Membership Sites and Profits

Business, any business, is about making money, right?

You’re in business to make money - it’s a great thing. There is absolutely no reason to have a business unless you’re in business to make money. You need it to live on, to make the world a better place and yes, to have fun. Even if you’re a non-profit organization – your goal is to make money and then spend it on your organization’s mission. Adding a membership site to your current business is a great way to increase that bottom line and make more money.

So how do membership sites make money?

First and foremost your members will be a captive audience. Better than a lead list, your members have proven they’re interested, they’ve practically committed themselves to being loyal customers. That means each and every new product or service you offer is going to have a stronger conversion rate with your members. In addition to being able to sell your product and services to a focused group of people, your members, you’re now able to profit off of the subscription income.

While many membership sites are free, some make millions of dollars annually just off of subscriptions. Subscriptions can also come in different levels. You can structure your membership site to offer free memberships and allow access to a portion of your site, silver level memberships and access to a little bit more of the site, gold memberships, and platinum memberships that allow access to your entire site. This way you’re appealing to all income levels and all levels of commitment.

Plus, when you offer different levels of membership, you can market to each segment differently. You can create high end products geared specifically for the customers that you know can afford it and appreciate it. And you can offer incentives to upgrade!

Whether you charge for membership like Match.com or if you offer membership for free like YouTube, the opportunity to profit is huge.

Multiple Streams of Income

Once you have a membership site up and running you will have the opportunity to generate multiple streams of income. You can sell affiliate products, make money from AdSense and advertising sales, and you can profit by selling information. Information in the form of books, reports, audio recordings, video recordings, tutorials, workshops, seminars…the sky is the limit. You can sell private label rights information.

A Billion Dollar Exit Plan.

Did you know that you can sell your membership site for a profit? YouTube did it for 1.65 billion dollars. Yep –billion. Do you need an extra billion?

The opportunity to make money with your membership site is limitless. There are so many amazing opportunities there’s no reason not to add it to your business model today.

What business are you in?

The truth is that you don’t have to have a business up and running to start a profitable membership site – but you do need a market. In fact, you need a highly targeted market that wants the information that your membership site will provide. It’s a very unprofitable idea to start a membership site without any initial target market or demand research.

Here are a few tips to find a niche if you’re just getting started:

First, consider what you like to do, what you’re interested in, and what you’re good at. This can be ANYTHING! If you’re passionate about organic gardening then begin researching that niche. If you love tropical aquariums then research that niche. If you have years of experience as a weight loss counselor then you have a niche, if you have years of experience helping people organize their lives, fix their cars, train their birds, or choose software for their businesses, then you have a niche. Research it!

Consider a sub-niche:

With so many markets over saturated and being so highly competitive, it makes sense to carve of a sub-niche within a niche and to try to dominate that sub-niche.

Here is a quick example of a sub niche:

Children’s Health: This is a fairly general term. A few sub-niches of this term might be nutrition, diabetes, weight loss for children, meal planning for busy children, nutrition for children with special needs like allergies - those are sub-niches of Children’s health which are more targeted. I’m sure you can come up with even better, more targeted ones.

Sub-niches are important not only for getting to the top of the search engine results but also for effectively communicating with your target market. Think about it for a minute; if you’re targeting a huge group of people who want to feed their kids better, how do you relate to all of them at once? Do you talk to them as parents of overweight children, parents of children with illness, or busy single parents?

You can’t do it. You can’t effectively communicate with a group of people who are all very different and have very different needs. By zeroing in on your niche market you can speak directly to your target market and solve the needs of that group. You can communicate effectively with them, know what offers to make to them, and ultimately make more sales.

In the next section, we’ll talk about researching your market. For many research is the drudgery of being an online marketer but if you look at it like a challenge, a challenge to see just how much money you can make, then market research becomes exhilarating.