You may have noticed a trend toward creating monthly memberships in just about every industry you can think of—ebooks, videos, movies, television, music, apps, services, food, accessories—you name it, there’s probably some sort of membership option associated to it. You can even be a member in a club that sends razor blades with an automated, monthly subscription!
Online memberships are a big deal... Literally, tens of thousands of people are exchanging their knowledge for the simple cost of enrollment every single day.
In fact, many people are generating a regular high dollar income just from offering online memberships, courses, subscriptions and virtual classes.
Offering an online/course membership website is one of the most profitable types of membership programs of all, because you have no inventory or shipping to deal with!
If you’ve been looking for a proven method, newbie-friendly method of making money online, while positioning yourself as a thought leader and authority in your market, there’s no better way than by creating an online course with an automated, monthly subscription option.
Think about all the different companies that have started monthly recurring membership programs and it’ll quickly become apparent that they are very profitable.
More than 6 million students are currently in online courses as part of their higher education... Millions of people are searching for the knowledge they need to do a hobby or to get a better job, everyday.
In this article, you will discover, how you can start your own membership site in just about any niche or genre.
So put on your thinking cap and read on 🙂
Think about how many online courses or guides you’ve personally used over the last year.
Perhaps you found yourself searching YouTube in search of videos from experts for the best ways to master something. Looking to minimize the learning curve while gaining some shortcuts and insider tips.
Or, maybe you’ve purchased a book or how-to guides that provided a step-by-step blueprint to accomplishing your goal, or acquire a new skill.
Everyone seems to need something and these forms of information are making their creators a solid amount of money.
If you have a marketable skill of any kind, you can easily create an online course that will make you money, too.
So, whether you are experienced in graphic design, marketing, blogging, or you know a lot about specific hobbies like crafts, scrapbooking, woodworking or even knitting, there’s an audience waiting to purchase your course!
Best of all, these people are paying customers, so you can sell additional products to them both inside the members’ area and through email campaigns!
It’s a great way to introduce people to other products, or network with others by joining their affiliate programs and maximize your income easily.
Setting Up a Membership Site
Setting up a membership site is a lot easier than you probably think.
It consists of building a website, and setting up a way for users to join and pay their monthly fee, plus provide an easy and secure way for members to download their content.
Think you need programming knowledge, or you need to be a spectacular designer? Nope.
What do you really need to set-up a membership website...?
All you need to set up a membership site is:
Once they join as a member and see the quality you deliver, they will trust you enough to buy higher ticket products later.
What do you really need to deliver content...?
There are several ways to deliver content to members:
There’s no right or wrong way to deliver content.
How you choose to deliver your content will be based on your particular needs.
Generally speaking, if your site is educational, it will probably need to drip feed starting from the first month.
Otherwise, you can give access to all content at once, or, to keep members longer, you can only give access to a certain amount of content each month. This is called “drip feeding”.
Some membership site owners choose to not give members access to past months’ content.
This is done to keep people from waiting a few months and joining to get several months’ worth of content for the price of just one month, and makes it fairer for current members who may have paid for several months.
This is mostly done when the content is limited in some way, such as PLR membership sites. The content would be devalued if too many people got access to everything for the price of just one month.
It’s important to keep your membership updated every month to keep members paying.
Most people are too busy to worry about canceling a membership if it’s not too expensive, but you don’t want to give them a reason to make the decision to cancel.
You might also choose to update slowly throughout the month to make sure people who sign up for a trial membership (if you offer one) don’t get a full month of updates during the trial and then cancel.
There’s a plethora of scripts out there to help you run your membership site, but one that operates on WordPress is probably the easiest to use.
There are many different plugins available for WordPress that will help you set up a membership site in no time. If you don’t know HTML and CSS and such, WordPress is the best option for creating your site.
At one point, most of the membership plugins for WordPress were prohibitively expensive, which prevented a lot of people from setting up a membership site, even if they wanted to.
But these days, there are many different options to choose from in prices to fit every budget and with options to fit pretty much anything you need to do.
Offering a membership is a great way to get recurring payments from your members. But what platform should you use to host your membership site?
One of the easiest ways to create a membership site is with Product Dyno (not that we are partial) available at ProductDyno.com
This is not ONLY our product, it is the best product.... Why? because with ProductDyno, not only are you able to quickly set up protected download pages for individual products or collections, but you can easily build a recurring membership website without having to host any off your own content.
It’s also one of the more affordable options, and completely newbie-friendly in the event you haven’t created a subscription site before.
Product Dyno is constantly evolving to include new features, and is kept up to date with what you need because we use it ourselves and we want what we use to be the best. Point blank.
They also ensure that your products are securely protected so that only authorized, paying customers can access them.
A membership site is really just useless if you don’t have a way to protect the content from unauthorized access.
Thankfully, most membership software has built-in protection for the members’ area, and Product Dyno is one of those options.
ProductDyno will also allow you to protect a single product or multiple products with one interface. If you sign up for the unlimited plan, you can set up as many different membership sites as you’d like!
The system is very secure and won’t let thieves or digital pirates steal your products. You can even revoke a buyer’s access with the click of a button if they ask for a refund, initial a chargeback, or break the terms of their usage license.
Plus, you can use the same system to protect any other products you sell, not just membership sites. So, if you create a single product, you can use ProductDyno to protect the download for that, too.
