9 Membership Website & Continuity Income Business Models
The Awesomeness of Membership/Subscription Models
Izzy and I are working away at creating a Foolish membership site to teach you to have a successful online business. Our first focus will be membership sites since Izzy has several successful membership sites that allowed him to quit his six figure corporate job and I’ve consulted on several membership sites (including Izzy’s) to make them more money.
We have a unique approach to online businesses that we summed up as Izzy’s 3 Product Approach (TM, copyright, patent-pending, etc 
). We take a Content Creator approach to online business where we build an audience through a free, but awesome content series such as a podcast and then offer another awesome product for free in exchange for their email address. Once the audience is growing, we offer an awesome product for sale.
And that’s just the beginning of it.
One thing I find a bit strange is all the confusion about membership sites or continuity business models. I find it strange because we are completely surrounded in our daily lives with all sorts of continuity programs such as magazines, newspapers, cable TV, utilities, gyms, residential services (housekeeping, pest control, etc).
The list of membership and continuity services are almost endless.But maybe I should define a continuity program. It is a subscription. You buy and they deliver a product more than once. To illustrate this, here are ways–off the top of my head, of different continuity models.
The 9 Different Membership Website and Continuity Income Models
The Freebie: You join a forum or email newsletter. You didn’t pay anything, but a product is delivered to you weekly, monthly or you have continual access to content such as inside a forum.
The Charity: You agree to donate money to a charity and they deduct money from your account every month, quarter, year or whatever you agreed to. You don’t get anything in exchange except for the good deed.
The Newspaper: You subscribe to a newspaper or other daily/weekly publication and they bill you multiple times per year such as weekly, monthly or annually.
The Magazine: You subscribe to a publication and pay an annual subscription fee. Though you get the best deals if you subscribe for multiple years and pay up front. There isn’t any continuity income on the part of the magazine because you aren’t auto-renewed each year. They have to do some heavy marketing to get you to renew your subscription. You get the continuity of having a magazine in the mail every month.
The eNewsletter: This is much like the Newspaper and there is even an off-line version called (you guessed it) The Newsletter. This is a periodical on a specific topic (niche) such as investing where you get timely information that you pay either monthly, bi-annually or annually. There most likely is an auto-renew component to your subscription.
The eCourse: Similar to the eNewsletter, but the scope is greatly reduced to a single topic and typically only a few months in duration. This could be training on how to raise urban chickens or how to use a software or do email marketing–I think you get the picture. This is also one of the easiest continuity programs to set up. You need a sales page and an autoresponder such as Aweber. All your content is delievered by email and you can take payment by Paypal. This tends to work best as a one-time payment instead of a monthly subscription. Can also be delivered by RSS.
The Online Course: A variation of the eCourse except this time the content is password protected on a website instead of delivered to the subscriber. A simple way to do this is use the password protection built in to WordPress and the Read More tag. Or you can use a membership management software to automate the whole thing. This is very close to a Membership site.
The Publisher: This is similar to the Online Course and the Newsletter. The subscribers get access to member-only periodical content. IzzyVideo fits this model. Izzy’s members get two premium videos per month and access to the extensive video library. I would say most “membership” sites are the publisher model and it is a great model. We teach this model, but will be adding the following one in our teaching too.
The Country Club: This is my definition of what a membership site really is–a country club. I like to think of a membership site as a place the members can interact with each other and not just the content. I love this model because it opens up the opportunity for user-generated premium content. A lot of sites have user-generated content such as Digg.com or even Facebook, but most don’t have premium versions where the members are paying to get access to the content created by the other members.
The Country Club also improves the retention and stickiness of the membership site. Retention being that they stay members and stickiness is how long they stay on the site. Members get a ton of value being able to interact with like-minded people. When you can share the ups and downs with someone else who understands, you’ll keep coming back. Many times the content (typically the reason for paying) becomes a minor thing.
Except when joining a paid forum where the only content is user-generated content. Oh, and there are a lot of these in the investing and tech worlds. Anytime access to other experts as peers can greatly improve your own circumstances is reason enough to pay for access. Industry associations offer this, too.
This is just an overview. There are a bunch of different ways to tweak each one of these models and mix-and-match them. Look at your niche or passion and think up ways you can use one or more of the above models for your online business.
~ t
