Lessons Learned about Developing a Paid Product & Membership Site

Posted by Professional Writing Services

July 6, 2009

This blog has become my area for sharing my web 2.0 experiences and other related topics.

Some of you know that I have been working on getting my blog up to speed and also getting ready to launch a membership site.

At the moment I am currently recovering from the mad dash to get the finalized ebook (for profit product) ready for the marketplace.

The process has been long and daunting since, due to health challenges, I have limited energy and also limited resources when related to outsourcing.

I thought it might be useful to share a few of my experiences as I toddle down this road—many of my friends and colleagues have asked me to recount the experience so I thought it might be easy to do that here.

Foundation Programs
The outline on some of this process came from the Become a Blogger Premium (Gideon Sheldrick) and the Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind Programs (Yaro Starak).

Gideon’s videos are tutorials that actually assist people in the very basics of the process. I was beyond most of these but decided to do the premium program and was happy that I did since I actually found tips and hints that were very useful.

Although I was implementing the strategies as taught, things for me have been slower than for others.

Some of my fellow students in the programs stopped blogging or did not launch a membership site while others made it very big.

Me, I am plodding along and watching the income stream increase. My visitors and subscribers are steadily growing especially as I narrow my focus. Fluctuations tell me to readjust.

eBook Research

Although I have a free ebook product to entice subscribers, I also wanted to use my expertise to create a for profit product that was timely and of value.

The creation process took over six months. I began by researching keywords and traffic related to the topic.

I did this via Market Samurai and through Adam Short’s Niche Profit Classroom. I was surprised that my topic really had not been tackled yet and looked at a variety of keywords, potential competition, and decided that this project was certainly a good one.

Mapping Out the Plan

Next, I began to gather data and search for products and services related to the topic and mapped out a tentative topic outline using Free Mind software.

Finally I began to write the ebook and pondered how I could make it more useful and more profitable.

During this time an advisory on topic was released–not once but twice!

This made it timely but also very time critical to step up the release.

I’ll talk more about this next.

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