The top ideas for a paid membership site come down to two things - your level of interest in the topic and the demand from potential customers.

I’m not going to present a list here, although my membership site ebook covers quite a few suggestions, based on what has proven successful for other people. It also shows you exactly where to go to look for market trends online for the past year. Pretty handy stuff when you’re trying to narrow down a list of topics.

Just off the top of my head though, if you were to go on keyword research alone, I did find some people looking for membership sites on plumbing and yorkies. Now, if you’re a plumber or yorkie lover, then these could be great paid membership site ideas for you!

If you’re not, it’s probably a good idea to look elsewhere. The owner of one of the membership sites I did a case study on in the Easy Membership Site ebook had this to say on choosing a membership site idea:

“I can never stress this enough - do your research… We8There.com has 2 million hits per month and growing because we offer content that is updated daily. Stale content loses visitors.”

And Chris Parkin had this advice:

“Before starting out with a subscription site, before you buy software and domain name and hosting, make sure you have enough interest in the topic to answer or to find answers for your paying members questions”

These points need to be taken into account when finding the top ideas for a paid membership site. Because an idea can have the best potential in terms of traffic and members, but if you don’t like it (at worst) or it just doesn’t interest you (at best), then it’s going to fizzle very quickly. Unless of course, you’ve got the money to hire a dedicated manager as well as all the content writers.

The fact is, your membership site will require you to develop content, as well as answer members questions, and contribute to the forums. You can hire people for this, but if you’re like most people, you won’t be doing that straight away. And if you’ve ever worked in a job you don’t like or find boring, you’ll know how hard it is to get motivated to do it. It’s the same for the daily work in managing a successful membership site.

The next part of the equation, once you’ve got your own list of paid membership site ideas, is to see whether there is sufficient demand, and whether it’s a ‘buyers market’. Demand is easy enough to see from keyword research, although there is one tool that makes it very easy to see the online trends. And a quick way to check out whether it’s a buyers market is to see how many other products and services are being offered to that market. If there is a lot, you know you’ve got a market where people are willing to spend money.

The Easy Membership Toolkit covers a lot of other things in developing top ideas for a paid membership site, not least is a swipe file, and hot areas for further research.

It does more than that though - it provides you with all the tools you need to start your own membership site. You don’t need to buy any software, as there 8 part, step-by-step video shows you how to set up your membership site using free tools. That is, tools that are the equivalent of software people pay from $3995.00 for. You can find out more about it here, and put your own top ideas for a paid membership site into action (and I say ideas, plural, because you don’t pay for a per-domain license with this toolkit).