Business is hard. Taxing. Excruciatingly painful. For some, it’s more than they can handle. That’s because it’s hard to acquire customers. And over the years costs have risen. You must spend a lot to find new customers. Plus, ads are more competitive. After all, more companies are vying for the same eyeballs. To turn a profit, you have to make more than you spend when hunting for customers.
The problem? Most companies have razor-thin margins. They can’t just snap their fingers and generate a higher profit on their ad spend. It doesn’t work that easily. But where most companies fail at this, others prosper. They understand the mechanics of getting customers to spend more money. And they do it by building sales funnels and launching subscription-based services like membership sites.
The beauty? You can launch a membership site in any industry or niche. It doesn’t matter what you do or what you sell. But how do you do it? And what membership site ideas are the most profitable? Most are afraid of the technical hurdles. How do you build a membership site without costing an arm and a leg? Where do you find the right developers? What software platform do you use?
If you’ve been toying with the idea of launching a membership site, here’s the scoop. Membership sites are easy to build when you use the right platform. You can use premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor to build intricate membership sites. There’s no coding involved. It just takes a little bit of effort and some time.
What Are The Best Membership Site Ideas?
If you’re already in business, pick a membership site aligned with your business or your industry. If you’re a chiropractor, build a chiropractic membership site. A place where you release content regularly designed for paying members. It could include best practices to keep your body in good chiropractic condition. How to have proper posture or different stretches for various ailments.
It’s not complicated. You just have to think things through. But let’s say for a moment that you’re not in business yet. You don’t have a company but you’re looking to build something that delivers real value. What are the most profitable membership site ideas that can make you money fast? That’s the real question, right?
Many great ideas exist for profitable membership sites. But the top 10 listed below can generate the highest profit in a short period. And the beauty of membership sites is this. You can spend more money to acquire a customer. Why? Because membership sites naturally boost the lifetime value of a customer. After all, they’re paying monthly.
If customers pay, on average, for six months or a year, you can quickly calculate your typical lifetime value (LTV) of a customer. You won’t know this before you build the membership site. But you can quickly learn it fast. As long as your membership content is interesting and engaging, people will continue to pay for access to that content.
1—Day Trading
Day trading has always been in high demand. That’s because many try but most fail at making money with day trading. If you’re good at day trading, or you’re willing to learn, this makes a great membership site idea. That’s because you can release fresh content regularly to help teach people how to do day trading the right way.
You can teach the basics by releasing free content that promotes the more advanced techniques. The basics could be about how to read different indicators and patterns, or what to look for in general. If people get a lot of value from the free content they will gladly sign up for the paid membership site content. Day trading can be taught in stocks, bonds, commodities, crypto, and more.
2—Sales Training
Sales are vital to every business. And if you’re good at sales, you can build a membership site to teach others how to make more money in sales. You can share frameworks, scripts, audio recordings, and so on with your members. Since sales are at the heart of a business, they’re willing to pay a lot of money for continued access to training.
You can also offer different tiers that could include personalized consulting, coaching calls, and more. Success in sales boils down to understanding the psychological drivers of human beings and your ability to build rapport. Some don’t understand it until they watch and listen to another person doing sales effectively.
3—Sales Funnels
Sales funnels are one of the most effective ways you can make money online. And you can use sales funnels to make money in any industry or niche. But most don’t know about sales funnels. They don’t realize that traditional websites are experiencing a slow and painful death. That’s because websites don’t convert as well as sales funnels.
If you understand how sales funnels work, you can build an entire membership site dedicated to teaching people how to make money with sales funnels. You can teach all the ins and outs of funnel design, mechanics, copywriting, marketing your funnel, using upsells, downsells, and so on. You can even provide premium funnel designs as exclusive membership content.
4—Real Estate
Many people want to learn about real estate. After all, real estate has always been a great way to make money. That’s why people will gladly pay for exclusive real estate training. You can teach many areas of real estate. You can teach people how to wholesale real estate, reverse wholesaling, fix and flips, multi-family, hard money lending, and so on.
You can charge a lot of money for real estate training. Plus, you can use resources like YouTube to release free content designed to get people to join your membership site. You can offer freemium content there with the option to pay for the more exclusive content. Plus, you can make money by using affiliate links to promote financing options, distressed seller platforms, and so on.
5—Diet & Fitness
The health industry is a big draw for many. People constantly want to get in better shape. They want to diet and workout. To lose weight and get fit. But most don’t understand the mechanics of the body and the macronutrients that go into it. They don’t know how to eat the right foods at the right time, or the right exercises to do.
If you’re in the health niche you can create exclusive member-based content on a membership site. This idea can take on many shapes and forms. It can be in the format of a challenge with membership content baked into it. You could provide recipes and an eating-out guide, for example. You can even gamify the whole thing and build a community around it. The options are endless.
6—Dog Training
People love their pets. But not many people know how to train their pets and properly give them the guidance and commands that they need. Since the dog niche is so massive, this makes a great idea for a membership site. People will gladly pay endless amounts of money to ensure that their dogs are well taken care of.
If you have experience with dog training, consider doing this. You can go into detail and provide explainer videos and a breakdown of the psychological tactics that work with dogs. Address all the typical problems that dog owners face and how to solve those problems. You can also use Ask Campaigns to ask an audience on social media what specifically they struggle with when it comes to dog train. Then, build your content around that.
7—Travel Hacks
If you love travel and know some great hacks, you can easily build a membership site devoted to this niche. The travel industry is huge and millions of travelers are constantly searching for the best ways to hack travel and save money. You can even teach people how to make money while traveling. This way, they can spend more time on the road and not have to worry about running back to a full-time job.
For example, in the US alone, there are roughly 2.3 billion person-trips each year. Internationally, there are so many trips done every year. And many of those travelers are looking for ways to make their travel dollars go farther. Entire blogs are dedicated to travel such as The Points Guy and others. You can teach people about credit card point hacking and other travel methods that can help people save thousands of dollars on trips.
8—Make Money Niche
Many people want to learn how to make money. If you can teach people how to do that effectively you can build a massive membership site. You must pick a topic within this niche that you can teach. And it should be a topic that you are familiar with and have experienced success with. If not, you’re doing others a disservice.
People from all walks of life want to learn how to make money online so that they can quit their jobs, travel more frequently, and spend more time with their children. If you can find a topic that isn’t saturated and go all in, you can do well. Be careful not to come across as too spammy or scammy. Build out free, useful content on social media and YouTube to help promote and market your membership site.
9—Social Media Marketing
Social media is a massive niche that frightens most people. That’s because many people don’t want to show their faces on social media. They’re either shy or embarrassed by how they look or sound. And they’re worried about what others will think of them. If you’re savvy with social media, you can create a membership site teaching people how to use social media to make money. And how to overcome some of the typical things that hold people back.
Since most businesses struggle to make money with social media, you can find an audience there. If you understand short-form content and are great at making videos that gain traction, you can share your tips there too. But you can also share strategies for outreach on social media. This can help ordinary people make money by finding their clients on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and others.
10—Freelancing
Another idea for a membership site is to teach people freelancing. It can be any niche inside of freelancing. It can also simply be ways to make money as a freelancer. You can provide exclusive content for freelancers to teach skills, help them find new clients, market their services and so on. Freelancing is a wide niche and you can teach many skills.
You can teach web development, graphic design, online marketing, search engine optimization, paid ads, and so on. Make sure that you’re knowledgeable in that topic before you teach it. You can also line up various ways to make money as an affiliate by recommending different products and services to your members.
How Do You Build A Membership Site?
Building a membership site isn’t hard or complex. Especially when you use the right software platform to build your site. ClickFunnels offers premade templates for membership sites that you can launch with a single click. Plus, there’s a drag-and-drop editor you can use to quickly set up and design your site, the login screen, and the content area.
It’s simple to add new content to your membership site regularly. It doesn’t require any coding or web development to do that. All you have to do is create the content in whatever form and then add it to the page using the editor. It’s simple to do and you can train others to do it for you. You can also easily link up your payment gateway to process monthly payments for your site.
What’s The Best Type Of Membership Site Content?
The best type of content you can create for a membership site is video content. Videos are easy to consume and digest. They can provide a lot of value in a short period. But making video content takes time. Everyone knows that, right? But you can easily make video content, and then have it transcribed into written content. Plus, you can always extract the audio from that to make podcast content.
How Do You Get People To Join Your Membership Site?
Setting up the membership site is the easy part. The uphill battle is to get people to join that site. The best way to do that is through marketing. Marketing is the key to growing your membership site. You can approach marketing in many ways. But the best way is to put out free content on social media platforms and YouTube. Your free content should address objections or problems people face related to your membership site.
Take the time to list out all the objections and problems that hold people back from achieving the objective your membership content solves. Then build free content around that. Focus on creating valuable content and not just looking for the sale. The sale should happen naturally because you’ll eventually become an authority. That’s what happens when you release a lot of high-quality content over time.
How Much Money Do Membership Sites Make?
There are many ways to make money today. But membership sites are a great opportunity because of the recurring revenue. Once you acquire the customer, they’ll likely stick around for 3 to 6 months. Even longer if your content is very helpful and engaging. That means you can generate passive income with membership sites and make money while you sleep.
That doesn’t mean you’ll get rich overnight. Building a membership site is easy but promoting that membership site takes a deeper understanding of marketing. Build a lead generation funnel with an effective lead magnet to take your marketing to the next level. Then, use the power of email marketing to share stories and convert browsers into buyers.