Often times you may want to sell individual products as well as offer a membership site to your customers. I was recently told by one of my customers that they didn’t have time to absorb the material each month and didn’t want to pay on an ongoing basis each month. They preferred to have something they can work with at their own pace. This means you can repurpose your content into a downloadable course, or DVD for example.

As I’ve mentioned I use Extreme Member (aff) since it offers fully integrated membership site services. According to their support documentation you can also sell non-recurring products such as an eBook or CD. There are basically 3 options outlined in the documentation. Use Extreme Member memberships to sell products, use your own shopping cart and add an Extreme Member mailing list, or use a shopping cart and also have affiliate integration.

I decided to go with the first option, using Extreme Member to sell my products. However, there are a few problems with that approach. You are actually creating a membership so this has many implications. When a customer goes to Paypal it will say ‘Subscription’ and also something like ‘$7 for 5 years’ which is the longest subscription you can have at Paypal. If you change your product’s subscription length to 24 hours you’ll get ‘$7 for 1 day’. This might confuse customers as it is a one time purchase and not a subscription. They also get lots of emails from both Paypal and Extreme Member telling them about their subscription. They also get a password sent to them from Extreme Member which might also be confusing (ie. what is it for?).

A subscription is different in that you need a Paypal account (it’s not really a one time payment although you are just paying once for ‘lifetime’ subscription or whatever length you decide) rather than just using a credit card. This is because subscriptions need to recur so you need a Paypal account for that (even though this is a one time payment it’s still a subscription!).

A better approach might be to use your own shopping cart (such as Paypal) and send them to a thank you page (through the Paypal button creation page) where you get them to sign up to an email list back at your membership site. This gets them in your email marketing system and allows you to deliver the product (if it’s digital) and follow up with them over time. The problem with this is that the page could technically be found by Google searches (unless you block the robots), shared by others and so on. The suggestion made was to change the thank you page URL every week or so – this would require recreating the buttons in Paypal as well, since they contain the URL. In other words, these aren’t fully integrated services.

Go here for the hottest 10 Tips On Starting a Membership Site