Think A Membership Site Isn’t For You? Consider These 5 Membership Types…

Today, I’m excited to have Ruth P. share her expertise in the area of membership sites!  Ruth knows what she is talking about as she has two of her own successful membership sites.  So read on………

You’ve probably heard it a million times: you MUST start a membership site if you want to take your business to the next level and secure that recurring income. Starting a membership site was certainly one of the best things I’ve ever done for my business, but what if your business or niche doesn’t seem suited to a membership site? Keep reading to see if you can find some ideas from this list:

1) Service-Based Membership Sites

Just because you’re a service provider doesn’t mean you can’t start your own membership site. In the past I’ve run membership subscriptions for article marketing submission, website creation and writing.

If you offer any services, consider offering a limited number of membership slots to your customers. Don’t burn yourself out, because this type of membership does require time spent on each and every customer. I limited my memberships to five members only, and they were always sold out.

This kind of membership site should be a win-win for you and your customers. You benefit by having guaranteed orders each month, and your customers benefit by getting a discount when they subscribe.

2) PLR Membership Sites (This Doesn’t Necessarily Mean What You Think It Does)

The PLR membership site is my main business model. I usually charge around $1 per article for my PLR packs, so I make sure to offer members a substantial discount. My PLR memberships each revolve around a very specific niche: electronics reviews, fitness product reviews and toy reviews. Customers usually prefer more specific niches so that they can be sure they’ll use the content each month.

Even if you’re not a traditional PLR provider, don’t write off this kind of membership site! This doesn’t need to involve articles or traditional content. You could provide video templates for beauty bloggers to use in their vlogs, you could provide graphics for self improvement bloggers to edit and post on social media, or you could provide blog maintenance tutorials for web designers to give to their clients.

Think outside the box and you’ll see that there are a huge range of products you could provide for your niche!

3) Fixed-Term Memberships

Although membership sites can bring many rewards, one of the biggest downsides is the time they can take to get going. You don’t just need to put time and effort into producing a one off product – you need to do it each and every month.

To help make things a little easier, consider starting a fixed term membership site. The idea behind this kind of membership is that you decide, up front, how long you want it to run for. Fixed term memberships usually run for 6-12 months, and members who join will always start at the beginning. This is best suited to evergreen information-based memberships where the contents aren’t constantly changing.

Once you’ve created the content for a fixed term membership (and there are shortcuts, like PLR, to help), this kind of membership is less hands-on, and can continue to earn you passive income long after you’ve finished creating it.

4) Paid Newsletters

No matter what niche you’re in, you can probably create a paid newsletter membership site. This simply means that your subscribers pay a regular fee to read premium content that won’t go out on your blog. This usually involves some kind of insider strategies that you’ve never shared before, or extras such as personal support. This kind of membership can be very simple to deliver through an autoresponder service like Aweber.

5) Paid Communities

Although there are plenty of free forums out there, people are still more than willing to pay a monthly fee for private communities full of like-minded people. This is an especially good idea if you already have an active subscriber group, and people regularly ask for a place to talk in more depth about the ideas on your blog. You can even incorporate a community into many of the above membership models to add more value and make it more likely that subscribers will stay on.

As you can see, membership sites can suit just about any niche, as long as you can think of something that will inspire your target market or help them solve a problem.