Lets take a look at membership sites in this article.
First of all, What exactly is a membership site?
A membership site as the name may suggest is a website where a visitor may go and pay a recurring membership fee to get access to content that is not available to others. You can think of this as an exclusive club that only a select few get access to.
Now for the owner of the membership site the passive income opportunity is fairly obvious, you get recurring revenue which may be weekly, monthly or yearly depending on the plan that the subscriber has chosen.
What can sell on your membership site?
As stated it has to be something fairly unique that people are willing to pay for (that is not freely available anywhere else).
Lets look at some examples in more detail.
PLR products – this was and is still one of the most common membership sites, you pay a fee and get access to products you can resell or use on your own sites. these are varied and can be ebooks, videos, images, infographics and a common example is article packages.
App development – there were a few sites that allowed to pay a fee and allowed tou to easily create apps based on generic templates, nice exampling of cashing in on the mobile phone boom.
Clickbank product launches – again there have been many product launches which have involved a membership fee. The most obvious one at the time of writing this article is https://www.clickfunnels.com, to get access to the service and tools you pay a set price. There are many examples of services and tools like this.
WordPress content – exclusive themes and plugins, maybe tutorials as well. Envato Elements is a great example of a membership site with stacks of content for a recurring fee
Photography or graphics – These could be unique photographs, infographics, vectors
How do I start a membership site?
The most obvious way is to go down the WordPress route, install wordpress on good hosting and then find a membership site theme or plugin. There are a few that should do the trick.
MemberPress – this is the big player in the plugins for creating a membership site
Paid Memberships Pro – another huge plugin for membership sites
MemberMouse – membership plugin that allows you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships easily
You may want to create the content yourself but for simple ebooks, reports, articles and images you would probably be best to outsource some of this work. Fiverr and Upwork are examples of sites where you can get content created, for a reasonable price.
Membership site gotchas
A membership site can take a lot of time to get started, you have to design the site, you need something to sell, you have to get word out there about your site and why people should visit.
Depending on the membership site, you may need to keep adding content regularly. In the earlier example where I mentioned PLR sites a subscriber expects to see updates, they want to see new content every so often. The content also has to be of a decent standard so people want to use it and pay for it, no-one will pay for rubbish.
If you host the membership site you will need very good hosting. Your subscribers may be downloading products, viewing videos, listening to podcasts – all of these require bandwidth and web space. You may go down the route of hosting the content on a site like amazon web services but thats an extra cost.
You have to provide support when and where required. People have paid to use your software, view your content or download it. If there any problems then you need to be able to answer them or at the versy least hire someone to do this for you.
Membership site tips
Research – look at other membership sites, what do they offer, what do they cost, research your niche – you don’t want a niche that is saturated but there again you want people who are actually interested in the niche you are selling memberships for.
Create a forum for members to interact and get a community feel. Make them feel they belong to the site.
Offer deals and discounts to your members, make them feel taht the membership fee they pay is giving them some real exclusive benefits.
Vary the content – the plr model as I said earlier relies on many types of content. Even if you offer video training, throw in a podcast or free ebooks every now again. Make your members again feel like they are getting a great deal.
Keep the content up to date – there is nothing worse than looking at the same article packs and ebooks that have been bouncing around for years on the internet. If your site focuses on subject matter that frequently updates then you have to keep up and make sure your content is up to date.
Offer some ‘teaser content’ – a few reports, articles, sample audio or video. Tease new visitors in and more of them will want to pay for a recurring fee if they can get sample of what you are offering them first.
Membership site summary
This can be a money earner but you need a reasonably large initial investment, there can be a lot of customer service and you need to keep adding to your member site. So this is not a true passive income source where you can put your feet up.
This would not be my first choice for earning passive income