The Pros and Cons of Starting a Paid Membership Site to Make Money Online - Part 2

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On the other hand, the cost of maintaining a membership business is minimal, especially those sites selling memberships to people for accessing information based products. Unlike physical products, information based products don’t need storage space; there are no shipping and handling charges your customers have to pay, and it costs you nothing to store such info products.

In addition to that, once the info products have been created, they can be sold again and again and sold to many different members. There is no product manufacturing process involved as info products are generally in digital format. The only thing the membership site owner needs to do focus is market those info products effectively on the Internet.

The Cons
Unfortunately, every business venture that has a number of advantages always has some drawbacks. Internet membership businesses are no exception to this rule; they do have a few disadvantages.

The biggest disadvantage of a paid membership site is that the site owner has to add in good content frequently for the members. When members join a website and pay a fee to get access to the information they interested, they will have the expectation that the information and content they are getting are valuable and even exclusive. It cannot be something that they could find easily by typing in a few words into their favorite search engine.

Writing original, relevant and helpful information pertaining to whatever the theme of your paid membership website can be time consuming and involve a lot work. Audio and video content are even more difficult to create and cost you more money.

You can hire professional freelance writers to write good content for you, but you have to be prepared to pay for their expensive writing service charges.

Content is the key to keep your members wanting to renew their membership. If you don’t invest the time or the money required to keep your content up-to-date and relevant, you will not be able to entice your members to continue paying for membership renewal.

Another drawback of this business is that the message boards, forums and blogs that are associated with a paid membership site have to be monitored closely and updated regularly.

People who pay money to join membership site expect to get what they are paying for. And many of them will even expect to get more than what they are paying for. It is necessary that the owner of a paid membership website schedule chats with experts in the field that is the subject of the website on an on-going basis and that the membership site owner answers the questions of the members on a daily basis.

Conclusion
Membership business is just like other business models. It takes effort, time and patience to achieve success. When you have started your membership business venture, you must be prepared to faced the challenges and overcome the obstacles to get your membership site to top level.