We’ve seen that running a membership site is a great way to make some money on the internet and to give your product more value to your customers and potential customers that are looking at your sales page. But how do you actually start a membership site? What do you need to accomplish this? There are certain things you need to get before you start developing your site. Here are some of them:

• Good Web Hosting

Now, what exactly is “good web hosting” when it comes to powering your membership site? The thing is, almost any kind of web hosting will support applications and scripts designed to run a membership site. Shared web hosting, the one that costs about $5 per month, is the most popular kind of hosting out there. However, it is not recommended for this purpose? Why not? It says unlimited everything, so you should have no worries, right?

Well, unfortunately this is wrong. Shared web hosting is NOT unlimited, despite what the marketing materials for the web host say. And this is really NOT something that you want to find out the hard way after you launch your site.

You see, shared web hosts impose certain limits on your account, such as the number of files, databases and simultaneous connections to your site. Even though they may say they have unlimited bandwidth, if you start to use too much (say more than a few GB per month, which is quite easy to go over if you host several videos on your site), they will simply cut you off. They do this not out of greed, but simply because a site that is too big will use up too much of the server’s resources, thus making it slow and unstable for the other websites that are hosted on the same server in a shared hosting environment. Shared hosting would only be good if you were planning to get just a dozen or so members to your site each month.

What you should get as a hosting solution instead would be a VPS web hosting account. This basically means that you would be getting a portion of the server allocated specifically for your needs (CPU, disk space, bandwidth and RAM). Your hosting will run on a virtual machine, similar to what you would get if you would be running Windows under MacOS on your home computer. That way, you will not have to worry about competing for resources with other sites on the server and you will also never have to worry about getting your hosting suspended because you used too much bandwidth or RAM.

VPS web hosting is a bit more expensive than shared hosting. However, if you plan to make some money from your membership site, you must be willing to invest a bit of money in it. If you are planning to get a few dozen members to your site each month, then a mid range VPS would be the solution. This will cost you between $35 to $50 per month, depending on the provider that you will be using.

Affiliate marketing is something we talk about quite a bit here, but one area we don’t always touch on enough is creating your own products. We have talked about it a bit, but I haven’t touched on one very valuable area of affiliate marketing — creating an incentive for your affiliates to try and sell your product.

Below are four rock solid ways for you to help your affiliates to sell your product and to make it easier on them.

Create Banners For Them
One of the easiest things you can do is create banners and graphics for your affiliates to display. It saves them time and money creating them banners for themselves to sell YOUR product, and it will keep your branding and identity of your product consistent.

Give Away a Prize
At launch, giving away a high valued prize can be a great incentive for people to work hard and sell your product. For example, a lot of affiliates give away a MacBook Pro or Apple iPad to the top selling affiliate after so many weeks or months. Nothing gives more incentive than cool gadgets and cold hard cash.

Make it Easy
Create a great product that people want to use. Don’t take shortcuts on your landing page design and make sure your sales copywriting is rock solid. Having a good product and a good website and layout is essential in getting affiliates in the first place. Every time I sign up for an affiliate program or to sell someone’s product, I go to their product page to see 1) Does the product fit my niche? 2) How well is the website laid out? 3) What is the sales copywriting look like? 4) Is the site easy to use, uncluttered and is it easy to find the “order” page (the most essential page!)? Create a good product and great site and you will be very successful if you take care of your affiliates.

Have a High Payout
Do not be cheap when it comes to payouts, because people love making money. If they are going to go through a ton of effort for your product, they better have a great reason why — money. If your product is $30, you should think of $15 as the minimum and $20 as a number down the road potentially. Why? The more people selling your product the more products you will sell, so you will try and make it up in mass sales.

Web hosting services provide space on their servers for your website in exchange for a monthly fee. That space is essential for getting your website up and running. There are a lot of different companies you can choose from, but there are only two different types of hosting. Picking the right type of hosting depends on a few different factors.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a type of hosting where your site (or sites) shares a server with a other sites. The server is divided up between all the customers paying for space on it. With shared hosting, you’ll usually get unlimited bandwidth, but limited system resources. If you tax the processor, or the RAM too hard, you will likely incur additional charges from your hosting provider. Since you get unlimited bandwidth, you can get as much traffic as you’d like, as long as your site doesn’t tax the server’s hardware. There are a lot of ways you can avoid that. If you are running a site built on WordPress, you can install a caching plugin that will keep your usage well within reasonable limits, no matter how much traffic you get. Most people won’t need to move off of shared hosting.

Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting is a type of hosting where you get access to your own server to host your website (or websites) on. Dedicated hosting accounts often come with limited bandwidth, but unlimited server resources. If you plan to launch a site that runs some complex software, you’re going to want to get dedicated hosting. Alternately, if you plan to run multiple high traffic websites, you’re probably going to want to use dedicated hosting. The additional system resources are necessary to handle the additional load put on the server by the additional traffic.

If you only run one website, and you don’t have any plans of running others, you can probably use shared hosting for the entire life of your website. By being mindful of the system resources your site is using, you can be sure that you’ll never outgrow your shared hosting plan. If, on the other hand, you plan to run multiple websites, or if you plan to implement features that will tax the server, you’ll want to go with dedicated hosting. If you know your needs, you can pick the right hosting program to suit your needs. Once you know which type you’ll need, just shop around for a company that suits your needs in terms of pricing and other features.

The term “viral marketing” often makes people think of viruses. Actually, viral marketing has nothing to do with computer viruses, or illness. Viral marketing is the process of creating a piece of content that both serves as an ad for a product or service, and gets spread around by the people that see it.

One of the best examples is willitblend.com. If you’re not familiar with the site, they post videos of non-food items being put in a blender. Generally, they put new products that people are excited about in a blender, turn it on, and see if the product will blend. Each video features a Blendtec blender, and you always see the Blendtec logo on the blender. These videos are extremely popular online. Each time a new Will It Blend video is released, it gets spread around quickly, and with minimal effort on Blendtech’s part. Each time someone sees one of their videos, they’re also seeing the Blendtech logo. As a result, the Blendtech brand becomes stronger every time they launch a new video.

Now that you know what viral marketing is, you probably want to know how to use it for your business. The most important thing to remember when attempting to launch a viral marketing campaign is that the advertisement needs to be secondary to the entertainment. You want to feature your brand in your viral marketing campaign, but in a passive way. In the Will It Blend example, Blendtech blenders appear in every video, but they’re not directly telling you to buy one. They’re just showing you that it can blend something that wasn’t meant to be put in a blender, and letting you draw you’re own conclusions from there. It’s entertaining, and it makes the point that Blendtech blenders are powerful. The entertainment angle is the real focus of the video, with the advertisement being more of a passive element. The result is a video that people want to share with their friends.  When was the last time you shared a commercial for a blender with a friend? Probably never. Will It Blend videos, on the other hand, get spread around quickly, and by a great many people.

Viral marketing is an inexpensive way to get your message out to your audience. After the content is created, you don’t have to do much to get it to catch on. If you’ve created something entertaining, people will share it with one another without being prompted to do so. That’s the key to viral marketing – create entertaining content, and let your audience do the rest.

When you first start out with internet marketing, success can seem very far away. There’s no guarantee that any new project you launch will succeed, and the work can be hard. There are a few things you can do to set yourself up for success though.

Build A Network

Having a network of other internet marketers, and influential people in your niche at your disposal can be a great help in launching any new project you might be working on.  You can get valuable advice that might help with your launch, as well as a little free word of mouth advertising. The easiest method for building a good internet marketing network is through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Do a search on either site for your niche, and for internet marketing, and try to befriend anyone who has a lot of other friends or followers. Once you’ve made some friends in internet marketing, and your niche, they can help you to launch your next project successfully.

Keep Up With Technology

The internet, and technology as a whole are constantly evolving. In order to be successful with internet marketing, you need to pay close attention to what direction the internet, and technology as a whole are taking. If you know what people are talking about online, and how they’re doing that talking, you’ll be better equipped to join in the conversation. For example, a few yars back, when social networking sites started popping up, the first people to figure out how to effectively use them as marketing tools were hugely successful. For a little while, they didn’t have a lot of competition to worry about, and as such, they enjoyed a great deal of success. If you stay on top of trends, you might find yourself getting a head start on the competition the next time a new service catches everyone’s attention.

Target Your Audience

Once you know what product or service you want to sell, you have to figure out who you plan to sell it to. You’re going to have to do a little market research about who is going to want to buy your product. Think about their age group, income bracket, and any other factors that might help you determine the right way to get their attention. With this information in hand, you’ll be able to construct a well thought out marketing campaign.

No matter what your niche, it can be tough to launch a blog, and have it become popular. If you’re thinking of launching a new blog, there are a few essential elements you should include in it.

Domain Name

A strong domain name can help your blog in a few ways. If the domain name is short, and easy to remember, it will be much easier for your readers to browse directly to your site. It’s also a good idea to try and include keywords relevant to your niche in your domain name. If your domain name includes strong keywords, your site will show up higher in search results for those keywords.

Theme

It’s important that your site’s appearance reflect it’s purpose. Pick colors and imagery that directly reflect the subject matter of your site, and be sure to stick with that theme throughout the entire site, as well as in any videos you produce.

RSS And Social Media

It’s important to make it as easy as possible for your users to find, and share your content. You should include an RSS button on your site in a prominent place. Each blog post should also include links to automatically share the post on various social media sites, like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and Reddit.

Affiliate Programs

Chances are, you’re hoping to be compensated for your time in some way when you launch a new blog. Sign up for some affiliate programs, and try to include affiliate links and other ads in each blog post. As you get more and more traffic to your site, you’ll also start to see more and more ad revenue.

Quality Content

If you want your new blog to succeed, you have to give your readers a reason to keep coming back. In other words, you have to provide high quality content for their enjoyment. You can choose to either entertain or inform your readers. If you’re going to entertain them, think about what your audience might find humorous or interesting, and try to craft a post around that. If you’re going to inform them, think about what problems your readers might have, or what questions they might be asking. Try to solve their problems, and answer their questions, and you’ll have some high quality content on your site in no time.

If you put these essential elements together to create your blog, you’ll be on your way to blogging success very quickly. If your users can find and share your high quality content easily, you won’t have any trouble building up; your traffic.

If you are thinking of creating a clickbank product then you need to make sure you launch it correctly as if done properly you can easily make $20,000 a month and be one of the top sellers for your category on clickbank with a very high gravity score.

First you need to setup an account with clickbank and pay the $49 activation fee and get your website sales and thank you page approved.  Then the next step is to get a buzz online about your new product.

I highly recommend joining the following forums and posting your advert in the following forums:

• Warrior Forum - http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/ (WSO)
• aBlake Forum – http://www.ablakeforum.com/ (ESF Marketplace)
• BlackHat Forum – http://www.blackhatworld.com/ (Buy, Sell or Trade)
• Digital Point Forum – http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ (Buy, Sell or Trade)

As an example i will use the Warrior Special Offers (WSO) section considering most people know this forum well.

In order to meet the posting rules of the Warrior Forum you need to make sure you sales page meets the following:

“A Warrior Special Offer Means The Price You Give Must Be Better Than The Price The Public At Large Can Get. (This is not a “buy my product” forum, it is a “Special Offer” forum)”

So make sure that the price you offer your product on the WSO section is cheaper then what you are selling it on clickbank for.

Then what you need to do is setup a 2nd free clickbank account and sign up as an affiliate to your product. 

Then when you setup your special offer sales page make the payment button go through your 2nd clickbank free account.  Or you can create a free special report for your product and within the report put your 2nd clickbank free link in there which then directs the user to your sales page.

By setting it up like this will shoot up your gravity ratings on Clickbank and push your product to the top of the category your advertising in, bringin in even more affiliates and more sales.

The famous “BANS” (buildanichestore.com) is up for sale on flippa.com as the owners have decided to move onto new challenges after several years developing their product which allows users to build a website that is affiliated with the Ebay affiliate program.  Similar to our website builder programme that uses the Amazon associates affiliate network.

In their hey day they were turning over $30,000 a month in subscribers joining upto their site to use their product.  But after several months they got bad feedback from some users, but this was mainly due to the fact that the users weren’t probably setting up their sites very well which caused their sites to get penilised in Google causing a tidle wave effect.  The owners saw this as a problem and completly changed their sales pitch on their home page so they could rebuild their reputation and grow as a well established brand which i think they have done today with the invention on their new partner website N1Way.com

Build a niche store currently has 10,000 members since their launch back in 2006 where they first started out selling a custom ebay script on Digitalpoint.com to webmasters.  This is where they found their niche and built on the product and created their own website and started selling their product on clickbank.com

They are currently looking for $500,000 for their business and looking for a team of developers to take over the business and grow it into a very large network of affiliate marketing related websites

Their website currently gets 1,000 unique visitors a day with on average 4 visitors signing up to buy their product the BANS website.  The product is $97 via clickbank and 50% commission goes to their affiliates promoting their product which is a great way to market their business for free and drive alot of traffic to their website.  Their user forum has over 100,000 forum posts with 20,000 threads.  They also have 1,400,000 referrences in Google pointing to their website with a Google page rank 5

I wish these guys good luck with their future projects and hope the sale goes well.  I only wish i had the cash to buy their business as it would go great with my Websites For Sale World Website Builder program.