Finally Some Other Ways to Promote Your Membership Site

We have seen that you can use forums, email, social media, as well as your own members to promote your membership site. But there are still a few other ways that you can attract members. Here they are:

• Create an affiliate program

In the online marketing world, many products have affiliate programs which pay a commission to the affiliate for each new sale. If you would like your site to be more successful, you could create an affiliate program for it and pay your affiliates around 50% of the monthly fee that you would make from members. You can promote this affiliate program on online marketing forums, just like you would promote the site itself. It is also possible for you to join an affiliate network. ClickBank is the most popular one out there, as they deal with digital products such as ebooks and membership sites.

• Use offline marketing

Even though your product is based on the internet and deals with internet marketing, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use any offline methods to promote it. Some ideas of offline methods include distributing fliers promoting your site or putting up ads in print media like newspapers and magazines. Some membership site owners have even created TV and radio commercials, but obviously these are quite expensive when compared to other advertising methods.

• Use pay per click ads

Pay per click ad networks such as the ones on the Google and Bing search engines are an excellent marketing tool and can be used to promote IM products. However, you would need to carefulyl plan, manage and optimize your campaigns in order to be successful. You would also need to have a decent budget, as the whole internet marketing niche is very competitive.

• Use media buying

Media buying simply means buying advertising space on another site. You can sometimes buy text ads, banner ads or even video ads. The payment model depends on the site where you buy the ad space from and could by a flat rate per week or month, a CPC (cost per click) or a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. You could deal either with an advertising network or make a private deal with a webmaster to advertise your membership site on their website.

All of these are excellent methods that you can make use of to promote your site and get some new members. However, the best way to generate revenue from your membership site is to keep your existing members, rather than constantly try to sign up new ones. This is actually much easier as you don’t need to do any advertising to retain your current members. All you need to do is to keep them interested in your site by adding new content on a regular basis, as well as listen to any feedback that they may have regarding the content of your site or how it runs.

Many internet marketers make their money by dealing with affiliate programs or with CPA networks that have various kinds of offers they can push in order to make money. Most of these companies are legitimate and will pay you the earnings that you have made on time, every single time. But there are a couple of bad players in the industry. Here are some ways to spot and avoid them:

• Do some research first

Before even signing up for a network simply doing a Google search for their name can bring you a lot of information about the company. You will often find blog posts, forum posts and articles that mention them. Read these. See what other internet marketers are saying about them and look at whether the general opinion is positive or negative.

• Be wary around “start ups” and smaller networks

If a company has not yet established their reputation in the industry, remember that things can go in two ways with them. Either they will grow to become a productive and successful network or they will fold. If it’s the second thing that happens, things are not likely to be pretty. There have been several cases of networks going under and skipping out on tens of thousands of dollars of payments to affiliates. The large majority involved CPA networks which were operating for less than a year.

• Be careful around networks who seem to approve everyone

While there are some notable exceptions to this, such as Commission Junction and ClickBank, which are very reputable networks, as a general rule you should be quite wary around a network that seems to approve every publisher that applies without giving them a phone call or emailing them to ask them about their marketing methods. While you may think it is convenient, this can cause problems down the road, if large amounts of fraudsters manage to sign up and merchants start dropping the network.

• Carefully check the terms of any offers that you run and ask questions if necessary

This is especially the case for “trial” or “membership” offers. While you may be offered a good amount for every sign up, some merchants have been known to use underhanded tactics if not enough of the sign ups that you refer have converted to full members on their end. Some may falsely accuse you of sending fraudulent leads or deliberately using bad quality traffic and refuse to pay you. For this reason, it is very important that you check the terms of the offer to see if the merchant has any special requirements with regards to the type of traffic you can send and its productivity.

• Work with multiple networks and run different offers

It is not a good idea to focus all of your marketing efforts for the month on just one offer or on offers from only one network, no matter how profitable they may seem. Spread out your traffic around several different offers in the niche on different networks. That way, if there is any problem with one of them, you will still be getting paid by the others.

If you are promoting any type of affiliate offer online, such as a Clickbank product or certain types of CPA offers, you will probably be searching for ways to increase your conversions and thus your revenues. Generally, there are two ways to promote an offer, either direct linking to the offer or creating a landing page. But there is a type of landing page that is being often used by internet marketers out there due to its potential to bring in more conversions: the multi product review page.

Now how does it work and is it complicated to set up?

What this type of landing page consists of is basically creating a comparison of a few offers (usually around 3) of the same category. So if you are promoting a dog training guide on Clickbank, you will basically include information and your affiliate link to 3 different Clickbank dog training products. Your reviews will need to be informational and generally positive, but it is possible to give ratings to the products and make one product appear as slightly better than the other ones. The other products are still “good” and useful to the buyer, it’s just that the top one offers the best value, or the best information, etc.

Setting it up is quite easy. Of course, the page needs to look good to the user and “professional”, not like something an 9 year old put together for his elementary school computer class. You just need to use a template that is related to your niche and structure the information well. You can find many review site templates for free just by browsing internet marketing forums or by doing a quick Google search. Some minimal web design is required, but you only need to know how to use a basic web editor. No need to design fancy graphics, logos, flash movies, etc. Then just get a domain related to your niche and upload it to the server. For some ideas on how the page is supposed to look like, just take a peek at how your competitors pages are doing and structure yours accordingly.

Why should I use this method? Will it be profitable?

This is profitable due to the fact that the user will feel more as if you are “on their side” and presenting information on various products, rather than pitching one product which will look like you are trying to sell them something.

While it is quite unlikely that someone will buy multiple products from the review site (since they all do pretty much the same thing), this is different for free offers. For example, if you are promoting survey sites, free biz opp leads or free dating site signup offers, a user could register at more than one of the sites thus making you more revenue than if you would have only been promoting a single offer. Feel free to try this method with different kinds of offers and see what the results are, then adjust your campaigns accordingly.

In the online marketing world, you’ve probably seen the name Clickbank mentioned quite a few times. In fact it has been the topic of many informational products and many of the “proofs of earnings” that you see posted online by successful marketers are screen shots of their Clickbank accounts. Obviously, since that network is so popular, it must have something good to offer to marketers and allow people to earn significant amounts of money.

Clickbank is basically an online marketplace for digital products. Affiliates make money from it by promoting products created by others through various means. Most of the products sold are informational products, such as guides on how to make money online, how to train your dog, how to lose weight, etc. Practically all the products being sold on Clickbank have one thing in common: they fill a need that people have, which is to find answers to their questions.

So how do you make money from it? Getting started is quite easy. You just sign up. Unlike certain other affiliate networks, everyone is approved and there is no need to speak to an affiliate manager before you are let in.

You will then need to select the product that you want to promote. As you can see, there are thousands of different products to choose from. When looking at a product in the list, you will see something called “gravity.” This is a number that is calculated by Clickbank and designed to reflect the overall popularity of a certain product, taking into account the number of sales and how recently they happened. A higher gravity means that a product is very popular, but it also indicates that you will face a lot of competition when promoting it. An ideal choice would be to select a product which has a gravity that is around 100. You will get a product that is getting many sales, but doesn’t have as many people promoting it as the top ones are.

Knowing how much competition you have will be important. No matter how good or popular the product that you are promoting is, the more affiliates you have that are pushing it, the more difficult it will be for you to make a profit, as they will be plenty of ads online for basically the same offer.

Another thing to look for when selecting a product to promote is the resources that the creators have given to the affiliates who will promote their creation. Simply go to their sales page and look at the bottom for a link called “affiliates.” In many cases, you will find various tools to help you out such as keyword lists, articles about the product, pre-made banners, various landing page templates, etc. All of these can save you a lot of work when you get started in your campaign to market their product.

Whatever type of online product you are promoting, whether it’s an ebook on Clickbank, or a CPA offer, you would need to get traffic to your offer. We all know that: if you get no traffic, you get no conversions and therefore no revenue. Google Adwords is one of the most popular online advertising tools that is used by internet marketers to get targeted traffic directly to their offers. Here is a quick overview of how it works:

Adwords is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising service. This means that you will pay for every click that is sent to your website, rather than the amount of times that your ad is displayed, or a flat rate for a certain period of time. The amount that you will pay for each click will depend on various factors. First is the competition for the keywords that you are targeting. Keywords that are quite broad in nature, such as “dog” or “computers” will cost you less, but the traffic will also be of lower quality than if you had used more specific keywords. This is quite simply due to the fact that these people will often not be in buying mode, but rather searching for general information about various products.

Keywords like “dog training guide” or “computer repair service” will yield much better results, but will cost you more for each click. Another factor that influences price is what other people are bidding for that keyword. The more competition for a certain keyword, the higher the average bid price will be. For example, most keywords related to financial products, such as “insurance” or “credit cards” can cost anywhere between $5 to $40 or more for a single click.

In Adwords, you will write a short text ad, composed of a title, 2 short lines of text and a link to your site. The ads themselves mainly appear on Google’s search results when someone searches for a keyword that you have bid on. The position of your ad will mainly depend on how much you bid. If your bid is higher than the other competitors, your ad has a better chance of appearing in the first position, highlighted on top of the search results. Google Adwords also uses the Google content network to distribute ads, however you may turn this option off in your account. This will make your ad appear on sites that have content related to your keywords. For example, if you are selling dog training guides, your ad could appear on a forum that talks about dogs.

Mastering the Google Adwords system will take you some time and practice. Therefore, you should do as much research as possible before launching a campaign on it. Believe me, mistakes on Adwords could be very costly for you. The good news is that many webhosting companies give a free voucher of $50 to $100 that you can use to create your first Adwords campaign, when you sign up for a hosting account with them.

If you’re reading this site, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with blogs. Blogs are online journals used either for personal, professional, or journalistic purposes. Whatever you decide to do with your blog, there are a few tips you should keep in mind if you want it to be profitable.

First thing’s first – pick a topic for you blog. Figure out exactly what sort of content you want to put on your new blog, and think about your audience, and their wants and needs. A blog won’t be profitable if no one reads it, so your content needs to be high quality, and it needs to appeal to a broad audience.

Now that you know what topic you’re going to be blogging about, it’s time to decide where to host your blog. You can use any number of free blogging sites, like WordPress, or Blogger, but it’s usually a better idea to host your blog yourself. Using a blogging service makes things easy – just sign up and start blogging. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow for a lot of customization. Hosting your own blog leaves room for a great deal of customization, but it’s a little harder to set up. You’ll need to register your domain name, get a hosting package, and then set up some blogging software, like WordPress, on your new site. It’s a little harder, but the customization options make it easy to build an attractive and engaging site.

Now that you have a blog up and running, it’s time to put some ads on it. Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, and Clickbank are easy to deal with for new comers to internet marketing and web design. All you have to do with each of those services is sign up, and paste the ad code into your blog posts. With a little effort, you can get some ads in your posts that are directly relevant to the topic of the post, which makes those ads more likely to get clicked on.

If you’re already familiar with internet marketing, consider looking for some more profitable affiliate programs to put on your site. Look for products and services that would be of interest to your target audience, and be sure to put your ads in noticeable places.

Building a profitable blog isn’t easy, but it is possible. Once you have your ads in place, remember, they won’t do you any good if no one reads your site. Put yourself out there, and do everything you can to drive traffic to your blog. If you can get it some traffic, you’ll have a profitable blog before you know it.

A great way to make money with a website is to purchase an established website that you know you can add value to the website and flip it at a later date for a profit.

To give you an example of what i mean i will give you an example of how i once made money buying a website from flippa.com for $1800 and then 3 months later sold it for $15,000 making a tidy profit.  The website i bought was a 6 months old blog that was rarely updated by its owner.  It was in the internet marketing niche which i know alot about so i knew i could add value to the blog.

The blog at the time was receiving 3,000 unique views a month and was a PR2 and was making $500 a month from affiliate sales via clickbank.com and a little on google adsense.

When i took over the blog this is what i did to improve the value of the blog:

1.) Made sure i added at least 2 very informal posts everyday to keep my readers and attract new readers.

2.) I offered a fee ebook download with an optin emails form. (i managed to capture 5,000 email addresses) to which i later emailed offers to bringing in $2,000 in commission, mainly clickbank products.

3.) I changed the theme of the blog to a premium wordpress theme.

4.) I installed a forum which help build a community around the blog.

5.) I submitted alot of articles to article websites and built up some good backlinks

6.) I did alot of blog commenting on other similar blogs helping bringing in more backlinks

7.) I sponsored wordpress themes digital point marketplace also helped bring in more backlinks.

After the first month my traffic had reached 6,700 uniques a month and my revenue went upto $1600 a month from commission from various networks i was using.  Most of my income came from my email list because within the free ebook i was given away had links to affiliate products and was earning money from my readers clicking on links within the ebook and purchasing a product.

By the end of month 3 i was adding 3 new articles a day and my email list had reached 5,000 email readers and was making on average $3,000 a month from affiliate commission mainly from Clickbank.com, Cj.com and Google adsense.

Now i knew i could resell the blog as i had added some very good value to the blog and sold it back on flippa.com for $15,000

So the key to buying and selling websites for profit is to look for a website you know you can add value to it.  Pick a niche you know about and would enjoy working on.

Website flipping was very popular a year ago but recently it is not as popular mainly because the market got saturated with simple sites being sold for $50 when a year ago you could sell them for $200.  I still believe you can make money from flipping websites and ive created this plan to help you make a living flipping websites

Step 1 – Find A Niche

I’ve personally found selling clickbank products to be very successful as alot of people like to buy digital products online.  Have a search on clickbank for a product you would like to sell that is popular within the market place.  Look to see their gravity rating, the percentage in refunds they have had, this is a good indicator to see if the product has been successful.  Also check to see how good their sales page is also.

Step 2 Keyword Research

I like to use the free tool from Google – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to look for keywords related to my niche that i want to promote.  Say for example you want to target the keyword ”loose weight fast” put that into the Google keyword tool and see what the competition is like.  You may wish to use another keyword similar that has less competition.

Once you have found the keyword you would like to use, pick 10 -15 long tail keywords and start writing some articles with these keywords you have chosen.

Step 3 – Choosing a domain

When picking your domain its a good idea to have your main keyword within your domain as this will greatly improve your chances of being on page 1 of Google (e.g looseweightfast.com)  if .com is taken the next best choices are either .net or .org anything else is no good.

Step 4 – Create your website

I would highly recommend setting your website using wordpress as these websites rank very very well in Google.  Google seems to love wordpress because of its structure and how well they are optimised for search engines.

Add some keyword rich articles to your website with some reviews on the clickbank product you are promoting.  If you can also make a video and upload it to youtube and embed this into your website.  Google likes websites with videos on and also readers also like videos about the product they are buying so this will also help your conversions.

Also add a contact page, about me page, privacy page as these also improve your rankings, this is something that Google looks for.

Step 5 – Promote your website

Once you have finished your website you now need to start promoting your website.  Submit around 10 articles to article directories like Ezinearticles with rich keyword content articles with anchor text links pointing back to your website.  Submit your website to all the major social networking websites.  You can use socialmarker.com for this.

You can also join forums related to your niche and write a number of posts with your anchor text link in your signature, this is a great way to drive traffic to your website and increases your serps.  Also blog commenting on blogs similar to your niche is another good method.

Create a squido lens, hubpage and wiki page to provide more backlinks for your website.

Step 6 – Site maintenance

For the next few days monitor the site everyday, checking traffic, sales, average time a user stays on your site, which pages they are exiting from.  Then you can make any adjustments changes or additions to improve.  If its still slow after a couple of weeks i would start submitting more articles to ezine, more blog commenting on other blogs and forum posting to build up your backlinks.

Step 7 – Sell your website

After 3 – 6 months you are now ready to sell your website if it has steady traffic going to it, steady flow of sales every month.  Great websites to sell your website are Digital Point or Flippa.  Generally you can sell your website for 6-10 times your monthly income. So for example if your website is making on average $200 a month from clickbank and adsense you could sell for $2,000.  Not bad for a weeks work.  You can create a new site every week and leave it on autopilot just monitoring its stats and making adjustments here and there.

If you keep your website for longer say for over a year and kept working on building up the backlinks and adding content which increased your monthly sales then you will be able to sell it for even more money.  It all depends how quickly you want to flip your website.