So, what do you go with? Do you go all out and create a full blown membership site or go with a simple digital product? Is there an advantage to one over the other? This article is going to take a brief look at the pros and cons of each.
Trust me on this, there is NO perfect solution.
Let's start with the simple digital product.
Certainly one advantage is that something like this is going to take a lot less time to develop.
As somebody who has done both, I can tell you for certain, a membership site is much more time consuming.
There is also less support involved with selling a stand alone digital product.
The headaches are less...
but so is the income, regardless of how much the digital product is selling for.
But I'll get to that later.
With a membership site, a big advantage, at least in theory, is that once you get a member, you have him for life as long as you keep supplying him a product or service that he can use.
I say in theory because in reality, it's not that easy.
Point is, with a life long member, you make ONE sale and get a recurring income month after month.
This is something you don't get out of a single digital product.
Okay, but let's really take a look at the downside to each of these.
With a digital product, in many cases, you have a limited life span, especially in the make money online niche where things change so often.
Therefore, after a while, the sales stop and you have to come out with something new.
That's the biggest disadvantage to digital products...
not to mention that they're easily pirated.
With a membership site, the biggest disadvantage is the real truth about membership retention.
Most members will only remain so for about 90 days.
So you're constantly recycling them.
So while your income may be steady, it may not ever really reach the level you'd expect because of the dropout rate.
The trick is to develop a membership site with a low turnover.
This is not easy to do.
So as you can see, neither model is perfect.
Ultimately, you need to pick the model that you think is going to work best for YOU.
To YOUR Success, Steven Wagenheim
Trust me on this, there is NO perfect solution.
Let's start with the simple digital product.
Certainly one advantage is that something like this is going to take a lot less time to develop.
As somebody who has done both, I can tell you for certain, a membership site is much more time consuming.
There is also less support involved with selling a stand alone digital product.
The headaches are less...
but so is the income, regardless of how much the digital product is selling for.
But I'll get to that later.
With a membership site, a big advantage, at least in theory, is that once you get a member, you have him for life as long as you keep supplying him a product or service that he can use.
I say in theory because in reality, it's not that easy.
Point is, with a life long member, you make ONE sale and get a recurring income month after month.
This is something you don't get out of a single digital product.
Okay, but let's really take a look at the downside to each of these.
With a digital product, in many cases, you have a limited life span, especially in the make money online niche where things change so often.
Therefore, after a while, the sales stop and you have to come out with something new.
That's the biggest disadvantage to digital products...
not to mention that they're easily pirated.
With a membership site, the biggest disadvantage is the real truth about membership retention.
Most members will only remain so for about 90 days.
So you're constantly recycling them.
So while your income may be steady, it may not ever really reach the level you'd expect because of the dropout rate.
The trick is to develop a membership site with a low turnover.
This is not easy to do.
So as you can see, neither model is perfect.
Ultimately, you need to pick the model that you think is going to work best for YOU.
To YOUR Success, Steven Wagenheim
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