When building a business plan, you should be thinking about how to use paid marketing programs to scale up additional channels. Although organic and email together can easily account for 50-60 percent of your revenue generation, paid marketing options broaden your reach. For instance, retail partners with companies like Apple or Amazon can tap into new audiences who already have relationships with these companies. And since these are major retailers with strong reputations, your content is available to new, massive groups of consumers.

In closing, membership websites utilizing paid and affinity content models will help you attract more website traffic, build a larger community of core audience members and help you generate more revenue through multiple marketing channels.

It’s important to understand that in a content-driven world you need at least one of two different types of subscription websites: the portal and the blog. Both of these content models are Google-friendly options, which makes it easier for your content to get noticed, crawled by the Google bots and ranked within search engine results pages.

A lighter version of your content offered for free through your own blog or portal will increase website traffic and converted users. You can use this list of audience members to market aligned products that incorporate more content.

In order to start upon this process of developing a successful blog or portal, begin by taking advantage of the products you already have. At the same time, you can build out what you don’t have. Launching an affinity site as a blog or portal allows you to open the organic marketing channel to a much wider audience.

In doing so, publishers disregard the historical print business model. If a publisher monetized his magazine assets in the past by selling advertising, it’s highly likely that the economics favor an ad-driven online publishing strategy. Or, if a publisher operates where circulation is the primary source of revenue, a membership website is a good option.

In terms of a content model, most magazine publishers over the past five-ten years launched periodical websites. In doing so, the publisher spent 800 hours per year to reformat magazine content into HTML.

Something about the magazine format on desktop hasn’t been a grand experience. This however didn’t come as a surprise to magazine publishers. Everybody assumed magazines wouldn’t format well for desktops, and didn’t present the desired experience. This has changed now, with the advent of the tablet.

Some magazines were successful in doing a great job of delivering and expanding audience with magazine style content even before the tablet. LEDs Magazine is one such example.

The tablet is a game changer though, as it affords the potential to deliver magazine content in a magazine format through the tablet, in addition to desktops and laptops.

Legacy publishers should take advantage of today’s technology by disaggregating all the magazine content by putting it into a periodical or reference website. This allows legacy publishers to monetize in a whole different way.

For instance, magazines are typically consumed in a per-issue basis where the audience is expected to digest all the content in a month or two. This paradigm is starting to change as back issues can be easily put online. Legacy publishers can take their archived content and publish it in digital formats, put it behind a subscription paywall and sell it as a separate subscription since it has a different value due to its reissue subject base. Subsequently, advertising could be sold on that format forever going forward. People want access to back issue content, and this is a revenue generating method for legacy publishers to provide back issue content to their audience.

Legacy publishers need to be aware of expanding business models while going forward in the digital age.

Beyond building an audience through search and website traffic, it’s important to generate retail partners like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Partnerships are how online businesses are able to open new channels to build upon the market share they need to grow.

Many online business operators do not explore retail channels right away. In most instances, it’s not that they didn’t have market access, they just hadn’t contacted the potential partners, nor did they have the horsepower to develop those business models.

Additional channels can be anything from online retailers, banner advertisements or syndicated content to portals. Most publishers rely on five to ten different channels; few can succeed relying on only one. And even if they could stay afloat with only one, they would probably be under-reaching their market – unless you’re in the big five: investing, food, travel, health or news.

Our webinar 29 Ways to Increase Website Traffic contains actionable methods for developing new content channels.

Look at the market, profession or hobby and pay close attention to the penetration levels of mature products in the two-five year range.

If you are thinking that a much larger customer base will be paying you, you often price lower than it should be. In order to succeed however, you have to get the price just right. If it’s too high, you cut out a lot of the market share you can achieve. At the same time, by charging too price you’ll find yourself in position where you have market share to possess, but the price point makes your business not viable.

The best strategy for a magazine, newsletter or periodical model is tiered pricing. For example, some publishers utilize the one-some-all pricing structure. Here, the consumer can buy one issue and receive the lowest possible price point that will meet their need. This process exposes them to some pricing. The next ideal step is subscription, considered to be the platinum option.

All the back issues are also offered for another higher price. If you’re considering tiered pricing, do competitive analysis and be honest with yourself. Look at your brand, where it sits and what everybody else in your market is charging for an annual subscription. Do careful price analysis in terms of pricing options, tiers and price points.

Be careful whom you follow. When you look at others in your space, it’s a good idea to make sure they are successful.

For instance, if you’re looking to launch a reference model, and you do not have enough content, it’s a deadly sin. A reference website – which is often organized in an encyclopedia-like fashion – is suppose to answer questions on a specific topic and implies that you can answer any question your audience has on the topic.

If you cannot adequately provide the answers your audience seeks, users will decide any price they paid is too much. At its launch, a membership website should have thousands of pages of content, which can be built upon through time.

Examples of great reference websites include Trip Advisor and WebMD.

The club model is the most prone to this problem. The blog, portal, forum, magazine, reference or periodical model do not have the problem of too much content as long as the site architecture allows the user to navigate and find content.

The software model could also have too much information within it. The most successful type of software model incorporates a single, highly desirable app opposed to a collection of apps. This main app should be freestanding. If you make the mistake of burying it, then you’re forced to sell the club subscription and a collection of tools. This makes the user much less focused and may lead to confusion.

The danger in the club model comes with bundling tools with too much information. You do not want consumers to think they are paying for a bunch of things that they don’t want or need. In this instance, the price won’t matter; if the user is given a bunch of things they don’t want or need, they will assume the price they are paying is too much.

If you are presenting a valuable proposition with a great freestanding app, don’t make the mistake of obscuring the deal with too much unnecessary content and a higher price tag.

The sheer number of content model choices – which totals nine through six premium models and three affinity models – dramatically increases the chances of choosing the wrong model for your membership website.

The ability to choose the right content models should be based off three questions:

-What kind of compelling information need are you trying to meet?

-How are users interacting with your website?

-Do users need to keep absolutely current on the latest information available?

If you answered yes, you could go down the list of the nine content models and eliminate most. If urgency were important to you, the blog format would be compatible. A portal would also be compatible, due to its inherent ability to present the most current information in a timely manner.

A forum would not be compatible because the information is not coming from an authoritative source. However, a forum may be an ancillary content model to present a location for audience members to join the in discussion and ask further, related questions.

You could eliminate the club model, application model and magazine model because they have longer lead time in terms of production. Reference would also not be applicable due to its propensity to include evergreen content – not updated news content.

All these eliminated content models bring you to the periodical or the newsletter membership websites content models.

This leads you to some further questions: what is your business model – is your business sponsor-driven, commerce-driven, or a hybrid of the two? Is the urgency need one your trying to meet to build your audience? Or is the urgency need important enough that you can gate content and charge for it?

In our new Membership Website Strategy free report, you will discover the nine deadly membership website mistakes and the nine membership website content models, including six premium and three affinity models. Premium membership website content models require registration and payment to access all of the content. Affinity membership website content models require only registration to access all the content. These membership website content models include:

Premium Membership Website Content Models

• Newsletter – The newsletter model is used to build subscriptions for a related print or digital newsletter and to provide access to issues of the newsletter.

• Club – The club model provides content and a place for interaction to their core audience members.

• Magazine – The magazine model is set up to build subscriptions for a related print or digital magazine and to provide access to issues of the magazine.

• Periodical – The periodical model offers regularly updated news content, which is expectedly consumed online, primarily in HTML, rather than downloaded.

• Application – The software application model allows access to specialized online software (also known as “apps”) that allows users to input information, use calculators and/or search a proprietary database, and access results.

• Reference – The reference model allows paid subscribers continued access to a library of content that is updated constantly with new information.

Affinity Membership Website Content Models

• Blog – The blog model blends publisher and user-generated content that is updated frequently and consistently with articles posted by one or more authors and corresponding reader comments.

• Portal – The portal model aggregates content from outside sources. Portals are intended to build and feed an audience; they are specifically designed for SEO, email marketing, list building, and lead generation.

• Social Network – A social network is a powerful networking tool that relies primarily on user-generated content.