LESSON #32: How to Build a Membership Website

By | February 7, 2009
325 Comments

Within the past several lessons, I’ve covered a handful of different ways to build a website.

Today I’m going to talk about building a membership website…

(Watch this video…)

Join my coaching club

Main points:

  • Membership website = a website that contains a member area.

  • Memberships can be free, paid, or both.

  • Free membership sites: Often used for building a database of members, which can then be monetized in other ways. (Ex. facebook.com)

  • Remember, “the money is in the list”.

  • Paid membership sites: A membership fee is charged. It could be a one-time fee or a recurring membership fee.

  • Using recurring membership fees is a great way to add continuity to your business model.

  • Continuity = Cash Flow = Financial Freedom

  • Membership area is an ideal way to provide ongoing products/services.

  • (see video for behind-the-scenes of one of my 6-figure paid membership sites)

  • Multi-tiered membership sites: can give you the best benefits of both free and paid membership sites. (Grow a big list while generating income)

  • (see video for behind-the-scenes of one of my multi-tiered membership sites with over 30,000 members)

  • Tips for choosing a membership site script:

    – Get one that will install on your own domain.

    – Get one that is popular… there’s safety in numbers.

    – Make sure it will support your payment processing method.

    Possible choices:

    Membergate – high end solution with a great reputation. Runs about $4k-$30k.

    Amember – this is what I use for my paid membership sites.

    Butterfly Marketing – this is what I use for my multi-tier membership sites.

    Marketing Website Generator – This is a souped up version of Butterfly, made by my friend and programmer Nick Temple. Highly recommended.

    WordPress Wishlist – a membership plugin for WordPress (not shown on the video).

    Monthly Income Formula – A complete step-by-step home study course for setting up a membership site, including the script, ALL for much less cost than any of the scripts above.

    Action steps:

    1) Decide if you’re going to create a membership site.

    2) If yes, choose a script to run your site, and buy it.

    3) Install the script, or pay someone to install it for you. You can post projects and get scripts installed as cheap as $10 at Rent A Coder

    In the next lesson I’ll be covering WordPress!

    As always, you are welcome to post your questions and comments below 🙂

    Have a great day!

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    • 325 thoughts on “LESSON #32: How to Build a Membership Website”

    1. Brenda

      I’ve been following all of your lessons since #1 and I can tell you that I have really learned a lot of things that I thought I already knew, but you seemed to make it easier or explained it better than it had been taught to me before. Thanks,

      Brenda

      PS: My brother has a link to your lessons on his blog, [www.tldnames.blogspot.com] that’s how I got started watching and following them.

      Reply ↓
    2. Dave

      I haven’t got a membership site of my own but belong to several. I am thinking of starting one though related to my blog http://homerenewall.com “Home Renew all” Just haven’t got there yet.
      Thanks for the great info.

      Reply ↓
    3. Kenneth Washington

      Eric, I’ve been also following your lessons since day one and I thank you for making them freely available.

      I’ve been marketing on-line for 8 years now and always have been nervous about operating a membership site. Now I have opened http://www.MyAdShowcase.com and it’s coming along quite nicely.

      Admit there have been a few snags, but your lessons have helped me get over the hump.

      Thanks again for creating them and I look forward to more.

      – Kenney

      Reply ↓
    4. Anonymous

      Eric – I am very disappointed that all your tips require you buy another product and then another. I would really appreciate a Refund!!!!!!!

      Reply ↓
    6. Brett

      Eric,

      Thanks for the info, I’m in the process now of setting up a membership site.

      Question about TradingProSystem.com, I know that’s from David Vallieres, did you purchase rights from him on that, or is this a system you created? You mentioned AFfiliate for that site, where’s the affiliate link?

      Thanks,
      -Brett

      Reply ↓
    7. Dez Futak

      Hi Eric – I really like the price of your Monthly Income Formula product. Will it run on any webserver? (The hosting company I use has php/mysql etc).

      Great training videos by the way – this one was a good overview & the idea of a paid memberships site is something I’ve been chewing over for some time.

      Cheers,

      Dez.

      Reply ↓
    8. vijay

      Hi Eric,
      The membership model is good but I can’t figure out the way by which I can make money from a 100% free membership site. Take a example of 100% free dating site. Can you tell me the ways by which we can monetize and make money from the members list of such sites. All possible ways..

      Reply ↓
    9. chris marx

      I think there is a typo in the link to rentacoder.com in the video.
      (the link in the video says rentalcoder.com)

      good stuff though 🙂
      inspiring to see how well you’ve done with the membership sites 🙂

      Reply ↓
    10. Thordur

      Hi Eric,

      Iam an old custemer of yours:-)

      I am launching a new site with my wife, It is a skin care site, I would love to compine the site as an blog with skin care product reviews and skin care tips as also an skin care membership site,

      The site will talk about, acne treatments, cellulite, stretch marks etc, you get the idea.

      The thing is, I just simply don’t know if there is a market for it and how i can make desireble content that people are willing to pay for it,

      Any suggestion or an ideas on how I can do this Eric ?

      Reply ↓
    11. Colin Noden

      Hi Eric,
      One phrase jumped out during your video. Have a business plan. I see we are getting into the goodies stage of online marketing. Time to go back to the first videos and do some souls searching. Thanks, Colin

      Reply ↓
    12. David McLean

      Great post Eric, and it comes just at the right time for me, I have been looking at different membership software for a site /i hope to build in the very near future. If amember is what you use I think I will use that too.

      On another note I have some good information on wordpress setup and getting fresh unique content to your blog for free automaticly. drop me an email for details. Regards.

      Reply ↓
    13. Michael Rytter

      Hi Eric…this is a little off topic…sorry for that!

      What I would like to know, (and I can’t tell from your page source), is, do you stream your videos from a special server like amazon’s S3, or do you just run them from your regular hosting account(like Hostgator). I just built a membership site that has a lot of instructional videos in the members area (not the site my name points to here), but at this point due to my lack of web/video experience, I am making my members download them. This is o.k. as long as my members have fast connections, but anyone on dial-up is “hooped”!(The video files are HUGE downloads, both in individual file size, and number of files, probably comaprable to your “Trading system Pro” in number and size of vids).

      Thanks for any comments/help you can give!
      Michael Rytter
      Vedder Mountain Hardwoods
      Chilliwack BC

      Reply ↓
    14. Instant TV On Your PC

      That’s what I’ve recently caught on to…the fact that a membership sites such as facebook, ebay, and youtube are really nothing more than list building programs. The success element is getting your membership to go viral.

      Reply ↓
    18. Eric Post author

      First… these lessons are currently free.

      Second, if you follow them in order you will see that not all of them require you to buy something.

      As I mention in lesson #3, you should not buy stuff unless you understand fully why you are buying it.

      As I explain in lesson #8, there are some things that you need in order to run the type of business that I am teaching how to build.

      In the case of this lesson… it just depends on whether you want to build a membership site. If you don’t, there’s nothing to buy.

      If you do, then you need a script to run your site. It’s as simple as that.

      Reply ↓
    22. Eric Post author

      There are many ways to monetize a free membership, all of which I can not cover in this comment.

      If you’re building a list, you can email them with related products and services.

      You can put contextual ads, like AdSense, on the pages.

      You can create a product (or series of products) that you sell on the back-end, inside your membership site.

      A couple years ago I wrote about a guy named Markus Frind, who was making $10k a day from Adsense on his free dating site (plentyoffish.com). So it’s definitely possible.

      The dating niche has been pretty saturated for years now, so its unlikely you’d be able to break into the market and gain a serious market share. But its a big enough industry (one of the most common reasons why people surf the web) that there is plenty of profit to be gleaned from it.

      Reply ↓
    24. Eric Post author

      There is definitely a market for those topics.

      The way to create desireable content is to provide the solution to your audience’s problems.

      In the ones you mentioned above… people want to gid RID of acne, cellulite, stretch marks, etc.

      So the key for you is to have LEGITMATE ways of accomplishing it, and if so, people will pay for it.

      Reply ↓
    27. Eric Post author

      I actually do some of both. It’s actually cheaper to stream off my own server, and I do stream all of my lessons from my own server currently. But I do use S3 for some things, including many of the Trading Pro System videos. The main reason for this is to make sure the server does not get bogged down, as I am also using it to host sales pages ,etc. And if I put a video on a sales page, I generally stream it from S3 to help make sure the server hosting the sales page does not get bogged down and is able to serve the page itself quickly.

      But I have not found S3 to be any “faster” than my own server. People on dial-up still will have trouble, regardless of where the video is hosted. The main benefit of S3 for me is that it automatically scales itself, so you never need to worry about how much traffic those files are getting.

      I use a program called Bucket Explorer to manage my S3.

      Reply ↓
    28. Joe

      Hey Eric thanks for the all the info. I have learned a lot from you lessons. I still go back and watch them over and over because I will find things that I missed when I first watched them.

      Reply ↓
    30. Jose

      Hey Eric, priceless lesson as always!!!, I have a silly question now, what’s the difference between applets, plugIns, Widgets, and Scripts? How are they related? Is WordPress a script or a plugIn, or just a page template? Thanks in advance.

      Reply ↓
    32. Eric Post author

      It’s a perfectly good question.

      Some of those terms could be used interchangeably in some instances, but they do each have unique definitions…

      A “script” is the most generic term out of the above. It is basically a piece of code or collection of code that is written in a programming language, in order to do something. When I talk about scripts in these lessons, I am specifically talking about web-based applications. It could be a small script, which is placed within a web page (for example, to display dynamic content). Or it could be a larger script, which essentially acts as a web-based software program (such is the case with a membership site script).

      An applet is essentially a small script that runs within the context of a web browser. Most commonly we see applets.

      A plugin is basically an enabler. For example, your browser may need to have a plugin in order for an applet to be enabled to run. But I think the term plugin has sort of been changed to take on a broader meaning. When we talk about WordPress plugins, we’re basically talking about little add-ons. They are little pieces of script that you add onto the WordPress script to enable it to do something more.

      Widget is another word that has taken on broader meaning, as it seems to be continually used in new contexts… computer OS, websites, mobile phones, etc.
      But in general, when we talk about a web based widget, we are talking about a snippet of code that anyone can paste into their website, and it will add something to the page. an example on this blog would be the “ShareThis” link.

      WordPress is technically a web-based application, which includes scripting, templates, widgets and optional plugins. I’m not sure if it is correct usage of the word, but I personally call it a “platform” because it is sort of a framework upon which you can build your site, add plugins, etc.

      Reply ↓
    33. Trudy

      Hi Eric,
      The membership business model, like most, has both pros & cons. Of course the residual income would be a major benefit… but I feel that continually adding different content each month could prove to be very stressful. Like anything else, its not for everybody. If its your “bag” pun intended, go for it!

      Trudy Harris

      Reply ↓
    34. Jeanette Fitzgerald

      Hey Eric, great lesson, I’m wondering if you will ever cover how you get traffic to your websites. It seems like you have so much out there, I can not imagine advertising all those websites individually.

      Reply ↓
    35. Eric Post author

      Yes I am planning on devoting at least 10-20 of the lessons for traffic generation.

      Reply ↓
    36. Dave

      I would love to start a membership site. I have known for some time from other readings that membership sites are very lucrative. I believe I speak for many readers, or maybe not, but the thing that is stopping me is the feeling that I don’t have the specialized knowledge on any niche subject to justify a membership site. I don’t want to put up a site just to make money unless I can provide a real service to members. Shouldn’t providing a valuable service to customers be one of the primary considerations. If so do you have any pointers to help with assuring value to members.

      Reply ↓
    37. MJ

      Monthly Income Formula
      Error Open Tag..
      page will not fully load to see your offer..
      Thanks

      Reply ↓
    38. Eric Post author

      Absolutely… same as any product, you want to provide real value. If it’s a monthly membership, it will be easy to tell if you’re providing value, because they won’t stay subscribed if you’re not 😉

      I’ll talk about value more when we get into product creation, but always shoot to provide 10X the value of what you’re charging.

      Reply ↓
    39. Eric Post author

      what browser and OS are you using? I just checked it on browsershots and it should be OK in all browsers… Or let me know if there is a specific error message. thanks

      Reply ↓
    40. Tom

      Eric you seem to get to these lessons just as I am getting to needing them. I am currently in the process of developing a membership site, and needed this lesson. Currently My site is Free but still in development so I am updating it daily. I would like your permission to advertise these lessons on it. Thank You!

      Reply ↓
    42. Jeri

      Hi Eric,

      Thanks, Eric, for some wonderful lessons.
      Just thought I would let you know that Butterfly Marketing has been blacklisted as a spam site by Web of Trust http://www.mywot.com/
      Just thought you might want to know.

      Thanks again!
      Jeri

      Reply ↓
    43. Eric Post author

      Thanks for the comment. I just checked it out, and it’s nothing to worry about. Apparently mywot accepts anonymous spam complaints and doesn’t provide any documentation. BM is not a spam site.

      Reply ↓
    45. Jamie

      Just wanted to add, there’s another membership script (it’s free with ad links):

      http://www.geniegate.com/listings/dolphin/

      It is more designed to be extended (for customization) rather than have a million features only 1/4 of which are actually used. (I’m of the view that code bloat should be avoided – better to provide a framework that is easy to extend)

      Reply ↓
    46. Kaycee

      Eric,

      i would like to thank you for the information that you so freely provide. As for anyone who believes that you are strictly promoting yourself with “new products” as the lessons progress, hasn’t taken into account the actual cost of time and investment that you are making. If anyone believes that it is self promo then indeed they do need to start on lesson one, watch and truly listen to what you are teaching.

      Gurus, or any other so to speak individual consistently promote themselves and “products” that many times leave any person whether a newbie or a seasoned internet marketer scratching their head, whilst trying to decipher the data and information in front of them.
      For those whose comment states that your lessons are right on time, I suggest that is a reflection of your “complete teaching module” as your grateful students are right on time in the learning curve that you have established.

      Thank you a GRATEFUL STUDENT
      Kaycee

      Reply ↓
    47. Ralph

      Simply awesome!!!
      I have been reading from you for a long time now… love your latest product: PushButtonMarketer.
      This is the best lesson so far… You have been very honest with all you lessons and I have personally signed up to some of the freebies before (occassionally bought stuffs) and wondered how they were done. Nice one! Well done and keep up the good work.
      One request though..
      I used to write gospel based motivational news letter for a christian organization of over 200 membership and intent to build a free (social-networking) membership site. Can you recommend one the best scripts for social networking. I came across boonex.com though I am still exploring, but guess your input will be helpful because I count on every word of yours.

      Reply ↓
    48. Tom

      I have found a FREE script for a free membership website at http://www.interology.com. They cant beat Monthly Income Formula’s price for paid membership site script though. I will be purchasing that pretty soon here.

      Reply ↓
    49. Bounama

      Hi Eric
      It’s a wonderful piece of the IM you have cleared. There is really something to learn for anyone who is interested in going forward in the IM stuff. And your resources also are valuable.
      Thanks once again

      Reply ↓
    50. nis

      I just got an email from Eric since I have subscribed to his newsletter.
      I know this is off this topic.
      Today I got an email about “Breakthrough Profit Creation” and just for $1…It looks so atrractive. BUt guys do not forget to read the term sof condition before you buy.
      Youwill be charged $39.95/month unless you cancel.
      I know that might be cheap for some of you but I just wanted to bring that into attention.
      This is also one clever way of doing marketing.

      Good Luck.

      Reply ↓

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