Membership websites are a great source of recurring income. One reason for this is that people love to belong to a community that is as interested and passionate about the same thing as they are. Look at golfers, for example. The golfing community is crazy about golf and are willing to spend big money on it. People like these are actually looking for an honest environment where they can interact and gain knowledge. The ‘money’ factor becomes negligible when they consider the benefits.

What that translates into is this: the biggest money-puller of your membership site is going to be your content, not your design, product or your name. You need content that sizzles!

Obviously, we are not talking about one-time content here. We are talking about intelligent, trustworthy content that is updated on a regular basis. This will give your visitors a reason to keep coming back for more. So, the foolproof formula for membership income is: provide great content consistently and you should have no problem getting a regular influx of visitors.

However, we all know how difficult it is to keep churning out fresh content every week. More so when your client base is beginning to expand and you’re not well and truly equipped to deal with everything at the same time. Suddenly, there are newsletters to send, blogs to post into, queries to answer and products to evaluate. In the mad rush to get everything done, your content is sidelined and it becomes stale.

How can you prevent that from happening? How can you ensure a steady flow of quality content to your marketing website?

The written word: Use articles, ezines, graphs, charts and reports on your website. Writing your own content is the best option for your website but it is not always the easiest. Hire ghostwriters to write for you. Many paid sites give you a fixed volume of articles every month for a small fee. Subscribe to them. Mix and match them to create unique content. Suppose your niche deals with ‘Making money online’ and you buy 45 articles about your topic. The easiest thing would be to simply post the articles as-is, but do NOT give into that temptation. Rewrite the articles you buy in your own words or string them together to form an e-book, distill them for their gist or use only the headlines. The possibilities are endless. The trick is to make the articles genuinely yours.

Audio content: This is a very nice variation to the staid and boring written word and a real attention grabber. Speak to an established expert, record the interview, and upload it to your website. Monthly interviews will keep visitors glued to your website if the content is good. Or add audio content by podcasting your blog and putting it up on your website.

Video content: This is another attractive alternative. Use QuickTime, Flash, MPEG or AVI to upload video to your site. Just keep one thing in mind: your objective here is to provide content that is more valuable than your competitors and not to show off. Let me give you an example. Suppose your niche deals with the makeup industry. Put up a video highlighting some of the fine tricks of applying makeup. Great way to attract visitors. However, if you were to have a video of yourself detailing the makeup process, people will be miffed. Why did you waste their time to show them what they can very well understand in a reading? Reeks of publicity, doesn’t it? Surest way to drive away traffic!

RSS feeds: RSS feeds will spice up your web content because they provide both audio and video content. RSS allows you to source headlines and summary content from other blogs. So every time these blogs are updated, your content too is updated!

Crosslink: This is another great way of encouraging traffic. Refer to other websites that provide helpful information in the same niche. Comment on their information and link to them. This way, your readers know that you are updating your knowledge. You will also get incoming traffic from the other party who will link back to you if your own content is good enough.

How can you decide if your content is ‘good’ enough? Simple. Good content is information that your visitors will enjoy reading and will benefit from knowing. Ask yourself this: would you pay for this information? That would be the litmus test for good content.

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