If you ask ten different successful Internet business people what their secret to success is - You will receive ten very different answers.
The truth about the Internet and Internet marketing specifically is that there is no one size fits all solution.
There are numerous different ways to make money on the Internet, but every system is going to work better for certain people.
Some Internet marketing and income generating programs are extremely specific in how they have to work in order to turn a profit.
One excellent endeavor that can cater to a variety of different people is the membership site business model.
One of the biggest challenges that most Internet marketers are facing is fluctuating income streams.
With many product launches, and a variety of other income streams, it is common to make a killing one month and then to have a sour month the next. The membership site business model is one example of this form of income generation.
One of the things that makes this membership site concept such an outstanding one, is that there is a point where you can almost completely just sit back and watch the income roll in.
Most of your effort is going to go into getting members to roll in, and once you have a steady membership base, you can simply watch the monthly membership fee roll in.
There will become a point where thousands of dollars will simply roll in like clockwork every single month, and this should be your ultimate goal.
The average gross yearly income in the United States is only around $28,000.
Most people who make this much money every year are doing it through a job that they absolutely detest, and they are working forty hours a week or MORE doing it.
What makes you think that you are tied down to that one dead end job that is going absolutely nowhere fast?
If you want to generate that same $28,000 a year average that everyone is striving for without continuing at your current endless, thankless job, listen up:
Let's say that you don't want to work 40 hours a week but you still want to make $28,000 every year without fail. Let us say that the membership site model that you choose has you selling memberships for $29.95 a month.
In order to generate your $28,000 a year, you would only have to sell approximately 77 memberships. This does not take 40 hours a week of work.
The only job that you have to do is to find or create the content that your site needs a few times a month, and all of this can be done from the comfortable setting of your very own home, and with the hours that YOU want to spend doing it, not what your boss dictates or your time card demands.
So, selling 77 memberships at $29.95 every month will generate you $2,333 per month, which is what you need to generate a grand total of $28,000 every year.
But what makes the membership business model such a lucrative one is the fact that there is absolutely unlimited potential when it comes to generating income.
Absolutely anyone, with the right tools and content, can get 77 people to join their membership site. 77 members is actually a really small number. If you double that 77 members to 154 members, you can easily make $56,000 every single year.
Double it again to 308 members and you can find yourself earning $112,000 every year, without fail and without having to put in 40 hours at the office.
Now imagine this: There are membership sites out there that have thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of members.
Build your community, develop your site, make it go viral - And you will find it building upon itself as more and more people discover how fruitful it is to become a member. Are you excited?
You should be because this is the business venture that is going to get the ball rolling for you. There are so many exciting opportunities for insane success in membership site marketing, that you really cannot go wrong.
Now, it is important that you keep one thing in mind: These figures assume that everyone in your membership remains in your membership for the duration.
However, you will encounter members who join and then leave after a month.
Still, in general, the number of new members pouring in every month is going to supersede how many people are cancelling at the same time.
In other words, what you can generally expect to experience is an increasing number of members from month to month.
What makes membership site success so great, is that starting a membership site allows you to take what you are interested in, good at or what you do for a living, and it allows you to turn that specialized knowledge into a business that is truly profitable.
Although it will more than likely eventually develop into a full time endeavor, online membership sites like these can begin as a part time project, meaning that you do not have to leave your regular 9 to 5 until you are ready to.
The purpose of this particular guide is to provide as much comprehensive information as possible on what it means to create a membership site.
We are going to touch on who can profit from membership sites and how, what business models make the most successful membership sites, and a number of resources that will help to get you started in the process, should you decide that the membership site business model is the right online business endeavor for you.
The accepted practice online used to have a lot to do with offering things for free. Everyone was offering something for free, and most consumers were looking for something for free.
In this day and age, however, free is slowly going out of style, and fee based is the way to go.
This is in part because many smart entrepreneurs are beginning to see the virtue in selling their hard-earned knowledge to others in a variety of different forms.
Content, for example, used to be completely free to anyone who wanted it online, but now because information seekers are willing to pay good money for real, original and high quality content, entrepreneurs are beginning to sell it for a price. In the end, everybody wins.
People really do prefer to get the most unique, high quality content that they can get, even if it means paying for it.
These days, most websites are giving serious consideration to the idea of charging even for basic level access to their content, either through a one time fee, or through a monthly subscription.
For example, the Wall Street Journal's website, located at http://www.WSJ.com has been successful at turning its free information website into a subscription-based model. This has actually inspired a variety of other publishers to do the same.
Some publishers are also looking to create a hybrid membership site that combines free website content with fee-based website content to meet the needs of those who wish to pay for good content, and those who simply do not.
In the case of this type of hybrid membership site, a significant amount of content will be offered for free, perhaps with banner ads or other advertising content to make up the cost.
Then paying members will have access to this level of content, and additional, perhaps better content with no advertising, and perhaps with the inclusion of other special features as well.
This type of strategy will allow a site to keep its traffic up overall, giving special treatment to subscribers without taking away the rights of those who cannot make the subscription payments.
Publishers are able to generate revenue that will get their bills paid, and will still have plenty of time to develop their site to draw in new members every month.
In order for this model to be successful, small sites that do not have large brands like the Wall Street Journal will have to be able to tap into a specific niche market, providing some level of information that cannot be found anywhere else.
If your website has a subscription fee and your level of content does not surpass what hundreds of other free websites are offering, people are going to have trouble paying your subscription fees.
Your website has to be comprehensive, accurate and dynamic if you want it to succeed. It needs to be able to give readers a true sense that they are belonging to a membership that is special, at least if you want to increase the perceived amount of value that your site holds.
People who follow this type of membership site business model do so because they believe that 100 paying visitors is more powerful a number than 100,000 free visitors.
