You might be thinking that with the amount of information available over the internet for free, who will actually want to pay? You’ll be surprised about how many actually do, and what a lucrative business it can be if done right. Starting a membership blog has its own set of difficulties, but the fruits reaped are plentiful especially in terms of income.
Advantages
- Healthy and continual income:
Blogging can be made into a full time source of income and the best way to go about it is to start a paid membership blog. Free sites do offer returns but the return period is far longer than the membership ones. With a paid membership blog, the blogger will have the obvious advantage of getting paid every time a member’s subscription is due. The money earned can then be invested into other projects, growing the web of blogs and as a result experiencing a rise in income.
- Recognition:
When people pay, they are more likely to stick around long enough to find out about the author, especially when the content is good enough. Once the writer gets recognition from readers, it is an uphill journey since the majority of paid members will be professionals and business people, who’ll recommend the blogger to their peers.
- Good sincere community:
In a paid membership blog, the writer and followers can have a more rewarding experience on the whole. The blog owner has to provide good content or face cancellations, and the readers will be more sincere in their feedback and interactions with the writer when their expectations are being met (or vice versa). It is a win-win situation for both and allows for healthy relationships to grow. It offers a place where dedicated people, without the spammers and all, can come together and form a community of like minded people.
Disadvantages
- Roping in subscribers:
Bringing people in initially is perhaps the hardest job. What will make people pay for something they might as well get for free with a little more searching? Achieving this feat calls for extensive investment of time and money.
Time: There is no short cut, and all strategies will take time. For example, to develop a free blog that leads the visitors to the paid membership blog. In this case you’ll have to provide good content for two sites, while offering additional material or information in the form of video etc on the paid site.
Money: No matter how good is the content, nobody is going to subscribe if they don’t know about it. It would take a lot of marketing and advertising to get you paid membership blog going. From Search Engine Optimization to Social Media Marketing, you will have to put out all stops for marketing your blog.
- No substandard content at all:
There is absolutely no room for substandard content when it comes to membership blogs. People are paying for good content and expect good content throughout their membership. Otherwise they always have the option to cancel. The writers have to be on toes all the time and provide the readers with reason to keep paying and following.
- No breaks or holidays:
Imagine the annoyance you face when your hawker takes a holiday on sending you the newspaper you’ve subscribed to, or you miss out on a monthly issue of your favorite magazine for any reason. Similarly, a membership blog can’t take a break and it needs to publish valuable content nonstop.
This can become difficult for the blogger after he/she has written a lot on the same niche and is reaching the writer’s block. The membership blogger simply can’t take a break, he has to keep providing something or the other to keep the audience engaged and satisfied.
So for those who expect an ATM machine in shape of a membership blog, things aren’t quite as simple, you have to invest a lot of time and efforts to reap anything at all. But when you do it right, the income you generate can be pretty handsome.
Image Credit:Adrian Sabah
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