As you’ve just learned, video courses are an excellent way to share information with your audience, particularly because they are perceived as highly valuable.
Here’s another effective option, especially if you have a lot of content to share: Create a membership site where you can teach what you know.
Membership sites can also provide access to tools, apps, and other resources.
Now, let’s explore the different membership models you can use to set this up…
The Ongoing Membership Site
This is a recurring membership site where members pay a monthly fee to access new content, and you provide fresh material on a regular basis—either monthly or even weekly.
Since this type of site is designed to run indefinitely, it works best when you have a continuous supply of content to offer your members.
Here are a few membership models that suit this approach:
Licensed Content:
In this model, you provide private label rights (PLR) or resell rights content to your members.
For instance, you might supply two new eBooks each month for them to resell, along with marketing materials like sales letters, graphics, and email sequences.
Software Subscriptions (SaaS):
This model gives members access to a software tool in exchange for their subscription fee.
A familiar example is an email service provider, which grants access to autoresponder software as long as you continue paying the monthly fee.
If you stop, access is revoked.
Tools and Resources:
You can create a membership site that offers valuable tools and resources to help your members reach specific goals.
These could be directly useful tools for achieving personal goals, or business tools that help members with their professional tasks.
For example, if you cater to web developers, your site might provide them with access to graphic packs and templates to use in their client projects.
Alternatively, if your audience is personal trainers, you could offer them monthly resources like meal plans, workout routines, and marketing materials they can use to attract new clients.
Training:
While not every topic can sustain an ongoing membership, larger subjects are often a good fit.
For instance, a monthly membership focused solely on how to groom a poodle would eventually run out of new content.
However, expanding the topic to cover all aspects of raising, training, and caring for poodles would give you nearly endless material to cover, from grooming and nutrition to training and health.
Similarly, you could create a membership site around the broad topic of business and marketing.
This could include subtopics like startups, business planning, market research, marketing, branding, and more.
Covering all these areas could sustain a membership site for years.
So, an ongoing monthly membership site is one model you can pursue.
Here’s another option…
The Fixed-Term Membership Site
This membership model is a great option if you have a limited amount of content to offer.
The membership runs for a predetermined period, which can range from a few weeks to a year or more.
During this time, you provide fresh content on a weekly or monthly basis, and members pay a recurring fee for the duration of the membership.
This approach works well for delivering structured training.
For example, if you’re offering a video course with 24 lessons on copywriting, you could release one lesson per week over 24 weeks (six months).
Members would pay a monthly fee for each of those six months, and billing would stop once the training is complete.
One key benefit of this model is a higher retention rate.
Since members know the membership has a set end date, they’re more likely to stay committed until the program finishes.
In contrast, open-ended memberships often see members canceling after a few months, while fixed-term memberships keep members engaged for the full term.
This model is advantageous for several reasons:
- Increased front-end revenue: The longer members stay active, the more membership fees you’ll collect upfront.
- Stronger back-end profits: Engaged and satisfied members are more likely to purchase additional products and services, boosting your back-end sales.
- Happy affiliates: If you offer recurring commissions to affiliates for membership sales, high retention rates mean more earnings for them. Satisfied affiliates are likely to continue promoting your membership site and other offers.
In summary, a fixed-term membership is an effective strategy for boosting revenue.
Now, let’s explore one more membership model you can consider…
The One-Off Membership Site
The third option is to create a one-time payment membership site, often called a “vault” site.
In this model, members pay a single fee for access to a large collection of content, which is delivered all at once.
The main advantage of this model is that it’s a “set it and forget it” approach.
You upload the content, set up a traffic generation system, and don’t need to continuously provide new materials. This makes it easy to maintain without ongoing work.
However, there is a downside: your backend sales tend to be less profitable. Here’s why:
Without regularly sending new content, members aren’t likely to check their emails as often or log into the site frequently.
As a result, you miss out on key opportunities to promote backend offers.
While you can still earn some revenue from backend sales, it’s typically not as profitable as with the other membership models.
Which Model Should You Choose?
Your choice of membership model will depend on the content or tools you’re offering and your overall business goals.
For instance, if you’re using the membership as a lead magnet, a one-time vault site might be a good option.
However, for higher profits on both the front and back ends, a fixed-term or monthly membership site is generally more effective, as explained earlier.
Now, let’s wrap up this section with a few tips to maximize the success of your membership site…
Promote Backend Offers
While membership sites can generate significant revenue upfront, the real profit often lies in the backend. Here’s a quick example:
If you have 500 members paying $20 a month, that’s $10,000 in monthly revenue.
But this is just the beginning. In most cases, your backend sales will make up the bulk of your profits.
To maximize this, you need to offer related products to your members. Here are several ways to promote these offers:
- On the membership order form: Cross-sell or upsell right when members are signing up.
- On the login page: Display an offer here, but ensure it doesn’t interfere with the login process.
- On the landing page: Rotate different offers on the homepage that members see every time they log in.
- In a welcome video: Include a promotion at the end of your intro video or direct members to check out a “Recommended Resources” section.
- In a “Recommended Tools and Resources” section: List tools and resources—both free and paid—that will help your members succeed. This is also a great place to include affiliate offers.
- Within the uploaded products: Promote backend offers in videos, PDFs, and other materials on the site, including bonuses.
- In emails: You can start promoting backend offers as soon as you send your welcome email and continue doing so in every email afterward. Be sure to include valuable content to keep members engaged.
Focus on Retaining Members
The profitability of your membership site relies heavily on member retention. Satisfied, engaged members will generate more revenue on both the front and back ends.
Here are a few tips to help retain your members:
Provide ongoing bonuses:
Offer both advertised and surprise bonuses to maintain member satisfaction. Announce bonuses every few months to keep members looking forward to them.
Offer high-quality content:
Ensure your content is unique and valuable, something members can’t find elsewhere. You can make it stand out by:
- Sharing exclusive tips.
- Including personal stories and examples.
- Offering case studies or results from testing.
- Presenting old content in a new way, such as organizing it into a step-by-step system.
Create an “anchor”:
Add features to your site that can only be accessed by logging in, like private groups, web-based apps, or streaming videos. These items give members a reason to stay, as they lose access if they cancel.
Set It Up Correctly
If your membership site isn’t set up properly, it can become difficult to manage and vulnerable to content theft.
Some marketers try to cut corners by using simple password-protected directories or autoresponders for fixed-term sites.
However, these approaches are insecure and make it easy for content to be stolen or pirated.
Others use complex membership scripts that are bloated with unnecessary features, making them hard to use and a poor investment.
A better solution is to keep it simple with a user-friendly platform like Product Dyno.
It protects your content, secures access, and even cross-promotes related products to help increase your revenue.
In Summary…
As you can see, setting up a membership site can be profitable.
And since there are different ways to set it up, you can pick the option that best suits your goals, your needs and the type of content you’re delivering.
