What is the best way to continually promote your membership website?

The best and only profitable way to promote your membership site is with affiliates...

All I use is word of mouth and an opt-in list on my home (sales) page. But then, I am not looking for 50,000 members. Right now I am happy with less than 1,000.

Also, lower the price for a WSO and you can see consistent new members if you bump it every once in a while.

Allen

Only one way:

Provide OUTSTANDING content and RIDICULOUS value for money. Overdeliver times 5 or times 10. You won't have a problem keeping members and growing your membership base.

According to most of the membership site experts people stay approx. 3-4 months in a membership site with monthly fee.

It is not my experience but that's what most of the manuals, courses say about this topic.

Some people say, based on the numbers above, that you could take your monthly fee (for example $17) and multiply it by 4 (=$68) - and offer a "lifetime" membership for $69 or $77). This way you get approx. the same amount from one member as with the average 4 months fee... and they don't cancel, so they are on your membership list: you can email them with new offers etc.

Affiliates and JVs can be a continuous source of incoming members that will only require you to handle the initial setup and maybe a recruitment drive to get some folks on board at first.

Also, if you can manage to incentivize existing members with the same affiliate program or perhaps simply a discount mechanism. For example, if you refer two members, your own membership is free for as long as the referrals stay in. And you can make that just as easy as a "Tell-a-friend" script that you pop in when they log-in (kind of like PayPal's interstitial ads).

Once you get both of those things in place (and assuming your site is good), you should be able to focus primarily on creating content for the membership site, and then only occasionally doing small "launches" as membership drives that you can coordinate just by managing your affiliates.

Hope that helps!

Also, THIS is really good advice, but take heed to what Steven Carl Kelley said above - you should really know your dropoff rate FOR REAL before you set the lifetime membership price. And actually, in the above scenario, I would even throw in some kind of decoy price. For example:

1 month for $17 ongoing.
6 months for $79 ongoing (2 months free).
lifetime membership $89 (one time payment).

And then I would make it so that everyone who chooses only one month, right before their second billing, offer them the other two options again, but at a price that's $17 cheaper for each. Basically, now that you've tried it, we'll give you one last opportunity to use this first months' fee towards the discounted long-term plans.

After that offer, the only way to upgrade will be at full price.

Once you get all that set up, I'd consider doing a very short free trial that will auto-upgrade to the monthly plan, and then just let them get the upgrade offer at the end of that.

If you do a big launch at the beginning you can get a TON of aweber subscribers. THen help other product launches and they'll do a reciprocal mailing for you. That's just one way, but tough.

a lot of good information in this thread, thanks for sharing the info.

I will try to focus on "overdelivering"

I give away a free Apprentice course in which I train folks how to drive traffic to their websites for social networks. About four or five lessons into it I do a couple soft sells for my membership site and get surprisingly great conversions that way. I only charge $15 a month for my site and my customers usually stay on in excess of 6 months. Hope that helps!

First offer GREAT content 4 FREE

then make 10x GREAT content and offer it 4 Premium Members!

isn't that fine ?