The gurus who want to sell you membership site how-tos will always tell you,

“Membership sites are great because you sell once and profit every month”

While that does have some truth to it, in the years of building membership sites for clients and created several of my own, I can tell you the cold hard truth is, keeping your members interested and subscribed can be one of the more challenging things about owning a subscription based product. Some products have a natural high retention rate – usually software based subscriptions or something people use everyday like hosting. It is a pain to move web sites or shopping carts so people tend to stay on for a longer period. Service based membership sites can also have a better retention rate – as long as the member sees a clear value in paying that fee every month, you’re good.

Image by ivan petrov

But for other products, it can be harder to keep them around. Usually these are products that require people to take action in order to reap the rewards of the membership. Take private label rights content (PLR ) memberships. While we all know how much PLR can benefit us, we don’t always get motivated to use the content and they end up gathering dust on your hard drive. I’ve been very guilty of that myself.

I’ll be honest about it. I am lazy. Rewriting the articles is one thing but if your membership delivers 200 articles (or any such ridiculous amount), are you going to be sitting there copying and pasting 200 times? Uhh… maybe I’ll do that later and later never comes.

You can certainly outsource this stuff. Here’s my personal take on outsourcing. I love it! However, just because you can get someone to do it doesn’t mean you can’t be smart and save money. Remember, you are paying your VA for the hours they work for you. The longer they take, the more you pay. Equip them with tools and automation that reduces their work, they spend less time on the task, you get billed less and guess what? You’re saving money. Well… I’ve gone off a tangent here. Back to the point at hand.

The ladies from All Private Label Content know all this and want to help members to utilize their purchases or use more of their monthly purchases. For this, they turned to technology, by providing a tool that makes the consumption of their products easier. If a member cancels, they are not allowed to use the tool anymore. This is great news for the members since it makes their lives easier but also great for the site owner because, it adds another reason why members shouldn’t cancel their membership. For some members, this might just be the deal maker for a long term membership.

This is a great case study in using technology to help with membership site retention. If you’re interested to take a peek at the plugin the video below explains the usage. If you are already a member of a recurring product in All Private Label Content, you can download it right away. If you are not a member, definitely check out the high quality PLR they can provide you each month.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–b1wEX7-Kw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]