What is a WordPress Membership site?
A membership site is any site that charges a monthly, quarterly, or yearly fee to belong. Most Membership sites will have a Trial period or a $1 special trial and then charge a regular monthly fee.
Membership sites can be broken down into a couple of main types.
Informational Membership
The Informational model would be like this site where you have a group of people that are being taught how to do something. Building a WordPress Website might be a model of an informational membership site but at this time I am using a free membership model for this site.
Membership Coaching Site
If you are an expert or have access to a couple of experts then you could build a coaching site. You can make a lot more money from the membership site by answering questions and having your recommendations out in front of your members than from private coaching. Just having a coaching site will help to position you as an expert. You could partner with a couple of other experts and share the work and share the profits.
The “Expert” in any field has at least one hour more knowledge than the students. Teaching what you just learned is often the best way to fully absorb the information. Often you “teach best what you most need to learn” quote from Richard Bach.
Software Membership
The Software model would be where you build a software program and instead of selling the software you charge a monthly fee to use it. Often this type of membership site will have a lot of regular updates to the software. You normally get a bigger check up front from selling your software but the long term monthly payments will usually add up to a lot more with a membership model. Also the monthly plan keeps money coming in so you can continue developing and improving your product. Also it makes it easy to pay for customer support.
PLR Membership Site
You can easily build a PLR membership site and put more content out monthly. This is more like a subscription. With many Membership scripts you can drip out the content. The content you allow your first month members will be available to all members. The second months content will be available the second month of their membership.
Interview Subscription
You can build a subscription service which interviews another Guru every month or something like that. Dripping content works here also.
Membership Site Advantages
The really cool thing about a membership site is the regular monthly income. If your site is good and keeps your members happy it can be very profitable to have a membership site. Retension is important
Membership site disadvantages
Coming up with enough good stuff to keep your members happy.
Turnover in many sites is huge so you are always prospecting for more members.
Simple solution to building your own membership site
Join and promote some of the best membership sites out there. With most membership sites any members you refer you get a percentage of the monthly fee. This solves all of your membership site ownership issues.
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