A subscription website creates recurring revenue. Most companies try to manage their customer relationship so that they can get repeated sales. A membership site helps you obtain repeat sales, as long as the customer sees value in continuing the relationship.

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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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.

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Here’s a good outline of what you might want in a membership site. I obtained this specification from an Elance membership site project. I appreciate seeing this level of detail. A consultant needs to know who is going to be adding the content, how much web design is needed (logo, banner) or if a downloable theme is acceptable.

Outline Design Scope for Membership website
Overall scope

A website designed to promote football (soccer) related items and to contain paid for membership content along similar lines to the following two sites:
Grassrootssoccer.com
Soccertutor.com
Academysoccercoach.co.uk

The site will exist on 3 levels.

• Pages than can be accessed by everyone.

• Additional pages that can be accessed by those completing an online registration (“standard membership”)

• More pages on top of those above only to be accessed by those paying either a monthly or annual instalment (“Gold membership”)

Processes to be supported

1. There should be a facility to link a number of pages to a number of on-line retailers such as kitbag.com and clickbank enabling affiliate income to be earnt.

2. Home page to contain the ability to capture membership details such as first name, surname, email address, password (to be entered twice for confirmation, with an error message generated if they do not match) separately recorded in a database and generate a membership number, (A sequential number to be used as a payment reference) Once membership number generated send an automated email confirming details to member and containing a link they click on to activate “standard” membership.

3. The data base should be formatted so can easily link into an auto responder facility such as aweber.

4. Once membership is activated the facility to add free gifts (PDF e books) to the confirmation email is required.

5. The membership sign in should consist of email address and the password input by the member.

6. Once the standard membership is activated, and each time the member signs in, then should go to an “upgrade” page that will list the additional facilities and give an option (similar to grassrootssoccer.com) to pay either a monthly recurring fee, or a one off annual payment (that turns into a recurring monthly payment after a year) by either bank account or credit card.

7. If the member chooses not to upgrade at this time then they can access a number of additional pages that will potentially include coaching drills contained on a medium (possibly PDF files but still to be decided) than should be available by “clicking on”. They should be printable once the file is opened. A discussion forum page where members can post to will need to be accessible.

8. Once a payment is made the member can access “gold” member area and standard area facilities. This will include a number of different pages to include more coaching drills as in (6) in the same way. An “ask the coach” facility where people can pose questions which can be answered only by someone with administrator rights. There should be the facility to add additional web pages up to a maximum of 50

9. Once payment is processed a confirmation email should be sent with the ability to attach a “free gift” (PDF file or files) that can be removed or added to.

10. There should be a facility to cancel payment by the member, when this happens it should remove the “gold” member access but keep the standard member access.

11. There should be the ability for the administrator to change the value of the one off or monthly payments. This can either effect all, or just new members.

12. The membership reference number must be included for each payment made.

13. There must be an ability to upload PDF files to a page as per (6) and (7) above.

14. A message board/forum must be included with edit rights held by an administrator

15. Payments should be collected automatically for monthly subscriptions. Any uncollected payments should result in an email being sent informing access rights have been removed to the “gold” area, and those rights should be removed.

16. Payments should be collected automatically for someone starting with an annual subscription. The payments should be collected monthly starting 12 calendar months from the annual payment. Any uncollected payments should result in an email being sent informing access rights have been removed to the “gold” area, and those rights should be removed

17. There should be a “password reminder” facility for those forgetting their password.

18. A “help” facility producing a blank email addressed to admin@xxxxx.com should be available

19. There should be administration rights available to amend the site in line with the above criteria.

20. The code should be provided for the website design in case a locally based designer needs to respond to further updates.

21. There should be an “affiliate tracking facility” so if someone joins gold membership from a link from a different website then a database entry is generated so that commission can be paid.

22. The site should be “search engine optimised” to enable a high ranking to be obtained within search engines

23. There should be a facility to “unsubscribe” from emails for standard members

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