Insider’s research team of four (and counting) has put together an enormous number of practical resources — ranging from how-to reports, to videos, to downloadable checklists, to vendor guides, to PowerPoint presentations, and even financial model spreadsheets. Plus collections of real-life marketing samples and legal contracts. The topics covered include:

1. How to optimize your paywalls.

2. How to drive more site traffic — cost effectively.

3. How to increase renewals and customer lifetime value.

4. R&D to launch new online membership services. (Includes how to pick pricing.)

5. M&As

6. Technology – including Buyer’s Guides and a list by site name of which subscription sites use which vendors.

7. New Q&A Webinars monthly

Everything is geared toward professionally run membership sites and subscription site businesses. (Sorry, we won’t tell consumers how to make millions on the Internet — we specialize in practical research to help existing and about-to-launch membership sites grow profitably and sustainably.)

Now, it’s back to redesign of our own public pages for greater optimization. The word “Beta” just means you get to improve it over and over again.

Because when people are paying for content, it shouldn’t crash on them. Ever if humanly possible.

WordPress is great because it’s (a) free, (b) relatively easy for your editorial staff to use without loads of training, (c) lots of free and cheap apps are available for it, so your site can be cooler without heavy custom dev costs, and (d) there are tons of experienced WordPress designers and developers for hire. Oh, and it’s relatively SEO-friendly.

In my experience personal though, it’s prone to crashing or to being crashed. The problem seems to lie in three things.

WordPress frequently issues upgrades. There’s a tech staff cost to going along with all the upgrades – you have to put the site on a dev server, try out the new version, see if it screws up any of your custom programming or works badly with any of your 3rd party apps… and then you move over to the main site. I’ll pay for my staff to do that once a year or so. But, WordPress’s last upgrade launched just 42 days after the the launch of the prior one.

Most of those free third party apps also issue upgrades. On their own whimsical schedules. Which you probably won’t know about until after part of your site is broken, and your customer service department is fending the calls off.

Lastly, your hosting company may throttle your traffic (ie. stop most people from getting in) when you have a spike in traffic due to, oh say, sending your weekly newsletter. Then they’ll try to point the blame at the fact that you did not comply with the most recent WordPress upgrade. Actually I’ve found often it’s just the fact their automated scripts noticed the spike in traffic and freaked out suspecting a DDoS attack or just fussing about you using too much of their precious bandwidth. Most blogs don’t have such sudden spikes, so it makes the hosting cos nervous. Yes, you can upgrade to a better account… which I’m about to do for the third time and counting.

That’s why I strongly recommend that all paid content sites be developed on a more stable content management platform. You do not need the aggravation.

The attendance was great and it was interesting to hear what sorts of experiences other people are having charging for content. On the newspaper front, Gallaty seems to be having success, even following a fairly substantial rate hike—showing that often we estimate incorrectly what our content is worth to people.

My presentation focused on research data we have collected, as well as details on what types of local content people currently pay (a lot) for and how newspapers might explore those topics. You can check out the presentation on the Sub Site Niches page at www.subscriptionsiteinsider.com.

When we say “content”, we include text, video, audio, games, images… anything you might consider media and/or entertainment. Yes, user-generated content is included, if people buy subscriptions to it (consider most dating sites!) When we say “subscription” we mean an account that’s sold on a renewable or recurring (automated) billing basis. It might be a membership site with content or a subscription service to access content. (These are basically the same thing anyway.)

And, now the next line of Net competition has stepped in to kick them while they’re down. Membership sites. These are paid content sites usually owned by entrepreneurs, laid-off journalists, and independent publishers who generally come from an Internet publishing and/or Web marketing background. Unlike formal associations, they are for-profit, but since their primary revenues are from members, their content and services are member-focused (vs sponsor focused.) Their services tend to include private online social networking, premium niche content, webinars, member classifieds, vendor directories, etc. It’s all the stuff you’d expect to find on an association member site.

Plus, the more progressive membership sites are moving into association’s offline territory as well now. For example, StomperNet runs live trade shows around the world and publishes a glossy print magazine.

This morning I asked Kevin for his take on the situation. He replied, “In our industry we have a subscription site that is an aggressive competitor. I like that, because I get to beat ‘em, but a lot of associations seem oblivious to what’s happening around them. They’re talking about ending membership while for-profit companies see membership as a goldmine!”

So how can associations differentiate themselves and provide true value without bumping heads with the membership site crowd? My immediate thought was that associations often have lobbyists in DC working on behalf of their members’ interests. Also, they often serve as a marketing agency/voice for their industry as a whole to its potential customers (albeit, usually fairly lamely.) I don’t know of any membership or subscription sites that do either of these things.

Kevin’s impassioned reply, “At its most basic, I think you are correct. Sub sites — all content and connection. Assns — vary widely. But basically some mix of advocacy on behalf of industry or profession (govt, public, other audiences), possibly certification or credentialing, possibly standards development, and plus — content and connection.

“Successful assns are what I call a perfect triangle of influence, value, and resources; need to focus on both influence and value equally (all influence, no value = nobody’s willing to pay; all value, no influence = you’re just another competitor, except one with a lot of nonprofit governance baggage). Assns have been getting cherry-picked for years: trade mags compete with assn mags, 4-profit tradeshow producers compete with assn expos, private buying groups compete with assn purchasing programs, etc. What usually happens is that assns put together a business that then draws private competitors (usually more agile, flexible, and much more focused). It’s been happening with membership, too.

He continues, “Assns need to smack themselves in the forehead and stop giving up market share, learn what the strengths of their competitors are and figure out how they can counteract or in some cases change the assn’s own culture/structure to build similar strengths. Assns focus too much on what other assns are doing and need to focus instead on their market and its own unique environment.”

Yeah baby!