Charging Membership Fees to Access Your Site

Membership Fee Revenue

Membership fees can be a great way of making money on your website, but to get people to pay for an online service, it needs to be really fantastic and they need to get something rewarding out of the experience to justify the expense.

I recommend that before you start spending money on a website that is intended to get most of its revenue through membership fees, you should probably do the following:

• Identify the websites that you will be competing against.
• Determine if there is a serious demand for the online service that you are proposing.
• Forecast your membership enrollment for the next 2 or 3 years.
• Analyze the market to determine the correct price of membership.
• Determine if having various levels of membership, including a free membership level, will be beneficial.
• Calculate the operating and support costs of running your website with the anticipated enrollment.

There are many more considerations that you could investigate and the end goal is to determine if it is realistic to expect your website to be profitable based on membership fees.

It's Competitive and the Initial Investment Might be Large

To be competitive with other sites that are similar to yours, you will need to make a major initial investment in design, development, copy writing, and promotion of your site.

This article is oriented towards small businesses, so I am assuming that they don't have a $250,000 budget to build a website. For this reason I feel it is tough for small businesses to quickly jump into the "membership" style website revenue model. It is also risky even if you have a really great idea, because what happens when someone copies your site and steals your customers by not charging any membership fees at all?