How to Make Money With Private Sites

Private Sites are websites which provide information, and/or resources, and/or tools, and/or services to members who join and pay a one-off or monthly/quarterly/yearly fee.
The way private sites work is after a member joins the private site they are usually given a user-name/password and log in to the private section to access the information that they paid for.
The big advantage of private sites is that if you information is updated regularly and is good quality many members will renew their subscriptions again and again - building you a residual income even if you do little additional marketing.
The disadvantages of private sites is that you probably need to frequently update the members' area (potentially lots of work!), and you absolutely must make sure your website is reliable - or otherwise members will not be able to access the information that they paid for.
To set up a private site you will need not only the private area, but also a public area explaining the benefits of purchasing membership, and a subscription management system to keep track of members' user-names and passwords. Creating your own subscription management system most likely requires significant programming or help from a programmer - or you can use Verotel's payment system which includes CGI scripts you can put on your site (you need to install them but not program them).
If you do not want to be tied to regularly updating the information you provide, or don't want to deal with subscriptions, you might want to consider creating an eBook instead.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to building a business around private websites. The advantages include:-
- You have your own unique product. (Less competition, and great for marketing and publicity)
- Customers are purchasing from you - if they like the product, you can offer them additional products/services and sell them those too, later.
- High profit for each sale (you only need to make a relatively small number of sales to make a good profit).
- No limit on the amount of sales that you can (potentially) make.
- Potential residual income
The disadvantages include:-
- You must spend time creating the members' area in the first place.
- You must spend time updating the members' area with new content
- You need a way to manage members' subscriptions and control access to the private area.
- You need a very reliable website, installed on a reliable web host (and therefore probably need to pay a bit more for your hosting)
- Customer Service - you need to devote at least part of your time to customer service (answering questions etc.)