For example if you had just 200 people paying you just $20 a month, you would have a steady cash flow of $4000/month, month after month, rain or shine. Many people accomplish this first month or two their site is up. But that’s just beginning. Some individuals have member only websites that generate 5-10x that amount of money!

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s discuss exactly what a member only, paid membership site is?

Whether you call them member only, membership, subscription, or mentor websites, they all have one thing in common. … they are bringing in steady, recurring cash flow for their owners, month after month, from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars with an endless variety of topics.

Some of these sites provide mentoring or coaching, others contain useful articles or information in a particular field or product. Still others publish results of tests and studies or product reviews. Finally some membership sites provide specialized service or act as a meeting place for people with a common interest.

But all these sites have one thing in common: to access website (or best information on site) you have to pay for it!

Why Would People Pay for Information on Internet?

The key to getting people to pay for access to a website, is to provide specialized information/coaching/data/service that is hard to find anywhere else, or would be time consuming to find on your own.

Here’s another way to look at it:

Have you ever subscribed to a newspaper, magazine, or newsletter? Have you ever bought a non fiction book that gave advice on a topic you were interested in? I’ll bet you have. I’ll also bet that you could have found almost all of information these resources contained from free sources.

You paid for information either to save time or because you thought information would be better or more specialized for what you were looking for, isn’t that correct?

Just a few short years ago it was almost unheard of to charge for access to a website and almost no one was doing it. Today it’s not only much more acceptable but there are still relatively few membership websites. This makes it perfect time to start your own member only site, since there is still little competition.

Choosing a Topic

Consider banner advertisement. In beginning of Internet era, banner advertisement was one of primer methods of online marketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. In search of good feature and content filled websites visitors were clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things are totally different! Over using of banners on web pages forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more. Visitors tend to avoid clicking through banners unless there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon! Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparison to what it used to be, depending on your objectives banner advertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads are used today, either for creating brand recognition or for bringing in more traffic to website and consequently generating more sales. Brand recognition As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies place banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted on high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your products or services popular to certain niche market, you should find websites catering this particular audience and post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether they click on it or not – same like traditional bill boards and TV advertisements – it helps you building consciousness to your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as effective as television advertising as far as brand recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among members of American Online who saw an ad of a product as a banner on website and on TV commercial. The result indicated that 40 percent of audience remembers static banners and 41 percent remembers TV commercial at time of poll conducted a few days later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison to traditional forms of advertisements for around 60 percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, in order to create a sustainable brand recognition, your online advertisement campaign also needs to run for a prolong period of time.