A membership site 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.

It might be a good idea for you to learn how to build and market your own membership site.

Many teachers are supplementing their classroom teaching with online courses. These are sometimes called virtual learning environments. There are many benefits to this:

• students can view the materials as many times as they need
• students can focus on trouble areas, and skip past more familiar areas
• teachers have one place to update and manage their course content
• students can watch material at their peak times such as late at night
• students can pause material and resume whenever they need

Every course should have learning outcomes so students know what to expect when going through the course. An outline is extremely useful to both the teacher and the student.

Files should be organized on the local hard drive to match what is online. This makes it much easier when updating content. Use subdirectories and filenames that match the course structure, course name and topic names within each course.

An excellent book on helping teachers with course and content design is Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design (Online Teaching and Learning Series (OTL))

It might be a good idea for you to learn how to build and market your own membership site.