KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays

Chapter 6. Membership Sites — Turning Your Internet Business into a Passive Revenue Machine

One of the biggest challenges in marketing is the fact that it's never-ending. Making profits means making lots of sales, but at the end of every sale, you have to return to the marketplace and find another buyer.

There are things that you can do of course to bring your old buyers back. Newsletters, e-mail marketing, and a constant flow of good content will all keep attracting those buyers and ad clickers. But each time you send out one of those e-mails or put up a new post, you still have to persuade users to buy a product or click on an ad. Internet marketing is a constant process of attracting, selling, and converting.

Wouldn't it be great if every time you converted a lead into a customer, those customers agreed to pay again and again, without fail, every single month?

Instead of wondering how much you're going to earn each month, you'd know that your subscribers will give you a set amount of money. Your business would have a firm financial foundation, allowing you to focus your efforts on creating new products that can bring in large, immediate bursts of cash to supplement that steady flow. Create a system in which the products your subscribers buy are created and distributed by staff or freelancers, and you'll even have a high-paying passive revenue stream.

That's what this chapter teaches you to do. It explains what membership sites are, what they should offer, how to price your subscriptions, ...