6 Simple and Easy Steps to Starting your Own Successful Membership Site

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

Creating a membership site for your online business is an excellent way for you to generate a recurring stream of revenue. Membership sites have become one of the most lucrative online profit opportunities available today, and it is easy to see why.

You may be interested in starting your own membership site to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity to generate recurring income; however, before you can get started, you have to understand the necessary ingredients for creating and running a successful membership website.

There are many advantages to building your own membership website, including the fact that you can create a substantial stream of income that has the potential to last for years if done correctly. As long as your site is running, and you continue to add valuable products and services to your portfolio, you will be able to have a steady stream of income.

While membership sites are often perceived as being difficult to develop, this guide will walk you through the key components that are needed to launch and successfully run a membership site. The guide will start with the brainstorming and planning phases and extend through to the post-launch process.

When you can understand the various ins and outs of constructing a successful membership site, you will finally be able to achieve the business opportunity that you have always dreamed about. 

Step 1: Understand the Benefits of a Membership Site  

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

While you might already be somewhat familiar with the idea of membership sites, you may not be entirely sure to exactly what kinds of benefits you can gain from starting a membership site and whether or not it would be worth your time to focus on creating one.

There are actually a variety of advantages that are associated with membership sites that you will be missing out on if you choose not to start a membership site. 

One of the most critical benefits of starting a membership site is the ability it provides you to establish your reputation or your brand. If you have a membership site for a particular niche, people will naturally perceive you to have more knowledge about that specific niche.

With a membership site, you are afforded the opportunity to become an authority site. This is something that you aren’t able to establish with just a thank you page or sales page. Here are some other benefits you can gain with a membership site. 

1. Fewer Opt-Outs 

Running a membership site also provides you with another distinct advantage in the ability to establish relationships with your customers. When you have a subscriber list that you send emails or a newsletter to, there is a good chance that at least a small percentage of those subscribers are going to be lost through the unsubscribe or opt-out option.

This is not to say that there will not be a small number of people who might choose to leave your membership site, but if they want to do so, they have to come back to your site to do so. 

2. Improved Security 

Another definite advantage of having a membership site is that it can allow you to have much better security. It is much more challenging for someone to hack into a membership site than it is for them to break into your thank you page so they can download your product without having to pay for it. 

3. Increased Traffic 

When it comes to membership sites, you also have to factor in what is known as the stickiness factor. With a membership site, you have a more significant potential to gain repeat visitors. Consider for a moment how many times you have returned to visit a site’s thank you page. The answer is probably never, and that is exactly what you can expect when you try to sell your products without the help of a membership site.

While visitors might not return to your thank you page, if you provide high-quality, relevant, and helpful products and content on your membership site, you can rest assured that your visitors will come back. The key to making this work is to make sure that you give your visitors a reason to go back to your site. You can accomplish this by providing high-quality articles, new products, and more. 

To find out more ways to get more traffic, check out this blog.

4. Easier Bonus Delivery 

It is a lot easier for you to deliver additional bonuses at a later point. Unfortunately, what many people try to do is simply deliver their product through email and then toss in a line telling the customer they can also download a bonus. If you have a membership site, you have the opportunity to send out an email and request that the customer logs into their account to download the new bonus to thank them for being a member.

This is a much more personal way to provide your customers with bonuses. When they do log into their member area on your site, they will also be able to see links to the other products that you’ve posted, as well as links to other websites that you might have, or anything else that you want to put there. This is an excellent way to start to earn some passive income. 

5. Passive Income 

Membership websites offer the ability to increase significantly the passive income you receive because you will know that your customers will continue to come back to your site. Not only are you building that important trust with your customers, but it is also more likely that they will check out your recommendations, increasing the likelihood that they will purchase it. 

Step 2: Steps to start your Membership Site

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

Here are the steps you need to take when you’re building your own membership site. You can build it yourself, or you can pay someone to build it for you. Regardless of which option you choose, it is essential that you understand the necessary steps that are involved in setting up a membership site.

1. Choosing a Topic

The first thing that you have to do to set up a membership site is to select a topic. You will want to give this careful thought and consideration to the topic that you choose to ensure that it will be of interest to your target audience.

Focus on choosing a niche market that will be of interest to others. One way that you can determine whether the topic that you’ve chosen will be of interest is to browse through the magazine section or your local bookstore.

When you do this, you can generally assume that if someone is willing to pay for a magazine subscription to learn about a specialized topic, then the chances are high that they will be ready to pay for high-quality information on the same subject through a membership site. 

It is also a good idea to take the time to think about topics that you are personally passionate about. You will generally find that when you are passionate about the topic of your membership site, it will be much easier to develop because you will have more fun working on it. Get started by jotting down a list of topics that you find interesting and then take the time to do some research to qualify your idea.

2. Register a Domain Name

After you’ve decided on your topic, you will need to get a domain name registered for your site. You need to take care when you chose your domain name because you need to make sure that it accurately reflects the topic that you have chosen. Ideally, your domain name should contain some of the same keywords that are related to your topic.

In some cases, it may work better for you to brand your membership site using a completely unique name. Regardless, you need to make sure that you chose a domain name that is simple and easy to remember. Once you’ve selected a domain name, you will need to check to make sure it is available and then register it for a minimum of two years. 

3. Getting Web Hosting

One of the more essential elements related to the success of your membership site is web hosting. Your website can only make money if it is up and running, which makes it vital to make sure that you have reliable hosting for your site.

There is a wide variety of hosting plans with different price points for every budget. While it might be tempting to go with the cheapest plan, but you will probably have a lot of trouble with downtime, which can be incredibly frustrating for your members.

When you are choosing a hosting plan, you need to consider whether it will allow you to grow as your membership site grows. Some things to keep an eye out for when choosing a hosting plan is to find one that will enable you to maintain as many domains as you need on the same server. One thing to keep in mind is that you will need a minimum of 1 GB of server space when you are first starting out.

My favourite domain channel is NameCheap. It is one of the best places to get the domain that you want for a great price, along with the security needed for your website.

4. Choosing the Right Membership Site Software

Just like with web hosting, there is a wide variety of membership site software that you can choose. You want to find software that is able to handle a variety of tasks that are associated with your membership site. A quality membership software program can provide you assistance with tasks, such as membership fees and managing site content.

Some amazing platforms you can start using to build your membership platforms including Podia and Thinkific and WordPress plugin like Learndash.

5. Choose Your Payment System

With your membership site, your income stream is something that recurs every month. This means that you need a method or payment system that will allow you to collect subscription payments from your members automatically. There are two basic options that allow for recurring payments: Clickbank, and PayPal.

While you can manually process payments, you will find that it is much easier to set up a recurring payment processor. Consider for a minute that you have a membership website that charges $10 per month. Now, if you have just one subscriber per month, you’ll be collecting $10 per month and handling one transaction.

If you have ten subscribers, that amount jumps to $150 a month and you’ll have to deal with 15 transactions. But what if you have 1,000 subscribers? As your site grows and you obtain more members, it becomes more complicated to handle payment processing on your own. Having a recurring payment processor makes it much easier for payments to be automated so you can spend time on more critical areas of your business. 

6. Gather Content for Your Site

The next thing that you need to do is gather the content for your site. There are several ways that you can go about doing this. Keep in mind that the content can cover a wide variety of offerings, including audio recordings, video, writing content, and a combination of these kinds of content.

One way that you can obtain content for your membership site is to have members create the content for you. This is probably one of the easiest ways to set up a membership site. The idea behind this method is that you set up a website that members join, and that is customer-driven.

To utilize this method, you need to decide on the topic for your site, create it, and fill it with some starter material. Then you need to create a community of individuals who will be able to upload their own content and grant a license-free right to other members to reuse the content.

Another method you can use to gather content for your site is to hire a freelancer to create content for you. This method can be a bit more expensive, so you need to make sure that you have the budget afforded for this method. The benefit of this method is that the content you provide for your site will be completely unique and will be of higher value to your members. 

You can also charge a higher membership fee for accessing this information. If you don’t have the budget for this method but are still interested in pursuing it, you might consider working out a joint-venture with someone that will create the content for you.

These are the basic things that you need to accomplish to get your membership site up and running. Next, you’ll learn about the pre-launch phase of starting and running a successful membership site. 

7. Pricing

When it comes to pricing your membership site, there are a couple of different ways it can be handled. One way is to charge a one-time fee, while another option would be to charge a recurring payment. Something you need to keep in mind with charging a recurring fee is that it can be a bit more complicated with recurring billing unless you have it set up so that people don’t mind the recurrent bill for the service that you’re providing.

It all comes down to whatever niche you happen to be in. There are some markets where it will be easier to charge recurring billing than others. So, make sure you give some thought to which pricing model is best for your particular market.

8. Building a Successful Membership Site is a Team Sport

One of the biggest mistakes that new online entrepreneurs make is trying to go it alone. It is essential to understand that creating a successful membership site is very similar to a team sport. It is critical that you find someone, or perhaps a small group of people that you can work with. The key is to find people that you feel comfortable working with over a long period. It is virtually impossible for you to go it alone in this kind of business, and the sooner you embrace the idea, the sooner you’ll be able to start your journey to success. 

Lesson 3: Pre-Launch Phase of Your Membership Site 

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

Beyond the brainstorming and planning of your membership site, there are three distinct phases of getting your membership site up and running. The three steps are pre-launch, launch, and post- launch. While all three of these phases are incredibly crucial to the success of your membership site, the pre-launch phase is where you get people interested in your product in the first place. 

Gaining Attention

During the pre-launch phase of your membership site, you need to concentrate your efforts on getting people interested in what you have to offer by increasing attention and demonstrating that there is value in what you’re doing.

It is important to remember that the goal of the pre-launch is to gain the attention of your target audience. Look at how the movie industry works. A good pre-launch to any successful movie begins well in advance of the movie premiere. This usually includes:

  • Advertisements
  • Podcasts
  • Social Media Ads

If you spend the time working on developing a pre-launch that is extraordinary, the next step of the process will be to simply put up the order button and wait for the orders to roll in.

That sounds incredibly simple, but the truth of the matter is that you will need to put in a ton of work and time during the pre- launch phase if you want it to be that simple. You will need to make sure that you have an excellent sales copy and that doesn’t happen overnight. However, this can be much easier if you have someone on your team that excels in that particular area.

You need to focus on determining how you can demonstrate to your target audience of potential customers that there is value in what you are offering. This is really the crux of gaining the attention of your target market. There are a variety of ways that you can go about accomplishing this.

For example, you could give away something for free, such as an audiobook, movie, eBook, etc. The key is that whatever you choose to give away, it must be of extremely high quality. This is your chance to make an excellent first impression.

You can’t just give away something that is nothing more than a sales plug for your product. You are going to need to make sure that you have something to give away that is solid. This is something to focus on during the planning phase. You need to focus on how you can develop something to give away for free that will grab the attention of your target audience.

There is no limit here. You don’t have to restrict yourself to just giving one thing away. Consider as many options that you can come up with. The goal is to have people look at what you have to give away and show them what they can do with the main product, developing a desire within them to purchase it.

Know Your Target Audience

You absolutely need to know who you want to purchase your products. Each and everything that you do must have a purpose. There should be a reason for each activity. During the pre-launch phase, you must make a strong effort to stay in constant communication with others, particularly your partners if you have them.

Staying in contact with your partners during the pre-launch of your membership site will allow you to accomplish much more than if you were to simply try to go it on your own. In the end, this can be much more beneficial for your business because between you and your partners you will be able to cover more ground and reach more areas.

One of the most essential elements of any business is being able to get the word out about you and your products.

When people are talking about your business and your products, you will be in a much better position for success. The thing that you need to keep in mind is that you have to be able to manage word of mouth about your business.

Often, there will be a temptation to overblow things and try to build up some hype during the pre-launch phase. While this is understandable, it isn’t something that is prudent.

Attracting a Wider Audience

When it becomes necessary for you to attract a wider audience, you need to focus on creating an appeal that is broader in nature. Remember that everything online is divided into many different niches. Building up the desire during your pre-launch is essential, but there are other factors that you need to consider as well.

Press Releases

No matter what you do, creating a buzz around the launch of your membership site is essential. Regardless of what it is that you are trying to sell, you need to create a buzz that gets people talking. There are plenty of ways that you can accomplish this, including through social media and the use of press releases. Press releases can be used quite extensively, and it is an inexpensive way to get the word out about your site.

Social Media

These days social media is one of the most effective ways for businesses to get the word out about their products and services and can be an excellent way for you to generate buzz about your upcoming membership site launch. Along with talking about your membership site with your current group of friends, you can also invest some money in social media ads.

All of the major social networks offer an advertising option. However, that doesn’t mean that you should use them all. You need to look at which social media networks perform well organically. Social platforms where your content naturally strikes a chord with your target audience are the obvious choice for your first social media campaigns.

The sky’s the limit when it comes to the different techniques that you can use to get the word out about your membership site. Use what you have available to attract attention and create interest in your product. 

Step 4: Getting Ready to Launch Your Membership Site 

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

When you reach the point where you are ready to launch your membership site, something that you need to focus on is building buzz not just among your potential customers, but also among your affiliates.

Building the Buzz

In order for you to create buzz around the launch of your membership site, you have to know what makes your target audience tick. For most business owners, this means incorporating some kind of competition into the mix. 

If you are going to work with affiliates, establishing a competitive element is an excellent way to get them buzzing about your products. This can also work to incentivize your target audience to spread the word about your upcoming launch.

Establishing a competitive element works by gaining the attention you need during the pre-launch phase while generating interest and the desire of your potential customers to take the required action.

The nuts and bolts of this are that you need some kind of incentive to get others to promote your launch for you.

The Importance of Having Everything in Place

When it comes to getting into launch mode, there are several things that you need to pay attention to. The most important of which is that you must make sure that you have everything in place. This is critical. You have to spend the time to test and be sure that everything on your site will work in advance. You must be sure that your website is ready and that you and your team are prepped.

In addition, you must make sure that you have a backup plan in place for absolutely everything, including your payment solutions and providers. Make sure you test the download link, and the payment links to ensure they are working. Don’t leave it up to chance only to find out whether or not the work on the day that your site goes live.

Keep in mind that while planning isn’t the most exciting thing, it can save you from a tremendous amount of stress and hassle later on. Since you are putting in a tremendous amount of time and money during the pre-launch phase, you want to make sure that the actual launch of your product will work. Everything has to work because if it doesn’t you will have a significant problem on your hands and your membership site is likely to fail.

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

Testing Your Server and Hosting Platform

Testing your server is an incredibly important part of having everything in place. It is critical that you make sure that you have your site on a reliable server and have constant support that won’t go down. It is vital that you are confident that your site won’t go down, which means monitoring it during the launch phase.

When it comes to hosting, keep in mind that while you can settle for cheap hosting, but as mentioned before you really don’t want to cut corners when it comes to where you host your site. You have to believe that you are going to have a ton of people going to your site during the launch, which means you have to have a reliable hosting platform, which typically costs more than the most basic of options. 

Lining Everything Up

You always want to make sure that you have plenty of help lined up. Be sure that the hosting and payment processing systems are lined up and tested. These form the backbone of your actual product launch. You should also make sure that you have all of this done in advance, so you have ample time to tweak anything that needs attention.

If you don’t have a support line in place already, you might want to consider getting one set up. The importance of having a support desk can’t be underscored enough. There is no realistic way that you can expect to handle all of the marketing as well as the support. You will only make yourself crazy if you attempt to do so, and it will hinder your success.

Developing Incentives

One of the most important things that you want to make sure happens when you go live with your launch is that people take action right away. The way to make sure this happens is to build in some incentives and bonuses. One of the more traditional approaches to do this is to give the first group of people who take action something extra with their membership.

Unfortunately, this method tends to be flawed because when all of your bonuses are gone, you will see a drop in your sales. 

One way to combat this is by placing a time limit on everything that you do. For example, you might set a ten-day time limit on one thing and a seven-day time limit on something else.

This allows people to know that they have a specific amount of time to take action before they lose out on the bonus offer. This will ultimately give your customers a reason to buy your product immediately rather than some vague point in the future.

Taking the time to make sure that you have everything lined up and planned well in advance of your membership site launch is one of the most crucial things that you can do to ensure your success. In the end, it doesn’t matter what kind of products you have to offer, if you don’t take the time to make sure everything is lined up.

You can have the highest quality products and created enough buzz around your product, but it will have been all for nothing if you didn’t make sure that everything is set up, tested, and planned for. 

Step 5: What to Do Post Launch 

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

Once you’ve launched your membership site, the next thing that you need to focus on is what you are going to do after the post- launch. There is a lot of planning that goes into the launch phase, and it is somewhat natural to think that once you have that out of the way you can simply sit back and relax.

Unfortunately, even after you’ve launched your site, there are still some things that you need to take care of.

After launching your membership site, you must continue to look forward and make sure that you are poised to capitalize on the success you have achieved with your website. It can be incredibly tempting to want to move immediately to your next project, but it can be helpful to take the time to take stock of what happened with this site and see where there may have possibly been problems so that you can work on correcting those issues to avoid them in the future.

Customer Service and Support

This is the time when you need to make sure that you are continuing to focus on any support issues that have arisen. You have to remember that you are now dealing with your customers and not your prospects. You have to do all that you can to take care of them and do whatever you can to help them with issues.

Issuing Refunds

In a perfect world, all of your customers will be happy with the service they are receiving and will continue to be open to paying a membership fee for the information you are providing. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. During the first month after your launch, you will need to focus on fixing any problems that might come up and answering any questions that your customers might have. 

You also have to expect that you will likely have some requests for refunds that might come in. This can happen even with higher- end products and services. It is merely a part of doing business. 

Every business has refunds, so you need to expect to receive your share of refund requests after you’ve launched your website.

Don’t allow yourself to get down about refund requests from your customers. You can make sure that you are prepared for this kind of issue by figuring between 5 and 10 percent for a refund rate. If at all possible, you want to try to have someone you can dedicate to handling any refund issues for you.

There is no point in you having to waste your valuable time handling these issues when there are other people that can take care of this.

Something else that you need to focus on during the post-launch is making sure that you are doing things to keep moving forward. Take the time to send out updates to members and paying commissions on time if you are using affiliates.

Building Relationships

At the same time, you need to be asking yourself what you can do to make your customers happy. One of the things that you can do is to send out a survey asking them how they like the product or if there is anything you can do to help them. 

You might also consider setting up a forum on your website for your customers. Whatever you do, make sure that you have provided your customers with easy access to your support desk.

One thing that you don’t want to do is start hitting your customers with more offers the moment they’ve become a member of your site. This is a huge mistake and will end up costing you, customers.

Now is the time to take it easy for a bit, especially if you are selling higher-end products. Instead of immediately sending more offers to your members after launching, focus your attention on helping your customers in whatever capacity is necessary.

This is the time when you want to focus on building and maintaining relationships. This isn’t to say that you can’t sell things through your thank you pages and other forms of backend selling, but in the end, the right way to establish wealth is by building solid relationships with your customers.

Developing and maintaining relationships with your customers makes it much easier to establish repeat customers because they are far more loyal and will be much more likely to buy from you again when they feel like they have an actual relationship with you. 

Overall, there isn’t usually much opportunity to build wealth from one-time sales. Wealth is created by establishing relationships and developing repeat customers. To do that you have to have outstanding products that bring your members value, and you have to create relationships with your customers.

One of the most beneficial aspects of a membership site is that it allows you to build those relationships in a very effective manner. It doesn’t matter what you sell on your website; all you need is a site that allows customers to download your products.

A useful membership site will allow you to start the process of establishing a relationship with your customers in a much more effective way than a thank you page where customers download the product and go on their way. 

Step 6: How to Ensure the Long-Term Success with Your Membership Site 

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

Hopefully, you now have a pretty good idea of how to effectively launch a membership site. If you follow the process, you should be ready to start making a long-term guaranteed income, which was the entire point of starting a membership site in the first place.

Now, you need to look at the additional tools that you can incorporate into your membership site that will ensure your traffic builds steadily, and more importantly, how to turn that traffic into paying subscribers. Launching your website is just the beginning, to continue getting the recurring revenue you will have to work to keep your subscribers happy. 

Newsletters

Newsletters are a great marketing tool that you shouldn’t overlook. Many website owners publish a free newsletter or tip of the week with the aim of enticing traffic to return and visit their site. You want to make sure that each article you include in your newsletter has enough of a ‘teaser’ to encourage readers to come back to your site to read in full.

Many site owners have started the habit of posting most of their articles to a blog shortly after sending a teaser to their subscribers. This has a twofold effect. First, it entices your readers to visit your blog, and it helps your newsletter to get past their email spam filters, which means more of your newsletters are delivered.

Spam filters can mean a large portion of the newsletters that you send out are never seen by your prospective members.

This way your newsletter can be used in a duel fashion to furnish your blog with content-rich information, as well as providing a link back to your main membership site and as an email to both subscribers and non-subscribers. You also don’t have to worry about using specific words in your newsletters, which would set spam filters off if posting it out in full to your subscribers. 

Google AdSense

Google AdSense can help turn your membership site into revenue earning machine. If you aren’t familiar with AdSense, it is Google tool where ‘AdWords’ advertisements are displayed throughout the Google AdSense network.

Those who are new to AdSense make the mistake of thinking they can just place the code on their site and sit back and wait for the money to roll in. However, the real profits come in by using specific target strategies like increasing the amount you earn per click by using higher paying keywords and increasing the actual number of clicks.

Something to take note of when using AdSense on a membership site, is you don’t want to fall into the trap of putting them on your members-only pages. This will only serve to irritate your paying members, but it will pull your site away from the non-sales feel that you’ve worked hard to create.

However, you also need to take into consideration when using AdSense on the front end that you may be in effect, directing potential subscribers away from your own site. 

Effective Strategies for Increasing Your Revenue with AdSense

There are several effective strategies that you can adopt to increase the revenue your membership site makes through Google AdSense. One of the most straightforward approach is incorporating AdSense banners into your website.

If you are considering this strategy, you might want to consider removing the borders from the adverts and making the links the same colour as those links on your site. Doing this essentially takes the eye away from the fact that it is an advertisement and looks more like an internal site link.

It has been shown that people are more inclined to click on something they think isn’t being sold to them. This is also a well- known strategy in offline display advertisements where the ad looks like a magazine or newspaper article. You are merely adapting this well-proven theory to the online world. However, you need to be careful that you aren’t breaking the AdSense rules when you do this because you might end up getting your account banned if you go too far.

When using AdSense, you want to make sure that you are taking advantage of the useful free tools to track the effectiveness of the ads that you use. Try running approximately four ads on each public page of your site and test out different positions to see which works best.

Another strategy is to run your ads near the top of the page because most readers don’t enjoy being subjected to advertisements as they scroll down your pages. Finally, you want to focus on using the highest paying keywords, because subtle differences in the words you use can make a significant difference in the profits that you see.

The most crucial point of all, if your site content is informative and exciting, the traffic you receive is more likely to be drawn to the subject and want to learn more. You want to avoid falling into the trap of designing your membership site around your AdSense campaign. You need to remember that it is only a small part of your income stream. If your members want to learn more, then you will earn more by an increased, click-through rate.

Think about AdSense as just another useful resource for your members and try not to get too hung up on it. Also, you must not forget there are other excellent ways of using advertising on your site to increase revenue.

Joint Ventures

Over the last several years, membership sites have started to become a popular way for online businesses to make recurring income. You might have heard how profitable membership sites can be, or perhaps you, yourself has been a member of a successful membership site.

It can be incredibly intimidating entering into the world of Joint Ventures (JV), especially if it is your first time. However, as with everything, it becomes much easier, the more contacts you make, and the more comfortable you become with the process.

Joint Ventures are one of the most potent forms of marketing that you can do, especially when you own a membership site. Joint Ventures can ensure that your membership site thrives and makes money. By becoming a part of a JV, you are in effect tapping into a whole new potential revenue stream, including the JV partner’s customers and list. Your JV partner also gets something out of the partnership, which is a very lucrative monthly income from your site, which makes it a win-win situation.

When you approach potential joint venture partners, it is best just to ask them outright to endorse your product. Too many people tend to beat around the bush because they don’t want to take the chance of being rejected. However, the worst thing that they can say is no, but a no just gives you the opportunity to convince them why it is a good idea for them to work with you.

This doesn’t mean that you should continue to pester them because it can be incredibly irritating and might ruin any future chances of working with them. However, they might just say that they are too busy at the moment but will look at your product later. If this is the case, you can wait a few weeks before sending them a timely reminder if you haven’t heard back from them. 

When it comes to approaching a possible JV partner, you want to stick to companies that are around your size or with a similar traffic ranking when you are first starting out. The secret to approaching a potential JV partner is to be polite, informative, and courteous.

An excellent way to ensure you are successful with landing a JV partner is to offer a complimentary copy of the product that you want them to promote or free membership to your membership site. This is standard practice, and no-one who is reputable will endorse something they haven’t tried out or read.

Affiliates

Affiliates can end up being the lifeblood of your membership site and should be treated as well as your JV partners. The best way to entice your affiliates to promote your products and membership site vigorously is by offering them a decent commission. The standard is 50 percent; however, you could get away with a slightly lower percentage for higher ticket items.

There are many people online who rake in thousands of dollars as affiliates. These are the people who have affiliate marketing down to a fine art, and if they like your site and wish to promote it, then you could find that you’ve hit the big time with one affiliate. They also tend to keep a relatively low profile so if any unknown potential affiliate contacts you and ask you for a review, give it to them, and that person might just be the person to sell a hundred subscriptions for you.

You need to make sure that you give your affiliates all of the tools that they will need to be successful, like prewritten emails. Also, you don’t want to forget to invest in banner ads and images for them to use on their blogs, websites, etc. It can be incredibly frustrating for potential affiliates to see a product they like but not be given any marketing materials to go with it. 

Conclusion 

By now, you should have a good idea of what it takes to set up a membership website and what you need to do to set up your own membership site. Ultimately, while setting up a membership site might take a bit of effort and time on your part, it is undoubtedly not something that is difficult or even impossible for you to do.

In fact, it can be a good bit of fun because you can enjoy a high degree of creativity in designing and developing a completely unique membership site that will benefit others. The primary key to developing a website that will be successful in determining what people want, what they are willing to pay for to receive your product, then designing a way to deliver it all to them. 

All you need to do to get started is to identify a niche market where there is a strong demand for information that is unusual or fresh. Once you are able to package that desirable information and deliver it in a way that is convenient and interesting, you will have a business source that has a high degree of potential for success.

You have to be willing to take the time to experiment as you go to determine what works and what doesn’t work. Don’t be afraid to make changes as you go and as you learn. This is your business, and you need to determine what is appropriate for your business and respond to what you see will work and what won’t.

Your options are almost without limit. Even if you’ve never operated an online business before, you can still gain the ability to make money, while developing a pool of customers who will be eager to buy other products that you develop in the future. 

Venese

Venese

Hey there, my fellow entrepreneur 🙂 Your Entrepreneur Resources is here to help entrepreneurs and solopreneurs just like you with your business journey. I have taken detours and made mistakes as an entrepreneur. Now, I want to help you fast track your success and save you time and money. I'm here to help you connect with amazing mentors, support you with free and paid resources, along with everything I have learnt!

NOTE: This content might contain affiliate links that allow you to find the items mentioned in this content and support Your Entrepreneur Resources at no extra cost to you. You can find out more about it here.

Online Business Toolkit
Your Entrepreneur Resources Connect Mock up

WHAT TO READ NEXT?

Online Business Success Bundle
101+ Ways to Make Money Online Cheatsheet vertical

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Pin It on Pinterest