Can I use a “blog” to build a membership site?

What is the best “blogging” platform to use?

Good questions that may seem to have obvious answers to the “seasoned internet user”, but maybe not so obvious to the ones just starting out on their internet journeys.

“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing supply of information and news.

A blog is a frequently updated personal (or business) website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles and/or other web sites.

Blogs range from the personal to the political, the sublime to the ridiculous, and they can focus on one narrow subject or a whole wide range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as health, dating, dog training, web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology.

Some are more into just presenting links to all manner of other sites.

And others are more like personal journals or diaries, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.

Whatever they are used for, blogs are ideally suited to building membership sites.

WordPress is probably the most popular and most powerful and versatile blogging software, and when I talk about blogging, I’m talking about using WordPress as the platform.

As far as using WordPress to build membership sites, I can say that it is definitely a very good way to get started. It is also a very low cost way to get started.

Membership sites are one of the hottest money makers on the web right now, and more and more people are creating an extra monthly pay check by building their own membership sites.

If you have a passion for a particular subject, almost any subject, chances are that a lot of other people have the same passion. Create a membership site where all of those people can mingle online with other like-minded people, and you are set to go.

If you have an expertise in a field, create a membership site, charge a monthly fee for others in the field to access your information, and you have money coming in every month, month after month.

Installing WordPress for the first time and getting it configured correctly can be a little intimidating, so watching a video tutorial on Using WordPress To Build Membership Sites can really give you a jump start on getting a membership site up and running.

In conclusion, if you want to build a membership site that costs almost no money, is easy to update and manage, and brings in a monthly recurring income, then I suggest you give WordPress a really close look.

Lewis Poteet

If you listen to all of the “gurus” on the internet right now, then you know that nearly all of them are preaching the message that you need to have your own membership site.

Creating and maintaining a membership site used to be a job for expert programmers, database administrators, and web developers, and the average “little guy” internet marketer was left out in the cold. Most could not afford to hire these experts and therefore owning a membership site was out of the question.

Those days are gone forever. Anyone now can afford to have their own membership site. You can easily learn what you need to know to create your own site quickly, easily, and at very low cost.

You can purchase a video at very low cost that shows you step-by-step how to create a membership site using WordPress (which is free), and a plugin for around $50 that will handle Paypal billing and keep up with your membership.

Some of the “big guys” in membership site ownership use Joomla content management system to manage their membership sites. Again, there are low cost videos available that will teach you how to install and configure Joomla and use it to manage a membership site. Joomla is a powerful content management system. There is a large selection of professionally created templates available, so you can get the exact look and feel that you want for your site.

Instead of selling your products one at a time, why not consider putting them in a membership site?  If you have a hobby, a passion for some subject, an expertise in some field, put it in a membership site.  Imagine getting 10 people a month paying you $19.95 per month, month after month!  What if you had 100 people paying you $19.95 per month?  What if you had 500 or 1000 people paying you $19.95 per month?

Yes, membership sites are the way to go, and with the training and software now available, anyone can build their own membership site and have it up, running, and bringing in a monthly income in no time at all!

Give it a try, I think you will find it enjoyable and rewarding.

Lewis Poteet

iTheme bSocial Premium WordPress Theme

Because WordPress is free you don’t have to spend money purchasing it,so with the money you’ll save you can afford to get a great looking premium theme—and it’ll still be cheaper than a custom-designed site.

When you purchase a premium theme you can avoid the somewhat shoddy work that sometimes shows up in free themes. That’s not to say free themes aren’t any good, because many of them are great themes, but often a lot of the detail  work that really makes a theme special is missing.

Anyone can put together a free theme and offer it to the public, but it takes a lot more skill, care, and dedication to build themes people are actually willing to pay money for.

One the other side of the coin, just because you pay for a theme doesn’t mean it’s worth what you paid for it. There are bad premium themes, good premium themes, and great premium themes. And even the good and great ones may not work to exactly fill your needs.

This article is all about helping you make intelligent decisions when choosing premium themes.

Some things we will discuss:

iTheme BizCard Premium WordPress Theme

1. Things to consider and plan for before you even start looking at themes.

2. How can you best assess a theme’s quality?

3. What you should be getting when you purchase a premium WordPress theme.

Item 1: Needs, Wants, and Expectations

The very first step to selecting a premium theme is to gauge your own needs, wants, and expectations. You surely can’t pick the right theme if you don’t even know what’s right for you and what you really need.

So, first step, before you start looking at all of the really cool themes and get excited about all of the really fancy designs, you need to sort out what it is that you really need and want.  What do you really want your site to look like, and what do you want it to do?

And before you even do that first step, you should probably understand what you’re getting in a premium theme.

What, exactly, makes a theme a Premium Theme?

No discussion on premium themes would be complete if it didn’t answer one question: What is a premium theme?

There are a lot of different opinions on what a premium theme should include, including but not limited to:
customization, documentation, support, higher quality code, better “design” work, etc.

What it comes down to though is that a premium theme is a theme you pay for, it’s as simple as that. All the other potential extras and goodies depend on what the creator of the theme actually delivers to you.

You can see some demo sites featuring premium themes at iTheme and Revolution.

For sure, not all premium theme creators are equal, and not all premium themes are equal. Everyone has a different opinion on what makes a theme great. Where one premium theme creator may have a lot of professional experience, another may only produce themes as a hobby. Both themes may be equally good but you’ll get a different experience from each.

iTheme Grunge Premium WordPress Theme

If you choose to buy a theme from a hobbyist you can’t expect the levels of support a pro-theme creator can offer. If you buy a theme from a company that offers premium themes as a second thought, you might get terrible or non-existant service. These are things you need to consider.

Bottom line, do your research, don’t let slick marketing fool you, and make your decision based on facts.

What Do You Need in a Website, what do you need it to do?

Before you start picking themes you need to make some decisions. If you don’t do your homework now, you may end up regretting it later. The most important thing to figure out is what you need your website to do.

• What type of content do you need to manage?
• Do you need blog capabilities (news, portfolio, press releases, catalog, etc.)?
• Does your site need a specific call to action (like an e-commerce component)?
• How many pages will your site need?
• Will those pages need a hierarchy?
• What do you want to show or feature on the homepage?

These are the sort of questions you need to answer. You’re trying to figure out what you need
from your website. Once you have that sorted out, it’s easier to find a theme that offers what you need.

What Kind of Theme Should You Buy?

One of the most common mistakes in choosing a theme is assuming it will fit your needs. Premium themes
come in all shapes and sizes and colors. Some focus on a specific need while others focus on generic blogging.

iTheme eCommerce Premium WordPress Theme

Some themes are designed to put the focus on the content. At the other extreme are the corporate themes. These tend to focus on static pages and relegate the blog content to a small news section. The key is to not make assumptions about what the theme will or won’t do.

Shown above is the iTheme eCommerce premium WordPress theme that I chose to use on my web site at TutorDaddy.com.  This is a good example of a specialized premium WordPress theme, in this case the theme was designed to showcase an ecommerce web site.

Just because WordPress is a blogging platform doesn’t mean that any theme will be great for blogging. WordPress is extremely flexible and more and more themes are focusing on sites that don’t focus on blogging at all.

What Features Do You Need?

Before you start shopping for themes you should decide what features you need. Some features may appeal to you when you read about the theme and view the demo, but if you don’t really need them then you may be paying for something you’ll never use.

In some cases those fancy features could actually interfere with what you do actually need. Finding the right theme for your needs is much more practical than finding a cool looking theme and bending and sacrificing your needs to make it work.

Here are just a few examples of some features that are available on premium themes:

• Featured post on the home page instead of the latest post
• Featured photographs from Flickr
• Featured video(s) from YouTube
• Advertising integration (Adsense, etc)
• Advertising management features
• Optional color themes to choose from
• Control panels for easily adding tracking code or feed URLs
• Header image replacement, resizing, and cropping capabilities
• Contact form (so you don’t publicize your email address to spammers)
• Tabbed sidebars
• Tabbed featured posts
• Multiple positions for sidebars and widget capable sidebars
• Multiple page layouts
• Menus auto generated from WordPress pages
• Menus auto generated from categories
• Menus generated from the blogroll
• Manual menu control
• Drop down menus
• Built in asides / sideblog
• Advanced search functionality
• Niche specific templates; e.g. real estate, auto sales, photography, etc
• E-commerce integration if desired
• Image / banner rotation if desired
• Reordering the home page
• Alternative graphics packs
• And more…

There are so many choices that you have your work cut out for you in choosing that “just right” theme.

Revolution Music Premium WordPress Theme

How Much Customization Are You Really Capable Of And Comfortable With?

If the thought of writing or changing code or installing plugins makes you nervous, you better pick a theme that has everything you need out of the box. On the other hand, if you’re fine with tweaking code, installing plugins or adjusting the CSS, then you can be a lot more flexible when you pick a theme.

A lot of the features shown above are built right into some premium themes, and many of them can
easily be added to themes with plugins. If you’re OK making some of those changes yourself, it might give you a little more leeway in choosing a theme you like for other reasons.

Next up in Part 2, we’ll cover specific details on what to look for when choosing a premium theme.

Lewis Poteet
http://www.TutorDaddy.com
http://www.TutorDaddyTraining.com

If you’re a web site designer/builder, whether highly experienced or  raw beginner, and you haven’t yet used WordPress to build a web site, you’ve definitely missed out on one of the quickest, easiest, and cheapest ways to build a professional looking web site.

If you think WordPress is just for blogging and bloggers and not useful for much of anything else, then you need to think again.

WordPress is a powerful, versatile, customizable, easy to install, and low priced(as in free) platform to build your web site on.

There are boat loads of free and premium WordPress themes available so you can quickly and easily transform a Plain-Jane looking site into a highly professional looking site that rivals the work of professional web site designers.

Using just a few of the many plugins available for WordPress, you can turn your WordPress web site into a highly functional and highly automated web site that would make any geeky web site code writer turn green with envy.

In addition to the hundreds of free themes available for WordPress you should also consider some of the highly specialized premium themes available that can have your WordPress web site installed, running, and looking great, and at a very reasonable cost.

Specialized premium themes are available to showcase sites such as music, news, photo sites, real estate, sports, sports teams, grunge, ecommerce, corporate, business, blogging, social, magazines, technology, and more.

A really cool looking feature that has recently become available from one leading premium theme provider is flash-like fading photos in a “featured” area on the front page. These create a really sharp looking effect. Take a look at the demo site featuring  Titanium Premium WordPress Theme to see this in action.

Two of my personal favorite custom theme providers, the ones I have chosen to use on my own web sites, are iTheme Premium WordPress Themes and Revolution Premium WordPress Themes.

Plugins, of which there are hundreds and hundreds available, are add-on features that you can quicky and easily install in your WordPress site. Most of them are free to download and install while others are sold at prices that are usually very reasonable for the work that they can perform for you.

There are plugins that will handle SEO(search engine optimization) chores on your web site. There are plugins that will auto-backup your database and email you the backup files. There are plugins that will install Adsense ads on your site.

There are plugins that will put a contact form on your site so you don’t need to expose your actual email address to spammers.

There are plugins that will convert your WordPress web site into a fully functional ecommerce sales site with a built in shopping cart, payment processing, and product delivery.

There are plugins that you can use to turn your WordPress site into a full fledged membership site, with comprehensive member management, your choice of one-time or recurring payment processing, and member content management.

I currently use a plugin called YourMember to handle the membership management on one of my web sites. I have been pleased with the way it works, and impressed with the support I have received from the two guys that developed it.

Digital Access Pass, or DAP, is a membership site management component that just recently appeared on the market. It can drip feed your content to members of your site, which means your new members cannot access all of the content that your old members have access to unless and until they remain a member and have the content drip fed out to them each month. This is a feature that I have long wanted in membership site management tools.

So, all things considered, WordPress is a web site builders dream come true. It’s fast, easy, free, and works like a charm. Where else can you beat a combination like that?

Check out the short video on How To Install WordPress Using cPanel And Fantastico to find out for yourself just how easy it is to install WordPress and have an instant web site, ready to customize to fit your needs.
How To Install WordPress Using cPanel And Fantastico

The WordPress bible is the ultimate video series for the beginning WordPress blogger

This six part video series takes you by the hand and teaches you the a to z’s of WordPress.

You will have your own WordPress blog up and running in minutes.

WordPress has become one of the most popular blogging platforms.

There are several reasons for this but the two most important reasons for it’s recent popularity are:

• Search engines eat them up like candy. The WordPress platform is built to create search engine optimized pages. With the addition of plugins it becomes quite easy to dominate the search engines.

• There is no other blogging platform as flexible in both design and functionality. There are thousands of free themes that you can use to change the look of your blog. There are also thousands of plugins that can extend the functionality of a WordPress blog. The possibilities are almost endless.

Look at this blog:

It was built with a free template and free plugins. You can easily make blogs as nice as this in no time at all.

The biggest obstacle with using WordPress has always been that it was cumbersome to use until you got used to it. That was before the release of version 2.5 which is what this video series is based on. It is much simpler to use and has many new functions. This video series will show you how to use the new streamlined interface and advanced functions – such as the media manager.

This is truly a must have if you have ever wanted to learn how to use WordPress. The WordPress Bible is an A to Z video guide that shows you the whole setup process from install to the final product.

Don’t wait – grab your copy now!

This 6 video series is available for purchase at $7.95 which gives unlimited access to view the videos for a period of 10 days.

Finally You Will Learn How To Modify Your Own WordPress Themes.

It’s easier than you think.

This four part step by step video series will show you exactly how to “Dig Into The Code” to get it done.

One of the most important parts about your Internet presence is branding.

You might not even be aware that you are creating a brand whenever you create a site or a blog. If someone is reading what you have to say or buying your products you already have the elements of a
brand working for you.

Just think of the importance of a brand. For instance when you want a cola product to drink you probably either think of Coke or Pepsi right away. These are examples of successful brands – and they are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

You should be striving to do the same thing with your Internet presence. Your brand can be your own name or the name of a business – but you need to make sure that it is getting noticed.

One way to help promote your brand is to make your sites look unique.

Many people use WordPress for their blogs and their sites. The only problem is that it is not immediately straight forward how to modify the themes to take maximum advantage of your brand.

Well we’ve changed that for you with this four part video series. You will learn how to “Dig Into The Code” to make changes to your WordPress themes (sometimes called templates as well). Don’t worry because this is actually quite simple to do once someone shows you how. You don’t need to be at all tech savvy to change your own template.

The good thing about WordPress themes is that they have standardized file names for their different pieces – for instance the side bar will be called “sidebar.php” so you know that if you want to change the sidebar it will be that file that you need to change. This makes it very easy to make your own changes.

Heck – we’ll even show you how you can use your own image as the header instead of using the one that came with the theme. This will help you promote your brand.

Here is What You Will Learn In These Videos

• How to modify the WordPress header.
• How to modify the WordPress footer.
• How to modify the WordPress sidebar.
• How to use your own image in the header
• How to add an opt in box (or any other code) to your site.
• How to change the colors on your site using CSS.

It’s Time You Started Promoting Your Brand To Your Maximum Potential – And Changing Your WordPress Themes Is An Effective Way To Get It Done!

Grab your copy now!

This four video series is available to rent for $7.95 which gives unlimited access to view the videos for a period of 10 days.

Create A Membership Site And You Just Created Yourself A New Monthly Pay Check.

Just As Important, You Can Have Your Membership Site Built And Pulling In Profits In 72 Hours Or Less, And You Can Do It Using WordPress (which is FREE) And FREE Plugins.

Yep, You Heard Me Right, We Include The Plugin That Handles The Membership Payment And Management Functions For You…..All Automatically!

And…..We Show You Where You Can Download Any Other Plugins You May Want To Use To Enhance Your Site…..All For Free!

It’s a well known fact, owning membership sites is like owning the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg, dropping money into your bank account just like clockwork, day after day after day.

You have got to be careful though!  If you overpay for that goose that lays the golden eggs, your profits will go downhill!

Savvy marketers understand that membership sites are one of the hottest ways to make money on the internet right now, and they’re building membership sites of all kinds like crazy.

Those same marketers also know it can be extremely expensive to create a membership site, and the learning curve can be a very steep one!

So yes, it can be expensive if you aren’t careful, and it can be complicated if you go about it the wrong way, but it certainly doesn’t have to be.

Our video series can show you exactly how to side-step both of those problems.

So, let your competitors make the costly mistakes and all the while you make trips to the bank!

Do That And You’re Ready To Start Making Some Serious Money Online.

What a great feeling it would be to have the security of an extra pay check every month, month after month, just like clockwork…..to have a “security blanket” in a world where job security is non-existent.

Our video series will show you how incredibly easy it can be to create WordPress membership sites that bring in recurring monthly income. Yes, I’m talking about money pouring into your bank account month after month after month.

So yes, it’s easy to do assuming you know the right steps to take.

But…..it won’t be so easy if you take the wrong steps.

Goal: To Build WordPress Membership Sites That Flow Money Into Your Bank Account Month After Month After Month

Solution: A Video Series That Will Teach You The Exact Steps You Must Take In Order To Accomplish Your Goal.

Yes, you can pay a lot of money for software to build and manage your membership site.

Yes, you can pay more money for a shopping cart to handle the sales.

And yes, you can pay even more money in start-up fees and monthly fees for a merchant account to handle the collection of customer payments.

Then you can go crazy trying to figure out how to tie it all together and make it work.

Surely there must be a better way!

And there is! A video series that will show you a better way to do it (and save you a lot of time and money in the process).

• A way that will save you a bundle of money.  Put the savings in your pocket and not in someone elses.
• A way that will save a lot of your precious time (you would welcome a little more leisure time, wouldn’t you?).
• A way that will show you step-by-step how to get your membership site built and running for the lowest possible cost and with the least amount of work!

In Less Than 1 Hour This Video Will Show You How To Easily Setup A Monthly Membership Money Machine With WordPress…

So, Here’s The Deal…..

You can create a membership site in 1 of 2 ways:

#1…..You can spend a lot of money, a lot of time, and endure a lot of frustration trying to figure it all out on your own….

Or…..

#2…..You can watch this video series that takes you by-the-hand and walks you step-by-step through the exact procedure.

You can have immediate access to this video tutorial that shows you exactly how to get it done and get it uploaded to your web site now.

Here’s what you’re going to find inside the package:

1. Step-by-step instructions that will have your membership site built and operational and ready to accept member signups (and payments) today.  Getting these steps right is absolutely vital to your success
2. Videos that show you the crucial settings you must make now to ENSURE that your private membership-only materials are safe from the prying eyes of non-members
3. An included plugin to make communication on your membership site INSTANT and CONVENIENT with a quick-and-easy chat feature.
4. Exactly how to set up your sales page on front of your WordPress membership site so that’s ALL that non-members see
5. A super-easy way to max out your membership profit by offering recurring monthly membership payments. You also have the option to have the membership fee be a one-time payment if you prefer.
6. An included plugin to setup a forum within your membership site to allow back-and-forth communication among your members
7. An included plugin to create a sitemap to submit to Google to attract search engine traffic to your site.

Plus much…much…more…

You can get started today!

This four video series is available to rent for $7.95 which gives unlimited access to view the videos for a period of 10 days.

Really, creating a web page can be easy or difficult, depending on how ambitious you are and what you want to include. A basic web page, one without a bunch of complicated scripts and things, can be very easy. A more elaborate web page, with lots of “bells and whistles”, can take a little more time.

You can download a free HTML editor, such as Kompozer, and begin creating basic web pages in no time at all. You can shorten the learning curve a bunch by watching a training video on how to use Kompozer to create basic web pages. Kompozer is a very good WYSIWYG HTML editor. In case you are wondering, WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get”, and it basically means you do not have to know HTML in order to create a pretty decent web page.

If you are only wanting to create your own blog, then there is absolutely nothing to it. All you really have to do is to register with one of the many services set up to make blogging easy, such as Blogger.com. They will tell you step by step how to create a web page, but believe me, it is easy to do on one of these sites. The layout is already set up for you, the page is basic and functional, and no programming knowledge is required.

If you are serious about blogging, especially if you want to get in it to use in your business, and to make money, then I recommend that you use WordPress. WordPress is free to download, and it offers you a lot more flexibility and features than Blogger. There are tons of plugins and templates available for WordPress, so you can have a really professional looking blog at almost zero cost.

Again, if you know very little about using WordPress, you can really shorten the learning curve by watching some training videos. One such video teaches you step-by-step how to build a WordPress blog that auto-updates using RSS

One way to make money with a blog is to have your own membership site. If you have a passion about some certain subject, then chances are that a lot of other people share that passion. Create a membership site and make some money while sharing your passion. Same goes if you have expertise in a subject, then you can charge other people (members) for that expertise.

You can build a membership site using WordPress and a Paypal plugin for a total cost of around $50 plus whatever you pay for a domain name and web hosting.

If you want a truly professional membership site with one of the best content management systems available, then you definitely would want to consider Joomla. Joomla is a content management system that will do just about anything you could want in managing a membership site.

Joomla is free to download, and there are numerous sources of templates to make your site look and feel exactly as you want it to. I recommend a video that shows how to install and configure Joomla, and another video shows how to build a membership site using Joomla.

If you are after something more elaborate, then more effort and expense is required. You can register several domain names, for example, which will cost some money. That way, you can match keywords and domain names for better search engine optimization and more traffic to your web sites.

In order to create more eloborate and sophisticated web sites, with even more “bells and whistles” you will want to learn some basic HTML. A shortcut, if you can afford it, is to invest in one of the professional HTML editors, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver. You also can use programs such as Macromedia Fireworks to create your own graphics.

Of course, once you learn how to create a website, there is still the question of what to do with it. The Internet has so much junk already, just there to look cute and take up space, so it would be a shame to just add more to the trash.

Create a web site or blog that provides some real quality content or products, make it look good and be easy to navigate, provide quality customer service when needed, and you will get the traffic. It’s only a matter of time.

Give it a try.

Lewis Poteet

How To Make Extra Money On The Internet.

Now that the Internet has become so popular, there are many ways a person can go about making extra money without leaving the comforts of home.

When it comes to money making opportunities on the Internet, or anywhere else for that matter, you have to watch out. There are some legitimate opportunities for making extra money, but there are also a ton of scams out there that you need to avoid. Many of these scams offer huge profits for little or no work. Many times people will ask you for money in order to make money. You have to read the fine print and use common sense. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

If you have a computer with email and Internet access, you probably have seen hundreds of advertisements on “How to make millions of dollars with no investment and no work, while sitting at home in your underwear!”

Well, let me tell you, it ain’t gonna happen. I tried it and it didn’t make me even 1 penny. I tried it in my underwear, I tried it in my pajamas, I even tried it with all of my clothes on, and it just flat out did not work.

I tried buying ebooks (which I never got around to reading), I subscribed to every newsletter of every guru, I spent thousands on software, seminars, training programs, etc., etc., etc.

Still did not make a penny!

I studied everything I could get my hands on about affiliate marketing, PPC advertising (Google adwords), Clickbank, and on and on and on. I paid a ton of money to Google trying to sell other peoples products, and I found that with all of the competition for keywords, and so many people trying to sell the exact same products, that I was spending around a dollar to make fifty cents. I’m no math whiz, but that doesn’t sound very good for the bottom line to me.

I tried buying ebooks and selling them on my web site, and found that I couldn’t give them away because ten thousand other people bought the exact same ebooks and they were trying to sell them also.

I tried creating hundreds of mini-sites and putting Adsense ads on them. Made enough money to buy a few cups of coffee (McDonalds, not Starbucks).

So what is the answer to making money on the Internet?

Many people have turned to eBay. They can sell used or new items there, and many make a living doing so. In order for this to work for you, you have to be serious about it, and you have to put a lot of work into it. If you wish to go this route, do some research before you begin. There are many sources for advice online that will help you be more successful when selling on eBay.

If you are a freelance writer, the Internet is a great place for making extra money. You can find many websites and businesses that are looking for writers, but again, watch out for the scams. It may take you a while to break into content writing for online sites, but once you get rolling, you will find you can make some decent money if you set your mind to it.

Other people go about making extra money by having their own websites. They have these sites set up to sell any number of goods or services, known as affiliate marketing, or they rely on web content to earn money through Googles Adsense program. These sites tend to come and go, but if you do your research and invest a little time and money, this can be a great way to go about making extra money online.

As far as affiliate marketing goes, the big guns are Clickbank, Commission Junction, and Linkshare. There are hundreds of others that offer products that you can sell and earn affiliate commissions.

Membership Sites

Right now, one of the hottest and most profitable ways to make money on the Internet is membership sites. There are thousands of membership sites, on almost any topic you can imagine, that charge their members anywhere from $5 per month up to $1000′s of dollars per month. This is recurring monthly income, so once you get one going and get a decent numbers of members subscribed, it can create a very nice income, month after month after month.

You may be thinking “wait a minute, I don’t know the first thing about creating and running a membership site!”.

Well, neither did I, but I found out that it’s not that hard with a little bit of the proper training. It’s also not expensive at all to create a professional looking, easy to manage membership site, if you know the right steps to take.

I found two systems that work very well, they are not difficult to learn and use, and not expensive at all to get started.

One way is to use a WordPress blog, which is completely free to install, and a plugin, which you can purchase for around $50 or so, to manage Paypal payment and members. You can find some excellent training videos on how to create a membership site using WordPress.

The second way is to use Joomla, which is one of the premier content management systems, and it also is free to install. You can find step-by-step videos on how to use Joomla content management system to build a membership site.

Remember that no matter what you choose to do, there are scammers out there waiting for you to fall for their sales pitch. Never give money to someone when you aren’t clear about what you are getting in return. You won’t make 2,000 dollars a day typing from home, and you can’t expect to earn 10,000 dollars a month from a program that doesn’t clearly state how you are going to make that money.

Good luck in whichever route you take, and remember, if you do not try, you will not succeed.

Lewis Poteet