Selling premium memberships

[Robby]

I saw this articel about selling premium memberships and thaught i would share: http://monetizepros.com/blog/2014/how-to-sell-paid-memberships-economics-of-a-premium-product/

Look on the percentage of big sites selling premium memberships. Nearly 1% convert in to premium.

Who has good succes with premium memberships?
Would incentives for moderators work?

 

[tajhay]

I feel that far too many forums start putting out premium memberships without having the traffic to back it up. Maybe it should be something to look at when you have a decent traffic and a large number of people online, but to start offering premium memberships on new forums is too much of an overkill.

Create Forum -> Get Decent Traffic -> Think about monetizing

Any other route will spell disaster.

 

[digitalpoint]

I think the biggest thing to make premium memberships really work is if you have something users want. There is a huge difference between when premium membership is something the user wants (some sort of product or service included in it) vs. being something they don't really need (then it's more of a donation).

We've had fair success with our premium membership, but we also load it with tons of stuff that a lot of people need (vBulletin/XenForo addons), access to special functions in the tools area of our site, functions to enable them to sell their products/services easier, etc.

Some stuff is "fluff" (the stuff that doesn't require any work to let them have, but also stuff they really don't care about... things like username color, ability to edit user title, etc.), but then some stuff is valuable 100 times over for the users that need those things. https://www.digitalpoint.com/help/premium

 

[Robby]

I think the biggest thing to make premium memberships really work is if you have something users want. There is a huge difference between when premium membership is something the user wants (some sort of product or service included in it) vs. being something they don't really need (then it's more of a donation).

We've had fair success with our premium membership, but we also load it with tons of stuff that a lot of people need (vBulletin/XenForo addons), access to special functions in the tools area of our site, functions to enable them to sell their products/services easier, etc.

Some stuff is "fluff" (the stuff that doesn't require any work to let them have, but also stuff they really don't care about... things like username color, ability to edit user title, etc.), but then some stuff is valuable 100 times over for the users that need those things. https://www.digitalpoint.com/help/premium

Your program is indeed pretty Great but my site is talking about relationships so software sells will not work. My premium has more then 10 benefits but indeed. Actually the user dont need it per se. Adsense is also not a good choice for me. The only thing that i see in my niche are dating sites like pof. Maybe i chose the wrong niche. I dont know. And the traffic is getting really descent.

 

[digitalpoint]

Yeah, I didn't mean you should start offering software or that sort of thing to people on a dating site, but there's a lot of things you could offer users of a dating site... really just depends on what you are offering now (without premium), and then build something of value in addition to what you are already offering.

For example OkCupid offers a ton of things like being able to filter out less attractive people in the list when you subscribe to their A-List (basically just premium membership).

 

[Suzanne O]

Yeah, I didn't mean you should start offering software or that sort of thing to people on a dating site, but there's a lot of things you could offer users of a dating site... really just depends on what you are offering now (without premium), and then build something of value in addition to what you are already offering.

For example OkCupid offers a ton of things like being able to filter out less attractive people in the list when you subscribe to their A-List (basically just premium membership).

That's similar to what Bigfooty do.

With my own forum I haven't as yet but I be will shortly.
The headache I have is trying to workout what do people get to see. Considering my forum is to do with Aussie Rules I was thinking of putting my General discussion section up and have everyone pay $5 au or some price.

 

[Brent W]

We currently do well with this on two sites: https://www.aspiescentral.com/threads/v-i-p-upgrades.5325/ and https://www.v6mustang.com/threads/premium-membership-how-to-disable-ads.277128/