Maximize Your Membership Site Profits

Posted on 19. Aug, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

While maximizing the profits from your membership sites seems like an obvious goal of any owner, it is even more important in hard economic times. This has lead to major changes in a number of membership sites over the past few years. While some changes hurt more than helped, there have also been a large number of successful ways to maximize your membership site profits. Here is a quick look at some simply ways to make more money, per member, on your membership site, without increasing your prices.

1. Improving Customer Retention

This seems like an obvious way to increase your profits, but many people are focused almost exclusively on recruiting more member. However, placing most of your effort in member recruitment, may not make the most financial sense over the long term. For example, let’s say your membership site has 100 members with an average retention rate of 3 months. This means that you will receive a total of 300 payments. Now let’s assume that you are focusing your efforts on recruiting more members in increase your number of members by 100% – which would be another 100 members. This means you will now receive at total of 600 payments. Instead of recruiting new members, let’s say that you improve you double your retention rate to 6 months. You still receive 600 payments, however you only have 100 members. The point of this illustration is not that you should focus entirely on one approach or the other, but rather that your ultimate goal needs to be maximizing how much money you make from each member.

2. Up Sell/Cross Sell

There are a lot of membership sites that shy away from cross selling or up selling because they don’t want to drive away members. The truth is, once you have established trust from your members, they are much more likely to purchase a product that you suggest to them, rather than resent it. The key is to make sure that they product will provide actual value to them and to not try and sell them something new every day. By finding products that your members would truly benefit from, you are actually helping them out. If they purchase the product and like it, they are even more likely to purchase the next product that you promote them. As long as you keep the interests of your members as a priority and only promote truly useful products, your members will embrace your cross sells and up sells rather than resent them.

3. Make Your Content Count

Once you have created a bunch on content for your membership site, you need to make sure that you are using it wisely. Content lasts forever, so why not profit from it multiple times. You can turn your content into additional information products, create multiple tiers of membership, or even use previous content into “new” content by changing the medium in which it is displayed (turn text to video).

Maximizing the profitability of your website doesn’t mean increasing the number of members because you should be doing that anyways. The key is to make sure that you are getting the maximum amount of profit from each, individual member. It also means that you need to extract the maximum amount of profit from each piece of content that you create.