How to Create a Money-Making Membership Site

One very impressive method of making money on the Internet is to set up a website service that people value so much they're willing to pay a monthly fee for access. This is usually called a membership site, because you subscribe and become a member of the site. If you can come up with a method or business plan that will provide valuable content on a regular basis, then this is a significant idea for your consideration.

You don't always have to provide the content yourself. eBay is a good example of a site that provides content for each member from other members of the site. Any website with a forum or other ways to interact with each other - video, audio, chat rooms, private messages - becomes a potential membership site.

You're familiar with the larger ones like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

Setting up and running such a site is a significant task, and you need to be careful you're not setting up something that will require your full-time efforts for the rest of your life.

Acquiring Content
To begin, you probably do need to supply significant content. This could be writing, products that are downloadable, or just advice. But if you can set up the site with enough significant content and get a community started, then you can make plans that will have that community generate its own content.

Many forums, both paid and unpaid, generate content on a daily basis from thousands of members who post and respond to each other. If this forum is part of a membership site, and people understand how valuable the content is, you can charge admission or access fees, and derive a cash flow from that community.

The most critical aspect is the quality of the content. The value of the content must equal or exceed the value you're asking as a subscription fee. This is measured form the perspective of the user, not your perspective. If you don't meet that criteria, you'll have people signing up for 2 months and quitting.

How do you set up such a site? You need two sections to the site: a public section and a private section. The section that is open to the public is where you educate the public on the value of the private part of the site, which is hidden until the customer pays the membership fee. Hopefully the hidden part of the site is larger, complex, and provides multiple ways for your customers to interact.

It's very difficult to set up a site where you supply all the content. Some sites supply software and they charge a yearly fee for upgrades and access to the community - that's a membership site, too, but that has the advantage that the particular software helps hold the community together. On the site itself you need to control access to the membership, or secure, part of the site. It's difficult to do that in a reliable manner without using commercial software.

Access Control Software
There are many access control software packages available for websites . One of the most significant is amember.com. You can find several others that are cheaper but have less features.

So your site consists of the public section, which is just a regular website that could be Joomla or Wordpress - and a secure section that is controlled by security software like amember. Users can tour the open part of the site and watch tours of the hidden part, or they can read descriptions of how it operates, see the prices, and see testimonials from existing members. And then when they sign up for a subscription, the amember software gives them access to the hidden site which might include a forum.

Logging In For Your Customers
One significant problem in building a site like this is logging people into all the different pieces of software. You want them to be able to log in only once and still have access to all the many restricted areas. But often the components you add to the private part of your site will all come with their own login functions. If there's a forum, there's one registration, amember has a registration. If you have other functions which require someone to give a name and password, they too will need to be registered. Amember provides a way to synchronize a forum or a Joomla site. But it is not a simple process. It's much better if you can design your site where where is only one registration. It's hard to do, but not impossible. You can find more information at Website - Do It Yourself.

Take a Look at...
A good example of a membership site is one on gardening. It was started at a very low cost per year - but it became so popular that half a million people signed up. And the main content is the contributions from other members.

So even if you're charging a tiny fee, if it's a popular site you can be making a lot of money. If your community is smaller, you may have to charge higher prices. You need to do calculations upfront using Excel spreadsheets to determine what your prices should be. Not only do you need to pay your salary and ongoing bills, but you need to build up cash reserve to expand the content.

In conclusion, you might consider building a membership site if you sell software and expect to have a community of users, or if you have a subject matter that you know is of interest to many people.