Your thoughts on 3 Tiered Member Access

[Mister X]

Originally posted by kaustic
Mister X

Y I understand what you mean by complicating the affiliate program, but I was going to gear the affiliate program a little differently than payouts. Instead of offering money for referals and signups and all that stuff... I´m going to giv ecredits or points to the members' accounts...

This way the members can use their points however they wish... whether it be a calendar, or a free gift, or a magazine subscription, or use the points to upgrade their own accounts, or get free months, etc....

I don´t really want a real professional Affiliate program like the ones advertised here on the site... I would want to gear mine to give the members as much free stuff as I can while still making way more money than whatever the payout is costing...

As for the 3-Level access, I plan on programming my own system for the website itself. I will be doing all the php/mysql programming myself, and leaving the artwork to someone else... If I can develop the system the way I invision is, the 3 access levels should not be a problem...... now for the billing:

I have to see what my options are... I do understand that the access levels might cause some problems if using ccbill, or another payment processor.... but I was thinking about getting my own merchant account, and setting up the server side stuff myself, to manage security, and the different group levels.

I think it is all very possible, and I appreciate the input. I rather people question it, and get me to think of alternatives, than to just flat out go with the original idea and possibly end up screwing it all up...

but with the billing issues aside, what do you think about converting those $5 members into $25 members within a few months?? Do you think it is easily attainable? I´m more interested in that, and what you think of the access levels to turn out better numbers...

....and I also plan for it to be a highly interative website.... similar to a portal site, with users of similar interest can communicate, and theres a user forum, and comment posting/image ratings, and prizes/give-aways, etc....

Thanks again Mister X!

Hmmmm. Actually it sounds like a fairly interesting project. There aren't that many sites like what you envision out there, except a few that are very niche specific and perhaps not 100% legitimate. If you are planning an affiliate program based on member referrals then the pricing won't matter.

The only question is just what to offer to make it worth their while to upgrade, while at the same time giving them enough to keep them rebilling at $5 a month. I would suggest trying to get a decent income from upsells for various feeds, paysites, etc. to maximize your profit from the $5 members. Also make sure that your advertising is no too too intrusive, but that it is hard to ignore. One perk for upgraded membership could be ad free access then I guess.

I still think that the billing questions will be the biggest hurdles to overcome. Regardless of what you program for setting access levels, you are limited to what is allowed by your processor. Even with your own merchant account you really need a processor to do the actual billing for you. company like Epoch is probably a bit more flexible than CCBill.

I think that you should actually find out what your options are before you write a line of code to build the site. There might be one or 2 lesser known alternative processors out there that can do what you want also.