Searchable Information
an eclectic collection of interesting information about health, work, money and life style.

Seven Types of Membership Sites You Can Start Today

Before choosing the issue your site will address, you need to be aware of the different kinds of sites out there. Almost all membership sites fall into seven basic types.

1. Coaching/Mentoring

This type of site provides help, insight and support to its members regarding a specific topic. There are life coaches, business coaches and mentoring programs focusing on varies industries or job types. A coaching or mentoring site allows the owner to leverage their time. Instead of offering their expertise to one client at a time, they can provide it to hundreds or thousands of clients at the same time.

2. PLR (Private Label Rights)

A PLR site offers a random assortment of articles centered around a key word or idea. The articles you provide through a Private Label Rights site can be legally modified. Many website owners and bloggers subscribe to these services to use the content on their sites or create special reports and ebooks out of them.

3. Social Sites

When you think of this type of site you probably think of sites like match.com. A dating site can also focus on bringing together specialized niches of people like senior citizens, dog lovers, people from a certain regional area, or just about any lifestyle choice or passion you can think of that would draw people together.

4. Content

This is probably one of the most popular types of membership site. A content site offers its members resources and information centered around a particular topic or problem. Usually the topic is highly specialized and the information it contains cannot be found quickly or easily elsewhere. Members gladly pay a monthly membership fee in order to have this useful information in one, easy to locate place.

5. Paid Newsletter

A newsletter site offers its members exclusive access to news and information relating to a specific topic. Basically, the owner of the site researches and compiles pertinent news stories and data from all sorts of media so that the members don’t have to.

6. Message Board or Forum

This type of site requires potential posters (or information seekers) to pay for a membership before they can contribute and/or use certain functions of the forum, such as a search. Creating a viable forum site can be tricky, as it must provide information that can’t easily be found on another forum or website for free. They also normally have a very low membership fee.

7. Content Delivered Via Audio

With this type of membership, all of your content is delivered to your members or posted on your site as audio files. I have seen this site model used to offer audio files on a wide variety of topics to be used as additional content on other membership sites - rather like business to business marketing.

You can also combine several of these ideas into one membership site. A content site can also have a members only forum, and a paid newsletter can feature a monthly audio bonus. The possibilities are endless, and the more you offer your subscribers, the more they will value your service.