Membership Has Its Privileges

By craig | April 9, 2008

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Thanks for stopping by today and I hope that you find this post helpful in your quest to make money online. As always, feel free to ask a question or leave a comment, as your participation is always welcome.

Membership does have its privileges, especially at the Country Club or the local card room. But membership can also have its privileges online too. That’s right. Membership sites are really popular right now and a lot of Internet marketers and businesses are going to them as a source of income.

The big draw to these sites is that they can bring in a regular income as compared to affiliate marketing or using AdSense. There are three basic groups that membership sites can be put into and they are: totally free, Free and paid, and totally paid membership sites. I will give examples of each below to help define each.

Totally Free - Yahoo Groups is a great example. There are thousands of sub-groups within this membership site, but it is as far as I know, totally free to join although some restrictions to membership to apply to some groups.
Free and Paid - Pogo.com is an example of this type. Pogo is a game site that offers free games for all to play. But they also make some games only available to “Club” members for a price of $39.99 a year. The last that I seen they had around 1.5 million paid subscribing members.
Totally Paid - There are a lot of these around and one that comes to mind is Wealthy Affiliates. They offer membership to their site for 29.99 a month in exchange for information, how-to’s and a very nice forum with tons of experienced Internet marketers willing to help you with your Internet business.

Starting one may seem kind of hard to do, but as with everything, there are software programs that make these membership sites simple to set up and run. Just Google “membership site software” and you would have many to chose from. One of my favorite software scripts to use is called amember. I have had great success with it and I can highly recommend it to you if your interested in starting a membership site.

Another simple form of a membership site is to develop a web page with information about your membership site. Have a payment link for joining your membership, and then re-direct them to your favorite autoresponder with weekly or monthly information, or an email newsletter, ect. for a specific period of time, say 3, 6 or 12 months. Naturally, there is a lot more to running a successful autoresponder membership than what I can explain in a paragraph, but maybe in the near future I will have something with more detail for you to sink your teeth into.

The main thing with running a membership site is to have enough valuable information to give to your members that they see it as a benefit to be a member and pay for the information.

The same aspect is true also if you plan on joining a membership site. If the site does not benefit you or does not have enough information and products worth the membership price, then by all means leave them. A decrease in members will wake the owner up and let him know that something is a miss.

As with most things on the Internet take your time and do a lot of research before you strike out with your membership site.

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To Your Success!

Many Blessings,

-Craig

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