With my first internet marketing product awaiting approval by Clickbank it’s time to give further thought to what comes next. Established wisdom says that it should be some form of backend, another product I can offer those who have already bought my first.

There are several possibilities, but essentially there are three main options. A downsell to offer those who are not interested in spending a certain amount on my first product, an upsell for those who are willing to spend more, and a membership site.

The option that appeals most to me is a membership site. Built and managed correctly it can become a long-term central hub for my online internet marketing business. Once set up and established I can also create other products to attract and feed people into the membership.

A membership site also helps find those willing to invest more in my content and therefore can also be used to target those who might interested in higher value, higher ticket products. It is also a means of achieving a recurring income and thus avoiding the cashflow peaks and troughs that result from only selling individual products.

First I need to come up with an overall concept for the membership site. I believe it’s best not to specialise too much here. If it addresses the general area of internet marketing there will be the potential of developing multiple front end products on various topics to attract and grow the membership.

With several years experience in struggling to make money online I have had a number of ideas for a site others would find useful. I have narrowed these down to just a couple of possibilities and now have to focus these further. To help with this I’ll try to summarise the concept in a tagline or draft the outline for a sales page promoting the site.

With the overall concept decided I can begin thinking about the content. Specifically what topics I should include, where to source the relevant information and how to deliver the content: written reports, video, interviews, etc.

Having decided this I can list or mind map an outline of the first six month’s content.

After this there will be still plenty of decisions to make. How to get traffic to the site, should members receive access to everything from day one or should content be drip fed? Then there’s the more technical issues to consider. Which membership site script to use? Which payment processor?

So, a whole list of issues to consider and decisions to make, but that’s always the case when you are building a business. All I can say is watch this space to discover the results of this process.