By Terry Dean

Every smart marketer knows that the profits in business are not in the first sale to a customer. The real profits from any business come from selling to that same customer over and over again during the life of your relationship.

If you are currently only selling to your customer one time, you have left most of your profits on the table. If your business is profitable now, then you haven't seen anything yet once you put backend sales to work for you.

If your business is losing money, this is the first place I would have you look into. Are you going back to your customers and continuing to sell them other similar products?

The first sale to a customer is the least profitable sale you will ever make. If you have treated them well and have Wow'ed them with the quality of your product or service, you are seven to eleven times more likely to be able to sell to them as to obtaining a new customer - which means more savings and a whole lot more profits.

Membership sites have the advantage of having a built-in backend. Once you start producing subscribers many of them will stay with your publication for years to come.

In my free ezine, I have people who have been with me for years and I don't have a doubt in my mind they would still be subscribed even if I was charging. I have helped many of them produce full-time Internet incomes during this time.

Membership sites are a little newer of an invention and even the oldest ones have only been in existence for three to five years. Yes, they have been around and have been successful that long.

So, if I had to compare them to something, the most similar business would be those publishing offline newsletters. Publishing a newsletter has been a profitable information business for small businesses for decades now. It is also often considered the most profitable product to be selling in an offline format.

They produce a yearly income and are as close to a "regular paycheck" that an information producer can have. As a matter of fact, newsletters can often sell for 10 times earnings. If you are earning $100,000 a year, you may be able to completely sell out your newsletter for a million or more.

Once they have had a newsletter for more than a year, those renewals will start coming in and producing a monthly paycheck with no advertising being paid for at all. Having your own newsletter has always been the best way to build a long-term residual income for an information publisher.

If you take a step back and look at some of the marketing gurus who have taught people how to market, you'll find that many of them have had their greatest successes while dealing with newsletters.

For example, Jay Abraham had many of his million dollar successes while working and joint venturing with financial newsletter publishers. They would create an irresistible first year offer and then would earn a fortune off of those who renewed the next year - and every year from then on.

Technology has now given us the ability to take newsletter publishing to a whole new level. You no longer have to pay huge printing bills and buy a truck full of stamps to send out your monthly newsletter.

You can also have members from around the world now and have the whole system automated to take care of your members automatically (not having to type them into a database and keep track of them).

Not only that, but you can also publish more than just text in an online newsletter. You can publish audio, video, and interactive content. You can have a discussion group, have people send in their own articles, and hold chats. You can deliver software right online and show online samples.

Every single one of advances makes the publishing process much easier than any newsletter publisher has ever had it. You can do your research online and in any many cases have much of your potential material delivered right to your email box.

And your backend sales are built right in. Someone subscribes...and they will be automatically charged each month until they cancel. You don't have to do any new sales piece and don't have to sign them up again.

Just provide good content and a good portion of your customers will just keep paying you month after month. It's the perfect online business model.