Many people have tried to make money from advertising. The simplest way is to use Google Adsense, but in order to make any serious money, you would have to get a huge amount of traffic and hope they click on your ads and leave your site. Affiliate programs can work but based on commissions you usually also need a huge amount of traffic.

Kevin Kelly talked about 1,000 true fans. Although he was talking about musicians, the idea is that you should focus on getting 1,000 customers who love your content and will sign up for your membership site. This is great because it focuses you on just getting a small number of loyal customers instead of trying to get millions of hits on your site.

Why would people pay for content that can often be obtained for free? There is so much ‘noise’ out there that people are looking for trusted experts who can filter all that out and provide quality content as well as a context around the content. While television had free channels, new paid cable channels came available.

Another great reason for membership sites is the idea of separating time from money. Most of us are paid a salary or by the hour, which is great but usually limits the amount of income. There are so many hours you can work. So people usually then decide to create products which are more scalable. Information products are great because they’re usually fairly easy and cheap to produce and don’t require any shipping or other complications. Products are great and should be used, but after you make a sale, you might not having anything else to sell them. Customers who buy usually are good candidates to buy again, if you have other products that is.

I highly recommend using hosted subscription software. While many sites show you how to integrate and install software you want to spend your time marketing the site and interacting with your members. The site I use has payment gateways, protects content, forums, and email and affiliate marketing built in.

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