What Makes A Good Membership Site?
There are a few things I always look for in membership sites. The first is always who the owner of the site is and whether they have an established reputation in their niche. A good example is Jimmy D Brown’s ‘List And Traffic‘. Whenever anyone asks on the Warrior Forums about good information and resources for building lists and traffic, Jimmy’s site is always one of the first to be mentioned. Recommendations from other marketers are always a good way of finding high quality membership sites.
One of the best suggestions I can make is to take your time. Take a good look around at what is available before you make your choice. In some niches there is a fairly high percentage of duplication. You will find that certain products appear on most sites, particularly in the Internet marketing ‘re-sell’ niche.
Once you have found a membership site that you want to join, make yourself a plan and stick to it! Too often, people join sites and then don’t make full use of the membership. Always keep in mind that you can’t just join a site, put a few sites or links around the Internet and expect to see the dollars come rolling in. Regardless of the membership site, you WILL need to do a fair amount of work before you see a good return. Some make it easier than others but all require a certain degree of time and commitment on your part.
If you don’t make a plan you will find that you are joining more and more sites which will do little more than leave a hole in your wallet! If you do feel that you aren’t making enough from a membership, take some time to review what YOU are doing. Are you taking full advantage of all aspects of the membership? Have you done everything you can to sell the products, refer other members etc? If not, then joining another site isn’t going to help you at all. You will find yourself in a cycle of joining new sites every month or two and then moving on. Stop, focus and leverage everything you possibly can out of your membership.
Other indicators I look for are things like how often the site is updated with new products. Does the site have forums and is the owner active in those forums? Are the products complete with sales materials such as sales pages, banner ads, sample emails etc? I’ve seen some very good sites that are updated regularly and have an active ownership. I’ve seen others that aren’t really membership sites in that they are just a collection of products and no new products are ever added. these are more accurately classified as ‘firesale’ sites.
Whatever your choice, I think you will find that with nearly all membership sites, if you are prepared to put a reasonable amount of work in you will build yourself a reasonable income.
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