A membership site is an amazing online business that enables you to earn your passive income, because it is a recurring payment where your members will pay you on a monthly basis.
In this chapter, I am going to show you how to generate extra income stream from your membership site. This is another exciting part where you can increase the revenue from your membership site without the need to generate extra traffic or trying hard to get more members.
Without further delay, let’s get started!
Membership Level
The first method that generates extra income for your membership site is by implementing the membership level. In this method, you will have one or two more levels, such as basic, pro, and deluxe level.
Obviously, the price is higher for each upgrade. According to research, people are willing to pay for online content, because the pay-for contents are much more effective than the free content.
Therefore, you can actually sell your membership site in different prices and charge higher depending on the kind of content you are offering.
The higher the level of your membership site, the more exclusive the contents should be. This is why they are willing to pay more for the upgraded version.
Banner Ads
Apart from setting up several membership levels, you can sell advertising spaces on your website for products related to your theme. Insert spaces to fit in the banner ads on your website.
You won’t make a profit from the sale but you will get paid for advertising the product. Meaning to say, this is not an affiliate program, you will only get paid once for putting up the banner ads.
Of course, you can use the spaces to promote your own product, as well as other people’s products. These can be real world products or e-books, reports, or how-to instructions.
The advertisements for these products are on your website. When members click on the ads, you are paid for a lead or a percentage of the sale.
Email Marketing
The third method to earn extra income is by mailing out new offers to your members. Email marketing has been used by marketers in the past decades, and statistics showed that emails are 40 times more successful at acquiring new clients than either Facebook or Twitter.
So, why not use this opportunity when you already have all the mailing addresses that you need when they subscribed to your membership site?
Regardless to promote your own product as vendor, or other people’s product as an affiliate, email marketing is a time-tested technique that has proven to work better than any other social media platform.
Sell the Membership Site
Here we come to the final method, which is selling away the membership site. This is the method that will bring the largest amount of income to you, but one thing for sure is you will lose your passive income stream.
However, you can always make up by having more than just one membership site.
Once you have a certain amount of regular members, you can actually consider selling away the site for a big payday. For the same reason people sell away properties in the real estate business, this is called the capital appreciation.
You can cash in big without doing a product launch. Sell away a membership site is easier than launching a brand new product.
The price of the membership site depends on the amount of the members you have. It can easily reach 10 to 12 times the monthly income if you have a massive amount of members.
For instance, if your membership site is doing $1000 a month, you can ask for $10,000 to $12,000 when selling it away.
Before selling away your membership site, you need to plan on how to transfer the details to your client. The things that you need to transfer to the new owners are:
- Domain Name
- Web Hosting
- Billing Account
- Member Database
#1: Domain Name
With the improvement of the domain name severs online nowadays, transferring domain name to the clients is easier than before. To transfer the domain to another registrar, you need to first verify that your administrative contact information is valid.
Once you know that it is applicable, you need to cancel your Protected Registration or Private Registration for your domain name. Next, unlock the domain name.
And then, you need to authorize the transfer in your account with the new registrar. Once the client accepts the transfer, you are done with this.
The domain name server will then notify you with a confirmation email. The process may vary in different domain name servers, such as NameCheap and GoDaddy. So, be sure to check out the guideline first.
#2: Web Hosting
Moving on, switching a web hosting can be a complicated process. So, this will be the last resort in transferring the web hosting.
You can simplify the whole process by using a shared hosting plan, in which the server provider serves pages for multiple websites; each will have its own Internet domain name, from a single web server, therefore making it easier to transfer to your client.
If the membership site is the only thing in the hosting account, I suggest that you give the username and password to your client. This would make the transferring task easier as well.
Here we come to the last resort, which you will alternatively transfer from your own virtual private server to client’s hosting. Kindly seek for the guideline to carry out this process, as different host may have different processes in switching the host.
#3: Billing Account
Transferring billing account is easier; all you need to do is give access to the new owner to the membership site administrative page. Have them relink the billing permissions to his account.
This is applicable for both ClickBank and JVZoo. For both of these market places, all you need to do is change the payment address. That is all there is to it. And then, you are done with the transferring of the billing account.
One thing to take note on this is never use a direct PayPal button for your membership site because there will be less leverage than to create a buy button through ClickBank or JVZoo. The process to transfer your billing account to a new owner is much complicated if you use a PayPal button.
If you do not plan to sell away the membership site, PayPal would be the easiest way to create the subscription button.
#4: Member Database
The final thing that you need to transfer to your client is the member database in your membership site. There are 2 ways depending on which way you use to store and manage your members:
- AutoResponder
- Scripting
If you are using AutoResponder to manage your members, import the leads over to your client’s AutoResponder. From there on, he can manage the members from his own AutoResponder.
If your lead is built in using a script, such as WishList, your client can use it to mail out right away. What he needs to do is reconfigure the settings in the plugin.
Once you have all 4 things successfully transferred to your client, you are then completely sells off the membership site
