How To Create A Membership Site

3 Tips For Choosing a Subject For Your Membership Site

Posted on 16. Jul, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

It seems like membership sites have become one of the most popular ways to create a long-term, residual income.  However, just because you create a membership site, doesn’t mean that you will make money.  One of the biggest mistakes that someone can make is choosing a subject for their membership site that no one is interested in.  Here are 5 quick tips to help you choose a great topic for your membership website.

1. Don’t Be Afraid to Go Small

One of the biggest mistakes that most people make when choosing the topic for their website is to focus on a category that is too broad.  As a general rule, many people will argue that choosing a niche that is too small is much better than choosing a niche that is too large.  The reason for this is simple.  If your membership site tries to cover a wide range of large topics, the overall focus will be lost and the content will become too diluted.  On the other hand, if you focus on too small of a niche, you may not get thousands of members, however every single member will be interested in your exact topic.  This means that they are more likely to remain a member over time.

2. Find an Involved Audience

One of the biggest keys to ensuring that your members will remain members is to choose a topic or niche where the participants are active.  If you choose a topic without an active niche, your membership site will likely have a large number of members that will leave after only a few months.  However, if the niche is very active, then there is a much higher chance that your members will find a reason to stay in your membership program.  A good way to gauge how active a community is to look at how active open communities within niche are, such as discussion boards and forums.  The more there are, the more active the community probably is.

3. Why You?

People naturally want to turn to “authorities” within their niche.  This means that you need to be able to establish yourself as a person that can trusted.  You can establish a sense of authority by becoming an active participant in the niche using blogs and forums to get involved with others.  You also need to make sure to research your competition.  Can you make a membership website that is better than other membership websites?  If not, then you may want to look elsewhere.  You should also make sure that your membership website can provide more value that free resources as well.

One of the most important aspects of creating a profitable and sustainable membership website is choosing the right subject.  Not only is this one of most important decisions that you have to make, but also one of the first.  3 tips to choosing a profitable subject is to opt for a niche that is too small over too large, making sure that audience is active and involved elsewhere online, and making sure that you can become an authority figure and offer something that the competition cannot.

Tags: creating a membership site, membership site, membership website, profitable membership site, your members