O.K. You’ve decided to jump into the membership or continuity program business. How do you continually produce fresh, valuable content that will keep your members contentedly paying their monthly fees while, at the same time, not causing you to have a nervous breakdown? Here are some ideas:

Encourage Member-Generated Content.
You can do this by adding a forum, a FAQ submitter, or even commenting functionality. You can run contests that generate content. What about a chat feature?

Interview Experts.
You should be able to get at least one expert on the phone each month. Record the call and get it transcribed. Ta da! Content that only took you about an hour to create.

Private Label Rights Articles.
If you have a niche membership program, there probably are some private label articles you can use as the basis of your content. I don’t recommend using them as is, but they can make wonderful leaping off points.

What are private label rights? Basically, someone creates content then sells you the permission to use it any way you wish, including slapping your name on it!

Public Domain Content.
Check out www.gutenberg.org and you’ll find a wealth of content — text, image and audio — that has passed the expiration of its copyright. For example, have you seen people giving away copies of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill as a bonus? That’s because it is now in the public domain and you can do what ever you want with it — including breaking it up into articles and even adding your name as co-author.

Hire a freelancer.
You can hire someone to create content for you. Places such as elance.com and guru.com have lots of content developers (writers, graphic artists, etc.) waiting to bid on your project.

Repurpose old content. Take a look at your old content — books you’ve written, emails you’ve sent, articles you’ve posted. Can you freshen any of this up and re-purpose it in a new format to make it a valuable part of your membership program? For example, take an article and record yourself reading it. Then create a slide show to illustrate it and merge the two into an online video! Voila! Higher value content from something you’d already produced before!

I’m sure there are more ideas out there, and I’d love it if you’d post them as a comment on this post so others can learn from your experience. But, in the meantime, I think these six ideas should give you a good head start on developing content for your membership program.