Starting A Membership Site

How to start a membership site

Social Communities

The easiest free social community to start is through Ning.com. You can set it up fast without technical knowledge and start promoting it right away through the Ning community and around the web.

People love social sites and will join the ones they are most interested in. Having a free social community is a great way to introduce lead-in products and services around the topic of your community.

It is also a great, fast way to build a list and credibility with your members. There are many kinds of social community software apps out there, but by far the best we've used is Ning's.

Paid Membership Site Software

Depending on what kind of paid membership site you want to start, there are different kinds of applications and services to suit your needs. The industry leader in sales and sheer number of features is VTribes.com.

We use their membership software for one of our memberships with over 400 members and we love it.

Combining a free social community as a front-end to your paid membership is a powerful one-two punch for growing an online business.

It is unbelievable the topics people have started free/paid memberships around. From mineral water to stock clubs to churches and fans clubs, people are monetizing their ability to build communities around all kinds of topics.

Why Start A Membership Site?

The #1 reason is residual income. Instead of selling one-off products or services, for the same effort you can create a membership site and get paid by members month to month.

By starting people off in a free social group and building up your expertise in their eyes, it is pretty easy to get a certain percentage to join your paid membership if the niche is right and people really are into what you are selling them.

How to feed paid membership with a free social community...

Community Zen News

More Tips for Engaging Your Members
Anyone running a membership website knows that keeping your members engaged and active is a challenging and time consuming part of the business. Smart membership site owners come up with creative and new ways to engage members and keep interest alive. Online discussion forums are great places to hook people, and there are [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "More Tips for Engaging Your Members", url: "http://www.communityzen.com/membership-sites/more-tips-for-engaging-your-members" }); - 2 months ago
Offering Trial Subscriptions to Increase Membership
There are several ways to get members to join your membership website and start paying you. You might recall that this is how you plan to make your money? One way that you can get members to your site is to offer some sort of a free trial membership. Free trial memberships [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Offering Trial Subscriptions to Increase Membership", url: "http://www.communityzen.com/membership-sites/offering-trial-subscriptions-to-increase-membership" }); - 2 months ago
Retention Plan
After all of your hard work recruiting new members, it’s even more hard work to keep them. Most membership websites lose members faster than they can find them. Stopping that reverse flow is critical to your success. So, how do you do actually convince your members to stay? Here are several ideas that [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Retention Plan", url: "http://www.communityzen.com/membership-sites/retention-plan" }); - 2 months ago

Helpful Membership Software Links

Social Marketing
Here is an example of a free Ning community that is very popular which feeds two different paid membership sites.
Membership Software
This is our pick for the best paid membership software on the market today. We've used it for a high-end membership site with around 400 members for over 3 years. It has brilliant features.
Community Zen
This is a great blog to learn more about building communities, both free and paid, online.

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