Although there are many benefits to having a membership site as an online business model, there are also some risks associated with it as is common with all types of business models. Here are a few of them and how to deal with them effectively:

1. Failure to Launch

One of the risks of launching a membership site is not enrolling enough people into the site to make it a viable and profitable proposition. There are various ways to reduce the risk of low enrollment and they mainly deal with tweaking your marketing strategy:

• Always do a pre-launch first-This will help you, your affiliates and your joint venture partners to spread the word around and gauge how much interest there is for your product. You can use pre-launch videos and free reports to explain what your site is about to potential prospects and get them to opt-in to your email list for early bird specials. These prelaunch activities will help you measure how much demand there will be for your membership site. If you notice there is low demand, then you can change your strategy to make it more effective.

• Enroll others to help you- the best way to avoid low enrollment is to open up your marketing activities to affiliates. By offering generous commission payouts and equipping them with the right promotional tools such as well-written and high converting sales pages, email letters, banners and videos, your affiliate army can rack up a large number of members on your behalf.

2. Members Opting Out

Another risk associated with membership sites is members cancelling their subscription to the site. Generally an opt-out rate of about 10% is accepted as the industry average, so don’t worry if a few of your members drop out as this is natural. However if you are having opt-out rates higher than 10%, you may want to consider improving the value of your content by paying attention to member feedback in the comments section of your blog, reading reviews about your membership site in other forums and sites, and asking your members what content they would like to see on the site. Another way to stem the tide of member fall out is to offer your members rewards, special deals and coupons. For example, if your site is about how to profit from social media, you can offer a free copy of an acclaimed social media course to the winner of a contest on your site.