AFF - Should I Create My Own Membership Site Or Promote As an Affiliate

I'm sure you've heard the craze about membership sites. You create a site with a bunch of content and people pay you month after month to get access on this content whether it's written materials, downloadable items, software, or video. But many other people have already created the membership you have thought of. And they have an affiliate program, meaning you can promote this; you can send paid members into these programs and get a commission back.

So the real question is should you create your own membership site or promote as an affiliate. There are pro's and con's to both.

Being an affiliate sounds great at first because you don't have to create the products. You don't have to maintain subscribers; you don't have to e-mail the subscribers so they'll know about new updates; you don't have to really do any work to keep people in the membership. All you have to do is recommend that these people join the site, and it's up to the membership site owner to keep people in that site.

But what are the bad things about being an affiliate?

You don't get all the money. You are working hard just to get some kind of a commission and many of these membership sites, you get a low percentage, like 20% or less for recurring commissions; and for some other affiliate programs, you get paid for the initial sale but not for the recurring commissions. So it's very important that you check the terms of service carefully.

Then the one thing that most affiliates don't realize, and that's when you recommend somebody to a membership, when you send them into that site, you give up that hard to earn and leave. You work hard to get traffic; you work hard to get somebody onto your mailing list and now, you just sent them off onto somebody else's list.

So think about that. If you had one person on your list, and you got lucky and happened to get that person into five other memberships, guess what, now they have six people e-mailing them instead of you.

So should you really promote someone else's membership site as an affiliate or should you make your own? It just depends on how quickly and how easily you can create content.

If you can put together a membership that last for six months, and you can put that together in two weeks or less, then you definitely should look into creating a membership. On the other hand, if you struggle to even create one single video or get one single subscriber, then you should start off slow, promote a membership as an affiliate now and then in the future, get into your own membership site.