Start
A Subscription or Membership Website
Websites are a perfect medium for generating money via publishing
on the internet.
Experience or technical skills might be a restriction, but if you
feel that making money from content is for geeks … think again.
There are just two major components that you need to make money
from subscriptions or memberships. A Membership or Subscription
Website, and obviously it needs hosting.
Developing a subscription or membership website to make money is
all well and good, but where does the money come from?
Visitors of course! But where do the visitors come from?
Without going into the ins and outs of marketing
websites, let's assume that your site attracting visitors, the
next task is to convert visitors into members or subscribers.
One suggestion is to provide free and member-only content. Free
content is a 'teaser' to attract visitors and is limited content
for free, visitors should then subscribe and become numbers in order
to access more comprehensive content.
There is a word used in internet circles that means keeping people
on your site, the word is 'sticky'. It means not only making
your website attractive, but keeping its content interesting. Good
website design has a lot to do with it, fast loading and easy to
navigate is more important.
To make a site 'Sticky' consider adding a member's forum
or chat room, you may be surprised at the activity it attracts.
Add an events calendar too to inform your members of forthcoming
attractions and events. These are excellent member loyalty tools.
It might be that you would prefer a fully managed online publishing
solution such as SubHub, to take the technical pressure off you.
In order to make money from a website, we need to develop multiple
streams of income. Your first stream might be generating revenue
from website subscribers or members, there are other ways to bring
in more money from your content by partnering with established partners
such as Google and Amazon.
Google operates a system call Adsense. You have probably seen sponsored
links on a web page, when a visitor clicks on those links, the website
owner earns a share of the revenue; you too can generate revenue
from Adsense.
Amazon operates an associates program. Amazon Associates is an affiliate
program focused on providing tools that allow website owners to
refer their site visitors to purchase Amazon's own products.
So, up to now we have options to make money from website subscriptions,
generate revenue from members, offer free content and add Google
Adsense to may money from sponsored links and include products from
Amazon to be sold on your site … that's what I call 'multiple
streams of income'. There is more!
You can add an advanced shopping cart or use PayPal
to sell other products and accept payment by all major credit cards.
With this source of revenue you can fully control what you sell
on your website. Click
here to register with PayPal.
Banner links are also an excellent method of making money from a
website and the more traffic you have coming through your site,
the more money you can ask for banner links.
Affiliate programs have made internet fortunes for many. There are
two opportunities for you here; the first is to develop a partnership
with an affiliate partnership such as ClickBank, CLICK
HERE
to register with Click Bank
Clickbank has some 100,000 members worldwide, each promote other
services and earn money from commissions. Lets say you enter into
a partnership with Clickbank and they market your membership/subscription
website to all its members who in turn add a link from their website
to yours, each time someone joins your subscription website, Click
Bank pay commission to your affiliates and pay you your fees each
month.
To add to this stream of income, you too can add products from ClickBank
members on your site! Thus adding even more possibilities of making
money from your membership/subscription website.
Ensure you have Automatic Recurring Billing for an automated collection
of monthly subscriptions … while you sleep. If you are accepting
worldwide members go for multiple currencies option so that you
can process payments in Sterling, Dollars and Euro.
Two more units that are worth looking at too; Content Syndication
with RSS Feeds - Share some of your content and add a link to Email-a-Friend
- make it extremely simple for your visitors to email an article
to a friend and you can start a viral marketing campaign.
Always have headlines and teaser text that relate to each article
on the home page to tempt people into becoming members.
Once you have become to build members, how do you manage them? A
membership management system is essential.
SubHub have a turnkey system that allows you to have an automatic
member sign-up system that provides an automatic password creation
system and an online member database to store thousands of members
details in a secure and searchable system.
You might want non-members to opt in to your mailing list, or operate
two opt in mailing lists so that you can select groups of members
in order to send them emails such as newsletters.
Be mindful that when hosting comes into the equation, you will need
a good commercial strength SSL secure server. A cheaper option is
to ask your website hosting company about shared SSL.
I'm pretty sure this information will be of great help to start
a subscription or membership website
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