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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Pros & Cons of Offering Archived Content to Your Members

By Robert Williams

Once your membership site has been up and running for a while, you will likely find you are accumulating a large volume of content. How soon this happens will depend on how often you update the content on your site. At some point you will need to decide how to handle this treasure trove of information.

There are two basic ways to manage your content. You can maintain all content forever and constantly have it all available to your members. Or, you can keep new content active for a certain period of time and then remove it from member access. There are pros and cons with both choices and you will have to decide what ultimately works best for you.

Some of the pros associated with leaving all of the content up forever is that new members will really feel they are getting their money's worth by having access to content from, possibly, years before they started paying for it. Of course, you also run the risk of having someone pay for a membership, download everything in sight and then drop their membership.

There are also some pretty serious advantages to making content available for a limited time only. You can go through your past content and repackage it and sell it again. Once you have a decent sized library of content to work with, you can find many different ways to repackage things for resell. This can provide a real increase in profits.

Some people know ahead of time that they want to provide content for a limited time. They may choose to update the content on the first of every month, for example. If you choose this method, you may want to have a few pieces of content accessible at all times, such as some beginner, "how-to" type of information.

Another option is to bring back popular pieces of content from previous months as a special "bonus". This works out great for people who were not members at the original time the content was published. To keep things fair, you may want to add on to the material, or provide some additional notes, or other information that was not included in the original form. This will make the customers who saw it the first time feel that they are still getting the bonus.

There are a million things that can influence your decision; for instance, the amount of available web space you have. All the factors that go into this decision will be unique to you and your site. There are no magic formulas or "right" answers to managing content. You can experiment to figure out what works best for you and your members.

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Robert Paul Williams is the Editor of Work At Home Business Website. Come Browse Our Free Article Library. Stay Informed with the Latest Home Business Website News, Success Tips & Strategies. Monetize Your Site Today with Audio Ad Clips