Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Types of Legitimate Online Businesses: Making Money from Membership Sites

In addition to Service Based Businesses, Affiliate Marketing, and Selling on E-Bay, there are some online business owners who make money by selling memberships to their websites. This works by people purchasing memberships to certain sites to gain access to content that the website owner provides on a regular basis.

For example, you might offer memberships to your site for internet users who need articles for their websites or blogs. These memberships would need to be renewed every few months or so depending on how long your memberships are good for. Each time someone renews their membership, you make more money.

This type of business has a pretty high profit potential, and it would not cost much to provide your members with informational items. In addition, you could charge them a nice amount to access those items, thereby giving you a profit that keeps on giving.

What skills are helpful?

Marketing skills will be the most helpful. These skills come into play when getting those internet users to your site to purchase your memberships. This is what will make you the money. You also should have some knowledge of running a website as this could be useful as well keeping your site running smoothly for your members.

You should also have some knowledge of the products you’re offering. For example, if you’re offering articles to your members, you should know what makes a good article and how they work for the different purposes.

What tools are needed?

You will need a high quality website to handle the demands that your membership site will bring. You should provide excellent customer service should something go wrong with your site. Also, you should invest in some membership site management software program that can help you get your site set up and running. You can find these programs for less than $100.

Content for the site is another tool you will need. You need to provide your paying members with fresh content to use regularly. It could be in the form of written articles, software programs, or even online games. This all depends on what you plan to give to your members.

How do you get started?

You will need to plan your membership site beforehand. What do you plan to offer your members? Will it be content, software, online games, etc? When you have made your decision, come up with a new and different angle to provide your consumers.

You could provide content in a specific niche, like nutrition, or you could offer a certain kind of written content. Just do whatever it takes to provide internet users with a fresh angle. This will help you stand out from the crowd of other membership site owners out there.

Next, get your membership site created with a shopping cart feature to handle the payments for the memberships. The membership management software program should come with all you need to accomplish your business. Then all you would need is the content to give to your members.

The most important step will be to market your membership site to get people to find you. You can market though SEO, Pay Per Click, classified ad sites, traffic exchange programs. The possibilities are endless. Try doing a search for marketing techniques in the search engines.

Membership sites can offer you a means of earning residual income. If people are satisfied with what you give them, they will have no problem handing you their money to keep renewing their memberships maintain their access to your site’s content.

Search Amazon.com for Make Money from Membership Sites

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