Pricing Your Membership and Accepting Payments

Membership sites are a great way to create a recurring income and when done correctly members will come. The right combination includes offering the right products and the right price. If you price yourself too high and you are the new kid on the block, you are far more likely to fail. There’s a strategy to how much you charge and what payments you accept, that can help you to build your business.

Starting low is smart – when your membership fees are low you are far more likely to get people to your site, and you’ll also reduce your cancellations especially if you increase the price for new members in the future. It is a much bigger challenge to decrease your price than it is to increase your price – many people don’t realize this. 

Have a look at other membership sites that are in your niche and see what they are charging for membership. This will give you a pretty good idea of what the ‘right price’ or the acceptable pricing rage is. It’s a good idea to fit into this range or be less. If you are more and a new membership site, people are more likely to head over to an established site. 

You might also want to test whether your potential members prefer to pay a one off charge annually or whether they prefer a monthly payment. If you thought it would be monthly, you aren’t alone, most people do; however, it seems that far more people prefer the one off payment, so make sure you understand your market. Keep this in mind when setting up your payment option. It is generally beneficial to offer both payment options. 

Another important factor is determining what payments you are going to accept. PayPal is by far the easiest and you can have it up in running in no time at all – minutes to be exact. Potential members really tend to favor PayPal. 

Clickbank is another solution that is pretty popular and for the site owner it provide more analytics and as well as features. However, you are going to have to be willing to lay out some cash to begin with. Plus, it takes a bit for your product to be approved.

It’s really up to you which one you choose, or if you decide to choose both, but unless you have a good reason for not using these. 

