Monetise your Website Traffic through Membership Platforms
Creating content for your website involves a cost. Even if you discount the development fee, domain registration and the hosting charges - all of which are recurring expenses for a growing website - as initial capital investment, there exists a cost for pitching, acquiring, editing and publishing the content. It involves person-hours which itself is payable and a process that goes into it that consumes intellect. If you give the content for free, your revenue ought to be user data. Else you will not sustain the race. Here is where a subscription-based service becomes an option.
What is a membership site?
A membership site is simply a website where access to some particular content is gated. To get the exclusive content placed behind a ’member login’ page or a ‘paywall’, People should have an active member account. By choosing an appropriate membership platform, you will be able to :
- Segment your contacts
- Create user-member pages
- Upgrade subscriptions
- Process payments
- Manage websites
- Track engagements
- Offer member-only newsletters
- Provide different membership levels, and many more.
How do membership platforms work?
Time spent on site, shares, likes, comments are a few pointers that tell you how engaging is your content. Give catchy articles, exciting podcasts, informative videos or whatever you like to share and make people’s jaws drop in disbelief. Once you get succeeded in connecting with your members, they will be ready to pay to get the gated content. Here, you charge a recurring fee from your customers and give them access to the exclusive content you have prepared.
The News Minute, a digital news platform, shows an inspiring example for a membership site. They grabbed the audience’s attention by building TNM connect.
You can offer your customers a wide variety of services, courses, discounts, entertainment, deals opportunities, or other facilities based on your platform.
CMS hub - a proprietary content management system, Wix - a hosted website builder that offers a limited free plan and several premium plans and 'Morweb' - a CMS designed specifically for nonprofits and associations, are a few membership website builders.
What are open-source membership platforms?
Open source membership platforms allow anyone to create their website with an online community that is personalised and up-to-date without any coding knowledge required. The target customers of the platform are organisations or nonprofit organisations that have excellent tech support.
Most open-source memberships offer the same features: event management, advanced analytics, membership payment gateway integration, and email marketing. Most of the time, it acts as a blueprint. The collective efforts of the open-source community constantly update the software, and the users can have direct access to the platform.
‘Admidio’ is a free open source user management system for websites of organisations and groups. ‘Tendenci’ is a cloud-based open-source, SaaS, community-based solution. Some other free open source membership platforms like ‘Sumac’ and ’CiviCRM’ are also the best online fundraising, event management, and content management options.
Conclusion:
Always make sure that your customers can watch you, and so be different and strategic in your approach. Your differences will help you to achieve what you want. It is time to enrich your user experience and generate revenue through membership platforms.
