Membership Sites for Fun and Profit

There are several different types of membership sites.

Product Sites
These sites provide Private Label Rights (PLR), Resell Rights (RR) or Master Resell Rights (MRR) products which members can turn around and resell to their own customers. Products are often supplied with ready-made sales letters and other sales material, up to and including entire pre-built websites.

Article Sites
Many marketers and website owners are always searching for content to use to drive traffic to their sites. PLR articles are very popular for doing so, and membership sites exist to supply this demand, often by publishing a new set or sets of articles in specific niche(s) each month which members can then use.

Coaching Sites
Often structured as private forums or discussion boards, these sites provide personal help and answers in a specific topic or niche.

Paid Newsletter
This kind of membership site is often run completely via email instead of an actual website, and it's one of the oldest types. The owner provides monthly (or sometimes weekly) information on a specific topic, and the members benefit by having the information provided with no research effort on their part. A newsletter often contains time-critical information.

e-training or e-course
Closely related to paid newsletters, in this case educational materials are delivered at intervals via email. The good thing about this klind of program is that it can be run completely on automatic pilot via autoresponder, since the material is not usually time-critical.

Social Sites
These can be facebook- or nyspace- style communities, traditional forums or message boards, and can be completely general or topic-specific like dating sites or hobby forums. Some are free to join and make their money via ads or other product sales, while others cost money to join or have paid "premium" memberships.

Content Sites
These sites specialize in providing information - sometimes unique or hard-to-find - to a specific niche topic or interest. The content can be text, audio, video or a mixture. The more unusual, and the more likely to earn money the content is, the more you can charge for membership.

The simplest membership programs to run are those based on email, since all you need is an email list and autoresponder software or service.

Next in difficulty are forums, either free or paid. There are many scripts available to run these (e.g. phpBB, vBulletin, Snitz) which have been around for years and there's plenty of information

If you plan to have an actual membership website then you'll be looking at something rather more complex. Examples are aMember Pro, Easy Member Pro, and MemberGate. You can also use free CMS software like Joomla and Wordpress with add-on scripts to run your site. Whichever way you choose, there is a substantial learning curve involved with getting and keeping the site running.

The next challenge you'll face with your membership site is creating or obtaining content.

Some membership models require you to provide ongoing new content every month without fail: if you don't, your members will gradually leave you.

Others, like email courses, allow you to create a set of content just once and dole it out to each member over time.

Member forums have the advantage that your members will create a great deal of content for you, and once the number of members reaches critical mass you will need only to manage the forum, not create content yourself.

How can you get content?

Your options are to buy it ready-packaged (eg PLR products for a product site), create it yourself, or pay others to create it. Which you choose to do depends on your skills and resources.