Internet Marketing Blog

Membership websites seem to be in full swing. They have become very popular and seem to be well liked by members. There are actually many reasons why you should consider starting a membership site, especially if you are an entrepreneur and love the experience of making your income online. First it produces a residual income, secondly it targets a specific market, and thirdly you are selling information or products in which you are the expert.

The most obvious advantage is that membership websites tend to produce a steady income. There is nothing better that a site that charges a subscription fee and makes a steady income from repeat clients or members.  The membership fees are usually set up for a specified amount of time and that could be monthly, quarterly or even yearly.

What do You Sell in a Membership Site?

Basically there are all kinds of membership sites. There are membership sites that sell products like music, movies, programs, information, etc.  There are membership sites that are network sites, or places to meet people, but the most productive membership sites are those that are selling online content. These password-protected websites are becoming the new “in” thing. 

People are Willing to Pay for Information

In fact, studies made by the “Online Publishers Association” show that online content is the new way to make money, along with matchmaking, personals and entertainment.

It has been found that even small marketing areas are growing because of such membership sites. Businesses like coaching, dieting and international living are making a profit by marketing themselves through membership sites. It is estimated that Internet users spend upwards of $800 million a year on membership sites.

Membership Fees

Membership fees will vary depending on the site, what they sell, and what they want to charge. Some can be as little as $15 every couple of months. Others charges as much as $20 a month, and others may even charge as much as $200 a month.  It really depends on the industry and what the customer receives for their money.

Subscription Renewals

It is a known fact that once a member has signed up he will generally continue to be a member. Most sites hold above a 70% renewal rate, which means that the owner receives a residual income over a long period of time.

Growth Rate of Membership Sites

Over the last few years’ membership rates have more than quadrupled, and that is close to a 600% growth rate per year.  We are talking about a huge growth rate and this is for any site in any country.

How to Start a Membership Site?

There are a few things you should pay attention to when you start a subscription based membership site.   First you need to seriously analyze your target market and you need to find a market that is really passionate about the product they are looking for.

Finding what people are looking for can be a little tricky, but you can start by conducting a keyword search. This will give you the words that are most looked for online. By doing a keyword search you will also be able to tell if there is really a big enough market for the product you are thinking of marketing to.

Your product needs to be unique and there should be little or no information on your product on the Internet for free.  That way you can focus on really searching online and off for quality information related to that product. This information or product may be as simple as “specialized expert opinions” on a certain topic.

Finding Your Subscribers

If you have done your research correctly and found the market you want to target for finding your traffic and subscribers, then this is not going to be that difficult. The best way to market your site is through affiliate programs, online newsletters, pay per click advertising, and once you have all these other marketing techniques in place, you will create viral marketing (marketing from other members or sites).

In reviewing everything related to membership site ownership we can say that it is a growing industry, with residual income potential and the potential to earn well, if you target the right market and you do your homework prior to setting it up.

For a commercial webpage to prosper in a search engine string search and come out on top, the page has to essentially be “prepared” to be detected and well-received by the search engine algorithm.

Because of the high amount of browsers visiting search engines such as Google and Yahoo, a new form of process was developed to make full use of the pros and avoid the cons of the algorithms used by the search engine companies. This process of preparation is called Search engine optimization (SEO).

As the amount of information grows exponentially, search engines will play a more vital role in keeping order in the World Wide Web. This has encouraged increasing numbers of people with something to look for to rely on search engines more. It simply is now a fact that you can find information faster if you use a search engine.

Because of this companies looking to attract more traffic to their sites would pay for valuable ad space within search results sent by the search engines to browsers. Because browsers are more often than not set on getting information about something, placing an ad that totally dovetails with what they’re looking for makes it easy for the advertiser to make a sale.

What search engine optimizers do then, is to make every effort to make the site considered highly relevant and show up in the top ten listing of their respective search strings. The usual method of SEO is to improve content, and dynamically expand the site with even more relevant data.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous SEO’s have also devised ways to cheat the algorithms of search engine to keep themselves on top with low quality or even misleading content. Google, Yahoo and other search engines have fought back by using even more complex algorithms to filter the junk and garbage out of their engines.

To properly optimize a web page, please follow the following steps:

1.             Optimization should be part of the design. To properly optimize a web page, it should be considered as part of the design process. It should not be treated as an afterthought after the fact. This will lead to shoddy worksmanship and create unnecessary strain in the browser looking for relevant data.

2.             Each web page must be optimized. That is to say, each web page must be unique, with their own content, titles and tags.

3.             It’s not just the search engines. Don’t create a site specifically for search engines alone. Most people who start out this way create a site that is unwieldy and has bad grammar. Most browsers pass over unprofessional sites with poor copy.

4.             Keywords. Make sure you have a list of terms you want placed in the page. Also consider that the keywords relevant to page 1 stays in page 1 while page 2 keywords stay in page 2. This is to make sure each page is unique in its offering, avoiding redundancy. In terms to competitiveness, a linking campaign will probably create more traffic and better results than concentrating on keywords.

Place your keywords strategically in the following areas: Page title, Meta tags, Body, Headings, Images, Bullets, Links.

High quality website typically rank well in the search engines partly because more and more people recommend it to others via word of mouth, email, instant messenger, or even better, take the link and place it in their own website link sections.

Google considers pages with inbound links as a vote to the quality and relevance of that site, increasing its rank in the search engine hierarchy.

In addition to inbound links, search engines also send out spiders to assess the site for relevance against an algorithm. The spider basically goes to the site and analyzes all the text in the page, including markup items, the meta tags and the title.

Spiders can read the following items on a web page, thus making the item highly relevant to search engines: text, page titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, code, tables. Depending on further technological considerations, search engines may consider other languages like Javascript and such. Currently, the spiders will just consider them clutter.

Web page optimization values content more than graphical artistic impact. One must keep in mind when the end result needed is to increase presence in the advertiser’s chosen search engine string.