There are a few things that come to mind when I am looking for specific types of membership sites. Here are some tips that are very important to know before signing up:

•  The cost of membership – Many people that bought products from so called Internet Marketing gurus got automatically signed up to monthly memberships, and didn’t know it at the time of purchase. This is known as forced continuity. It wasn’t until the FTC made a ruling stating that all Continuity programs must be disclosed in plan view to the public at the time of sign up, and what is required.

I don’t sign up for any memberships if the membership sites don’t disclose what they are offering, and how much it costs.

•  What Membership sites offer matters – Make sure you know what the membership is offering you.  You are the customer and what you want to pay for and what you may get can be two different things.

•  Are the owners offering fresh, new and innovative products, material, or services?  A lot of membership sites do not offer these things. They run the same memberships year in and year out.  I know some online marketers offer fresh content every month, but the content they have in the members area is regurgitated or copied from other memberships.

I know Article Productions offers an outstanding membership. They offer good solid article marketing strategies, and outstanding tools that distribute and bookmark your articles to various directories.

If you are interested in setting up your own membership site, you should take a look at membership Script This website offers one of the most advanced membership scripts on the market today.

I was recently asked on one of my many forums about choosing who to handle your payment processing. He could not decide whether to use Clickbank or PayPal to sell his products. I have found that this is a question that many people have, and the answer is simply complex. Basically it all comes down to knowing what you want to do with your products.

If you plan on building up a lot of affiliates, and you want people to promote your product for you, then Clickbank is the best way to go. They make it easy to set up and manage your affiliates with out the hassles that running your affiliates on your own will cause. Clickbank handles affiliate payments, as well as  processing the payments for your customers. They guarantee refunds to all customers within 60 days, so if you choose to use them, you have to provide the refund offer.

Choosing PayPal means you will handle all of your affiliates yourself. Of course, Using the AffilateMark PhP script will help with that a alot. PayPal gives you the option to pay out affilates when you want, where as ‘Clickbank only pays monthly.

Personally I run most of my sales myself. Therefore, I don’t worry too much about having all the fancy affiliate things that Clickbank does for me. If your main focus is on affiliates, then you need to choose Clickbank. However, if you plan on promoting things yourself, go for PayPal. They are much easier to use and friendlier as well.