Membership sites easily offer one of the best business models for creating a business online, that generates a regular income. Let’s face it, it is one thing to sell products online, but it is a whole other story to set up an ‘income stream’ that provides monthly cash that you can count on.
Some of the big advantages of creating and running your own Membership Sites include:
1) Do the work once and then continue to earn virtual passive income. Yes setting up a membership site, does require some work, particularly in the beginning, but not necessarily any more than other systems for earning online income. The great thing about a Membership Site is that it offers the benefit of ongoing income, where you can continue to utilize and benefit from the work you have already done.
Using an Autoresponder you can ensure your members receive their content at the set intervals, so once you have your system set up, it can almost function on auto-pilot
2) Create a community of ‘happy customers’. You want to make sure you over deliver and keep your members happy. Continue to do this for a very reasonable price, and then you will be sure to be building a community of ‘raving’ fans. You will be building trust and clearly these people will be keen to snap up other products that you may recommend. Always operate from a position of integrity and maintain your online reputation, it can be very quickly destroyed. So only recommend products that you would be happy to buy yourself. If you always aim to provide more value than they are paying for and you listen to your members then you are creating a valuable online business that will return a good income for a lot of years to come.
3) You can train your own affiliates. This can be ideal, particularly for a good quality, good value membership site. Raging fans love to recommend things to their friends, so create your own affiliate program so that they can easily benefit from making recommendations. You never know, there may be some ‘budding Internet Marketers’ among your members and if you provide the right training, then it will be a ‘win/win’ situation.
4) Maximum return for minimal effort. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not promoting laziness… although some of you might say what is wrong with that? I think leading a productive life is a valuable character trait. The issue is when you are doing what you love then you are not really working and creating a membership site around one of your keen interests or hobbies, means even when you are working it doesn’t need to feel like it.
Obviously, everything involves some tasks you may not enjoy, however, if you set yourself up correctly from the beginning it won’t be long before you can start to outsource the tasks that you either don’t like or that you are not so good at. This gives you more time to focus on the things you enjoy.
Working for yourself offers so many more benefits than working for someone else, but of course it gets even better than this. It is not much good if you are working for yourself, but end up a slave to your business or your computer for 16 or more hours a day! Again, Membership Sites offer the best of so many worlds where so much of the work is done once, with ongoing benefits, then when you add outsourcing to your business setup you start to reap the benefits of ‘maximum return for minimum efforts’.
Clearly, life is not all about work, and if you have a family, then spending quality time with them is perhaps your most important ‘job’ in life. Having a time effective and lucrative business allows you to get your life priorities in order.
You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to work out if you have 100 regular members, who pay $20 a month, that is a regular income of $2,000 a month. If you had 500 regular members then that would be $10,000 a month. How would that change your life?
5) You can run your business from anywhere you have a laptop and an Internet connection. Clearly, this is the advantage of any online business, but it really does apply to membership sites in a special way. If you are on vacation, the last thing you want to do is be spending a lot of your time working; so the ‘passive’ nature of your online business combined with the portability of your business being online, means that even an hour or two every couple of days could easily be enough to maintain your business. Of course, it is perfectly possible to set things up that you could go away and not even look at it for a couple of weeks or even a month and at the end of it, come back and find your members and income have actually increased!
6) Multiple membership models to choose from. There are more than just one membership model that you can choose from. You can choose an ongoing model, an expanding model or a termination model. Each of these have their own positives and negatives. Perhaps choosing the termination model might be the best way to ‘get your feet wet’ if you are just starting out, and this can certainly be done with minimal startup cost.
7) Membership sites have a long life span, if you set them up properly in the first place. This is true no matter which model you choose.
Creating a Membership site need not be as daunting as you might think. Yes it will help a lot to get some good quality training and support to start out. Yes it will take some planning and work…. but anything worthwhile usually does. Yes it can create an ongoing passive source of income that will potentially provide you with the freedom and lifestyle you dream about!
Till Next Time…
Lynne
