One of the reasons that membership sites became popular was because they were coined as being one of the easiest ways to generate the passive income. A few years later, some of the most successful examples of online membership sites are constantly updated, advertised, and very active in social networking. With of this in mind, the real question is whether or not a membership site can actually be source of passive income. Can they create income – absolutely. Is it passive – Maybe.

The most important thing to keep in mind when answering this question is what passive income really is. The goal of passive income is that you can do something once and get paid multiple times for it. In it’s most basic form, membership sites are de facto passive income because you are only creating one membership site, but profiting from it multiple times. When you dig a little a deeper, it becomes apparent that many people have created a clear distinction between recurring income and passive income. The difference being the amount of effort or maintenance that is required. Membership sites are definitely a source of recurring income, but depending on your site, it could definitely require a lot of maintenance on a monthly basis, which means that the income may not be passive.

The primary factor that will determine whether or not your membership site becomes a source of passive income is how your overall strategy. There are a number of different variables that will affect this. One of the biggest variables is your content. If you truly want to focus on passive income, then you need to be able to create a one set of content and use it over and over again. This is most apparent in continuity sites and educational/training membership sites. On the other hand, if you plan on adding new content on a regular basis, then you would not fall into the category of passive income.

Another important factor is promotion. If you want to generate passive income, then the goal should be to do as little promotion yourself as possible. Fortunately, will a sound strategy, this is easy to achieve. As long as you spend some time establishing a quality affiliate program, then you could potentially grow a huge membership base without ever directly promoting your site on your own. Affiliates are a powerful asset and the key to turning your membership site into a passive income generator.

At the same time, there are some revenue streams tied to membership sites that could be considered passive, regardless of your membership site model. For example, if you profit from selling ad space or promoting affiliate products through your content, then those revenue streams could be considered passive, even if your overall membership model is not.

In the end, membership sites have the potential to be a source of passive income, however it all comes down your strategies. Many of the most successful membership sites may not be considered passive income, however they are also require much more effort and input throughout each billing cycle. This means that you could potentially create 4 or 5 passive membership sites and generate the same level of incomes with less total effort once they are established.

There will always be a debate over which style of membership site is better – fixed term or indefinite. The problem is that both of these models have proven to be effective. This means that you need to look at your niche and what you are offering in order to decide which one is right for you.

In case you haven’t considered both of these options, here is a quick look at what they are. Fixed term membership sites are designed so that a members signs up for a certain period of time. Essentially, it has a fixed end-date. For example, a pregnancy website designed to walk expecting parents through the process of what to do and what to expect during those 9 months is obviously not going to be useful forever. On the other hand, if you look at a sports related membership site like ESPN’s Insiders Club, there is a recurring monthly fee with new content added on a regular basis indefinitely.

Benefits of Fixed Term Membership Sites

1. When Your Done, Your Done
One of the biggest benefits to creating a fixed term membership site is that once you have created all of the content, you can leave it alone. Sure, you will need to update the information as needed, but the actual content creation process is over. It doesn’t matter if you plan on creating all of the content yourself or outsource it, there is only a one time investment. This means that you can create new membership sites at a fairly rapid rate.

2. Creates a Sense of Closure
Another benefit of a fixed term membership site is that it provides the members with a sense of closure. They know exactly what they are getting and for how long. As an added benefit, some member may stay for the extra month or two simply because they know that it will end soon. This means a lower attrition rate and more income.

3. Leverage Success to Feed Related Memberships
Another benefit is that you can leverage a good experience with one of your sites to get people to sign up for another one. Let’s stick with the pregnancy example – once they have reached the end of month 9, you can promote another membership site that will walk them through the first year of parenthood. When that is done, year 2 and so on. Since they feel like they are getting new membership sites, you can keep them as members for much longer than a traditional indefinite membership site.

Benefits of Indefinite Membership Sites

1. One Focus
One benefit of creating an indefinite membership site is that you can place all of your attention into maximizing your income from that single effort. This means more time for testing and promotion.

2. Brand Loyalty
With a single, indefinite membership site, you have the ability to build a greater sense of brand loyalty. While this is also popular with fixed term membership sites, it is more difficult because at the end of one membership, the members may re-evaluate their options and go elsewhere.

In the end, neither of these options are inherently better than the other. The key is looking at the content that you will provide and niche that you are targeting to see which style fits best.

Using a Facebook Fan Page to promote an idea, brand, or product is nothing new. However, many membership sites still haven’t created a page of their own. There are a variety of benefits that your membership site can gain once you have created a Fan Page dedicated solely to what it has to offer. At most, many people will integrate their membership information into other Fan Pages that they already have, however this detracts from it’s exposure in many cases. Here is a quick look at how a dedicated Fan Page can boost conversions and effectively promote your membership site.

1. Credibility
One of the immediate results that your membership site will gain is credibility. In general, people have become a little more skeptical when they have to give out their personal information online. This is largely due to scam websites and a number of questionable billing practices for a variety of products. With a Fan Page dedicated solely to your membership site, it acts as a symbol of trust because it is regarded as a level of transparency. If there were ever any problems, then Facebook users would know that it would show up in the comments on your Fan Page.

2. Pre-Screening
For most membership sites, list building is a vital part of the promotion process. Fan Pages can help in two ways. First, they can pre-screen potential customers. If someone becomes a fan, but never visits the page again, then you can be fairly certain that they didn’t have any real interest in your product anyways. Second, if fans take the extra step that is needed to sign up for your list, then they have shown an active interest in what you have to offer.

3. Promotion
The obvious benefit is that a Fan Page can be a central social networking asset that can be used to promote your membership site. It can also be used to promote the free content on your blog as well. Both of which can drive traffic to your site and boost conversions.

4. Pre-Selling
Along with promoting your membership site, it can also be used to pre-sell potential members. This not only true of the content that you share on your page, but also what other people say. It provides you with a more casual, low-pressure method to get people interested in your offer.

5. Social Proof
Finally, a Fan Page gives you instant social proof. You can leverage the crowd mentality to show potential customers that their Facebook Friends have already joined your membership site and have good things to say about it. Along with social proof, it also gives you a way to interact socially with potential members and current members.

As you can see, there are a number of benefits that you can gain from creating a Facebook Fan Page solely dedicated to your membership site. As an added bonus, a Fan Page that only focuses on your site, also ensures that your fans don’t get distracted with other products and promotions, thus boosting your conversion rates.

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Over the past few years, the increase in low cost membership sites, especially continuity sites, has made many people wonder whether or not free membership sites are still a good option. Of course, there is always going to be more inherent appeal to generating income from paying members rather than hoping to monetize a free membership base. At the same time, there are still some very real benefits to creating a free membership site. This is especially true if you consider some of the ways that free memberships have evolved. The big question is whether or not these benefits are great enough to outweigh charging a small monthly fee. Here is a quick look at how free membership sites stack up.

List Building

Both paid and free membership sites are a great way to build your list. The question is what kind of list you want to build. In general, a paid membership will create a smaller list, but it will be full of people who have already made a purchase. On the other other hand, free membership sites will help you generate a much larger list, although some of the people on it may just be freebie seekers or only signed up to get a better idea about what it was all about. Both of these types of lists can be very useful, it is really a question of which fits better into your overall strategy.

Profit Potential

This is an interesting variable to look at because of what members expect. In general, people who sign up for a free membership site will expect to see a lot of offers and promotions. Since they are more receptive, they could be easier to monetize over the short term. At the same time, paying members are already monetized and the back end sales are simply a bonus.

Another way to look at the profit potential is completely reliant on where your membership site is in your sales funnel. If your paid membership site is the primary end-product, then the long term monetization could be smaller than a free membership site which is designed to introduce people to more high ticket items over time.

Combining Free and Paid Memberships

As you can see, there are benefits to both paid and free membership sites, which might be why more membership sites now offer a free membership level. There are two different ways that this has been done. The first is simply a straightforward free membership level in which members get access to the most basic content. The other option, which has grown more popular is combining a free trial with a free membership level. When a members initially signs up, they get a free trial that includes access to the entire website. Once the free trial is over, they revert back to a basic member. This is effective because it gives them a taste of what a premium members gets, plus they remain a member even if they don’t upgrade. Using this method, your membership site can actually use two completely monetization strategies to achieve their income potential.

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Membership Site Hosting

Membership sites are continuing to grow in popularity as they have proven to become a excellent source of income. They have quickly gained many of the same tactics as other types of online information products from the sales page to content. However, there is one thing that many membership sites fail to do. They don’t choose the right membership site hosting.

PacificHost has partnered with Magic Members to provide you with the best hosting experience with 100% integration and support with Magic Member software. All of our services are fully compatible with Magic Members in addition to WordPress and all of our technicians are trained to assist you with any issues or questions related to Magic Members or WordPress. Our focus on providing reliable hosting with our 24x7x365 support assures that your website will always be online.

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All accounts come with the ability to instantly install Dolphin at the click of a mouse, no editing files or databases, our software will do everything for you. Simply let our system know where to install WordPress and away it goes, simple as one, two, three.

Free Website Migration

Transferring from another host couldn’t be easier with our free migration service. If you have an existing site with another cPanel hosting provider, just fill out our transfer request form and we’ll transfer over all of your site content in no time.

Why choose PacificHost?

We take pride in offering a premium service with our supermicro hardware and fast, redundant network. Utilizing bandwidth providers such as global crossing, Internap, Level 3 and more we are able to provide routing optimization that decreases website loading time by up to 50%. We don’t stop there, our service comes with top-tier 24/7/365 Support, a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and an Anytime Money Back Guarantee

Our philosophy leads us to focus on retaining our existing clients with maximum uptime, fast speeds and top-notch technical support. We guarantee that you will not only like, but love our hosting service. Our Anytime Money Back Guarantee ensures that this is risk-free hosting, so give us a try today and take your first steps towards finding your website’s full potential.

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What Is the Most Important Feature of Your Membership Software?

It seems like the average membership site software that has been released over the past few years has become much more feature-rich. While this is great news for users because it can boost versatility and productivity, it can also be distracting and actually hinder your site. The key is to identify the most important feature or set of features and make sure that they are a priority. So what is the most important feature of your membership software?

Most people can answer this question immediately, but does that mean that they are actually giving the right answer? For example, many people would immediately point to either a security related feature or promotion related feature, but that doesn’t mean that they are right. Identifying the most important feature can actually be a tricky process. Here is a closer look at some key factors to keep in mind.

The first thing that you need to do is identifying whether or not the feature is considered necessary. For now, set aside the general feature of protecting content because if your membership software cannot keep your members area secure then you have bigger issues to address. So outside of general security, what feature can you absolutely not live without?

There are several different ways to approach this, but all paths lead to the same destination – profits. This could mean boosting profits because you can better recruit new members, improved member retention, additional perceived value (which means a higher monthly fee), or even the ability to cross promote and utilize multiple monetization methods. It could even be a feature that cuts costs such as the ability to automatically add and segment members in an autoresponder.

The tricky part is everyone may have a different answer, but that doesn’t mean that anyone is actually wrong. For some people adding additional methods of monetization is essential, whereas list building is vital to others. With so much variation is possible answers, why is identifying your most important feature important?

Identifying the most important feature of your membership software is important for two reasons. The first reason is that by recognizing what feature is most important to your site, you will also have discovered what makes your specific membership site successful. This is something that a lot of people take for granted. They set up membership sites, have success, but don’t have a firm understanding what part of their process is getting the results. By identifying the most important feature, you will always have a starting point for testing out new methods. If you know that list building is the most important feature of your software, then in order to improve your monthly income focusing on perfecting your list monetization is where you should start.

The other reason that this is important is that you may have to change membership software in the future. This could be because your current software is no longer good enough or no longer available. It could also be because you simply want to test out other alternatives. Either way, it means that you will using a different piece of software and when shopping around you know what features are most important for you to have.

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One of the biggest mistakes that online businesses and membership sites make in regards to social media is that they get so wrapped up in the social aspect that they forget about the importance of quality copywriting. It can be tough to think about copywriting if you trying to post on several different outlets everyday, especially when they all have different formats. The combination of social media and copywriting can be a difficult one, in fact many people see little value in it because they feel that copywriting decreases the “feel” of being social.

There can definitely be a balance between copywriting and social media as long as you can mesh the two concepts effectively. Some people wonder why effective copywriting would matter on mediums like Twitter, because the Tweets are so short. However, when it all boils down to it, you attract most of your new followers because they did some type of search. The key is not only being able to write great social content, but to be able to do so while still utilizing your keywords.

One way to get into the right frame of mind is to think the way that you have to write. One of biggest problems that many people run into is that they think that copywriting means writing long posts or a giant sales page. While copywriting is definitely used in those cases, it can also be done in 140 characters or less. The goal of each tweet or social post is accomplish 3 goals: getting them to click, share, and respond.

The one big change between traditional copywriting and social media is the tone of it. Copywriting is best known for being fairly serious. No one looks at a well written sales page and finds it entertaining because the goal of it is get the consumer to be serious and make a purchase. With social media this is rarely the case. Most people who monetize their social media don’t do it directly. They don’t get a sale from Twitter, they get someone to click on a link, which takes them to a sales page. If you look at the most popular viral content, it is funny and/or entertaining. It is this type of difference that you have to keep in mind.

As you can see, fundamentally copywriting plays a role in effective social media. It does this because you gain a majority of your attention through search engines, which are done via keywords and SERP’s. Additionally, you are trying to get your readers to take action, while it is normally a click or response rather than making a purchase, you are still trying to compel them to take action. All of these goals are accomplished through effective copywriting. While the “style” of copywriting has to move away from the more traditional approaches, it still has to have a place in social media.

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You have worked really hard getting people to sign up and become trial members, but it doesn’t seem to be paying off because you are having difficulty turning them into premium members. In many cases, the main problem is how membership sites actually view their trial members. There is so much attention being paid to recruiting trial members, that little attention is being paid to people who are currently in a free trial. Into to address this issue, it is critical that you change the way that you view trail members.

The first thing that you have to do is treat trial members as leads, not trial members. Just because they have signed up for a trial membership, doesn’t mean that you are going to be able to monetize them and turn them into premium customers. Instead, it is much more beneficial to view trial members in the same way that you would someone who has opted into your mailing list. You will need to do the same things that you do with list members in order to actually get a conversion. This includes, staying in constant contact, getting constant feedback, and tracking/testing different promotional methods.

The second thing that you need to do is find out whether or not the underlying problem is related to the type of people that you are attracting to your free trial. When you build your list, most people would prefer 300 highly targeted list members over 3000 untargeted list members. The same should be held true for your trial members as well. You should be putting a lot of thought and testing into how you are acquiring trial members. If you are just handing trial memberships out to everyone, then of course your conversion stats are going to be low. However, if your marketing campaign is highly targeted, you will likely significantly boost your conversion rate.

Finally, you need to make sure that you are giving people are reason to become premium members today. The most difficult thing about marketing a membership site is that most people will never feel the “fear of loss”. If they don’t sign up today, then they can sign up a year from now. In order to convert trial members into premium members, you must create a reason for them to become a member now. This could be a one-time discount, access to a particular section of the membership site that isn’t available to everyone, or a supplemental product. Regardless of what it is, you must give trial members a reason to convert today and not take a year to think about it.

By changing the way that you view your trial members, you can dramatically improve your conversion rate and gain more premium customers. By understanding that trial members are still not “a conversion”, you will start to do the same types of things that you do when recruiting people into becoming trial members. Additionally, by giving people a reason to go directly from trial member to premium member, you will increase the odds that they will want to take action right away.

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The use of affiliate marketers to promote membership sites is not a new idea, however it is still a powerful one. While many new membership site owners focus on different ways to generate traffic, many are overlooking the importance of a quality affiliate plugin. This could be because they don’t want to deal with managing affiliates or simply don’t feel like their membership site is popular enough to attract affiliates Whatever the reason, it is definitely NOT to your advantage to forget about affiliate marketers. Here is a quick look at some common scenarios that arise and how they affect membership sites.

1. Your Members

There is no better advertising than positive comments and referrals from current members. Without an affiliate plugin, you can still benefit from this type of word of mouth advertising, however it will be minimal. Some people will try and run a referral program without an affiliate plugin by having new members enter the name of the person that referred them. However, this requires hours of tedious data compilation and manually making payments one at a time to hundreds of members. With an affiliate plugin for your membership site, your members can promote your site with affiliate links. Not only will the plugin automatically process all of these sales, many will give you a much easier way of actually making your payments. This is especially helpful with membership sites if you are offering recurring commissions

2. Review Advertising Costs

Another reason that an affiliate plugin is essential for a membership site is because it dramatically decreases the overall advertising costs necessary to promote the site. How much would it cost to get a positive review on a website? It could cost anywhere from $25 to $250. By having an affiliate program, you can get hundreds of these reviews by paying a small monthly commission. The best part is that you get guaranteed results. You only pay out these commissions if the reviews directly lead to a trackable sale.

3. Relevancy

In order to stay relevant in your niche, you need to make sure that you are always “known”. The easiest way for a membership site to fail is to simply fade into the background. With an army of affiliate marketers, there will always be someone talking about your site. This ensures that you will never be completely out of site. This also goes a long way in improving your brand recognition. As an added bonus, whenever you make an upgrade to your membership site, everyone will know, members and non-members alike.

As you can see, something as simple as an affiliate plugin can lead to a vastly higher success rate for your membership site. It will manage your affiliate program, decrease your overall advertising costs, and ensure that someone is always talking about how great your product is.

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Getting you content ready to go before you launch your website is absolutely essential. There have the been a number of membership sites that looked promising, but didn’t succeed because they launched before they had enough content to keep their first set of members happy. On the other hand, there are membership sites that were full of fantastic content, but didn’t know when to quit adding content and actually launch their website. Here are some simple tips to helping you get your content in order before your launch.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have enough content to ensure that your first wave of members are happy. They are going to be the first people who are telling others about your membership site and you definitely need them to be saying good things. It is impossible for most membership sites to recover from a poor initial review. Even if you do manage to recover, you will have likely wasted months doing damage control when you should be riding a wave of new members.

In the perfect world, you should have about 90 days or 3 months worth of content already created before you launch your website. This will allow you to focus most of your early efforts on the launch itself and the post launch promotions that are common for new membership sites. By recruiting a large number of members during your first three months, membership sites can almost become self-sustaining as far as marketing is concerned (almost). These three months are too important to spend them creating content that you can easily do before you launch.

Another aspect of content creating and content management that is commonly overlooked is the importance of free premium content. The best membership sites provide free, premium content to visitors. This means that the content is of a very high quality and truly value to the people who are getting it. This will boost their confidence in your product and make them feel much more comfortable with paying for additional content, as long as the quality remains high. It is impossible to say exactly how much of your premium content should be free, but it seems like the general tend is to make about 20% of the content free to visitors.

Content is definitely one of the lifelines of a membership site. If you launch with either too much or too little content, you can quickly miss out on a great opportunity to profit and if things go poorly enough, you could doom your membership site before it ever begins. In order to avoid this, make sure that you create about 3 months of worth of content before your initial launch and make about 20% of that content free to website visitors.

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