Is It Possible to Create an Entirely Automated Membership Site?

Posted on 22. Jun, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

Membership sites are a great way to create sustainable income online, however the people who have become extremely successful at it understand that the more time that you spend maintaining a current membership website, the less time you are spending on creating an additional stream of income (or new membership website). In order to ensure that you are constantly moving forward, it is essential that you know how to create a membership website that will run itself.

One of the first things that you need to do when creating a self-sustaining membership website is set it up so that it is as automated as possible. There are a variety of different tasks that can automated, as long as you design it correctly. The first series of steps that need to be automated is the recruitment of new members. For example, a potential members should be able to sign up for your list (autoresponder) and receive a pre-set group of message that will promote your membership site. Once they decide to join your membership site, they should be able to make a payment, set up their account, and get payment confirmation, all without you doing anything. With a quality autoresponder and payment gateway, this should be simple to do. (The same is true for members who want to cancel their membership).

The next area that needs to be automated is the content. While there is no way to automate content creation, you can hire a freelancer or virtual assistant to do this for you. Additionally, you should use a piece of membership management software that allows you to drip feed content. This means you set up an entire year of content and every member will get access to it based on a timeline of your choosing. This means that every member will receive their content for a year without you having to lift a finger.

With everything above, you have created a sales funnel that begins when someone signs up for your list and ends after they have received the pre-loaded content over the course of a year. All of this means that your entire site is automated for an entire year. The only thing left to do is actually attract the potential members. The best way to automate this job is to create an affiliate program. By creating an effective affiliate program, all of the actual website promotion is taken care of for you. This will often include PPC marketing, article marketing, product reviews, and much more.

If you have an affiliate program, automated sales funnel, and pre-loaded content, your entire membership website can become almost entirely automated.