There’s been a lot of talk in recent months about “forced continuity” This is a sales technique which, amongst other things, seems to give you something for f’ree, but forces you to take out a subscription to another product - which may or may not be difficult to cancel.

But there’s another type of forced continuity which I keep encountering, and I call it “forced subscription continuity”. I know that I’ve invented the term, because I’ve just Googled the phrase without any results being returned

Here’s how it works.. you take out a subscription to a membership site. Part of the deal, included in your membership, are services such as autoresponders and web space. They’re not part of the main package; they’re off’ered as “bonuses”.

Suppose you decide that the main membership benefits (new PLR products each month, whatever) aren’t worth the $47 or $67 per month, what do you do?

If you cancel your membership, you lose these services. Now these are services which you are going to want to continue with once you’ve started to use them. It can be a real pain starting with a new service - transferring a domain name to a new host, uploading all your files again. And an autoresponder is almost impossible to move to a new provider once sign-ups are coming through.

So you bite the bullet and keep paying what is, in effect, an inflated rate for your web space, autoresponder etc. You’re locked in!

Some internet marketers act in an honourable way. JayKay Bak, for example, offers web hosting as part of his Vault membership. But if you cancel this membership, you have the option of continuing with his web hosting at a reasonable commercial rate. You can check out “The Vault” here:

http://www.IanSays.com/ILike/UnselfishMarketer.html

During the week, I encountered a more virulent type of “forced subscription continuity”. I’m not going to name the product, but one of the main things you get for your monthly subscription is access to online software which builds special types of web pages (not very well!) - and hosts them for you. You then have to drive visitors to these pages.

If you cancel your subscription, you lose your special pages. And all the time that you’ve spent sending visitors to these pages is completely wasted. So there’s huge pressure on you to continue your subscription once you’ve started to use the service extensively.

Be very careful if you come across this type of membership service.