Along with having the right topic for your membership site,  the
next key to having a successful and profitable membership site is to
make your site easy maintain.

If you don't, building, updating, and administering your site could
quickly become a time consuming nightmare!

 That's why it's vital to have as many administrative functions
happen automatically as possible. For example automatic enrollment,
automatic billing, automatic cancellation, etc. Ask anyone who has
tried to do these tasks manually and they will tell you how time
consuming and frustrating it is.

Another thing to consider is that people who pay for access to a
membership site expect and deserve to have the content of the
website updated often....normally several times a week. Even
if you are pretty good at creating websites this can be pretty time
consuming. If you aren't, forget it!

Fortunately there are some tools to help you. There are several 3rd
party services like IBILL.com and Ezpay.com. Some of the services
like IBILL not only do the billing but also handle the enrollments,
passwords and other administrative parts of managing a membership
site. Many of these services don't even require you to have a credit
card merchant service.

That's the good news about these services. The bad news is that when
you use a 3rd party service you are introducing many other potential
problems. Here's a link to the problems I encountered first hand.

http://tinyurl.com/ppo1

Another solution to starting and maintaining a membership website is
to use a special software program.

Some of this software only handles administrative functions like,
billings enrollments, etc. The best software takes care of these
functions plus make it easy to set up the site, maintain it, manage
content and more.

After my bad experience I created my own membership software called
Memberstar^TM It reduces the workload about 80% from trying to do it
yourself and even manages your content. It also avoids the headaches
of using a 3rd party service.

I highly recommend it.

It's features are too long to list here but for more information go
to:

 http://memberstar.com/

Next time I'll show you some examples of successful membership
websites.