Passionate bloggers are always looking for ways to streamline their revenue. The traditional way of doing it is hosting ads on the website, but if you’re really looking to do this full-time, you should definitely consider adding paid memberships. You’re probably asking yourself when the right time is to add paid memberships to your website? These 3 factors will help you decide when it’s time!

Different Revenue Streams

You know the famous saying, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Making money out of paid memberships is one thing, but make sure to explore different streams of revenue as well. For example, if you’re a fitness blogger, you can be making money from memberships, but you can also give fitness evaluations to new members, help them make a specialized meal and exercise plans to help them reach their fitness goal! Another stream of revenue can be through offering non-members a chance to download your series of “easy-home exercise videos.” As a fitness blogger, you can even host an event. The event can be a chance for you to meet your members, introduce non-members to your community, offer a limited number of fitness evaluations and customized meal plans.

Test Audience Engagement

You can’t have a successful Paywall without a loyal audience. Before you add paid memberships to your website, it’s important to test audience engagement. There are several ways to do so! Below are three examples.

E-mail Open Rates
As a blogger, you should be consistently sending out newsletters. A great way to test engagement is to check the open rate of the e-mails. Are your members actually clicking on your e-mails? Or do they just ignore them? If you’re looking for a great platform to send out weekly newsletters, I would definitely check out MailChimp. Monitor your open e-mail rates and research different ways to increase them. Maybe you need to work on creating a more attractive subject line. You may also be sending out too many e-mails. In any case, this is definitely an amazing way to test engagement.

Subscribe/Unsubscribe Rate
It’s normal to lose a few members here and there. What you want to do is make sure that the subscribed rate is higher than the unsubscribe rate. Initially, members will subscribe to your website if they are interested in your content and want to see more of it. Unsubscribing means that they’ve lost interest in the content, and you can’t have a paid membership website with subscribers. Having trouble with an unsubscribe rate? Check out these tips on how to keep your audience away from that unsubscribe button.

Social Media Sharing
If people love your content they will share it!  A great way to find out how popular your content is is to monitor how many of your viewers click the Share button. If you have a high viewing rate, but a low sharing rate, then your audience is interested in your content, but are choosing not to do anything further with it. 

Test With Pelcro

When in doubt, consult experts! Some might be worried about how paid memberships will affect their relationship with their members. The truth is you don’t need to start with 1,000 members to have a successful paid membership website, you can start with 15.  It’s important to look at the long-term return and not just pay attention to the numbers now. Let’s say you start with 10 members, and in 2 months, you lose 1 member, but you gain 2. Obviously, there are costs, and other factors involved, but as long as there is growth you are on the right track!

If you are thinking about creating a membership website, but don’t know where to start, or are worried about risks, you can work with Pelcro to test early. Pelco’s targeting makes it risk-free by allowing you to target a small % of your userbase.