If you have a lot of information to offer your customers, and if you intend to add to that information over time, a membership site is a great way to generate revenue with that information. A membership site is exactly what it sounds like, people sign up to your site for a recurring fee, and you provide them with ongoing information and support. If you use the right tactics, a membership site can be extremely profitable.

One Call To Action At A Time

A call to action is anything you tell your visitors to do. For example, “Sign Up Now” or “Watch this video” would be examples of a call to action. You never want to make the customer feel confused about what to do next, and presenting them with two calls to action at a time can leave them confused or uncertain about what to do next. Instead, present one call to action at a time. If you want your visitors to watch a video before moving on to the next thing you want them to do, put that video, and a call to action for it above everything else on that page.

Clear Navigation

Your visitors should be able to get to every section of your site quickly, and easily. Your site should include a navigation bar at the top that contains links to every section of your site. If some sections contain subsections, be sure to include those in a drop down menu underneath their parent section. By giving your visitors an easy way to navigate your site, you are ensuring that they can find what they need easily. If they don’t have any trouble using  your site, they’re more likely to keep coming back.

Professional And Interesting

If you want your visitors to take you seriously, then your site needs to keep their attention. If your site appears unprofessional, or if the content is boring, or otherwise unappealing to the visitor, you won’t sell many memberships. If your content is solid, and your presentation is professional, you’ll have a much easier time of getting people to sign up for your site. Keep that in mind as you set up your membership site.

A membership site can be a great way to bring in some money if you do it right. Keep your message clear, your navigation simple, and your content compelling, and you’ll get plenty of sign ups.

We’ve talked a little about what SEO is and how you can use it in a broad sense to generate traffic for your site. Now we’re going to get into the finer details of optimizing a website for search.

Don’t make your site more complicated than it needs to be. Flash apps, podcasts, and videos might look nice, and feel fancy, but search engines can’t index the information in them. If you’re going to include those things on your site, be sure to use text to reiterate the information in your media files. Search engines can’t hear your podcast, or watch your videos, so it’s very important that the information in them be converted to test, and placed on your site. We’re not suggesting that you transcribe your entire podcast, but rather that you write a couple paragraphs detailing what’s covered in the podcast.

It’s also important to provide a well organized navigation system on your site. Consider adding a nav bar just under the header that includes links to all the major sections of your site. If your site is broken down into a lot of subsections, add a drop down menu for each section that shows all of its subsections. You should also add a sitemap to your website. Not only does it make it easy for your visitors to find what they’re looking for,  but it also makes it easier for search engines to index your site.

Be careful about the quality and quantity of links on your site. If you have more than 50 links on any given page, you may be damaging your search rank. Also, keep an eye out for broken links on your site. From time to time, a page on another site will get deleted, or moved. If you have a link leading to content that isn’t there anymore, it reflects poorly on your site. There are a lot of free link checkers out there that will browse your site, and give you a report on the status of your links. If you’re using WordPress, there are several highly effective plugins available to help you avoid broken links.

The most important thing of all is to have good, original content on your site. Your content should be keyword rich, and each page should be completely original. If you have two pages with near identical content on your site, search engines will view them as duplicate content, and your search rank will be damaged because of it.

By keeping a well organized site with a lot of quality content, you can boost your search rank significantly. Keep your links up to date, and make sure there’s some text to go with your media, and your site will climb it’s way to the top of any major search engine in no time.

The biggest growing segment on the internet for traffic is mobile web browsers. Every smartphone (minus BlackBerry until BB 6.0, at least) has a very capable web browser able to display rich content just like you are used to on your computer.

The problem is, it isn’t always fluid. What does that mean? When you are viewing your website on the web browser, and you have an iPhone or Android phone (without Flash) your header image might not be there because it was Adobe Flash based instead of HTML. That ruins the experience for the viewer, and with more and more people that will be viewing your website on their phone you need to do something about it.

First thing first, no Flash. I don’t care if Android just announced they would be getting Flash today, you are still segmenting a huge piece of the market if you continue to use Flash on your website. It simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Another thing to be conscience of is your navigation. I have a Motorola Milestone and it doesn’t have the best touch screen (actually, it is horrendous). The inability to click on tiny links is very frustrating to me and ruins my experience (and wastes my time) on may of my favorite sites.

By making navigation bigger and easier to select (and not select the wrong one) you will improve your user experience both on computer and mobile browsers. Drop down menus are a great example, Android phones can click the first link fine, but any links in the drop down menu can be easily mis-clicked while on a mobile device, breaking the experience.

You can have a great website for a computer, but make sure you also consider the mobile device. Having your designer code for the mobile version as well is really important. Keep the mobile market in mind when doing anything, or have a complete mobile version. WordPress and many other platforms have great mobile plugins that allow you to easily transform your design into a mobile version, or create your own.