Start a Membership Website to Make Money Online

Many of the world’s most profitable websites are subscription websites because those can make you a lot of money and cause much less work than single-sale websites. Beside that, most subscription websites have set up recurring monthly payments. This means, that once you have a customer you most probably will keep him for a few months and therefore he or she will make you good money over that period. If you offer an ongoing value, your customers will stay much longer. Here at the Living For Mondays Academy I have a few customers which are with me now since the first opening of the site early 2013. I totally appreciate that and what I love most is that I can offer them ongoing value and work with them on their problems on how to build their online business.

Here are some more reasons why you want to start a membership website:

The Benefits of a Subscription Website

As mentioned before, one huge benefit of building a subscription-based website is the consistency of income. When you give your customers a lot of value, they’ll stay with you. Period. Try to give them the best support ever. Be personal. It doesn’t matter what you sell, the question is to convince them that it is worth to stay.

Additionally, the traffic coming to your website is often inconsistent. If you’re making money from AdSense or advertising, your income could go up or down by as much as 40% on any given month. That makes it very hard to plan a business. A subscription-based website on the other hand is guaranteed income every month. Even if traffic drops off for a month or two, you still have income from your past subscribers. It is not very likely that all, let’s say 50 subscribers, will go at once. If you see people unsubscribing, ask them why they go and change your strategy.

Subscription sites also benefit from the “snowball effect.” Instead of just getting sales, you’re getting subscribers that pay you every month. Your monthly income will increase though as long as you keep getting traffic. Where other webmasters might feel like their earning power is capped, yours will keep growing simply because of your business model.

The Components of a Successful Subscription Website

To make your subscription based website benefical you need a few ingredients:

1) First of all, build trust. Before someone will subscribe they need to know you and your company. It helps a lot to build a reputation in your space. Getting someone to pay for something every month is a lot harder than getting a single sale. Trust is crucial for making the sale.

2) Think about what is worth being paid for every month. It needs to help them getting somewhere and solving their problems. Again, it doesn’t matter what niche you are in. Just make sure your customers have a good reason to stay with you. So offer highly valuable unique content. Make sure you plan ahead of time so you don’t get stuck and cannot think of any good content.

3) Spend some time on your sales page. It needs to tell people about all the benefits of being a member and why they should join.

Getting Started

To Start a membership site is easy. What is hard is to stick to your own schedule. And to set up your content. Actually that is the hardest part or at least it was for me. I remember well when I started Living For Mondays over a year ago. It was easy to be excited about all the new possibilities, about all the features I could add and so on. What I didn’t expected was the fact that producing highly valuable content took me a LOT of time. Beside that I also needed an audience to make sure that I have someone to promote my site to once it is set up. So it was really a balancing act to produce content for the site on the one hand and setting up the member area on the other hand. I believe that planning and a passion for this topic helped me a lot to stick to it. I’m happy that I’m over the beginning stages though.

When you create your website make sure that your site has enough free content or proof such that people can really get a sense for who you are and the quality of your content.

Process your payments using a processor that can handle recurring payments. These include PayPal, ClickBank, 1ShoppingCart and Authorize.net.

Drive traffic to your website through SEO, PPC, social media or through various online communities. Convert people who land on your web page into subscribers through a compelling sales page.

Don’t think it’s easy – but it is well worth!!! I totally enjoy the community, I love waking up and answering the emails people send me and I love to help out.

So if you also feel that you would like to join us, please go here

Filed in: Blog • Internet Marketing