1

Making Money With Membership Sites

2

“Building a membership site takes time and money. You will also need patience because very few membership sites start earning big money over night. You might have to invest three, four or even six months’ worth of work before you see really serious revenue. However, hundreds of other people have created moneymaking membership sites and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do this as well.”

So, let’s get started …

3

“The Three Major Types Of Membership Sites”

The three major types of membership sites are “open membership,” “fixed term” and “autoresponder.”

An open membership site is just that–it goes on forever or until such time as the webmaster decides to close it down. In comparison, fixed term sites provide members with a fixed amount of information for a fixed amount of time. Auto responder sites are where information is delivered by email via an auto responder. They can be either open membership or fixed term.

4

-Pluses and minuses to all three types-

An open membership site usually generates more money because its members have to keep paying you month after month (called recurring income) for as long as they remain members.

The downside of an open membership site is that if you want to keep your subscribers happy and coming back for more (and continuing to pay you), you have to create fresh, new content every month. If not, you could lose a lot of your subscribers.

5

-The joy of passive income-

A great upside to fixed term sites is called passive income. Once you create the site and its content, you’re finished. You do have to keep marketing it to attract new members but beyond this, you just can sit back and watch the revenue pour in. It’s like being a college professor where you create a semester’s worth of lessons and then just keep using them year after year.

An auto responder site might just be the best of both worlds. It is capable of generating almost as much revenue as an open membership site (because you can keep it open for as long as you wish) and it will generate passive income.

6

“Choose a Topic”

You need to choose a topic you care about for some reason because you’re going to be spending a heck of a lot of your time focused on it – building it, marketing it and creating its content. If you choose to build an open membership site, you will also be moderating it, answering questions from your members, creating and moderating sub-forums (or user groups) and so forth.

7

-Don’t get slimed-

Your site should also be about a topic you know something about. You might be really excited about the idea of starting a membership site devoted to robotics but if you know little or nothing about it, forget about it.

8

“Seven Membership Site Models”

Private label rights

These are sites offering a number of PLR articles focused around one specific concept or keyword.

Note: Private label rights (PLR) articles are those you buy and can use as your own and in any way you wish.

Social sites

This type of site has become hugely popular in recent years. Examples of social sites include dating sites andfriendship sites.

9

Content sites

In this kind of site members pay a fee monthly to obtain information from a single resource that is not readily available without a lot of research.

Coaching/mentoring sites

This type of site provides members with support, help and guidance regarding a particular theme or topic.

Paid newsletter

This is where the website owner brings together content related to a particular theme. Those who belong benefit by having up-to-date information sent to them, eliminating the need to sort through a lot of other information to find what they need.

10

Message boards or forums

Message boards usually serve as a sort of community center on a website. People who are enthusiastic about some particular hobby or interest use them to post relevant messages to other enthusiasts.

Content delivered by video or audio

This type of membership site is becoming increasingly popular. They typically offer audio or video files to their membership usually on a monthly basis.

11

“Membership Site Software”

Once you decide which type and style of membership site you want to build, you will need to choose the software required to operate it. The simplest way to deliver content to your subscribers is via email. You could even do coaching or mentoring via emails or use them to deliver audio or video.

If you decide that email makes the most sense for your site, you need to open an account with Aweber (www.aweber.com), Infusionsoft (www.infusionsoft.com) or another such auto responder company. The reason for this is because an auto responder will not only send out your e-mails at whatever interval you choose, it will start a new series for every new subscriber.

12

-Create a forum-

If you decide that you would like to build an open membership, the simplest solution is to create a forum. Earn 1K a Day (http://www.earn1kaday.net/)is a great example of what one of these looks like. It has a great many user groups (or sub-forums) that focus on specific interests such as copywriting, video marketing and mini-money sites.

If you want to build a forum with free software, phBB is free and offers some very nice features (Earn1KaDay is powered by phBB).

13

Simple Machines Forum software is also free and is considered by many to be the best free forum software available. It is open source software and offers a number of helpful features.

If your membership site will be on a WordPress blog, you can get a plugin to host your forum. These are usually free. Some of the most popular of these are bbPress Bulletin Forums (which was created by the same team that created WordPress), Tal-ki Forums, Mingle Forum, Simple Press and WP-Forum.

Wishlist Member and aMember are also popular software platforms for hosting a membership site.

14

Here is a chart showing which types of software you might use, depending on the type (model) of site you’d like to build.

15

16

“Your Content”

The heart and soul of any membership site is content. Whether you create a fixed term or an open membership site, you need to provide your members with a steady stream of good, interesting, informative content or they will unsubscribe.

If you're able to easily write good copy, you can write the content yourself. If not, there are websites where you can get content written for you. You will almost always get good quality articles from the sites RentACoder.com, Elance.com and Constant Content. The way RentACoder.com and Elance.com work is that you post information about the content (articles or posts) you want.

17

“Marketing Your Membership Site”

I have to be honest and tell you that this is not only the most important part of creating a moneymaking site, it may be the hardest.

To begin with, it’s a two-step process. First you have to get visitors (traffic) to your site and then second, convert them into paying customers.

Keywords

Getting traffic begins with ferreting out which keywords your visitors would search on and that would get them to your site. Two tools you can use to learn your keywords are the Google External Keyword Tool (GEKT)and Market Samurai.

18

GEKT is free. You can use Market Samurai free for a few days and will then have to buy it if you want to continue using all of its features. However, you can use its keyword tool free forever.

For an example, let’s use GEKT and say you want to build your membership site around organic gardening. If you go to the site

(https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and type in the term organic gardening, here’s a partial list of the keywords you’d see (on next page).

19

20

Free traffic

There are two ways to get traffic to a site. They are free and paid. Free traffic begins with on-page SEO (search engine optimization), a kind of techie term that means you have to let the search engines (especially Google) know what your site is about.

Search engine optimization

For SEO, you would want the term in the site’s meta title, meta description and in the first and last paragraphs of its home page. You should also include the term several times within the page.

21

Off-page optimization

The second free way to get traffic to a site is with off-page optimization. Article marketing is writing and placing articles on subjects related to your site in article directories such as ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com – with links back to your sites.

Find affiliates

A third way to get free traffic is by marketing your site to webmasters who have sites that are related to yours but not competitive.

22

Post to forums

Another good way to attract traffic to your membership site is to find forums devoted to your topic and post comments. Most of the people who own these forums will allow you to add something in such as your signature that would help get traffic to your site. If you do post to forums, make sure you offer helpful information.

Swap banners

If you can find websites that compliment yours but are not competitive, contact the webmasters and offer to put a banner on your site promoting their site if they will return the favor.

23

Paid traffic

Free traffic is great because, well, it's free. However, it's hard to count on it. In comparison, you can buy traffic so that is guaranteed to get people to your site.

Google sells advertising called Adwords, which are those little four-line ads you see on the right-hand side of all of Google’s result pages.

Another popular way to buy traffic is through Facebook advertising. It is different from Adwords because instead of paying per click (when someone clicks on your ad) you pay by exposures, that is you pay for the number of people who have been exposed to the ad.

24

“Monetizing Your Website”

There are other ways you can monetize your membership site to earn additional revenue. And you can do this whether you have a fixed term, open membership or auto responder site.

Your members will come to like you and your content because if they didn't, they would soon unsubscribe. Since you’ve developed a good relationship with them and they trust you, they’re very likely to take your recommendations regarding other products and services.

25

“Conclusion”

As you have learned in this report, a membership site can be a beautiful thing. You have learned about the three types of membership sites – open member, fixed term and auto responder. You now know about membership site models such as content and PLR. This report has taught you about membership site software, about keyword research and how to get traffic to your site. You’ve also learned about marketing your site, including ways to get free traffic and the traffic you will have to pay for.

In short, you now know the fundamentals of creating a successful, moneymaking membership site.

To your success!

Thank You

Visit my Blog marcomoeschter.com

(just click on it)

Free! How To Get Instant Access To My `Revolutionary` New Business

ModelThat Can Make You $10,000 Per

Month”Click Here

26