Profit Masters

The people who have paid to join your membership site depend on you to provide relevant and timely information. It is their right to expect that information to be updated on a regular basis because they may be depending upon it to make decisions. When a person joins your membership site they should be told what your publishing schedule will be so that they know when they can expect to get fresh information. Adhering to that announced schedule is vitally important.

Deciding what your publishing schedule will be for your website is important. Keep in mind the kind of information you will be supplying to your membership. Information that changes hourly will require a RSS feed. Information that needs to up-dated on a daily basis will most likely require a content management system. For weekly publishing of content, you can do that yourself but a content management system can make it a lot easier.

When you are planning your newsletter, you need to decide how often your ezine or newsletter will be sent out to your subscribers. Basically, you need to create a schedule and stick with it. But how often should you publish? How much is too much and how often is not enough? When it comes to frequency, the usual choices are daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Daily – that means 365 newsletters a year. You could wear out your welcome even with your most devoted members.

Weekly – that is still a lot of work…52 letters a year…a little over 4 a month. Would your members appreciate that much mail from you?

Bi-weekly – Publishing an e-zine twice a month is just often enough to keep you fresh in your subscribers’ minds but not so often that they become annoyed with you.

Monthly – doesn’t seem often enough. Your members may forget about you and where your website lives on the Internet.

No matter what interval you choose, stick to it. People like consistancy. Just make sure that the interval you choose fits the message or service you’re providing to your membership.

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Hi Fellow Profit Masters… Randy here…

We’ve been plowing through the basics of membership sites. Now we start to get a bit more specific. Still there’s a few more general concepts to discover. Enjoy….

Basically, a free membership site is a site where the user is not charged a membership fee to use the site but is required to supply their e-mail address, choose a user name and password to enter the site, participate in the discussions and activities. Sometimes free memberships are limited to less useful information or access while paid memberships have full access.

A large entity like MSN, for example, allows members to access most things on their sites without the need for any sign in procedure at all but, in order to join a group, you must supply your email address, choose a user name and a password. The use of the site is still free. However, to use MSN as your ISP or to gain enhanced email resources you will be required to pay for it.

In the same way, an individual might start a free membership website. There would be no charge at all to access the site. To gain access to limited information would require supplying an email address, choosing a user name and a password. To gain full access to the site would most likely require payment if the information they are providing merits a fee. Some sites never charge a membership fee and rely solely on selling their own product or promoting products produced by others as a source of income.

Free membership sites very rarely, if ever, supply information that you couldn’t easily acquire on the Internet yourself. An individual who sets up a free membership site doesn’t do it for free so they will be planning to make an income in some way. Usually free membership sites are for the purpose of selling a product or service. Some information will be provided but supplying information is not the main objective.

Stay tuned for Article #7 “Starting a Paid Membership Site”

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