Thinking About Setting Up A Membership Site
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 18, 2009
First, the latest TTM Consulting Newsletter, Educate Employees Consistently, is now available.
The latest newsletter is my 133rd missive since 2003. I still continue to get new subscribers, and one of the things they miss is getting access to newsletters from earlier in the game. I've been thinking about that, and wondering what might be the best way to go about finding a way to give access to those newsletters, or any previous newsletters, while still having the opportunity to make a small chunk of change off it.
I've got two ideas, two different directions, that I could go. One, I could think about compiling them into a book of some sort. The problem with that is, based on their length, I could only fit maybe 20 to 25 newsletters into a book, which means I'd have to put together a bunch of books, otherwise people would still miss some of them.
Or two, I could create a membership site as an offshoot of this blog. I could set a monthly fee, and put all of my newsletters, outside of the initial free ones on my newsletters page, onto the site for folks to access whenever they wanted to. It would be much easier, though still somewhat time consuming, to do it this way, but I could get all of the newsletters on the site, including the healthcare newsletters, and consistently add the newer ones to it. That way, I could also take my time in adding them all, not having to have every single newsletter on the site at the outset.
And, I could add other stuff into the mix, which may include audio and video submissions from myself, and possibly from others. That, plus I would go back and remove the free access to all the newsletters that I've posted on this blog since some point last week, since that wouldn't quite be fair, now would it?
I'd like a little bit of feedback from some of you, though, on this idea. Let me know what you think of either idea; I appreciate the input already.
Often I find the best model to get folks to pay for articles or newsletters is given some free information or the ability to read the first few paragraphs (wet their appetite) and then have them pay to see the rest.
Hi Keith,
Thanks for the comment. On my newsletters page, I actually have 10 examples of my management newsletter, and 5 examples of my healthcare newsletter, the full shot. I figure that gives people an idea of what the newsletters will be like when they subscribe. If you look to the left there, above the bird, you see the link to my newsletters page in big, bold letters. 🙂
The first couple sentences work great for that. But you need to remember to write about stuff other people don’t write.
If I see “something about affiliate marketing.. something something… learn how to make money from home… something something” pay to read the rest I’ll obviously just find the same thing for free on the internet.
But I think you should be fine Mitch, your articles are actualy pretty interestin.
Gry dla Dzieci´s last blog post..Karaoke – Ubieranka
Thanks Gry. Everything in my membership site would be stuff people couldn’t get anywhere else, because I’d definitely make sure all those newsletters were nofollow links and protected content. That, plus the descriptions and links would be nondescript, and with the titles being the main thing instead of the topic, without any optimization, it would be a major fluke for anyone to just “find” the articles.