6 Models For Membership Sites and Services
Last week I compared three revenue models for making money online and concluded that the membership site is the way to go if you want to generate a recurring revenue stream. In this post I present 6 concrete ideas for sites and services that fit this model.
1) Fresh Content For Consumption
Some people need fresh content on a regular basis and if you can provide that content then you can cater to your market for as long as you can come up with the content. Some examples:
- A PLR site that produces fresh PLR articles
- Graphics for use in computer games
- Music for use in all manner of projects
This kind of membership site may tend to generate a high turnover of members as people lose interest in the industry but there will always be other members to take their place. You’ll need to be constantly marketing this kind of site. However to offset this downside, if all of your content is always available to all members your site will become more and more valuable as time goes on and you produce more and more. You might also be able to generate stand-alone products with a sample of your work as an added income stream or as promotional material for the membership site itself.
2) Cutting Edge Information
In some industries, the latest information about how to get ahead is forever changing. A good example would be the Internet Marketing industry! How often do things change in this industry? Search engine algorithms, social media sites, pay per click tactics and so on. The Immediate Edge is an example of a membership site that caters exactly to this market. It is run by Ed Dale and Dan Raine, the two guys behind the Thirty Day Challenge.
In order to make this kind of membership site work it is imperative that you know your industry and you can deliver the goods month after month! It is not sufficient to just slap together a series of articles about a topic and call it a membership site. It needs to be constantly up-to-date, you can never take a few months off. Also, whatever you are teaching or reporting on needs to be accurate. If you feed your members a bunch of bull you will not keep them for long. On the other hand if you really can deliver true cutting edge information in your industry you will have some very loyal members! Examples of possible industries:
- Internet Marketing or one of the many sub-topics
- Investing, or other financial information
- Technology - computer programming, graphic design, digitial photography etc
3) Project Based Teaching
Some people like to learn a skill by example and there are lots of examples of skills that can be taught in projects or lessons that students are able to follow along with. In certain industries there is no limit to the number of projects that you could create and thus as long as your students continued to learn you would be able to keep them as members. For example:
- Art - drawing, painting, pottery etc
- Flower Arranging - floristry for weddings, holidays, birthdays etc
- Cookery - dishes for every occasion
- Computer Programming - game projects for example
That last example is one that I was going to try myself a few months ago. Like with the fresh content for consumption, with every new project you create you are increasing the value of your site if you make it all available. Alternatively you can package up previous projects and sell them as stand-alone products.
One of my readers runs a membership site along these lines - Banjo Expert which produces many lessons. There is no limit to the number of lessons that could be created for this site.
4) Matching Services
The world is based around supply and demand but very often the people who have the demand and the people who can supply it don’t know how to get together. A matching service brings these two groups of people together. There are lots of examples of this model already working well:
- Dating / friendship services
- Buying & Selling such as eBay, Auto Trader etc
- Recruitment Agencies - matching employees to employers
There are numerous ways in which you can generate an income from these sites. In the examples above dating sites usually charge a flat monthly fee to its members, eBay charges commissions on products sold and most recruitment agencies charge a finders fee to an employer when somebody is hired.
5) Online Tools & Services
With advances in web development technology, software that was previously only available on a desktop computer can now be brought to the web and this has opened up a whole new world of opportunities in web-based software. If you can create (or hire a programmer to create it for you) a tool that provides a valuable service you can charge a fee to use it and keep members for as long as they want to use the software. I use many of these myself, for example:
- Weight Loss Resources is a calorie database with a food planning element
- Allakhazam is a comprehensive database for the online game World of Warcraft
- Vitalist is a task management service based on GTD
The last two on the list have both a free and a premium (paid) version so of course the free version is used as a pre-seller for the premium version. If you have access to the skills required to produce this kind of service then you can be onto a winner because once the software is written, little maintenance is usually required. Of course, somebody else can just come along and copy your idea so you will also need to keep your software up-to-date and keep on top of your marketing efforts.
6) Access to an Expert
This is often presented in the form of coaching around a particular topic. Usually there is a sense of community built into it. This kind of membership site is tricky to pull off unless you have already established yourself as an expert in your particular niche but if you have already done that with a successful info product perhaps, then this is a good way of converting your expertise into an ongoing income stream. Some example of people who have done this:
- Tom Venuto released a book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and later released the Burn the Fat Inner Circle
- Jeff Walker released his Product Launch Formula and now has the PLF Inner Sanctum
Any Others?
I’m sure there are lots more ideas that I haven’t thought of. Can you think of any? I would also be interested to hear from those of you who currently run a membership site. Does it fit into one of the models above or is it something else?
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Jacob from JobMob
June 30, 2008
Terrific roundup, Caroline. I’m just about to graduate Yaro’s MSM and you’ve given me some extra food for future project thought.
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Jacob from JobMobs last blog post..First JobMob Pro Chat: Payroll Specialist Moshe Egel-Tal, July 15th 2008