Freebie sites vs paid membership sites?

Dude,
Just went through 6 months of running all these complicated ways to run my membership site. I looked at all the ways you mentioned and many many more.

IMHO

I have gone for the simplest possible structure. 1 Membership level. I will be bringing in a free trial but that trial will have access to everything so its not a separate LEVEL.

My products are Mostly created by me as well and I decided to go with the one membership level and just give everyone access to branding rights to my products and as high rights as I can get for the additional content.

My TWIST is that I can Custom Brand and build software titles and that will be the upsell service inside the members area.

Members get access to branding/plr/resellrights and have the option of ordering UPGRADED custom copies with additional benefits for a small fee.

My site is IM niche, by the way.

I also decided that I would charge a premium price for membership to the site and LIMIT the number of members.

I figure that if your paying $27-$47 a month to join a site your going to use it.
And that's what I am after, interactivity.

I love to build products and If I can get 200 people paying $47 a month and Interacting with me and my membership site to give me new ideas and new direction I will be a happy person.

With the extra money from custom work and selling my products stand alone I believe I have a good model.

Now its Just a matter of doing the launch.

I Hope this helps in your decision making.
Best wishes

Oda

I like the free trial idea as well.

I didn't think about offering branding/plr/resellrights. I actually think that would work well with my niche. One of the major pieces to my site will be video tutorials.

Im thinking maybe I can offer the tutorials for free any maybe have a membership option or just single payment option w/ optin that will offer a zip file w/ all of the resources needed including the final product already complete with branding/resellrights.

I'd have to do a little more research as far as the types of prices people would be comfortable paying.

Since your basic membership will be for branding/plr/resellrights to your products, how often are you planning on releasing products for your members? Or it just a few stand-alone products that require membership to access/use?

Are you targeting long-term memberships?

I did tried a few different things with my membership site for my learn to play guitar course. Here's a few things I tried.

1. I gave access to the first 10 days and locked down the final 21 days. (My course is broken into day by day chunks ie. day 1, day 2...day 31)
2. Charged a flat one time fee for access
3. Charged a one time fee after a 7 day trial
4. Gave it away for free but had affiliate offers throughout it.

To be honest they all seemed to work fairly well. The easiest to get people in was option 1 and 4 as it was free. with option 2 being the hardest as they had to pay for it.

I'd just pick whatever you think is best and go with that. Test it out and see which is actually best.

I guess I really need to take some time and think ...if it were me visiting my site, what would I be interested in paying for and how much.

If I would actually pay for a membership to have access to all items or if I would like to choose the items that I'm interested in and pay for those only.

Its like the difference in paying for a membership to 76 Premium WordPress Themes With Over 100k Customers vs paying for selected themes at Premium WordPress Themes | Premium Templates | Mojo Themes. I believe they both have their benefits.

A person who has different clients would go after elegantthemes while a person who is only interested in creating their own personal website would go with mojo.

I'll have to do some research to find out what my target audiences plans are, although I think I may be leaning more towards the single paid downloads.