Creating A Cash Generating Membership Site (on A Shoestring Budget)

By now you must have heard many online celebrities talking about how you should set-up your own membership site in order to create substantial, automatic profits...month in, year out. Is it all hype or can you really create your own dynamic membership site and get paid $29, $29 or even $97 plus every month?

I'll show you today that creating your own membership site is something that is highly achievable to practically every internet entrepreneur around - and unlike the old days (when setting up membership sites would set you back potentially hundreds of dollars a month) it's not going to deflate your Paypal account a bit.

The Benefits Of Creating Your Own Membership Sites

For a start, consider the age that we are living in - "the information age" - today, people are willing to pay good money for a regular stream of targeted, quality information (or software) in areas that are of interest to them. Sure, a lot of information is available free on the internet but the fact is that places like Google are just jam packed with sites that offer little more than thinly disguised sales pages. It takes forever to find quality information, and with todays lifestyle time is the one commodity that people simply do not have.

The result? They will PAY you for information that hits the spot as long as they get it NOW! This makes the membership site business model highly potent. Consider these advantages & benefits of setting up your own membership sites:

You can exploit your areas of expertise and create a full or part time business simply by disclosing your knowledge/skills into your members site.

A successful & profitable membership site can be started for practically any niche under the sun from rose-gardening to the Mumbai stock market! There are an unlimited number of niches that have markets with prospects that number in the millions.

While members sites used to be for the elite with budgets in excess of thousands of dollars the emergence of quality, mainstream software means that just about anyone can set-up with minimal capital requirements (I mean under $100).

Membership sites enable you to take advantage of residual streams of income - the beauty of this business model is that you can focus on providing tip-top content so that your members continue to deposit monthly subscription fees into your bank account. In effect, you're creating a monthly salary for yourself without the nuisance of having a pathological liar of a boss hovering over your shoulders every two minutes.

Membership sites only increase in value with each passing month. This means the longer your site is open, the more content/products are inside and the more subscriptions you'll receive.

Owners of membership sites are able to use their sites to gain an awful lot of leverage & engineer win-win situations for themselves. The great thing about digital information is that they spit out 100% profit-margins - the cost of producing a members site is negligible but you can use your membership site to trade with other product owners - in this way you can actually get webhosting, graphics, software and even opt-in subscribers free.

While stand-alone eBooks & mini-sites will always have their place, membership sites offer something far more valuable - both to the internet business owner as well as the end user.

What Type Of Niches Can You Set-Up A Membership Site In?

Certain types of niches are simply made for a membership style structure, typically niches with a huge number of potential topics.

The below are just some examples of the types of niches that you could set-up membership sites in:

- Internet marketing related content & products.

- Finance, money, property & stock market.

- Health, beauty & fitness.

- eBay, power-selling & wholesale goods/dropshippers.

- Career development.

- Gardening.

You have to understand that this is a TINY list of the potential possibilities - the fact is you could turn practically any subject matter into a membership-site.

Are There Any Difficulties In Setting-Up A Membership Site?

The main issue with setting up a content based membership site used to be the expense involved with running it. For example, one quite famous option that many people still use has an entry pricing plan of $3500 - that's for one single URL with a maximum of 1000 members and 1000 pages.

Not exactly within the budget of the average internet business entrepreneur!

Don't panic because recently, a couple of classy mainstream membership site creation software have been released that allow you to set-up as many members sites with as much content as you want for a tiny fraction of that (more on that later in case you're interested).

So now that funding is no longer an obstacle let's look at some other potential stumbling blocks that you will need to consider before diving in head-first into your first membership site project:

Can you install the software? This may sound like a silly thing to say - after all the software you can buy come with detailed instructions but some very fresh newbies (ie those that struggle with things like setting up payment links) may struggle to install the software. Even where this is the case, they can of course have the software installed for them for a low fee (typically $20 to $50) via online forums or using services such as elance. Those that can set-up web-pages comfortably should not really struggle too much with software installation.

Can you commit to providing fresh content, resources & value-adding material that will delight your subscribers? Remember, people will be paying you monthly so you have to make sure that you have the time, knowledge and ability to provide them with whatever it is that you're offering.

What Features Should Your Membership Site Have?

Your membership site should function quite smoothly on auto-pilot and you must offer your potential prospects the chance to pay using standard options (in the information field this is typically Paypal).

Here are a few features that you may want to look out for when considering your options RE purchasing membership site software:

-Ability to accept recurring Paypal payments.

- Subscriber should be able to automatically set-up an account with ZERO interaction on your account.

- Once subscriber ends the subscription the members-site should automatically deny them access without any interaction from you (your time is far too valuable for you to be fidgeting with manual things like deleting accounts every few hours).

There should be no limit to the number of websites that you can set-up using the software - or to the amount of content/pages that you can set-up. Once you get the taste of running a membership site you may well want to open another one...and another still - you don't really want to pay separate fees for each new site you create.

Setting up your first membership site will be your biggest challenge. Once you implement a successful first members-site then you'll have the skills and experience to create plenty more in the future - all churning out hundreds of $29 monthly payments like clockwork!