Membership Blogs: Benefits of a Members-Only Blog

Membership blogs have the potential to create a tidy, passive revenue stream for their owners if set up properly. Membership blogs are easier to set up than you might think, and even easier to maintain when using the right tools.

Now, your first question about membership blogs properly revolves around the necessary software you need to set one up. You’ve probably read about membership software that costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars. But when you set up membership blogs on WordPress, you can do it for much less than that. WordPress itself is free, and so are some of the membership plugins you can install to manage your members.

Main Benefits of Membership Blogs

Why would you want to create membership blogs? Let’s go over some of the benefits you’ll enjoy when you set up your blog so that customers can become paying members of your site.
Membership blogging provides recurring income: Let’s suggest that you’ve set up a blog that members can join for $10 per month. Then let’s pretend that you’ve recruited at least 25 members. When they each pay $10 per month, that’s $250 per month.  Assuming that you have generated plenty of quality content to keep them busy for at least twelve months, that equates to $3,000 per year.
And that’s with a very low price and very few members. Assuming that your membership blog takes off and attracts 500 members, you could be making $5,000 per month, or $60,000 per year. That’s more than some people make at an average day job! In other words, membership blogs have the potential to provide their owners with full-time income.
Membership blogging can be more fun than other avenues of online marketing: Some people pale at the thought of spending hour after grinding hour in front of a computer all day long. But if you have a membership site passively bringing in money, you can alleviate several hours per day for other activities.
Of course, you don’t want to neglect your members. Be sure you make yourself available to them for online chat, Q&A sessions, technical help, forum responses and of course, for creating additional content.
Membership blogs require very little capital to set up: Your only upfront expenses are the cost of purchasing the domain and web hosting. If you can create the content yourself and implement free tools like WordPress and free plugins like the Easy PayPal WordPress plugin to manage your members and your content, then you’ll be on your way to making hundreds and thousands of dollars with very little money down.

Drawbacks of Membership Blogs

There are very few drawbacks of creating membership blogs. Of course, you’ll face the problem of customers signing up, taking advantage of all your content, then canceling their subscription the next day. Depending upon how you set up the site, you can drip feed content to prevent this from happening.
Membership blogs do take a while to set up in terms of quality content. It will take a significant time commitment on your part to write blog posts and develop products and tutorial videos that will keep members’ interested for months on end. But you can also host webinars and Q&A sessions that require less development and are more hands-on. Overall, membership blogs typically present more benefits than drawbacks.

  by imsuccesscenter.com