Many people are looking for the ultimate way to make money online. Their dream is to be self reliant, work from home and base all of their business online, which in theory is a great idea and can be done. One of the ways people can achieve this is through the running of a membership site. By running a membership site you will obtain a reliable monthly income and a large group of people that look forward to what you have to say and who trust what you do online. For these people you are an expert in your field and a person that can be relied on and that is what every Internet marketer is looking for.
The Benefits of a Membership Web Site
Whether you know it or not, it is every internet marketers dream to have a large group of people who know you and trust you. You can achieve this through a membership web site. Once you have created these bonds, then you can market your own products or affiliated products to these members, so not only do you get the residual income from the fee you charge, but you also sell other products to your select group of people.
As your membership grows, so will the opportunities that come your way. People will see you as the expert in your field and other people will want to join, as well as marketers who will want to advertise with you, have you promote their products and you will also earn a commission from those products. This means you will receive bigger and better business opportunities.
Does this sound good? Well this is what owning a membership site can do for you. It is said that membership sites have increased in popularity by over 500% in the last few years, and a very hot product, believe it or not, is information. You can sell quality content or information to your members and get paid quite nicely to do it.
Paid Membership Site Vs. Free Membership Site
There are essentially two types of membership sites; the paid membership site, and the free membership site.
The paid membership site has a certain limited number of members who pay you a certain amount monthly, bi-monthly, twice a year or yearly to access the information they need. These fees can vary from between $5 to $10 to $200 depending on your industry and what you are selling. The benefits to this type of membership site are obvious in that you produce a residual income and because almost 70% of your members will be recurring members then you don’t have to focus so much attention to attracting new clients.
What are the benefits of the Free Membership site?
So how does the free membership site work? Obviously, if you’re not charging a fee then you can’t be making any money from your site. This is not so! Remember when I mentioned before, that a membership site produces one of the most sought after goals of any Internet marketer, and that is trust. You have established yourself as an expert in your field to your membership group. You have done this by offering quality information they can use, and information that your reader is looking for.
This works to your advantage in that at the same time you offer free information, you also offer other services or products that are related to your industry. This is called affiliate marketing, and the benefit is that you can market any number o products and services.
Your email list will continually grow and you can send all kinds of information about different products to the members who have signed up at your site.
Of course one of the issues with free membership sites is that you always have to be adding fresh content, updating constantly and finding things that are of interest to your readers, but even that is less expensive than running all of those PPC campaigns or advertisements.
If you still feel like you are not making enough revenue from your free membership site, you can always have an option where your readers or viewers can upgrade to a paid membership version where they will receive even more information than what they do from the free membership site.