Membership Site Profits: How to Make Six Figures a Year Running Your Own Membership Site!

Introduction
The Internet is a wonderful medium that can provide you global reach in the most
efficient and economic manner. It has been used to promote communication and
interaction between people, companies, and countries throughout the world. It has opened
up several opportunities for innovative ideas of delivering value to customers. One idea
that has been growing in leaps and bounds is offering information or content online
through a paid subscription or “members only” website. Not only is the Internet the most
cost effective way of providing valuable content to a selected audience, it also expands
your reach beyond geographies. It means your paid subscription business does not just
have to concentrate on local markets - nothing is impossible! If your business has a web
site, it is accessible by the global market, and it is vital that your business take advantage
of this.
This guide provides comprehensive and wide-ranging information on the complete
process of setting up a paid content subscription website right from scratch. It explains in
detail all aspects - how to plan, create, launch, market, and monitor a paid subscription
website.
Free is slowly changing to fee-based
The dot com bubble is perhaps reflective of similar gold rush mania in the history of
enterprise. Suddenly the established tenets of business were thrown to the wind and
everyone would talk of the “new economy”. Having an internet presence and attracting
visitors was considered success without any consideration to whether value was delivered
and whether customers paid for the privilege. Eyeballs, and not cash, were the currency.
Eventually sanity has returned to the Internet. Cash is king. Value has to be delivered.
Having a visitor or even a sticky visitor is not enough, the visitor should become a buyer
and should pay for the offering and should receive value for what he is paying.
Many websites in the past have offered free products and services to their customers.
This trend is fast changing towards paid services and products. Smart entrepreneurs are
now realizing that their hard-earned knowledge is valuable to others. They are moving
content, which used to be available for free to anyone and everyone on the Internet,
behind the turnstile and charging a toll from the information seeker. Resistance to paying
for services is gradually melting away.
There are many reasons for this. First, only a few websites operated by big companies
can afford to provide valuable content for free. The rest of us can't afford this. Selling
advertising on our websites has failed to pay the bills. Second, many people are now
more than willing to pay to receive quality services and products, even if they were
offered for free earlier. Several paid content websites have already proven this
unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values his/her time as also the quality of
information or service and is willing to pay for it.
The Internet crunch has put to test the accepted practice of offering everything for free on
the Web. Sites offering free information, free web sites, free shipping, and other Web
freebies are shrinking in numbers, if not disappearing totally.
Both big and small online businesses have realized, some more painfully than others, that
running a business by giving away free products is not workable. There are overhead
expenses to pay -- salaries, rents marketing costs, and others. Small online entrepreneurs,
even the part-time hobbyists, are not spared from expenses; they need to pay for server or
hosting fees to continue their operations.
As costs increase, advertising revenues have steeply declined making it difficult for a
business to survive by displaying banner ads alone. To cope with the increasingly
difficult market, dot-coms are cutting their budgets by laying off or reducing salaries of
their staff. Many have already closed their businesses altogether.
As a result, online businesses are experiencing a mad scramble to find other means to
increase revenues. NetZero, a once free Internet provider, has introduced paid
subscriptions. Bizland now charges for Web hosting it used to provide for free to small
businesses. Salon.com, the online magazine, will now carry fee-based premium content.
What used to be free is now slowly changing to fee-based. The low ad rates and poor
affiliate returns have forced many small entrepreneurs to face two options: to charge or
go under. The state of running a free site only to earn $1 for every 1,000-banner
impression per month can only last so long. With the current slump in ad market rates, a
site generating 100,000 page views a month can only expect to earn $100 - an amount
that is not even enough to cover dedicated server fees.