What should go into your membership site? Will it be enough?

What should you charge for it? How do you get people to sign up for it?

... and how do you get members to stick around?

You've probably heard the glory stories of the big guru product launches in the world of internet marketing.

The stories of people making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single day. Sometimes more.

But, it is hard to see yourself doing it with those lingering questions and doubts like those above - the same questions I get quite often from Academy subscribers and readers.

Even the people who have done it will now tell you the problems that come along with it. I've heard my share of stories of big-name gurus doing a huge product launch... only to have a hard time making payroll just months later.

Those are the stories they won't tell you, usually.

Big product launches can be fun, but personally... I'll take slow and sustainable any day.

I don't know about you, but I far prefer to build a business online which is grounded in reality. Which is built on a solid framework and a long-range plan, not something that is just a one-time launch (which may or may not even work out).

I love the feeling that I can always count on my business to bring in a predictable amount of revenue each month.

And the way I do it is by building my online business around a membership site.

When people thinking of a "membership site", they often think just about recurring monthly revenue. And surely, that's an awesome way to do it.

To illustrate the compounding income power of a membership site, let's take a mythical membership.

Let's assume the cost is $20/month and it has a 5% member churn (which means that, every month, about 5% of your members cancel). If you enroll 20 new members each month, here's how the income would build up...

One sale every day and a half of $20, yet it compounds up to the point where you’re generating $3,665.74/month by the end of the first year. And it would just keep on going.

It might not be as sexy as a hundred-thousand dollar launch, but this is much more real. This, you can do.

Even if you've never made a sale like this before, you can clearly see that the only "secret" here is to start. Because it does compound over time as long as you keep at it. And before you know it, your blog is generating a monthly revenue that you previously thought would be impossible (and it would be all but impossible if you were depending solely on one-off sales, such as ebooks).

But, there's more...

... because a membership site isn't only about recurring revenue.

See, a membership site is, at the core, simply a site where one has to log in to access some protected content. How you decide to bill people is up to you. It can be a one-time fee, monthly, annual... even free.

So, in the end, if you intend to sell pretty much any form of protected content at all, you will be doing it with a membership site.