creating a cooking membership site?

Do you cook, or have knowledge that people would pay for?

John

sounds good my friend. give great value, if you build it they will come

My advice is to pick a good niche. Lot's of food allergies, diabetics etc. That's where the gold is

If you have enough knowledge about cooking, its a good niche. But i don';t suggest you to face it only as a business. Because you should be expert on this area to have visitors and then earn money from it. Its my suggestion.

What did you do to earn $6K/mo. in less than a year? That's very impressive! I want to start a cooking membership too.

When I first started selling online over a dozen years ago, my first niche was cooking. I had several specialized recipe sites, and sold recipe ebooks and CDs. I made several hundred dollars a day doing that before the niches became over-saturated. I need to give it a go again. I still own recipecd.com and I need to do something with it.

My 3 biggest recipe niches at the time were
1. Gift-Jar recipes
2. diabetic recipes
3. Camping recipes.

That's a good idea. But do you really cook? Is it your hobby?.... it is more easier and comfortable to create and maintain a site like that if you know how to cook. Just a suggestion. Good luck!

I agree with what "Brad Gosse" and "kenj" says. Find your unsaturated and information hungry niche within the cooking niche. That is how you will be successful.

On another note, I came across a free membership software two days ago that I thought I would share here since it is on the topic. You can check it out at membersgear.com.

I am in no way affiliated with this company, their website, or their software. I just thought that I would share what I found

go niche,
there is a an excellent interview with a lady who has a cooking membership site for parents who need to make food for kids with a certain medical condition.. check smartpassiveincome.com and look for the episode all about sites doing well outside of the make money niche

I definitely agree about finding a niche. Think of who your "ideal customer" is. For instance, if you want to cover general, basic cooking, you might target newlyweds or college-age kids away from home for the first time. Then you could create a fixed-term membership promising to teach them x-number of basic recipes in, say, six months. Then you could provide step-by-step videos. Or it might be for people recently diagnosed with diabetes, high cholesterol or another health condition. Or maybe target people who want to learn to make the most popular Italian/Polish/whatever dishes.

I think you might get farther if you can solve a particular problem, rather than just provide a bunch of recipes. Like in the first example above, you'd be helping people build a repertoire of healthy, "go-to" recipes, which cuts down on their planning and "wondering what's for dinner" time.

I don't know what the demand for a membership site would be like, but the demand for recipes and cooking tips is there. I used to run a site on Middle Eastern cooking and even some of the more obscure topics I posted about got lots of views with relatively little promotion.

Another way to go with the membership site is menu planning. This is great for those with particular health concerns who can only have a limited diet. They would pay $10 per month for your membership and each week you would send them a menu with recipes plus a shopping list. This saves them tons of time and they learn to cook new healthy meals each week.

The cooking niche has many excellent smaller niches that it contains.
You should better narrow down and define the sub-niche that you target.
Recipes are great if you pick a more narrowly defined niche.

I wouldn't think a membership site would be a success in this category.
Mainly because the type of traffic would be information seekers.or they might
Want to pay once for a bunch of recipes.I could be dead wrong Offcourse I'm just assuming.
You can always test test and test you know

Provide good solid examples and ideas and build your list organically - then they'll continue to read/buy in.

I also agree with "focused" that perhaps drill down to a more specific niche. Advertising and affiliations might also be the way forward.

I really think that if you are going to work in the cooking niche you must have at least some understanding of how recipes work and how foods interact with one another. Most of this is stuff you can learn by reading up about it but practical experience is still the best way to learn about cooking.

How do I know? From experience. For example, I once made a cake and forgot the baking powder. Now, I knew, intelectually, that the baking powder helped the cake to rise but when I saw the results of leaving it out with my own eyes, then I KNEW for sure that this is what baking powder does.

I am already in the cooking niche and my first six books were more geared to the 'quick and easy' subniche. I think even that is too broad.

I am now in the process of working on books that will encompass both diet and food, after all, we still need food, even when on a diet. These books will be about a specific way of eating, however, not general diet books. I think that drilling down into a more specific niche will be helpful, at least I hope so.

Good luck with your site!