matter is "continued" on the Forum and people are invited to try the Forum free for 30 days. I love the model.

Of course the owner needs to be sure to post and participate in the Forum, but it's amazing how little is really required.

I've never really gone down the membership site route because it seems so hard to get great quality content that will keep them coming back. Eventually you must run out of ideas - how do you manage to get them to pay $50 a month?

Very cool! Which software do you guys prefer to use?

Good job in keeping members. I've seen some pretty cool techniques for keeping people as members. Many of them were used on me and even though I know what they are doing, they work.

Good fresh, new, and regular content is the bare min. that must be done. That won't by itself guarantee sticky members. I've quit continuity programs that were very good at providing new content. Sometimes people just look at that monthly expense as something that can be done away with. The key to keeping people is to make them crave the information so much that they would rather almost go without eating to get it.

Good info and encouraging, Iv'e just launched a work from home review site with a membership program. We'll see how well it goes.

Heck, just promoting recurring-fee products/sites as an affiliate is awesome! I do the same amount of promoting as I used to, but I am making 3 times more money

Recurring income should be one of your priorities online (and off). period.

wow. i didnt expect so many queries. looks like i need to put an ebook or a manual on how to do membership sites just like mine.

the model i am using for my membership site is the one which has sequential emails sent out as eclasses. this way people get information gradually in the way so its broken down in logical chunks. this also allows you to keep members in the program much longer since a lot of people sign up only to copy the information.

the sequential model is based on aweber emails as eclasses and amember as user management platform. paypal, payflow pro or clickbank as payment platform.

i guess it really comes down to mentality of people. some people think that noone will ever pay for their info. this is the common mistake, as what is known to some is mystery to others.

if you never buy anything online, you probably think that others will do the same...

This is a great thread started by the OP. Thanks alexei, but there is actually a much easier way to generate monthly income from memberships than building a traditional membership site. Another warrior and I are setting up one for copywriting coaching and should launch soon (time difference between us slows us down, we live on different continents) otherwise we could have launched within 1 day actually.

The trick has been revealed and fully documented by Jimmy Brown one pretty astute marketer, the strategy is a membership site model but it's NOT a membership site, it's a membership training program delivered strictly via email autoresponder (so you can automate it as well once your content has been fully written).

The good thing about this style is that you can start within a day (if you already have content lying around or in your head (see http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...overnight.html), or if you can outsource the writing), the reason is that you build your membership training content as your site grows and gains subscribers. The model works best it seems (I haven't used it, so not speaking with authority here, just from what I have gathered), to work best as weekly training modules. You send an "article", video, audios, any kind of content you like really out to your members once a week. so you have 6 or 7 days to create more content, meanwhile, they have paid for a month and you roll out as time goes buy (this is just for your first set of subscribers). Your next and much farther into the future sets of subscribers then get your premium email course (which is what i like to term it) on autopilot, you don't ever have to be there with the new set of subscribers, creating monthly content (which is often harder or more expensive), so this a model that seems to be working, Ive seen quite a few sites doing this and a friend of mine got this suggestion from me for his new SEO product and he's almost ready to roll in a few days, I'm on the same path and frankly would have never considered the membership model if I couldn't build it this way one week at a time, still get paid in full then automate the whole process once the first set has "graduated". Oh its important to have that last bit, the graduation stage where you let your old subscribers go and allow in a new set (that's how traditional schools, colleges make money year in year out, it obviously works).

So you would set a limit to the length of time they can be with you as subscribers, if someone knows they just need to be subscribed for a few months they are more likely to stay subscribed to full term, if you want them subscribed eternally then you have a lot more work to do, so you just turn over your customer base every few months to keep income coming in, i imagine it isn't much harder to do this than to keep subscribers over long long periods, everyone will have a different experience with retention so you can't base yours on mine or someone else's on yours etc, just get ideas and structure how you would build yours, then generate the right traffic and see how it works out.

Another good thing is with this process you don't even need cumbersome or even easy to use membership software, all you need is something like aweber $29 a month or so, and a PDF converter to convert your lessons into PDF for easier distribution to your list. You write or outsource your "articles" -- they can be short or long, our first lesson for our copywriting membersip training is going to be about 20 pages of very juicy content, we had only planned about 5-10 pages including introductions etc and then 3 - 5 pages on going content but sometimes when you write (if you knw your stuff) you get into it and just keep writing more and more sense and giving up more and more stuff so that would be a bonus to your subscribers, otherwise you could i imagine pretty much write shorter articles like 2 - 3 pages (as long as the content is valuable, revetting and very useful your subscribers shouldn't buck at it, they would be grateful for the insights, I know that's how I would react)

Case in point... many of the threads in this very forum can be valuable membership content, if you're wondering if you can write, if you participate here and do so in such a way that it really helps others, you have what it takes already. Just add whatever is missing.

I like Chucks idea of adding videos, interviews and so on, I will be doing that later down the line, but like I said the fun of it is we dont have to have a ton of content ready, not even several week's worth like alexei suggested, just one or 2 weeks (we have 2 weeks ready now) and you're good to go, put up your sales letter, drive the right kind of traffic and this should be relatively regular income for the length of your training program, then before that one is over, you're already promoting or having affiliates promote for the next set of students/members, so that your income never slows to a complete halt before you refresh your list... you could offer a discount for early sign ups and give them a start date a week or 2 into the future, in the meantime, give them some juicy bonuses for agreeing to join your site in advance... these are just some ideas, you can get a more detailed course on how to this at How To Setup Your Own Membership Site in 48 Hours Or Less that's Jimmy's site, and I have no affiliation just think it's very good content for the money and I'm following that model so I obviously approve, if you're thinking of a relatively easy way to set up a membership site, this may be something you want to try.

I'm also starting one of these OFFLINE. I market my content (whatever it is IM or other content to an offline crowd) set them up to receive one email a week, they pay in advance, i kick off within a few days follow the same strategy, it really feels easy.

I will update you later how it all goes once we're fully launched.

Good luck to all,

Kunle

Kunle dear,

Thanks for this addition. I love it.

Taiwo

Nice income. But in my case I joined a membership site but it does not give me money from it. It says in their header that it is a legit online and real money and money back guaranteed. But in a month or so it comes with zero money back.

We've had ours paid now for the 5 years and before that free since 1999. We weren't too smart in the early days, we didn't even require people to register! Who knows how many names we'd have now!

One thing we don't do however is place our members on a mailing list outside of the membership site. We can send them announcements through the site but we also ask them to join our lists for ongoing and up to date news NOT covered within the site.

The majority sign up for those lists but the ones that don't...oh well! We try extremely hard to listen to our members and we give them what they are requesting. We even have a form of "affiliates" where if they send over 5 new subscribers we give them an extra year at no charge.

We will also run promotions and give away memberships under certain conditions. I even offered to give WF members a free membership but no one took me up on it!

chuck