I think I have a great technique to get people to pay for membership of my Real Estate site. The plan is to encourage visitors to sign up for membership. This gives them the ability to contribute to the discussion forum and also to create a property sales page.

However, they will only be able to preview their sales page with the photos and such. So, this allows them to get familiar with the system and if they are happy with it, they can activate their listing by paying the monthly subscription.

This should avoid the need to sell them up front on the property listing offer.

I am integrating the property listing feature into the forum member’s profile editing area so every forum member will be tempted to play with it.

The forum rules will strictly ban advertising in the forums apart from maybe signature links. So people should hopefully be highly likely to subscribe if they have property to sell.

A further feature I am planning to have is the “portfolio” admin page where agents can create multiple property sales pages. Everyone will have their own personal “portfolio” page but they will only be able to create one property page initially. I expect to create some bulk buy offers for agents so they can create say up to 100 Ad pages for a fixed monthly fee.

What do you think? Is this a good strategy to take?