Are you ready to turn your online business idea into a membership site?
You may have heard all the buzz about ‘continuity’ business models where you can beef up your online earnings by having people subscribe to a life-long program of regular, recurring billing.
The model is well proven, and can be delivered electronically via a secured, private site offering ongoing content or it could be delivered online or offline via regular electronic mail, video-of-the-month, or regularly shipped physical products such as newsletters, CD-ROM or DVD videos.
We operate our own membership site over at InfoMarketer’sZone as well as other niche markets – we have also coached a number of clients to build and grow their own profit-producing membership sites.
In a nutshell, here are three of the most important elements in turning your desire to operate a membership site into a reality.
1. Identify demand – you need to discover what it is within a given niche market that your audience absolutely dreams about, things they desparately want or desparately want to avoid. The #1 factor impacting how many people will join your membership site or continuity program is the topic, so you want to get this one right. Refer to the Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package if you want the most powerful system for narrowing down a niche market and topic for your online business.
2. Enter the market with a product, list or forum first, then move to a membership site. There are two very common mistakes new internet marketers make when they launch their membership sites – 1) They miss the mark in terms of demand and 2) They underestimate the level of effort in generate ongoing ideas for content. By operating a website, forum or selling a product (even just a report) into a market first, you will get a much better idea of what your market wants and come up with lots of ideas for potential content to use in your membership site.
3. Deliver a combination of information, tools, lessons, and build a community around your topic. In many case I’ve had people comment that the reason they love our membership site so much is the private forum and the tools and templates that come as part of the membership site. It may initially be the content that attracts them, but the tools, templates, updates and private community forum can lock them in as lifetime subscribers helping lower your attrition rates.
Following these simple, yet powerful strategies you will get results in the two most important areas of any successful membership site – getting new subscribers and keeping them month-in and month-out so your income continues to grow astronomically.
