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November 18, 2007

About Online Membership Sites

The following extract is from a series of online business articles on the benefits of membership sites ...

In other posts, I explain how internet business automation is not something you truly "experience" until you have reached the last stage of a specific business development sequence as shown below:

Reflection > Decision > Planning > Organising > SetuP > Systems Development > Online Business Automation.

In this article, we will discuss in more detail one of the most important resources you will need to consider investing into during the "Setup" phase ... membership sites. For the purpose of this article, we'll be specifically addressing the topic of joining one or more membership sites, not starting your own membership site.

There are several types of online membership sites which you can look at joining. There are free membership sites, and there are paid membership sites. There are sites that focus on delivering a particular kind of service (e.g. content on a specific niche area, like "self help") and there are "Mastermind" membership sites, where the main purpose is sharing information and ideas. There are exclusive, or limited membership sites that restrict their intake of new members once a certain level of membership numbers is reached, and there are membership sites that have no capping on the number of members that can join. We will be looking briefly at each of these types of membership sites.

Before we do this, however, an important question we need to address first is "why" are membership sites important to the process of automating an online business?

There are several reasons why you should really consider joining one or more membership sites during the "Setup" phase of your business development process. One of the main reasons, is that the virtual universe is expanding in all areas at such an outstanding rate, that if you are not connecting with other online business developers, you will quickly find that all of your ideas, knowledge, strategic planning, marketing plans, etc ... will have been rendered obsolete. Other businesses, networks of people and entrepreneurs that want to occupy your market space, will overtake you in every aspect and your business and all of your efforts at building it could thus be literally wiped out overnight.

Other reasons for joining membership sites are to increase your own technical, business, or marketing knowledge (e.g. by interacting with other members in a member's forum), to leverage and synergize your efforts (e.g. by forming joint venture partnerships), and to outsource some of the necessary "production" requirements of your business (e.g. Private Label Rights, membership sites that provide you with content for your business - articles, information products, software, etc...).

So now that we've established that you will need to join one or more membership sites in order to build and eventually automate your online business, what type of membership sites should you join?

Well, that depends on your business plan. You only have so much time to invest in networking with other online business owners, browsing forums to post questions and find answers, etc, so you will really need to think hard about the number of membership sites you decide to join, especially if most of these are paid membership sites. Since most paid membership sites charge their members on a monthly recurring basis, your membership costs can quickly add up.

The real answer to this question is found in your "Planning" stage. If you have decided to build content-driven sites, whether that's just one portal site on a specific topic, or many sites on a range of topics, you will probably need to initially join one or more good "Private Label Right" (PLR), membership sites. These types of sites pay for the cost of research and hiring content writers using a significant portion of member's fees, then co-op the created products among all paid members. For this reason, good PLR sites tend to cap their membership openings (normally between 150 - 500 members only).

Beware of membership sites that provide you with PLR or "resell rights" software. You really want to do your research before joining sites that offer software which you can resell as your own, because at some point in the future, you will have to deal with customer support issues. Find out who is responsible for providing technical support, software upgrades, handling customer service enquiries and complaints, etc. before you join a software resell membership site. Preferably, this person will not be you.

This brings up another concern regarding membership sites that provide proprietary software. If the cost of the membership is too low, you should not expect to receive good customer support or frequent software updates to improve software functionality or fix bugs and glitches (it's a guaranteed fact that there will always be a ton of those in any type of software application). In my experience, it's definitely better for a good paid membership site to charge a reasonable recurring fee, provided they deliver a quality product, excellent customer service and are attentive to the needs of their members. In fact, the best membership sites on the internet, are those that effectively treat their members as stakeholders of the business, and allow them to have a significant input in the future progress, development and direction of the membership site itself. After all, the members are ultimately the real target audience of the membership site.

For more tips on buiding automated online businesses, visit: Building An Automated Online Business

Posted by David at November 18, 2007 1:43 PM

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