Now that you have your membership website up and running, one of the things that you will need to consider is whether or not to offer lifetime memberships or one-time payments. While it might seem a good idea at first to get a lump sum of money from prospective customers up-front it is not a good long term solution. There are three reasons why you don’t want to accept one-time payments for your site.
You want your members to be conditioned to paying you a regular fee.
You don’t want your members to overload on new material.
You want to avoid download collectors.
On your membership site you are always in the process of training or conditioning your members to do something. One of the first things that it would be good to teach them is to pay a monthly fee to enjoy access to your site. This will be better for the success of your site in the long run, both in terms of financial returns and in the participation of your members. You will have healthy monthly cash flow from the membership fees and your members will be reminded to log on and participate when they receive their bills.
You also need to be concerned about members getting an information overload. If you let people give you a one-time payment that lets them access all of your sites content at once the amount of information can be intimidating and overwhelm them. If they are members of more than one site this can be even more of a problem. New members are also less likely to appreciate the value of your materials when they receive them all at once. When they pay a monthly membership fee people are more likely to use the site regularly and participate in its activities.
When you condition your members to pay you on a monthly basis you will help to avoid download collectors. These are people who join a membership site in order to download all of the available materials and then quit once they have all of your content. The point of a membership website is that it is a community where people learn and interact together, so you don’t want ‘hit and run’ members who just take materials and don’t want to participate. People who pay monthly will get more involved in your membership site.
When you are in the process of deciding how you are going to charge your members for access to the membership site you need to remember that there are three good reasons not to let people pay a one-time or lifetime membership fee.
You want your members to get accustomed to paying you a monthly fee.
You don’t want members overloading on new materials.
You don’t want members only looking to download content.
These three reasons help to show why it is better for you to charge a monthly membership fee in order for members to access your site.
Get expert membership site training from Robert Plank today at: http://www.membershipcube.com