Would you like to earn a recurring income for minimal work? You can -- with a membership site. And it doesn't have to be expensive or complicated either. Read on to find out how you can get membership sites for peanuts or even free without running yourself ragged.

At first thought, the mere concept of membership sites probably sounds intimidating. And that used to be justified. Most membership sites used to require entire teams of administrators. Some of them still do.

But much has changed. The software has become more user-friendly and some of it is freely available for a reasonably investment -- or even free:

The most well-known among those is Amember, which still has a significant price tag attached and which is considered the gold standard.

Then, there's Moodle, which is free, but can be a bit of a pain. Many people need to hire someone to set it up, and maybe even administer it. It's also not as user-friendly as you would like -- each segment has to be made available separately, and so everyone has to be given a new code every month.

This may not sound like too much trouble, but for some people, the process has simply too many steps, so they end up not logging in as often as they should -- or at all. And when they don't log in, they won't get much from the membership. And the logical conclusion: They'll eventually drop the membership.  And there goes your recurring income.

And then, there's WordPress. Yes, WordPress. It's free, of course. And you can set up a membership there with all free tools. It's even easy to use, for you as well as for your members. Getting a recurring income doesn't have to be hard.