Creating a membership site is another great way to earn money online. Most people are creating membership sites as an alternative way of generating a passive income, where members pay a certain monthly or one time fee to access to the website contents. Creating a membership website is indeed very easy and you can set up one within a few minutes.
How to Set Up a Membership Website
First, you will have to choose a niche. You can decide to choose a niche related to your professional or whatever niche you may feel comfortable writing about. Just make sure you already have a ready market or targeted audience for the niche that you choose.
Once you have selected your niche, the next step is to create the membership website. You will have to purchase an online software that will help you in creating the site. Membership sites creating software (plugin) ranges from $97 – $180, depending on the company. Make sure you purchase your software from a well known company with a good reputation.
With your membership website ready, the next step is to create and write informative contents that will attract readers and make them pay for the monthly or one time subscription fee. If you have enough skills to be able to come up with unique, interesting contents, it better to do it by yourself or you could hire someone to write for you.
The point here is to make sure whatever you are writing about is worth every cent spend by the members. Otherwise, it will be hard for anyone to subscribe to your website or even pay for your contents if the same information can be found anywhere else on the internet for free.
Lastly, you will need to drive traffic to your website. Even if you manage to create unique contents, without adequate and well targeted traffic, you are most likely not going to success in making money with your membership website since in the first place, no one knows whether your website exists or not.
As with any other online money making program, you will need to learn the proper way of marketing and SEO inorder to be able to send traffic to your membership website. One effective way to do this is by having a targeted email subscription list and then giving them a free trial subscriptions for a month or so.
After one month, you can now start re-billing them and since they are already aware of the type of contents you are providing, it is most likely they will be willing to pay.
To attract more members, you could start by charging a little membership fee and then supplementing the membership income by selling your own products or sell other peoples’ products to earn commission.
What are the Pros and Cons of Membership Sites?
Pros
- You earn a constant passive monthly income.
- You do not need to be an expert, you can hire professional writers to do everything for you for a little fee.
- With adequate traffic, well written contents and proper marketing, having a membership website can be one of the best way to earn online.
- Easy to create unlike when you are designing an ebook.
Cons
- You will need to create unique contents and update it frequently to make sure it remain relevant and appealing to your target audience.
- You need to spend money to purchase the software to create the site and other plugin.
- You will need to outsource for professional writers if you cannot come up with a unique idea on the niche that you are targeting.
Basically, this is the most important information you need to get started on a membership site. Creating a membership website is not like starting a regular website and proper planning need to be put in place.
