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The following article is from a series of online business automation articles and tips on the advantages of joining membership sites …

In other articles, I discuss how online business automation is not something you truly “experience” until you have reached the last stage of a specific business development sequence as shown below:

Reflection > Decision > Planning > Organising > SetuP > Systems Development > Business Automation.

In this post, we will analyze in more detail one of the most important resources you will need to consider investing into during the “Setup” phase … membership sites. For the purpose of this article, we’ll be specifically dealing with the topic of joining one or more membership sites, instead of discussing the idea of starting your own membership site.

There are several types of online membership sites which you can look at becoming a member of. There are free membership sites, and there are paid membership sites. There are sites that focus on delivering a specific type of service (e.g. content on a specific niche area, like “health”) and there are “Mastermind” membership sites, where the main purpose is sharing information and ideas. There are exclusive, or limited membership sites that “close” their doors to new members once a certain level of membership numbers is reached, and there are membership sites that have no limit to the number of members that can join. We will be looking briefly at each of these types of memberships.

Before we do this, however, the question we need to address first is “why” are membership sites so important to the process of automating an online business?

There are many reasons why you should seriously plan on joining one or more membership sites during the “Setup” phase of your online business development process. One of the more obvious reasons, is that the virtual universe is expanding in all areas at such a prodigious rate, that if you are not in touch with other like-minded people, you will quickly discover that all of your ideas, knowledge, strategies, marketing efforts, etc … will become obsolete. Other businesses, networks of people and entrepreneurs that aim to compete for your market share, will overtake you in every aspect and your business and all of your efforts at building it could become literally extinguished overnight.

Other reasons for joining membership sites are to improve your own technical, business, or marketing performance (e.g. by interacting with other members in a member’s forum), to leverage and synergize your efforts (e.g. by forming joint venture partnerships), and to outsource some of the fundamental “production” requirements of your business (e.g. Private Label Rights, membership sites that provide you with content for your business in the form of articles, information products, software, etc…).

So now that we’ve established that you will need to consider joining one or more membership sites in order to build and eventually automate a profitable online business, what type of sites should you join?

Well, that depends on your business plan. You only have so much time to network with other online business owners, browsing forums for information, etc, so you will really need to think hard about the number of membership sites you will want to join, especially if most of these are paid membership sites. Since most paid membership sites charge their members on a monthly basis, your membership costs can quickly add up.

The real answer to this question is found in your “Planning” stage. If you have decided to build content sites, whether that’s just one portal site on a specific subject, or multiple sites on a range of categories, you will probably need to initially consider joining one or more good “Private Label Right” (PLR), membership sites. These types of sites pay for the cost of researching and hiring article writers using a significant portion of member’s fees, then co-op the articles among all paid members. For this reason, good PLR sites tend to cap their membership numbers (normally between 150 - 500 members only).

Beware of membership sites that provide you with PLR or “resell rights” software. You really want to do your due diligence before joining sites that offer software which you can resell as your own, because at some stage, you will have to deal with customer support issues. Find out who is responsible for providing technical support, software upgrades, handling customer service enquiries and complaints, etc. before you join a software resell membership site. Ideally, this should not be your responsibility.

This brings up another concern regarding membership sites that rely on using proprietary software. If the cost of the membership is too low, you should not expect to receive excellent customer support or regular software updates to improve software functionality or fix bugs and shortcomings (and there will always be a ton of issues that need fixing in any kind of software application). In my experience, it’s definitely better for a good paid membership site to charge a reasonable recurring fee, provided they deliver a quality product, excellent customer service and are attentive to the needs of their members. In fact, the best membership sites to join, are those that effectively treat their members as stakeholders of the business, and allow them to influence the future progress, development and direction of the membership site itself. After all, the members are ultimately the true target market of the membership site.

For more resources on buiding automated online businesses, go here: Online Business Tips

Tags: Business, Management & Administration, Webmaster, Internet & SEO