Is a Membership Site Profitable? 5 Reasons Free Content Performs Better
If you are thinking of creating a membership site, you may reconsider that after reading this article.
Membership sites usually get a lot less traffic than free content websites because people are not willing to pay to access your information unless your content has a very good reputation. The reason for this is that people aren't willing to pay you to access your content which might not be what they want.
If you are looking to gain profit off your site, offering your content for free will bring in a large amount of traffic which you will be able to convert into revenue through advertisements on your site. Using advertisements to monetize your website will provide you with a lot more income as you will be gaining a lot more traffic to your site as the free content is publicly available which means that Google will be able to access it and index it into the search engine. Once Google has indexed it, more people will be able to discover your website and might even click the advertisements if they are interested in what is being offered. This helps you to get the best of both worlds as you are tapping into the free traffic offered by the Google search engine and still earning income through your site by the strategic placement of advertisements that are relevant to your site.
If you are locking your content to members only, you will also be locking Google out of your content which means that it is not able to access the content. So not only will you not be getting members signing up, but you will always be exponentially reducing the amount of overall traffic your website gets.
If you are still set on creating a membership payment for your site, you want to create a good reputation for you and your site before implementing this system. The way you can do this is by offering your content for free and using the traffic you generate through the search engine to create return users. Once you have a large group of returning users to your site, you have already gained their trust and they know that you have quality content to offer them. You can then offer them to sign up to your membership program to gain exclusive content which is not publicly available. They will be more likely to sign up for this as they know that the content that you make publicly available is very high quality, so the content you are keeping for members only will be of an even higher quality.
If you still don't see the value in making your content free and publicly available, you should give it a try and monitor the traffic your site is getting by using Google Analytics. Dylan Bozeman blogs about these concepts and how to get the most out of membership sites with digital marketing, inbound marketing, blog management and content marketing. Always remember that you have an opportunity to turn every user that visits your site into a return visitor and even a paid user but if you are not making your content available to be indexed, you will not be getting the traffic which will in turn be converted into a paid user.