Make Money Online With Peomedia

Reason #10: Membership Sites Aren’t NOT Magic

When you start a membership site,  don’t expect to get rich overnight. You’re not going to earn a million bucks
…in a weekend
…while you’re sitting on the beach
…in your pajamas.

What a membership site will do for you, however, is provide you with a business model that has been used successfully and profitably in offline, “brick and mortar” businesses for hundreds of years.

Here’s what I mean…

I’m a member of an auto club and I’d wager you are too.  We pay them a fee – usually once a year – to enjoy all of the resources, facilities, and amenities  available only to members of our club.  These auto clubs have been in existence for years.  And they’re so profitable that credit card companies, auto manufacturers, and even insurance companies are now trying to get a piece of the pie.

Then there are health clubs.  Health clubs have been around for hundreds of years.  They charged fees which their members paid in return for access to the facilities, the resources, and often the exclusivity of the club.  Today, we call them fitness centers and memberships are much more universally available because enterprising businesses saw the potential in offering health club memberships to regular, working class individuals.  But the basic concept remains unchanged – members pay a periodic fee for the right to receive the benefits provided by the club.

We pay for golf memberships, we subscribe to magazines and newspapers, and we join discount clubs like Sam’s Club, Costco, and BJ’s just so we can have access to the facilities, resources, and information available only to members or subscribers.

These are all examples of solid, successful, profitable, membership based businesses – real “brick and mortar” businesses that are using the membership model to bring in big-time dollars for their owners.

So, what’s so great about the membership business model?

It’s a business model that inherently does one thing really well.  When you start a membership site you’ll be forced into doing the single thing every successful business MUST do – provide ongoing value to your members.

It forces you to refine and improve you products and processes to make sure your members are satisfied and continue to renew their memberships.  Unlike the business model most companies are built on – where no one really keeps track of unsatisfied customers or one-shot customers (customers that buy just once and never return) – large numbers of  non-renewing members is concrete evidence of a problem with your business.

If you don’t fix the problem… if you don’t start giving real value to your members, you’ll lose them.  They won’t renew their memberships your membership site will fail.

If you continually provide an obvious value to your members, they’ll continue renewing their memberships – and continue buying your products – over and over and over  again.

Reason #9: Membership Sites Offer a Dependable Income Stream

When you start a membership site, the very nature of the business model forces you to do the one thing every successful business MUST do.

You are forced to provide ongoing value to your members.

If you don’t, they won’t renew.  If you do, you’ll have customers that will stay with you month after month, year after year.

The ongoing value that keeps your members returning is what leads to reason #9 – You should start a membership site because the membership site business model creates a dependable income stream.

Compare your membership site business model with its monthly member payments to a one time product sale.  To keep making money with the single product model you need to keep finding and selling new customers, you must continually make and sell new products, and your financial success often depends on going from one product launch the next.

In contrast, your membership site will provide you with a steady income each month, and while you’ll still need to create new content to keep your members happy, you won’t have to re-sell them.  They’ve already committed to buying this month’s “product”.

That dependable income stream has the obvious benefit of giving you a consistent cash flow.  But there’s another, less obvious benefit that a steady cash flow allows.  Having the income without having to chase sales gives you the time and resources to let you concentrate on providing value to your members – which, as we discussed earlier, is the one thing you must do to run a successful business.

One more thing about that steady, recurring income – something that sets the membership site model head and shoulders above any other internet business model you might choose.  When you start a membership site and your members sign up – they actually give you permission to take money from their checking account or credit card for months into the future.

Now, how the heck can you beat that?

What’s even better is that a well designed membership site with the right membership site software will automate that entire process – from sign-ups and initial payments to renewal payments and cancellations.  You won’t have to deal with billing or collecting money from your members.  90% of that grunt work will by handled by your membership site software using a robust payment processor like PayPal, or ClickBank.

So, when it comes to internet based businesses, there isn’t any better way to create a steady, dependable income stream than with a membership site.

Reason #8: Membership Sites are Like List Building on Steroids.

You’ve probably heard it over and over again – from both online and offline marketing gurus.

“The money is in the list.”

And for the most part, they’re right on.  A great list of responsive buyers can be a goldmine.

But anyone who’s been around marketing for any time also knows that…

The real money is in the RELATIONSHIP you build with your list.

All profitable, long-term businesses are built on relationships.  That’s a rule you can’t to ignore when you start a membership site.  As long as you’re maintaining a great relationship with your customers, they’ll come back to support your business over and over and over again.  They won’t just renew their memberships, but you’ll get backend sales and downstream sales and even referrals – because your members know you, they respect you, and they trust you.

Why, then, is a membership site like list building on steroids?

First, there’s the membership site registration process.  When your members sign up, the standard membership site registration form captures, at the very least, your members’  names and email addresses – automatically adding them to your list.

Secondly, you have the visual nature inherent in a website.  This makes it easier to promote your brand to your members in a way that’s much harder to do with other membership options – like using an email autoresponder to deliver content to your members.  You can try to create that visual appeal with fancy, HTML-formatted emails, but it takes a lot more work and, even then, isn’t nearly as effective.

And lastly, the membership site forces you maintain an active relationship with your members.  It forces you to communicate, to take feedback, and to really build the kind of trust that every business needs to have with their customers.

It’s the very nature of a good, well conceived, well constructed membership site to do all of the things you need to do to build, maintain, and cultivate your list of good, satisfied, buying customers.

Reason #7 – Membership Sites Let You Use Web 2.0 Strategies

To be profitable for the long haul, a business must build solid, active relationships.  Usually, that means the relationship between the business and its customers.

With today’s technology and Web 2.0 strategies, that relationship model can first be expanded with back-and-forth, two-way communications.  Then, the entire process can be rocketed to a new level – exploding the relationship paradigm by turning one-way and two-way relationships into vibrant, complex, multi-lateral communities – communities that will be even more valuable and more profitable to your internet business.

When you start a membership site, the right membership site software will let you add community friendly features and function to your basic site.  These added features (usually called modules or plugins) let your individual members to join together into a cohesive gathering.

For example, you can add a blog to your site.  This will allow you to post information or to share your opinions and your members can leave comments and feedback to let you know what they think.  Usually, you’ll find that your members will also make comments about the comments.  So, with a blog, you can send information to your members (one-way communications),  they can respond to you (two-way communications), and your members can respond to one another (a community).

Forums, chat rooms, and member-to-member messaging can all be integrated into your site to promote discussions, support, collaborations, and even heated arguments.   Your membership site can handle whatever type of interaction your members prefer.

Also, with the right membership site software, your members will be able to enter a personal profile – pictures, bios, and other information that make member-to-member interactions even more personal.

All of these Web 2.0 techniques will keep your members happy and have them renewing their subscriptions month after month.  These products and strategies work together to engage and to entertain your members – and ultimately, which is exactly what your members are looking for…  that’s what they want from you.

Reason #6: Membership Sites Let You Deliver Interesting Content

It’s a given that when you start a membership site you’re going to fill it to the brim with interesting and engaging content.  So, what we’re talking about here is looking at interesting content in a uniquely different way.

A study done a few years ago found that a large segment of the American population is A-literate.  Not IL-literate in that they CAN’T read but A-literate in that they CAN read but they just DON’T.  These are people who choose listening and watching over reading.

Now you may think this is a bad thing or you may not care one way or another.  But, regardless of whether this is good, bad, or indifferent – it’s a fact.  And what’s great about your  membership site is that you can package and deliver your content exactly the way your members want it.

You can deliver audio and podcasts.
You can deliver video and recorded webinars.
You can place tutorials, interviews and product demonstrations on your website.

You’d have a really tough time delivering the same active content using email autoresponders or any other alternative to a well constructed membership website.

With a membership web site you can really get fancy and feature reality style videos – not just clips you create, but you can allow your members to share their own unique or interesting video experiences.  Personally, I’m not much of a fan of the reality phenomenon, but there’s a reason you see “reality” everywhere.  The content is easy and cheap to produce and a lot of people love it.  Many of those people will join your membership site and finding content they can relate to will keep them returning for more.

So, if you do start a membership site consider adding software that will let your members post their own interesting, informative, or humorous stories and videos – adding to your site’s content and enhancing the community feeling that will make your membership site a success.

Reason #5 – Membership Sites Provide a Framework for All of Your Marketing

Are you interested in making money on the internet?

What’s your plan?

Are you using affiliate marketing?  Email marketing?  Adsense?

Do you use article marketing to drive traffic to your web pages?

Well, here’s something your should consider…. when you start a membership site, it doesn’t really matter what your plan is for generating revenue.  Regardless of the method or methods you choose, a membership site is the ideal platform from which you can launch your marketing campaigns.

Let’s assume you’ve chosen affiliate marketing.  You can start a membership site in one of your more profitable niches and build a membership list that provides a ready pool of buyers for the  affiliate products you promote.  And, it goes both ways – you can use your affiliate product to attract more traffic to your membership site or you can customize your product landing page (or thank you page if the affiliate program supports it) to solicit new members from the visitors who purchase the affiliate product.

If you currently focus on article marketing, your membership site will let you hone your copy and test your articles before you submit them to the directories.  You can write your articles and post them to your blog.  That’ll let your member give you feedback on your article – with comments and criticisms that can help you gauge how well you’ve communicated your point.  Then, when you’ve incorporated their feedback into a final product that gets published, you’ll end up with an article that not only gives you backlinks from the article directories – but will likely get picked up and distributed to other markets.

I’m not a fan of Adsense ads on membership sites, but there are sites that use this method to generate extra revenue.  If the ad’s aren’t intrusive and your members don’t complain, Adsense is just one more great way to boost your membership site’s income.

Finally, with your own membership site you’ll also have a ready market for your own, home grown products (assuming they fit your membership niche).

No matter what marketing strategies you have planned, your active, flourishing membership site will only increase their effectiveness.

Reason #4: Membership Sites Let You Easily Add Value to Your Products

Have you ever tried affiliate marketing?

One of the toughest challenges for both newbie and established affiliate marketers – especially when it comes to large, widely promoted product launches – is making our product offers stand out from all of the other offers from all of the other affiliates.  The standard way to differentiate an offer is with compelling, pre-sales copy or by adding unique, high perceived value, free bonuses.

But by far, the best way to overcome that challenge is to use the “secret” the really successful internet marketers use…

…they totally ignore it.

Instead of trying to drown out the offers of their rivals, they simply market the new product to captive audiences – contacts on their own mailing list and on the lists of their trusted associates.

How can you compete with that? Well, how about this… once you start a membership site, you’ll have your own captive audience that you can market to.  Your members will already be familiar with you and the excellent service you’ve provided month after month.

When you offer a new product to them, they’re not going to shop anyplace else.

On top of that, starting up a membership site makes it so much easier for you to add obvious value to your products.  You can do things like:
•    add ebook, audio, or video tutorials
•    add video product demonstrations
You can even have your members review and recommend products, providing the very kind of quality testimonials that will increase the product’s perceived value and making it that much more desirable.

Then, if you use the right membership site platform and software, you can add backend support items like product forums, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), and knowledge bases that would allow members to learn from each other.  Providing features like these creates added value for  products in a way that your affiliate competition can’t come close to.

Do all these things and your members will love you for it.  They’ll be happy, engaged, and plugged into your membership community.  Most importantly, you’ll get them coming back month after month for more of the special value your site offers.

Reason #3: Membership Sites are Simple to Set Up

Did you know you could use WordPress as the platform for your membership site?

I’m a technician – a programmer by trade.  I’ve taught programming and web development at the college level.  I’ve also developed web sites and web applications for nearly 15 years.   All all of those years of experience have led me to choose a single product for developing websites…

WordPress.

Joomla is nifty.  Drupal has security and customization capabilities that are unrivaled among the current crop of content management systems (CMS).  But when it comes to quickly setting up website that’s gorgeous, simple to use, and easy to maintain, WordPress wins hands down.

I use for WordPress for nearly all of my websites – including my membership sites.  It’s great blogging software that isn’t just for blogging.  In my book, WordPress is the simplest, best supported, SEO friendliest, most easily extendable, standards compliant CMS available on the planet.

And, because it’s fully open source… it’s free.

I can set up a really nice-looking WordPress membership site in about an hour.  That includes installing WordPress, finding a suitable theme, and installing all of the standard plugins that I use for SEO, membership control and administration, forums, event calendars, chat rooms, video support, plus a few more nifty features that I like to use on all of my membership sites.

Even if you’re not a WordPress guru, as long as you know your way around a web server you be able to get a membership site up and running in just a few minutes using WordPress and the right membership site plugin.

As for your membership site content, consider creating simple, easy to maintain, Micro-Continuity web sites.

Micro-continuity is a fancy way of saying you’re delivering a course over the internet.  And, just like a course you might take at your local community college, there’s a fixed period of time for the training – like maybe 12 or 13 weeks, or 5 months, or whatever time period you need to deliver the content to your members.

If you start a membership site based on the micro-continuity model, creating the content for the site is pretty much a no-brainer.  The topic of your membership site can come from a hobby or from any specialized knowledge or interest you may have.

And, if YOU don’t have a hobby or specialized knowledge – you probably have a relative or friend who does.  You can partner with them – using their product knowledge and your internet knowledge – to create a unique and profitable membership site.

As I mentioned earlier, I taught college level Information Technology (IT) classes as a part-time instructor for a number of years.  I mostly taught intro and mid-level courses in programming, web development, and IT Management.

Since I was part-time, I’d often get a  last minute call to teach a class that, for whatever reason, couldn’t be covered by a full-time staff member.  I’d have to quickly create a syllabus for the entire course – outlining the topics that I’d be covering in each session.

For these last-minute, rush cases I almost never had all of my lectures fully fleshed out by the time the classes actually started.  I’d have just 1 or maybe 2 weeks of lectures planned.  The rest of them I’d create as the class progressed.

This is exactly what you can do with your micro-continuity membership site.

Micro-continuity is designed to feed content to your members in chunks or modules – usually one module each week.  As a result, you don’t need to have your entire “course” created before you launch your site.  You just need is the 1st installment of content – generally just the first week – creating the rest as your members progress.

The simplicity of both WordPress and the Micro-Continuity model results in membership sites that are pretty simple to setup.  With the right planning and the right membership site software you can start a membership site and easily have it up, running, and pulling in new members in a single weekend.

Reason #2: You Can Set It and Forget It

When you start a membership site, your single greatest challenge will be providing the kind of fresh, interesting content that will keep your members coming back for more.  For a standard membership site, this creates an unending demand that can turn into a maintenance nightmare.

But, there’s a special kind of membership site that will free you from continually manufacturing new content.  The concept is called Micro-Continuity and if you’re looking to start a membership site it’s a concept you should definitely consider.

Micro-continuity is a fancy way of saying you’re delivering a course over the internet.  And, just like a course you’d take at your local community college, there’s a fixed period of time for the course – for example 12 or 13 weeks, or 5 months, or whatever you need to deliver the content.

I can also tell you from years of experience teaching part-time at the college level, most  professors don’t make significant changes to their course syllabus or to their lectures and handouts once they’ve got the course fine tuned and working just right.  They’ll reuse course material semester after semester.

Since your micro-continuity membership site is just a course delivered over the web, you can follow the lead of those college professors and not add to or change the content of your micro-continuity site once you’ve got it running well.

In the words of Mr. Popeil… you simply set it and forget it.

The micro-continuity concept lets you start a membership site… then “walk away from it” – freeing you up to create more “set it and forget it” membership sites one right after another.

Multiple membership sites will give you multiple income streams, multiple platforms for backend affiliate sales, and multiple opportunities to engage your members since you’ll find that satisfied members from one of your sites will follow you to join other membership sites you create.

Oh… there’s one more super benefit that the micro-continuity concept provides.  It’s that prospects feel much more comfortable with the fixed time period and finite payments.  They know they won’t be paying a monthly fee forever and they can quickly calculate how much the “course” will cost them.  Which all works to make micro-continuity sites much easier to promote and sell.

And the #1 Reason you should have a membership site…

Internet millionaires– people who’ve already been wildly successful on the internet – are moving over to the membership site business model.

Now, I realize that just because someone has made a lot of money doesn’t mean they’re always right. But as the saying goes, “although past performance can’t predict future performance – it’s the best indicator we’ve got.”  Besides, it’s not like these guys are embracing crazy schemes or questionable business practices – they’re just looking at all of the membership site benefits that I discussed in my other nine articles.

So, let’s take a quick look at three internet business owners who are shifting their businesses over to membership sites.  This is by no means an exhaustive list of successful internet entrepreneurs who are embracing the membership site model.  They’re moving over in droves.

First, there’s Yaro Starak – one of the most successful individual bloggers on the internet.  In 2007 he earned over $200,000 from blogging – and astounding figure for a blogger since most bloggers have a tough time making ANYTHING.  In years past he taught a course called the Blog Mastermind where he coached people on how to set up their own successful, money-making blogs.  Now, he runs a membership site called… you guessed it… Membership Site Mastermind.  Our  successful former blogger has found greener pastures with membership sites.

Then there’s Russell Brunson – the King of Micro-Continuity.  As best I can tell he’s the one that  coined the phrase.  He runs courses, workshops, and membership sites to teach the micro-continuity concept.  But a positive sign of his commitment to the concept is that he doesn’t just teach it.  Russell is converting all of his internet businesses and products – businesses and products will bring in an amazing $10 million this year – over to micro-continuity sites.  Why? For all of the reasons discussed in my other articles but specifically for Reason #2 – that these membership sites so easy to setup and to manage.

By the way, not only is Russell converting HIS products over to Micro-Continuity – but, because Micro-C sites are so simple to setup and maintain, he’s been buying products, courses, and websites that other people have given up on and converting them into profitable micro-continuity sites.

Last, but certainly not least, is Mike Filsame.  For many people, the name Mike Filsame is synonymous with one of his best known products – Butterfly Marketing.  The product was originally introduced as a $2,000 home study course, but earlier this year Mike decided to give the course away for free and attach it to a forced continuity form of a membership site.  Even though he didn’t make a dime off the free course, the membership site revenues netted Mike over $2.3 Million.

Yep, there are a lot of ways to make money on the internet, but when I see very successful business people embracing a strategy or business model, especially a fundamentally sound and proven one like memberships, I’m likely to stand up and take notice.

You should take notice too… and start a membership site of your own.

After almost all membership script I have try, I can say that DLGuard is the best one with the most features and the best support.