Depending on whether you choose a newsletter open-ended or fixed term membership site, it’s going to drastically affect what kind of membership site you create. How many hours per week you put into it and how much money you make? So let’s go through the difference between these two very important types of membership site.
The first type is a newsletter. This is just simply an e-mail autoresponder. This is where somebody pays you money; they get put on and e-mail subscriber list and your autoresponder sends them lessons automatically every few days. This is the cheapest and easiest way to create a so-called “membership site,” and I like to do this for simple one-time payment products.
This is kind of cheap. You probably already have an e-mail autoresponder. You just go and add extra messages, but the problem with this is that you have almost no control over where the content goes. You’re always going to have people e-mailing you back, ask you for yesterday’s e-mail, last week’s e-mail; it’s not stored anywhere and it’s a real headache to take people off of the list if they cancel, refunds, or accidentally even unsubscribe. It’s a hassle to maintain. But if you’re just selling a simple single-payment product, it’s always a good idea to having some extra followups.
The next type of membership site is probably what you normally think of when you hear the word “membership site.” This is a download area. This is an open-ended membership site where you charge people month after month forever. They pay a monthly fee and can log in with their own unique username and password, and get access to your old articles, your old videos, and your old audios.
But the problem with the open-ended membership site is it continues on forever. So in a year from now, if you still have subscribers in this membership site and your heart just isn’t in it, you just don’t want to update the site, too bad; you still have too. So it becomes a chore and over time, less and less people are going to be in the membership site, so you’re now stuck.
The solution to this is to create a fixed-term membership site. This is just like the open-ended membership site where somebody can log in to your webpage, but the difference is you have an ending date. So your membership site might only last for six months; after six months there ain’t forever.
So instead of an ongoing training area, you instead have a course—a class people take—and after six months, they have graduated.
So I definitely recommend you to create a fixed-term membership site instead of a newsletter or an open-ended site because you get the best of both worlds. It’s easy to set up; it’s simple to maintain; and you can always go and change it later whereas with ongoing membership site, you’re always trying to catch up to this month’s worth of content and there’s no time left to market your site the way you should market it.
So those are the differences between a newsletter open ended and fixed-term membership site.
Go ahead right now and complete your very own fixed-term membership site with my help.