One of the most lucrative websites to build is the Membership site. This is because the income should grow exponentially and the resale value of the site will be greater than a static website.

Investors value your website on it’s revenue history and potential. So the ideal situation is where the revenue is ramping up. The best way to get this ramping effect of the imcome is to have a membership site. So each time somebody subscribes as a member they add to the monthly income stream.

For example, you have a $20 per month subscription site and just 1 person joins per month. Here is the revenue you can look forward to over the first 6 months:

Month 1: $20
Month 2: $40
Month 3: $60
Month 4: $80
Month 5: $100
Month 6: $120

That’s with just 1 member joining per month!

As the site grows, it should attract a greater influx of new members leading to exponential growth.

However, the big stumbling block I find is the question of what kind of membership site should you go for. This irritated me so much as I read blog posts and forums saying how lucrative the membership sites are.

I tried before to create a dating site, but it was a flop because only guys pay to join dating sites! So if you create a dating site, I suggest targeting the gay male market LOL.

This is what I am doing now: I am going for the specialist Real Estate niche. Sure there are lots of existing websites out there but the world is a big place and I hope I can carve out my niche.

My thinking is that when people are anxious to sell a $500,000 property, they will not have a big issue with paying say $50 a month to advertise it on a site that is highly focussed on their locality with a nicely presented Ad for their property with a photo gallery etc.

I think it’s worth the effort to build a Real Estate site and see how it goes. If I make a mistake with the locality, I can always start again with a head start with all the code and templates in another untapped region of the world.

What do you think? Is this a good idea?

Tags: membership sites, real estate

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 by Andy and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.