In the relatively brief time that I have been marketing on the Internet, many people have come to me and asked me why they would need a membership site. It’s a fair question. After giving it careful thought, I realized that in all the articles I have ever written, I’ve never really touched on why you need a membership site if you really want to have long term success in this business of Internet marketing. When you read my reasoning, you’ll be off to start your own membership site as soon as possible.

The best way to really explain this is to point out what are basically the two most common roads to earning a living online and the differences between them.

The first road is to sell a product, such as an ebook. Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking ebooks. I sell them myself. But what happens when you sell a customer an ebook? Well, unless you have other products to sell, you’re not going to see any future income out of him. You had your one shot and now if you want to earn additional income, you either have to sell that person a different product or find somebody else to sell your ebook to.

The second road, and this is where membership sites come in, is to sell somebody a service. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is Aweber, which is an autoresponder service. Aweber is so good at what they do that you’d be hard pressed to find people who don’t rave about it. But the best thing about selling a service like Aweber is that it’s not a one shot deal. Once a person signs up and pays for his first month’s membership, if he wants to continue using this service, he has to continue paying the following month. This is called residual income. You’ve really made only one sale and still get money from it for months and months afterwards.

In the long run, a membership site, which is what Aweber is, is going to bring you more income with fewer sales. This is how people build up a solid income over time. It is very hard to keep coming up with product after product year after year. But if you have a solid membership site, you can earn a solid income promoting just the one site for as long as the service that it provides is in demand and of high quality.

There is another very important reason to start your own membership site. It’s called Internet presence. Selling ebooks and other “tools” is fine, but once somebody has been to your sales page, they’re not likely to come back. With membership sites, you develop a kind of community, a place where people come to hang out, especially if your membership site is a forum. That’s where things really get personal. And there is nothing better than that personal touch for building a reputation and an Internet presence.

So, if you’ve been spending your time selling ebooks, or whatever, you might want to consider starting your own membership site.

Because it’s more than just about money.

For more information about setting up and running your own membership site visit

http://www.karlwarren.com/membership