The latest ‘Site Reference’ newsletter has been released. The featured article is titled “Membership Sites ““ How To Handle Common Membership Site Challenges.” [Site Reference Newsletter]


The latest Site Reference newsletter has been released.

‘Membership Sites ““ How To Handle Common Membership Site Challenges’

by Jeremy Gislason

Membership sites are one of the most lucrative business models on the internet. Some of the benefits include earning continual income, incurring less advertising expenses, earning the trust and respect of members, building your reputation, and being able to make various offers to members.

Membership sites can be very profitable indeed; but maintaining them is no walk in the park, especially if you don’t have the proper knowledge or experience.

Here are the most common challenges encountered by membership site owners, and the steps you can take to resolve these issues.

1) You have to provide excellent content or products on a consistent basis.

To keep members happy and satisfied, you have to provide quality content. Unless you’re happy creating the content yourself, you’re better off outsourcing the task to qualified freelancers, so you can focus on the moneymaking aspects of your business.

When you outsource, you may run the risk of hiring incompetent ghost writers. That’s why you should test them with a small assignment first to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Once you’ve chosen your ideal freelancers, ask them if they can provide the same type of quality content on a consistent basis.

Before you launch your membership site, make sure that you have already found the best freelancers or ghostwriters for the job, and that they are committed to providing their services every month.

Keep the contact details of other good freelancers. In case your main ones fail to deliver due to any reason, you can choose the 2nd or 3rdbest to fill in their positions.

2) Reports indicate that the average member cancels after 3 months.

Even if you have monthly income coming in, you need to continuously promote your membership sites so that new members can replace the ones who have cancelled.

However, your ultimate aim is to keep your members from canceling by providing excellent products and services. Over deliver and strive to exceed their expectations.

As an example, let’s say you’re providing quality PLR products and teaching your members how to make money with them through a step-by-step system. If your techniques and products really work, and their ROI (return on investment) is high, they’d be crazy to cancel their membership.

3) Membership sites have lower conversion rates than other site models.

Since membership sites charge monthly, people are more doubtful of joining because they have to shed out money every month without knowing if it’s truly worth it. So how can you resolve this?

Forced continuity is the answer. You can set up a free trial offer or a special deal such as a “$1 trial for 30 days.” You can then bill them monthly after the trial period, unless they cancel.

Forced continuity has gotten a negative reputation because either some customers are not aware of the monthly charges, or the membership site owner did not make the forced continuity statement clear on his website.

That’s why you should clearly state that your members can cancel anytime, and tell them exactly how to do it. Give them your help desk url, email, or phone number as an added assurance that they may contact you if they want to cancel.

If you can set up a system where the members can automatically cancel by themselves, it will be a huge advantage since some members might be too hesitant to ask for a cancellation (hence they won’t join in the first place).

4) Members can’t handle information overload.

Many membership sites simply provide too many materials that tend to get members confused.

Giving enormous amounts of valuable stuffs is an effective strategy to keep members; but it may backfire if the members don’t know what to do with everything you’ve given them.

Consider providing step-by-step, foolproof instructions on how to use the membership products. Unless you know your members’ knowledge or experience level, don’t assume. Ask your members to fill up a survey so you’ll know how to treat the majority of them. If there are many differing opinions or if in doubt, explain everything as if you’re doing it to a 12-year old.

5) You may have to deal with some unethical members (Members using one-time credit cards; those who sign up, download everything, and then cancel immediately; those who share their login info).

What you can do is to blacklist these unethical members so you can avoid having them as your customers in the future.

You may also use a download protection software like DL Guard to prevent members from sharing their download details.

Since we can’t do much about these issues, don’t waste your energy on them; just focus on the more important aspects of your business.

6) Credit card has been declined or has expired.

Use a membership management solution that allows a reminder email to be automatically sent to any member whose card has expired or has been declined.

The way the software works is it will automatically ask members to update their credit card details if it fails to rebill them. Members will regain access once they have given valid credit card information.
window.google_render_ad();

If this is not feasible for you, you (or someone you hired) can always contact them to update their information to restore their account access.

Operating and maintaining a membership site can be challenging, but the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages. In this article, you discovered how to handle the most common dilemmas encountered by membership site owners. Are you now ready to cash in on this billion-dollar industry?

Want to know proven ways to tremendously increase membership sales? Want to take membership marketing to a whole new level of overflowing profits? Build high-earning membership sites like a pro by going to http://www.membershipmillionaire.com

Top Strategies and Intelligence…

How To Write For Search Engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing, as a distinct style, was born in the Internet era and has matured before our very eyes in a relatively short span of time. Although it is evolving and maturing still,and will continuously do so, we can define some of the tried and tested steps of content optimization to help unique pages place at or near the top of search engine rankings.

Best WordPress Plugins Every WordPress Blogger Should Be Using On ThereBlogs

Are you tired of searching the web for the best WordPress plugins for your WordPress blog? If so then today is your lucky day because what I have you here is what I think to be the best WordPress plugins every WordPress blogger should be using for there blog or blogs period.

Membership Sites – How To Handle Common Membership Site Challenges

Membership sites can be very profitable; but maintaining them is no walk in the park, especially if you don’t have the proper knowledge or experience. This article reveals the most common challenges encountered by membership site owners, and the steps you can take to resolve these issues.

Get the latest strategies instantly or share them with your own visitors with Site-Reference’s RSS Feeds

Related Site-Reference Video

5 Things To Hate About Web Design (and how to fix them) Part 2 of 2

In this second part we examine a few more annoying traits of web design and how to fix them. We’ll examine information overload, the revenge of the columns and finally how to keep your visitors happy.

Succeed With These Webmaster Resources…


Make your Google AdSense Monthly Check Bigger!

You’ll wish you had heard of this sooner. Use Yield Build’s ad format optimizer to figure out the ad unit sizes, shapes, colors and formats that make the most money from your AdSense. Used successfully on hundreds of sites;revenue lifts of up to 200%. Start Today!

ShoutYour News to the World!

Grab free PR Web account and expose your website to thousands of bloggers and journalists. Plus get listed in Yahoo News and Topix.

GetYour Website Listed in 20 Search Engines – FREE!

Give your website a traffic boost with exposure on 20 search engines.Register your website for inclusion with this free submission service.Don’t wait – Get listed today!

Questions, Answers and Discussions From Our Members…

WYSIWYG Editors

You’ll hear many of the hardened old school webmasters swear that doing it all by hand is the only way to go. But, isn’t there a time and place for WYSIWYG editors? They do make life easier some times, don’t they?

Google Profile

Have you seen Google Profile yet? Wonder why Google would bother asking us to fill in our own profiles?With all the info they store on us, you’d think they know us better than we know ourselves…

SEO for Membership Sites

It seems that most believe allowing search engines to crawl pages restricted to humans, such as the ones on membership sites, can’t be done.But is that really true? Are there no ways around this?

Looking for Pertinant Keywords?

Doom and gloom seem all the rage in regards to internet searches these days. Queries like how to cook leftovers or where to get cheap clothes are topping the charts…

Backing up Your OS

I am looking for some advice regarding backing-up and restoring of an operating system. I thought the best approach maybe to create and image of the existing OS and then to put this on the new box. Is this the way to do it or are there other suggestions?

Newsletter Information

RSS Feed: Use our articles as your content – subscribe to our RSS feed

Want to read more articles? Go to the front page of Site Reference

We also have plenty of articles in our archives

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Site-Reference for granting permission to reprint the latest newsletter.

Sharing is caring