While your may have a pet site set up to help promote your products and services, why not convert it into a membership site for recurring income? Here are some ways to do that and ideas on how you can transform your site into a more profitable model.

1) Begin by doing a little research to see what type of membership sites are popular in your niche. If there are free trials, check them out to get an insider's look and see what's offered. Some have forum areas where only members can join in discussions, download freebies there, join in live chats for the group, etc. Others have areas where you enter and find monthly ebooks to read, maybes discount coupons to use, a product of the month, a newsletter or ezine, etc.

2) Once you find what looks appealing to you and something that you could incorporate fairly easily with what you already have, check with your hosting company to see about the easiest way to transform your site; for example, how to add a forum there, plus how to set up a secure access folder for this members' area on your website. For instance, if your domain is MyDomain.com, first you could set up a member area in a folder called "Members" and it would look like this: MyDomain.com/Members. Then you password protect the folder (see your web host for details on how to do this) and voila! That's where your members will go once they subscribe. Get help as needed added a free forum script to that folder, and set up a members' only forum with sections. Or set up an online newsletter AKA ezine there with a nice website template (search for free ones at your favorite search engine).

3) Money making avenues for your pet membership site could include any of the following:

• Set up coupons for your shopping cart. Place new coupons in a section of your forum or ezine each month.

• Write articles about pets or hire someone to ghostwrite for you from industry forums in your niche or freelance bid sites like Elance.com. Add your resource box to the articles and post them on your forum or in your ezine, adding links in them to products and services on our website so that web guests will click and go there to shop. Also submit some of these regularly to article directories to get links and more coverage.

• Place banner and small button type or other ads throughout your member area (like at the top of your forum or ezine.)

• Charge a membership fee and give away freebies in your members' area every month that are targeted for your niche. Then insert your ads in them as you can, without blatantly spamming everyone. For instance if you sell dog grooming tools you could offer paid members a free ebook with grooming instructions and tips that also contains some ads for our products and service inside.

• Set up a Classified Ads section and invite members to place ads. If it's a paid membership, ads can be free. If it's a free membership site, have members pay for ads. Plus sprinkle Googe Adsense in this area to bring in a few dollars here and there, like if someone placed an add about pet strollers and you have Adsense code in the section, ads for pet products will probably come up as people go to post, so if they click on the Google Ads, you make money for the clicks.