Why Do I Want A Membership Site?

I've had the opportunity to speak to many people in my years online and several times I've brought up the topic of running your own membership site. Whenever I would suggest the idea, the response I would get would basically border on the "What are you crazy? Why would I want to do all that work?" Well, I can't lie. Creating and running a membership site is a lot of hard work. But after reading this article, you may want to reconsider your opinion on creating your own membership site if you are dead set against it. The benefits certainly outweigh the problems.

Probably the biggest advantage of creating and running your own membership site is that once you have a member, if you treat him or right, you may have a member for life. What you have now done, is you have done the work one time, essentially made one sale, the initial sign up, and ultimately get a residual income for as long as this person remains a member. Imagine that you have a membership site with 100 paid members at $10 per member. That's $1,000 income each month without having to do anything other than just maintain the site.

Another advantage of having a membership site is online presence. With selling a digital product, most people will buy your product and then pretty much forget about you. But with a membership site, this is an area that people have to go to each day in order to get the benefits of their membership. This builds up an online presence. Gradually, your site will climb up the search engines and you'll start getting members without having to do much promotion. Even just article marketing should slowly get people to your site.

This is not to say that running a membership site isn't going to have its problems, because it will. Unfortunately, there is no perfection on the Internet and membership sites are no different. One of the problems you're going to have, and actually the biggest problem, is that as your membership grows, which is what you want, you are going to have more people to support. Eventually, the number of emails you're going to receive in a day are going to be more than you can handle if the site is successful. This will ultimately require you to either install a help desk or get some outside help through outsourcing.

Another problem you're going to have is bandwidth and disk space. As your membership grows, you may reach a point where your current hosting service can't handle the traffic. You may have a monthly cap on bandwidth and limited disk space. This may require you to either upgrade your package or go to a completely different hosting company. As you grow, your problems will grow.

Naturally, there is going to be a trade off with anything that you do. Ultimately, you have to decide if the extra work and customer support is worth the extra income that comes with it. This is not something I can decide for you. All I can do is give you an overall picture of what you can expect from running your own membership site.

The rest, as they say, is up to you.

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