Creating & Running A Successful Membership Website: Recurring Revenue Business Model
- What ideas can work great for Recurring Revenue Business Model?
- How to convert any Project based service into a Membership Model?
- Sales funnel for your membership site
- What are different membership business models to consider?
- How to increase revenue After a successfully setting up a membership Site?
- Brick & Mortar Business that should implement Membership Website
- How to put this all together?
This article is a part of series of blogs we are writing for The Prefr.co Network This article will give you information to set up a recurring revenue business model website from scratch. I will try to touch on all points like why create a membership website, planning, creating, launching, marketing and monitoring such membership sites using WordPress.
What ideas can work great for Recurring Revenue Business Model?
Software as a Service
If you have any software package, work on a subscription model. Take a cue from big companies like Adobe who changed their Creative Suite to cloud subscription service. They did this because smaller entrepreneurs were making it big with SAAS Models.
Affiliates Sales
If you don’t have a software but have a blog or a twitter following or facebook fans you can direct them to products and services that you trust. Very often when anyone purchases something you promotes as an affiliate you will earn revenue as long as the person stays subscribed the service.
Productized Service
Are you into a service where you are doing the same thing over and over again for different clients? Then you are in luck because you can turn this into a productized service whereby a client pays a small monthly fee to you to take care of these repetitive tasks.
Online Courses
This is directed towards people looking for information. This is quickly getting saturated so you will have to think very hard about what information product you want to create. For usual topics in business, marketing, etc there are already too many players so think outside the box.
How to convert any Project-based service into a Membership Model?
Are you having trouble thinking about what idea to convert to a membership model? Let’s do this, make a list of all things that your clients pay you to get done. Website design, Lead Research, telemarketing, content creation, SEO?
So let’s say you have given a client a $1000 dollar budget and a months deadline (assuming it’s going to take you 86 hours to complete). Is there a possibility you can split this into 6 parts delivered over 6 months and charge only $149/mo. But now you may ask how will this help you?
From my personal experience when every you take a client and give month deadline it’s very common that it may turn into 2 months. And since you are only working with one or 2 clients it gets you worried and you start to doubt if taking this client was even a good idea.
Now imagine instead of spending 86 hrs in the first month (20hrs/week) you are able to spread this over 6 months. This would mean you only have to devote 4 hours/ week for a single client. Now you are free to take on 10 clients instead of only 2. And since the client has to pay monthly you can pause work for that client if you don’t get payments on time and still have 9 more clients to work with.
Sales funnel for your membership site
What are different membership business models to consider?
Initially, I think one should try everything to see what works. More often this question you will be able to answer instinctively by yourself as you have been in you field for a long time.
Free membership Model
Allow your users to signup and get a free membership. If you are selling information products this is a must have option, for you to offer your clients. They should be able to try-before-they-buy some of the goodies you offer.
You can allow access to some blogs, some exclusive pdfs and also summaries of you paid content.
The kind of content in this free section should be structured in such a way that its concise (not long) and the free member should be able to get instant benefit from this. The benefit can be small but it has to be instant.
- Free members directly quality and reach the 3rd step in sales funnel. (Check Graph on top)
- Great way to leverage “instant gratification” of visitor to your advantage
- Charge for add-on after the visitor becomes members they have high chance of paying
One-time Fee Model
This is good if you are selling single product like access to special content, report, data, software, plugins, cheap hosting, SEO audit report, security checkup report etc These can also be for things that are not repetitive and you were unable to include in your membership plans, such service can be sold as one-off things.
Recurring Fee Limited Time Model
As we discussed if you are converting a project based service. This is the best option for you and your clients. Small businesses usually start here. Once you have developed a trusted following your can move on to unlimited time frame.
Recurring Fee Unlimited time (weekly/monthly/yearly)
This type of membership models works best for well know businesses. This will also work if you the content or data you provide is constantly updated.
How to increase revenue After a successfully setting up a membership Site?
Advertising
It is very likely once you start with a membership and you get a good client base they will visit your website very often to get status about their products, manage their memberships so on so forth. This kind of visitor is very loyal and they trust you very well. With a little effort, you can easily sell one/two advertising space slots in the sidebar of your site. Since your visitor is highly qualified and probably has purchased your membership so advertiser will pay much higher for such a slot on your website.
Own Affiliate program
As was mentioned earlier in this article that becoming an affiliate for other brands is a good way to earn some money. Now it’s your time to build your affiliate program and let your loyal customer do the work for you. Create an affiliate program that helps you, your affiliate and the prospective client. There should be something for everybody.
Add-on Projects
Initially, we converted our project-based business model into a membership-based model. Now it’s time to go back and start some of the project based work as well. Now now you may ask: what’s changed?
Initially, the client was not tested by us so there was a high chance for things to go sideways but now we know through our membership payment history which clients are worthwhile. Also it’s very hard to charge higher project fee from a new client. Here is my suggestion.
Create a project based solutions for clients who have been with you for longer than a year. You can offer similar project based service for such clients but can charge significantly higher 2x, 3x even 4x the price you charged before you converted to a membership model.
Coaching
Over some period of time, if you collect data properly you will start to see patterns where you clients are facing issues. Sometimes it’s beneficial for you to solve those issue for your clients and get paid for it, and sometimes it’s beneficial for you to actually teach them how to solve those issue.
If there is a Recurring problem directly related to your service then it’s beneficial for you to include that in your membership plan but what if the problem is not related your service? Why not create a course for your clients, or start a facebook group, or start add-on consulting to help solve tangential problems of your clients.
Solving problems for your clients will not only cement your position in clients business but if the business increases after the problem are fixed it could mean more business for you from that client. If Your clients grow, chances are you will grow with them.
Brick & Mortar Business that should implement Membership Website
- Charities
- Publishers: Newspapers, Magazines, Newltetters
- Education Institutes
- Country Clubs
How to put this all together?
- Convert Existing product/service into Monthly Consumable or service
- Create a monetization strategy
- Setup A Website
- Drive traffic to your site
- Plan Out Customer journey
- Automate Marketing & Social Media
- Automate order Purchase & Delivery
- Automate Affiliate Program, Upsells, Cross-sells & Referral Business
If you have read any content anywhere you probably become sure by now that most of the content is probably a hook for you to buy something so let me not disappoint you.
We help businesses convert their ideas into membership/recurring models. Reach me anything time on
jass AT wpwd DOT io to discuss how we can make your idea work or if you already have a membership site how to make it better. We normally use
wordpress to build out the website
- Use woocommerce as a ecommerce platform
- Stripe, authorize.net & paypal as payment gateways
- Woocommerce memberships to manage access control
- Woocommerce subscriptions to control recurring payments
- And add our magic touch to put all this together and make it work for your based on your specific need.
Jass SK
(Founder The Prefr.co Network)We are working to bring many tools under one roof to help small business be successful. We also cater to individuals that are in the service space & want to get started with their own business and get successful.