If you’re selling info products or affiliate products, you get paid whenever someone buys. If you build a good membership site and fill it full of members, you get money from them every month. Even if it’s only a couple of bucks to subscribe, that couple of bucks can really add up for you.

The cool thing about membership sites is that they hardly cost you anything at all to run. You need to pay for the software and hosting, and that’s it. Once you get it set up, your site is password protected so that they can only access your content if they’ve paid.

How to Make a Membership Site Work

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, there’s more to running a successful membership site than most people realize. If you’re not willing to babysit it and take care of it, it’s going to fail miserably.

The first step is to find a really good target market, here’s how: This market has to be especially laser-targeted. They have to really want what you’re offering in order to pay for it month after month. It’s not like a one-shot info product.

The other cornerstone of a membership site is amazingly good content. Again, your blog or website can offer pretty good stuff, but the content on your membership site has to be killer. You’ve got to have them coming back for more. That’s the real challenge. You’ve got to up the ante on everything.

There’s an endless amount of tech stuff (remember the babysitting) and it’s important to have someone who can handle it on short notice. If you’re a techie wizard, you can handle it yourself. If not, you might need to invest in a virtual assistant. If the site crashes for some reason, you need to fix it fast.

Getting Members

The best way to get members is to offer a freebie, just like getting them to sign up to a list. Again, make sure that you’re offering them something they can really use.

There are lots of membership sites out there in all kinds of niches, so set yours apart somehow. Targeting a really narrow sub-niche is a great way to do this. Find a sub-niche within your niche that nobody has done yet. It also helps if you have a unique voice that your market really responds to.

If you think you might ever want to start a membership site, start building relationships with your prospects right now. The easiest way to get members quickly is to have a huge list or fan base that loves you. Then, you can just basically say, ‘Hey, I’ve started a membership site’ and they’ll be beating down your door.

The main bit of advice I can give is that running a membership site sometimes feels like a whole job in and of itself. Lots of people quit because they don’t see members signing up and they get tired of it. Make sure that you’re committed to putting in the time and maintenance before you get started.

Tony