I have talked about the value of membership sites before on this blog. I have also discussed being a part of several successful membership sites. I may have even mentioned that I had a failed membership site that never got off the ground. Yup, I dumped $15k into it but it is still sitting on my server waiting to be finished. I’ve had bad luck with developers.

I also have another tattoo design membership site I built using Amember. This site was a little bit different than what I am putting together now as all of the content is in the form of images.

I created that site using plain HTML/CSS/Dreamweaver and the automatic web gallery feature in Photoshop. I hired an outside developer to do the Amember integration because I kept screwing things up. If you need a developer for your Amember site drop me a line and I’ll connect you with mine. Total customization cost me around $100 plus the Amember which cost me around $200.

So…in that case I had the site up and running in about a week for around $300 out of pocket and then probably a few thousand dollars worth of my time. I doubt I would use Amember again. It’s a good script but somewhat confusing to me and support was slow and not very helpful.

To be honest, I don’t promote TattooDesignHeaven.com I built it a while ago, back when I was chasing more of the low hanging fruit than I am now. I’m not really into tattoos. I just got a good deal on the content and decided to test the waters.

Now once again I am starting another membership site. This time I am creating the site I would have liked when I got into this whole internet marketing game;  a site to help you learn making money online. I have been licensing and creating content now for the past six months or so and now I am trying to get this thing off the ground.

Why am I telling you all this? Who cares right? Well, I figured I’d take you along on this trip and tell you everything I’m doing to create this site and maybe you’ll discover how to start your own membership site.

So, where did I start? I came up with the vision for this site on a nice run along the coast nearly a year ago. I though how awesome would it be to have a video library jam packed with info, forums, step-by-step guides, monthly teleconferences, and intimate guidance and critiques dedicated to helping people free themselves from the nine-to-five and make money online. At the time I had a hundred different projects happening so I put the idea on the shelf.

It wasn’t until some months later after joining Armand Morin’s $500 a month AM2.0 membership program that I picked the idea back up. I saw an opportunity there to teach people about online business at an affordable rate. I haven’t decided yet but I imagine my memberships will start off at around $87 a month. That should be affordable for everyone.

Once I finally committed to the project here are the steps I have taken to realize the goal.

• First, I began writing down all of the things I would want and all of the things I wish someone would teach me about online business. Then I asked a number of business owners and others what kinds of things they would like to know about online business building.
• Next, I created a mind map and basic outline of the content and resources I felt I needed for the site.
• I thought about the delivery platform and decided I wanted to have audio, video, and text.
• Now I needed to figure out how and where I would get the content I needed for my categories. So…I cracked open a spreadsheet and began making notes, doing online research, and talking to people.
• Finish the outline.
• I decided on Wordpress for my delivery platform. Wordpress is so stable and so easy to use I really didn’t consider many other options. I thought about Joomla or Drupal but WP is much simpler.
• Decide on hosting. This has been a tricky issue. I decided not to host on my normal virtual dedicated server over at Vexxhost. I already have a number of sites running on that server and I am uncertain of the bandwidth requirements of a video membership site. I decided to go with Godaddy grid hosting for the trial run.Grid hosting is supposed to spread the processing out over multiple machines thereby hadling the load better. I looked into private video hosting but decided I could get the same capabilities with Godaddy grid hosting. I get 100GB of storage and 1000GB of transfer. Hopefully that will suffice. I have used Godaddy hosting in the past but I’m not a big fan because I don’t like the proprietary control panel compared to the CPanel hosting I normally use. Also, there is a 25MB backup limit in the Godaddy control panel.
• Next I needed to decide on the membership software. Which I will devote the next post to.

I’ll carry this discussion on in the next post where I’ll talk more about my hosting considerations and membership software choices.

If you have experience with membership sites I would love to hear your thoughts. Go ahead and leave a comment.

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