Get a Membership Site Up… TONIGHT!

JaceMan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:04:11 +0000

You’re familiar with membership sites, right? Yeah, me too — and they have always been my favorite way of delivering content and garnering customers — even though I’m just getting started, I knew I wanted to make my fortune using membership sites. I mean, where’s the downfall? You get a customer and he keeps giving you money over and over and over and again. Well, as it turns out — traditional membership sites have a lot of pitfalls that I wasn’t really aware of.

For instance, did you know:

1.	Traditional membership sites require too much work setting up. One of the biggest reasons why people don’t get their membership sites going in the first place is because there is a lot of work that goes into the initial setup. Many membership sites die in the planning and “installation” phases simply because they are such a heavy burden to get cranking.
2.	Traditional membership sites have built-in pressures to create content. Think about it. You have members who are paying you for fresh, daily content. You’re asking them to invest in you for the long run, and they expect it to be an exciting stay. As a result, you have to keep the content coming fresh and entertaining, FOREVER!
3.	Traditional membership sites require pricey and complicated scripts. By running a membership site, you have to manage passwords, protect your member’s area, keep up with who’s active and who’s stopped paying you, manage your content and at least two dozen other things. Content Management Systems (CMS) can run most, if not all — depending on the script selected, of these things for you, but you will find that most of these scripts require a large investment to use, either monetary or time just to launch.
4.	Traditional membership sites demand a large investment of time. You have a forum to moderate, cancellations to process, content to add, technical problems to troubleshoot, password problems to fix, and a variety of other tasks that usually get left out of the “salesletter” for a product or service trying to convince you to start a membership site. The truth is, a traditional membership site requires a large investment of time. Remember, your customers will demand fresh and entertaining content too! So, even if you never run out of informative content that you want to deliver, you may find it difficult to actually find the time TO deliver it.
5.	Traditional membership sites include a continual battle to keep subscribers. Here’s a figure most people don’t tell you about: the “average” subscriber will stay active for 3-4 months and then they’ll cancel. What, you thought they’d join and stay with you forever? It simply doesn’t happen that way. And in reality that’s because of two big reasons. One, people are naturally goal-oriented. If their membership is open-ended and goes on forever, eventually they start to wonder what their goal is. It seems like your sire no longer exists to actually TEACH them anything only to TAKE from them. Secondly, more and more membership sites pop-up all the time. And people simply can’t afford to be members of all of them. So, they start evaluating which ones they need and which they don’t. If you’re site isn’t as useful today as it was 2 years ago, it’s probably going to be yours that is first to go.

So, if “traditional” membership sites aren’t the answer, what is? I’m glad you asked…

Their is a “new kid on the block” that they are calling “Fixed-Term Membership Sites.” Basically, this type of site capitalizes on all of the advantages of membership sites (Like RECURRING Income — a personal favorite of all of ours), while eliminating most of the drawbacks. They are quicker and easier to maintain; promote longer-term relationships with your customers; more cost efficient to setup; and perhaps best yet don’t require you to have an ENDLESS stream of fresh content forever. You can actually get one of these little babies set-up in a weekend.

Jimmy Brown shows you a very innovative way to pull this off on his site. Check it out!

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Get a Membership Site Up… TONIGHT!