In case you don’t know, I am a huge fan of membership sites. Not just any sites, but membership sites that are of value to their members. With great scripts available, just about anyone can throw up a membership site in a few hours, but it takes a special person to create a membership site that is valuable and will withstand the test of time.

To me, a successful membership site starts as a labor of love. It is typically created by the owner in order to share their knowledge and provide immense benefit to their members. It is not necessarily created simply to turn a profit, although a profit will likely occur if the owner does a good job providing value.

That said, the problem with purchasing an existing membership site is that the new owner doesn’t have an established relationship with their members. In fact, most new owners purchase the site based on the monthly income it is currently generating and lose sight of the fact that you have to continuously improve and add value to the members or you risk losing them.

The existing members know this and are leery of a new owner from the get-go. As such, the new owner has to work double hard to establish themselves and have big shoes to fill in rebuilding trust. Plus, the value they create will be different from the previous owner based on their backgrounds and life experiences, and this may or may not fly with the new members.

With this in mind, I decided not to purchase a membership site recently.

Although the asking price was fair, and I was interested in the subject, I didn’t believe I could create as much value as the previous owner.

Plus, I felt that another membership site would distract from my Internet Marketing Writers membership site , so I turned it down. Instead, I have recommitted myself to creating and establishing my own membership site.

A lot of people wonder, what was it that made me want to switch from full-time ghostwriter to soon-to-be full-time Internet Marketer. I can honestly say that it wasn’t one single thing but a combination of things that made me want more. More for myself and more for my life. Here’s my list of favorite 10 reasons that I made the switch.

1. I got tired of being the blunt of gurus’ jokes. I was tired of being “one of those cheap ghostwriters who they could hire to do all their work while they reaped all the benefits.”
   
2. Every day I started to dislike myself even more. The more and harder I worked as a writer, I could never penetrate the mindset that I was working for someone else’s benefit.
3. I started losing my passion for writing. Writing for everyone else but me was frustrating and depressing. It became more of a burden than a joy. Like I’ve said previously, I can write for myself forever, butit takes a bit of pushing to write for clients.
4. I became frustrated with my clients calling all the shots. For instance, they could pay me or not, they could steal my work, and they could even ruin my reputation just for the heck of it by leaving bad feedback.
5. I got really tired of making everyone rich but me. Every day, someone else made money off of my efforts and although I would get paid for my efforts the payment was miniscule for the hard work and effort that I put into pleasing my clients.
6. I was tired of competing for low-paying projects on bidding websites.
7. I became frustrated with impossible and cheap clients. You know the ones that want something for nothing. Those clients that complain about your rates, promise long-term projects when they don’t mean to, leave undeserving nasty feedback, don’t pay the final balances, and complain the whole time.
8. I got tired of my debt growing and my bank account depleting. Every month I worked my fanny off for these clients and I had absolutely nothing to show for it.
9. Although I had 16 years of education, I realized that my massage therapist, hairdresser, dog groomer, and gardener made more per hour than me, and I was determined to do something about it.
10. I wanted more for myself and my kids. I wanted to use my God-given talents to help us achieve financial peace and make a difference in the lives of others.

After nine years of freelancing, it still amazes me when a client does something totally unexpected. Here’s the situation. I have been working on a book project with a client for over a year now. This project was supposed to be completed within three months.Now, I admit that a couple of delays were my fault. The project was a bit harder than I initially thought, so it took me about three months to just understand the subject in order to write about it. However, once I had a better understanding of what I was doing, it was smooth sailing.

I then created a great rough draft. I thought so and so did the client. He read it over and told me that it looked great on first glance but that it would need tweaking. Well, that was nine freaking months ago.

To make a long story short, this client jerked me around for over a year now. And I had little choice but to keep working because my final payment was held “hostage.”

Well, today I just got sick and tired of this client. I gave him an ultimatum. I told him that the stress of this project was just not worth it to me. I told him that I was slowly losing interest in his project and that we needed to get this done or he needed to find someone else to assist him.

Well, he chose the latter, so now I’ve lost my $1500 final payment. But I’ve gained something else…a new outlook and peace of mind.

Good riddance, dude. The money I lost will be made up with my IM efforts as I now have more time to get my own books and reports written so that I can receive residual income for my efforts.

This experience has taught me that as hard as you try, you can’t please all your clients all the time. You will have some good days and some bad ones. Sometimes clients can jerk you around but you have the power to simply say, “the heck with it, it isn’t worth my time and effort.”

In the future, I will be clearer with my terms. I will set limits as to how many “free revisions” are covered and will request that clients submit revision requests within seven days or the project is considered complete. I’ve also learned that by refocusing my time and energy into my own efforts, I will reap a hundredfold.

Are you the type of person who starts new ventures, tries it for a few days, and then gives up because you don’t make instant money or become the next internet millionaire? Are you very excited at the beginning of a project but then quickly lose interest when the new strategy doesn’t pan out right away?If so, you’re like I used to be. You’re stuck in newbie quicksand land. Now before you get all frustrated and drown your dreams and hopes in a sea of frustration, there’s hope. You can get out!

Now, I’m going to tell you something that the gurus hope you never know. They hope that you keep going from project to project looking for the next best thing. Why? Because they can then keep making money off of your drowning efforts. They secretly hope you never have the “a-ha” moment where you realize that you already know enough to succeed.

How do I know so much? Because I’ve been there, friends. Like most newbies, I used to constantly search for the next greatest thing that I could find. I would spend all my income buying more junk and more software and then neglect myself and my family while I read and tried to digest all that information.

In essence, I would look for the easy way out. Then I realized with Internet Marketing, there is no such thing. There is only focusing your way out. Then I read a book by Dennis Becker called 5 bucks a day and learned to stop putting a half-hearted effort into the next big project. I learned to focus on the smaller wins and then move on once that one was finished.

In essence, I changed my mindset and realized that I had to nurture and grow my business. There were no fast roads to riches and the grass was just fine where I was standing. I then stopped seeing failure as an option and saw success as the ONLY way to go.

Like me, you can do the same. Just stop hopping around looking for the next best thing. Instead, focus all your efforts and succeed. Take action and do what needs to be done. Visualize and achieve success. You can do it!

Okay, a little sneaky, but I did a bit of underground research. I secretly worked for a few well-known freelance websites like Need-an-Article (NAA) and Internet Research Associates (IRA) in order to see how they operated. It was actually a very interesting experience.

In all, I liked NAA much better, as their system was extremely easy to deal with, they had a lot of open projects, and the payments were always delivered on time. As for IRA, I didn’t like working there. The article delivery system wasn’t as nice, payments were a tad bit slower, and I didn’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling. Plus, other writers could review your submitted work.

Even so, I must say that working at places like this have some value to beginning IMers. Although you will have to work your fanny off in order to make decent money, that shouldn’t deter you.

Instead, you can use places like this to perfect your writing skills and use the income that you gain and turn them into wealth to support your IM efforts. Here’s how: Let’s say that you work a few hours writing 10 articles and you’re paid about $50.00 for your time. Let’s say you don’t spend this money on a new outfit. Instead, you reinvest this money into your Internet Marketing business and use it as seed money to fund another online venture.

With this method, you could take those meager earnings and turn them into something worthwhile.

To explain further, let’s say you take that $50.00 you made and buy a logo from a talented designer on eBay for $25.00 and obtain a domain name from namecheap.com for $9.00. Then you use blogger.com to create a free blog, create or purchase some articles, place them on your site, add a bit of AdSense, promote a few affiliate products, and boom, you have a website/blog with much possibility. In fact, you could even write additional articles and reinvest the money again to purchase some back links. By doing this investing, you will take a $50.00 investment and turn it into a cash cow.

In conclusion, websites like NAA and IRA aren’t likely to make you rich, but you can help them grow your IM business. The key is to use a bit of creativity and boom…you’ll be raking in the cash/building a sustainable business and your broke money-spending counterparts will be left in the dark saying…freelance writing is too hard and doesn’t pay the bills.