Ways To Profit From Membership Sites

The membership sites model is one of the many possibilities to make money online. You might not make your first million with a membership site but such a site can become a steady source of income for you. There are several direct ways to make money from your membership site and the three most notable of them are free content, recurring fees, and one-time content sales.

Free Content Does Make You Money

As illogical as it sounds, free content can make money for a membership site. Maybe you are thinking that since you are running a membership site, all your income comes from fees. No, it isn’t so. You do make a hefty portion of your income from fees but since you also need a lot of free content for promotion purposes, why not monetize it as well?

Actually, you could go even further – offer free content to everybody and place ads in it and offer the same content as ads-free to your subscribing members. However, a more frequent distinction is to have different content for free and paid members. In this case, just place ads in visible places in your free sections and this will make you money for sure.

Recurring Fees Are Your Stable Source of Income

Of course, recurring fees are the major source of income for a membership site. If this weren’t so – i.e. if you were making enough from free content alone, why bother at all to set and run a membership site? If you manage to attract (and retain) a good amount of paid subscribers, this could easily make you a couple grand a month.

For instance, if you have 200 subscribers (and this figure is kind of lowish, if your membership site is really popular) and each of them pays $25 a month (again, for a good membership site, you could charge even higher), this is $5,000 a month! Many membership sites are making much more than that because they have thousands of subscribers and/or charge more than $25 a month. Of course, you do have your expenses, so this is not your net profit but still it is a nice income you can rely on.

One-time Content Sales Are Always Welcome

Recurring fees might give you security but you will always have visitors, who are interested in your content, would pay for it, but are unwilling to do it month after month. If you don’t want to lose these visitors (and their money), you need to be flexible. One approach is to use one-time content sales.

For instance, you have a great report you wouldn’t distribute for free but no matter how great the report is, people are unwilling to commit long-term. The wisest step in this situation is to offer a one-time sale – i.e. you offer the report for download and collect the payment. This might look too much of a hassle but with the right WordPress plugin, such as s2Member, one-time sales are very easy to handle.

You can regard one-time sales not only as a way to make money but also as a way to gain new subscribers. When the visitor gets your report and reads it, he or she might get convinced that your paid content is worth the money and you will gain a subscribing member. Of course, if the one-time buyer doesn’t become a subscribing member in a week or so, don’t forget to send a follow-up message to ask for feedback and remind the buyer to come to your site again. You never know when you will get a new member, so it doesn’t hurt to try.

These three ways to profit from a membership site are a solid foundation to build your business on. No doubt, recurring fees should be your major source of income but don’t neglect the earning potential of free content and one-time sales.

Author Byline: Ada is the Blogger Relations Manager at WinkPress, which is a web resource about leveraging WordPress, its themes, and plugins to create versatile and unusual websites.

Tagged as: make money online, Membership Site, WordPress make money, WordPress membership sites

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