Paid membership websites are where people pay a recurring fee to be a member of your website (usually monthly or annual subscription).

To offer paid membership your website needs a ‘members area(s)’ where your members can exclusively access information or services.

Paid membership websites can be used for:

• Providing an online service or directory
• Paid Content
  

  “Content” refers to articles, news, announcemnts, photos, video or extended components such as member forums, live chat etc.

• Establishing an online network where people can seek advice, opinions or expertise from you or other members.

Our paid membership solutions offer the following features:

• Content Teasers – allows you to use short snippets of text that are visible to anyone, including search engines, while keeping your main contents protected and accessible only to members. This feature will help your membership site to be found by prospects on all search engines.
• Digital Content Download Protection – Protects your files against unauthorized downloads due to link sharing and link “guessing”.
• Gradual Content delivery – This can be great if you are offering online courses where you can stagger the course lessons over a set time period.  The delivery of content can be completely automated through email autoresponders.
• Integrated Paypal Subscriptions (for recurring payments) & ‘Buy Now’ buttons (for single payment) . Paid members are granted access automatically.
• Supports unlimited levels of membership

Free Membership websites are obviously based on there being no joining fees to become a member for your site.

So how do you make money out of offering free membership?

Revenue is generated through advertising on the website. Advertising can be displayed in the way of Banner Ads, Google Adwords or a directory listing. Each advertiser can pay you a once-off or recurring fee for advertising.

Free membership can also add value to your business by way of an established marketing base for from your members.

Points to consider about free membership websites:

• They are reliant on popularity (high volumes of traffic and members ) to be successful – if you are considering setting up a site like this then make sure you have a good budget left over to promote the website or have time up your sleeve to promote it through social media. Basically the more traffic you can create and the larger your membership base becomes, the more your advertising is worth and the more income you can generate from it.
• They require excellent content and features to work. People need to be interested in what is on your website in order to use it and engage in it. The success of a free membership site relies on the members to keep coming back to your site. You can create a huge volume of traffic but if you can’t generate the interest in keeping people coming back then there is less value in your membership base.
• You should offer members the opportunity to interact, so features such as a Blog, forums or live chat can faciliate this interaction.