Sell Ad Space
You could also consider offering advertising space within your member’s center, once your subscriber’s base has grown.
This way, you could monetize “unused” space within your member’s center by allowing third party merchants to promote their products and services to your community.
If you run a members forum, you could also consider integrating promotional banners and allocated ad spaces that feature affiliate based products.
If you run a newsletter (and you should), you could also offer solo ad campaigns to advertisers who are interested in gaining exposure at affordable rates.
Just be sure to adjust your advertising prices as your community grows and your overall ad campaigns become more valuable.
Renewals System
Recurring income is one of the best parts of running a membership website, and something that many other types of online businesses lack.
Just remember, while first time subscribers certainly breathe life into a membership website, renewals keep it alive.
Make sure to consistently remain active within your community and to do your best to provide high quality, exclusive material to your subscriber base on a regular basis.
Feature An Affiliate Program
You will also want to incorporate an affiliate program into your membership website, so that both visitors and subscribers are able to generate commissions from every referred sale they make.
When structuring your affiliate program, focus on offering a very appealing commission percentage; in order to recruit active affiliates who will help you jump- start your marketing campaigns.
Different companies pay different percentages and amounts for leads and sales.
The differences paid for a sale can range from 75% down to 1% depending on the company and the product.
What you decide to pay your affiliates will depend entirely upon what you are selling and to whom you are selling it.
A good idea would be to check what other companies selling a product comparable to yours is paying their affiliates.
However, how much you pay your Affiliates really depends on how much your product/service costs, its profit margin, how much you’re willing to give up and what action you want to take place.
When running an affiliate program, you will want to make sure that your current membership script or software is able to effectively track all sales and leads, as well as provide detailed information to affiliates (including overall earnings, stats, payment dates, etc).
You could also actively join affiliate programs that are focused on your niche market yourself, and incorporate your affiliate links into a “Recommended Websites” page, so that you are able to maximize earnings by promoting third party products and related websites.
For example, if you run a membership based website focusing on golf training, you could feature affiliate products that include golf gear, advanced lessons, physical books and even video tutorials.
This way, you can maximize your income by featuring affiliate-based tools, resources and materials that you are not offering yourself, without having to advertise competing membership websites.
Just make sure that the products or services you are recommending are relevant to your overall theme.
List /Email Promotions
Apart from allowing advertises to purchase email based advertisements, you could also monetize your subscriber mailing list by sending out promotional emails that showcase affiliate products, as well as your own special offers.
Consider creating a special bundle that features new content, relevant to your membership site, and making it available as an upgrade only to existing members.
When it comes to building a profitable, highly monetized membership community, you need to remain consistently active.
This doesn’t mean that you need to dedicate every hour of your day building your community, in fact, you can outsource the majority of the work to experienced freelance writers and developers, but what it does mean is that you need to play an important role in defining your community.
Conclusion
In closing, there’s just a couple last words I have for you.
For starters, when creating a membership site, it’s important to give your members a true feeling of community spirit and being a part of something unique and exclusive.
You can do this by incorporating features such as a forum, live chat, or weekly webinars – things that allow you to engage and interact with your subscriber base, so that they feel connected to the community.
Whenever possible, always power up your membership site with your own unique, proprietary content, rather than with private label or saturated content.
The more exclusive and original your material is, the more valuable it will be to those who pay to access it.
Running a profitable membership website obviously takes time and energy, but it can be exceptionally rewarding if you dedicate yourself to consistently evaluating your community and what it is interested in.
Always monitor your progress and track your efforts to see what’s converting and creating the most interactions.
Don’t be afraid to survey your members to determine what they are most interested in, and would like to see added to the membership program.
After all, it’s their community!
With that said, take all of this information and apply it or even expand upon it in any way that you see fit.
Try to make it work for your specific membership program and the members of your community.
