Opening a Membership Area in Your Niche Can Reap Big Profits.

The Internet, once hailed as the new economy went through it’s first wave of growing pains with the first dot bomb. Today, we are in another growth cycle that is, ironically, being overshadowed by a financial crisis. I say ironic because our attention is being diverted away from what is a very real and sustainable period of growth online. Sadly, there are two elements preventing this trend from getting the headlines that it deserves. First, is the aforementioned crisis. Second, is the fact that we already had one dot bomb and there is understandable caution with regards to any other such over-hyped boom cycles.

Let’s compare the two though, the first boom period was marked by groundless speculation and irrational optimism without any consideration for the technical realities preventing widespread adoption of various business models. Online payment processing was immature and untrusted, Video was slow and rich media such as Flash and Director was not yet as ubiquitous as it is today. People just assumed everything would be working by the time their sites launched. That didn’t happen.

Today, however while everyone is either distracted or cynical about The Internet’s potential to make money for small online businesses, we are enjoying the realization of the technologies envisioned in 2000. In addition, we also have content management systems and coding practices that greatly facilitate and make possible what we were anticipating a decade ago. It’s finally arrived, the technology and adoption rates are here but many of us are twice shy.

What this means for those who are not afraid is a huge opportunity to get situated as a leader in your niche and to do so easily, thanks to vast improvements in technology as well as a better understanding of human behavior on the internet.

Application vs e-book vs membership site

There will be growth in many different areas and some incredible applications will be built but what is most important for small and medium sized businesses is to determine the kind of model that will work for them. This is a great time to be an entrepreneur because of the potential to deal in electronic goods. There is a greater amount of trust developing in this area and more and more people are comfortable not only shopping for tangible goods online, but also for knowledge online. For this reason, content is like always, King.

What is important for any individual business person are products and service, this is the front of the shop but what is equally important are the processes behind the business. The more complex the organization, the more work involved in maintenance and the less time spent on creating new value.

Take a look at some choices available for online business. The most newsworthy of the bunch are the web applications. This means social networks, search, data organization, file storage and a host of other online programs that perform tasks that require a network. While the internet will certainly have many successful cases in this area, the amount of organization, maintenance, trouble shooting and traffic required to monetize here is massive. This is the kind of project that will rapidly eat through capital and work resources and only be sustainable via investment capital. If you have an earth shattering idea and want to see your baby on CNN, go for it. The truth is, however, that for every Twitter there are tens of thousand of sites with under 1000 visitors a day, struggling to make a living off of Adsense.

The main problem with the model above is that you are soon leaving the area of expertise behind and entering into the world of engineering. Maintaining data, backing things up, customer service and adding features. And all for what? At the end of the day, the person visiting your site is most likely looking for information, that’s all – information. Why not skip all of the geeky stuff and just provide the information. Write good, informative copy and provide the tools for your visitors to access it quickly. This doesn’t require a lot of technology, what it requires is the discipline to not get sucked into that latest widget or user interface trend and to continue writing. This is where e-books come in. If you are going to write good content, you’ll soon find that some of that content is of more value than others. For that premium stuff, you can charge money. People are comfortable now with information products. In fact, they wish there was more of it out there is high quality. If this is something you are capable of, you should really get started ASAP.

E-books are great but after 6 months the information starts to get a bit stale. Sales drop. What if you could dynamically append things to the book and modify its contents to pertain to current trends? You can, that is a membership site. Instead of electronically distributing the book, you have the people come to your one copy of the material that changes every day and, in fact, is improved by the people who are reading it and their online interactions.

Simplicity is key –

Again, keeping things simple is important. Not only does it make the user experience simpler, it makes your job easier as well. In fact, simplicity benefits both sides of the equation and provides more value.

Content is king

A membership site focuses not only on content, but also on ways to facilitate access to that content as well as discussions on the ideas therein. This means constant reinforcement of your brand.

A variety of media

The goal is not to load a site with tons of social media features, it is to enhance the learning experience with a variety of tools. Again, you don’t need fancy widgets or production value, what you need is content. That’s the beauty of membership sites, the more valuable the content, the less you have to rely on flashy technology and user interfaces.

Real original and valuable content

Content is king, but only when it is original. While membership sites are a great potential return, you do have to know your stuff or be working with someone who does.

Ease of maintenance

Via Wordpress you can update and modify easily. Again, because your customers are there to learn, text, audio and video will be the main portion of their experience. Simple tools for each of these are freely available.

Best of all, recurring payments

As long as you provide your monthly fee’s worth of value, your customers will keep paying that fee, and on a recurring basis. This far surpasses the model of a single e-book containing content that degrades over time.

For more information on how you can make your unique skill set and knowledge work for you, check out what Yaro Starak has put together. It is an excellent overview of the opportunities, tools and methods related to starting a membership site.
Free Membership Site Masterplan

In addition, here is a fantastic case study detailing the success of one such site. There are some great lessons here as well as some very useful strategy.

Case study

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