membership sitesDuring my time online the topic of membership sites comes up again and again.

It seems everyone and their dog wants one!

The reason of course is fairly obvious: Who wouldn’t want a recurring revenue stream generated by loyal customers paying you each and every month?

Recently, I was approached by someone who asked the following:

“What niches and topics of interest are suitable for a membership or recurring billing type model?”

This is a fine question and one that we could go into in an awful lot of detail.

Instead though, I would like to share with you a little trick.

The 10 Second “Trick”…

1) Go to cbengine.com

We’ve mentioned this website a lot here on the blog and also in the members area but if you are not already aware it essentially gives you a lot of detail and analysis on the Clickbank marketplace.

You don’t need to register and when I do market research I always head there instead of Clickbank itself 🙂

2) Scroll down and look for the “CUSTOM” box on the right hand side:

cbengine find membership sites

In the example above you can see I am looking for products that generate at least $50 in rebilling. The smaller the number you choose, the more products and niches you’ll get.

Alternatively, you could simply choose “Yes” from the “Recurring Only” option at the very bottom although personally I haven’t found this to work as well.

3) Click the “Search” button

4) Click on the “Gravity” column in the results to sort in descending order.

From there you can click into any product you like, look at the numbers (I really like the “Graph” tab here) and visit the sales page as well.

The Results

Obviously a lot of the products you’ll find are in the internet marketing niche because Clickbank has been strongly weighted to this in the past.

However, you’ll also find a lot of other niches as well: tennis, dating, woodworking,  fat loss, jobs, music, forex, model trains, lottery, fitness, photography…

Points to note:

1) The products listed will either be membership sites in their own right, e.g., join us for $x/month OR they will at least have some kind of rebilling built into the sales funnel, e.g., $37 one time payment front end product, leading to a $x/month upsell.

2) All these products that have positive gravity numbers give you proof that these niches are not only profitable but also can support recurring billing structures.

3) Clickbank isn’t everything. Just because you can’t find a particular niche doesn’t mean it won’t be suitable for a membership site. For example, here’s a great little niche with a brilliant membership site that isn’t on Clickbank. Equally, if you see a zero gravity number it doesn’t mean the product isn’t selling well, just that it isn’t selling via affiliates. So this is a guide, but a reasonably good one.

The second point above is vital because the first rule of product creation is to sell into existing demand. And there’s no stronger indication of demand than proof that products or services are already selling.

This is one of the many things I love about doing business online – numbers and stats like this are much harder to find in the traditional “offline” world!

We could go on about membership sites, niche selection and product creation at this point but I think it’s best to turn this over to questions and comments.

Please LIKE/SHARE/TWEET if you enjoyed this. Drop a quick comment below – would love to hear your thoughts… 🙂