How To Operate A Profitable Membership Site – Part 1
Copyright 2009 by Willie Crawford
I’ve been operating lucrative membership sites for nearly seven
years now. They are a great way to build numerous nice residual
income streams. I have friends who operate (co-own) over 20.
A membership site doesn’t have to have a huge number of members,
or charge an exorbitant membership fee, to be profitable. The
key is to also design them to be as low maintenance as practical.
A site with just 200 members pay you $25 per month, gives you
a residual income stream of $5000 per month. If you spend no
more than one or two hours per week on this site, that’s a very
respectable hourly income.
Here are some tips for operating a profitable membership site
without working yourself to death.
1) In order to retain members, you do need to update the site
frequently. If a site feels stale, or has no new content, your
members will grow bored and leave.
2) Build in a way for members to interact. One of the easiest
ways to do that is to install a discussion forum on the site.
This allows members to benefit by sharing information. Also,
it gives members a place to go when they are simply bored.
Working from home, especially if it’s a computer-based business
can be very lonely. Members will often visit your membership
site to combat this loneliness and chat with friends.
Some of the newer forum software actually lets members set
up their own mini-communities. The forum is then one
central communities, surrounded by a collection of individual,
personalized communities.
3) Create a sense of community. You want to have your members
feel like this is their site, and that it is a community where
they can feel safe, and learn. This generally means that you
need to have a few moderators on your forum. Without
moderators to maintain order, and even discipline members,
mean-tempered members can quickly make others feel unwelcome.
When you do foster this sense of community, you’ll find your
members very protective of “their backyard.”
4) Strive for the majority of new content to be created by
members. This is also why it’s good to have a forum. Experts
on your topic will join, share priceless information and
resources, and give the membership real value. Allow members
to offer freebies to each other, etc. This is how you avoid
having to spend countless hours maintaining and growing the site.
Certain leaders and regular contributors to the community will
emerge, and many members will stick around because they benefit
from interacting with those specific members. When you identify
those community leaders, those “thought leaders,” encourage them.
These are the people you also want to seek as moderators. Just
the respect that they earn naturally will keep other members in
check.
5) Maintain exclusivity in your community. If members are
paying to be members, or having to meet some other requirement,
you need to guard against outsiders coming in. Using a secure
password protected script will often accomplish this, but
passwords do get shared and hackers abound.
You need to be forever vigilant to protect your community.
Otherwise, you could quickly find your forum filled with disgusting
content or overrun by advertisements.
You also want to make sure you’re running the latest version of
whatever script you’re using to power your site. As software
developers discover venerabilities in scripts they put out
patches, and running the latest version is the only way to
ensure you have the latest security patch. The bad guys are
constantly searching for sites powered by outdated scripts
because they know where the holes are.
We’ll look at a few more ways to grow and protect your membership
site in part 2.
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Willie Crawford is a 13 year internet marketing veteran. One of
his favorite, relative hands-free methods of generating revenue
is operating simple membership sites. To see how you can set up
a profitable membership site in just 6 minutes, using all free
resources visit: http://YourNewMembershipSite.com
Tags: Membership Site Retention, Membership Site Software, Operating A Membership Site, Running A Membership Site, Setting Up A Membership Site