1. Content-based Membership Sites
With a simple content-based membership site you can provide new content to your members every month that could include any of the following elements:
- A new “Special Report” created every month
- Video tutorials (Camtasia screen capture videos, for example)
- Expert interviews
- An Ask-the-Expert page
- Recommended resources
- Articles
- You can charge $37 to $297 a month (or more) for this content.
Examples of content-based subscription sites are restaurantowner.com, rockstarfitnessmarketing.com, or insidermusicbusiness.com.
The profit margins can be huge, because by keeping the content online there are no fulfillment costs. Kavit Haria makes $80,000 a month from his membership sites selling how-to-make-money-from-your-music type information to musicians from all over the world with an 83 percent profit margin.
Remember that you don’t need to be the expert yourself. You can simply be the publisher of the information and pay an expert to provide the content every month. And you don’t need any special skills or technology.
Finally, content-based membership sites are extremely easy to set up and update (more on this later).
2. Monthly Newsletters
I subscribe to various newsletters myself to keep abreast of topics I am interested in, including StansberryResearch.com’s investment newsletter, the “Sovereign Man Confidential” newsletter on how to protect your assets, and Expansions.com’s newsletter on conspiracy theories (don’t ask!). Prices vary from $17 a month to $397 a year, and you get a monthly newsletter sent to your inbox with all the latest information.
Nick Laight has thousands of members at www.whatreallymakesmoney.com, and he charges $150 a year for his business opportunity review newsletter.
To watch Nick Laight explain how to profit from your own newsletter, live at the Internet Millionaire Bootcamp, go to www.laptopmillionaire.tv/nicklaight.
3. Online Software-as-a-Service and Internet Services
Software, hosting, autoresponders, webinar services, shopping cart tools, and so on can be amongst the most lucrative residual income streams you can have online, because they can become an integral part of someone’s business and these people might stay on as paying members for years.
Examples include GoToWebinar.com (webinar service provider), GetResponse.com (autoresponders), HostGator.com (hosting), and 1ShoppingCart.com (shopping cart tools).
Why not license some software or have some created for you by a web programmer? I recently licensed a YouTube-related software tool for $2,000, and then had a software programmer from www.vWorker.com create another tool for $1,500. I gave access to these two software tools to my clients for only $37 a month, and at one point I had 1,187 paying members on this continuity program.
4. CD/DVD of the Month
This has a very high perceived value (higher than a paper newsletter, for example) and is incredibly easy to set up.
For example, Kunaki.com or Disk.com can get a CD sent out for only $5 to $6. You simply upload your content to their site (for example, an MP3 file or an MP4 file), and then simply upload an Excel spreadsheet with your list of customers every month, and they duplicate your disks and send them out to that list.
DoubleYourDating.com provides interviews every month with dating experts through a CD-of-the-month program (they charge $30 a month; it’s a massive eight-figure business! And a competitor sends out a DVD each month for $79 a month!).
Another real-world example of this was the now-defunct Columbia House Record Club offer of five CDs for just pennies. It attracted millions of subscribers a year with that irresistible front-end offer (the back end was a $40 a month recurring membership). By the end of 1955, the Columbia House Record Club boasted 128,000 members who purchased 700,000 records. In 1975, it surpassed the 3-million-member mark. The company shipped its one-billionth record in 1990 and membership exceeded 10 million by the end of 1991.
“If I was starting all over again I would go for a DVD-of-the-month club!” says membership site expert Lee McIntyre.
To watch Lee McIntyre explain how to get up to 1,000 members for your continuity program go to www.laptopmillionaire.tv/leemcintyre.
5. Free Community Sites
These sites are good for lead generation (building your list). They have the potential to become viral and give you credibility in your marketplace. The challenge is that most free community sites don’t go viral and never build up the critical mass necessary to make them viable and profitable. This model can be a bit hit-or-miss.
Examples of free community sites include:
- HearandPlay.com: with 80,000 musicians, founder Jermaine Griggs generates up to $1,000,000 a year selling products to his members.
- PsychCentral.com: an independent mental health network featuring original peer-reviewed editorial content, news, research briefs, and more. It gets more than 1.1 million visitors a month.
- FitDay.com: more than 2.2 million members worldwide.
6. Done-for-Them Services
Examples of done-for-them monthly continuity programs include:
- Private label rights sites (PLR)—you get a new PLR product and website each month.
- Trading signal services—for example, my friend Guy Cohen offers his incredible OVI stock market indicator to traders for $97 a month (www.oviindex.com).
- Access to databases—for example, real estate auctions lists, or car auctions lists, bank property foreclosure lists (www.bankforeclosurelist.com, for example, gives you access for free for seven days, and then it costs $97 a month).
One of my all-time favorite business success stories is that of a monthly done-for-them newsletter subscription service created by the late John Gommes.
He hired one woman for $1,400 a month to research and list every week all the free competitions people could enter to win free stuff. Among those she identified were competitions like “Win a free car by entering the Wal-Mart supermarket draw!” and “Win a free holiday to the Caribbean by entering the Thomas Cook draw!” and “Win a year’s supply of wine,” or “Win a free toaster!”
He promoted this newsletter service through direct mail in the United Kingdom, and he signed up more than 50,000 paying members and made millions of dollars a year from it.
7. Fixed-term Membership
With fixed-term memberships, content is delivered for a specified term (e.g., a six-month tutorial with weekly lessons sent via autoresponder e-mails). Content is created just once and is then sold over and over again.
This is very easy to set up and run. It is the same as the content-based subscription site, but people know how long they’re going to stay on as members.
With content-based membership programs, members could stay on for months and months (sometimes years) but the average member only stays on for four months. It is common to lose 10 percent to 15 percent of your members every month, but as long as you grow by 20 percent a month or more your membership base should keep expanding.
Having a fixed-term membership can increase the stick rate from the average of four months to six months because the members know and expect to pay for the duration of the six-month program, but you lose the 10 percent of members who would have kept paying you for over a year in an open-ended content-based program.
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