Get Your Vision Board Iphone/Ipod App and start moving toward your dreams today! Books by this Author 20 Ways To Boost Your Online Credibility Without credibility, believability and trust, your online business is doomed. Ebook is transcript from radio show covering 20 ways to boost you online credibility.   Feature Articles Compassionate Business in Action... Fast Track Your Journey to Home Business Succ... Simplify Your Holidays,Stuffing is for TURKEY... Money Can Be Made on the Web... How To Use The Socratic Method To Create And ... How Does A Business Goddess Make Decisions?... Rebrand Your Company to Boost Your Bottom Lin... Cinnamon Rolls, Breast Cancer and Your Busine... Click here for more >>

A membership site doesn't have to have a huge number of members, or charge an exorbitant membership fee, to be profitable. The key is to also design them to be as low maintenance as practical.

A site with just 200 members pay you $25 per month, gives you a residual income stream of $5000 per month. If you spend no more than one or two hours per week on this site, that's a very respectable hourly income.

Here are some tips for operating a profitable membership site without working yourself to death.

1) In order to retain members, you do need to update the site frequently. If a site feels stale, or has no new content, your members will grow bored and leave.

2) Build in a way for members to interact. One of the easiest ways to do that is to install a discussion forum on the site. This allows members to benefit by sharing information. Also, it gives members a place to go when they are simply bored. Working from home, especially if it's a computer-based business can be very lonely. Members will often visit your membership site to combat this loneliness and chat with friends.

Some of the newer forum software actually lets members set up their own mini-communities. The forum is then one central communities, surrounded by a collection of individual, personalized communities.

3) Create a sense of community. You want to have your members feel like this is their site, and that it is a community where they can feel safe, and learn. This generally means that you need to have a few moderators on your forum. Without moderators to maintain order, and even discipline members, mean-tempered members can quickly make others feel unwelcome.

When you do foster this sense of community, you'll find your members very protective of "their backyard."

4) Strive for the majority of new content to be created by members. This is also why it's good to have a forum. Experts on your topic will join, share priceless information and resources, and give the membership real value. Allow members to offer freebies to each other, etc. This is how you avoid having to spend countless hours maintaining and growing the site.

Certain leaders and regular contributors to the community will emerge, and many members will stick around because they benefit from interacting with those specific members. When you identify those community leaders, those "thought leaders," encourage them. These are the people you also want to seek as moderators. Just the respect that they earn naturally will keep other members in check.

5) Maintain exclusivity in your community. If members are paying to be members, or having to meet some other requirement, you need to guard against outsiders coming in. Using a secure password protected script will often accomplish this, but passwords do get shared and hackers abound.

You need to be forever vigilant to protect your community. Otherwise, you could quickly find your forum filled with disgusting content or overrun by advertisements.

You also want to make sure you're running the latest version of whatever script you're using to power your site. As software developers discover venerabilities in scripts they put out patches, and running the latest version is the only way to ensure you have the latest security patch. The bad guys are constantly searching for sites powered by outdated scripts because they know where the holes are.

We'll look at a few more ways to grow and protect your membership site in part 2.