The First Steps for Starting a Membership Site of Your Own

A membership site is a website that provides information or services to those people who register and pay to be a member. Most membership sites bill their members on a monthly basis. Once someone signs up as a member, depending on the owner’s set up, they are automatically billed each month. Those who sign up to become members have access to member’s only information provided by the site owner on a regular basis.



In order to start a membership site of your own, you must first determine who your market is. Next, you’ll need to put together a product, service or other information your market is in need of. Remember, it must be valuable enough they will be willing to pay for it on a recurring basis.

Once you have this information it’s time to think about how you will receive and keep track of member payments for each billing cycle. Popular payment options for members include credit cards or Paypal. Clickbank is also a popular payment gateway for membership sites, since they’ve recently added a recurring billing feature for publishers. The payments are still made by your customer via a credit card or Paypal, but Clickbank deals with all the accounting for you. This saves you a lot of time each and every month. You receive your check after all returns and fees have been removed and that’s it.

Next you’ll need to determine which type of membership site software you want to use to manage your members, the content, and all the important confidential information such as logins, etc. that come with a membership site.

If you’re looking to save a bit of money with this step (some membership management software can be a bit pricey) one way you can handle how you offer your content and member access to it is to set up an email list. Each month send an email telling current members where to go in order to access their new information via a special link on your website.