When you create a membership site, you need to promote it in order to get people to subscribe to it and thus make some money from it. We have already seen how using internet marketing forums could get you the members that you need to your site. But what about using your existing members to promote the site for you? This is indeed quite possible.

If you run a quality site that is very helpful and informational, many people will tell their friends about it and encourage them to join if they want to learn a few things about online marketing. Indeed, word of mouth marketing can be quite a powerful tool. But if you want to be even more successful with it, then you will need to give incentives to your members so that they recruit others to join. This can be done by various means such as:

• Giving a discount to the member being referred. If someone has been referred by an existing member of the site, they would get a discount on their first month’s membership.
• Creating a contest. By doing so, you can offer a prize to the top 3 people who refer others to your site. This will encourage members to get their friends to sign up for it.
• Giving a special bonus once someone has referred a certain amount of people to the site. This could be a product that you own, or maybe a one on one coaching session with you.

By doing these things, you will encourage members of your site to refer others to your site in greater number than what you would have ever though possible before. But if you want members to tell others about your site, there are also a few other things you need to remember:

• Run a good quality site. This means having useful and informative content on it. It also means that your site must be easy to navigate and function well. Nobody will like a membership site that goes down every few minutes and will definitely not want to recommend this kind of website to their friends.
• Update your site on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean that you will need to add new content every single day, however you should give your members the impression that your site is updated regularly. If members see that your site looks “dead” with no new information added to it in quite a while, then they are less likely to stay members and even less likely to encourage others to join.

Remember, that one of the best advertising tools would be word of mouth referrals. This works well in almost any business and it will definitely work well if you run a membership site. All that you need to do is to give your members the necessary incentives to promote your website to others and chances are, they will actually go ahead and do it.

Now that you have learned about what is necessary to run a membership site that you created, you now need to figure out how you will get members to join. Obviously, this means putting the message out there. People will not just magically type in the URL of your site in the address bar and join. There are a couple of methods that you can employ in order to gain members to your site. Each have their unique advantages, so it is a good thing for you to review all of them before you make your decision as to how you will promote it.

Here are some promotional methods:

• IM Forums

This is perhaps the best way to promote a membership site, as you will be showing your message to people who are already interested in learning about internet marketing and online money making techniques. The traffic is already there, all you would need to do is to get their attention and to convince them that your membership site is worth joining.

This can be done through various means. When a member of an internet marketing forum sees that a new membership site is being created, the first thing they will want to know if WHO created it. People who frequent IM forums have generally seen plenty of “make money online” products and are more likely to be skeptical than someone who is completely new to the industry and does not frequent any IM related communities online. In order to get better results, it would be good that you would be a reputed member of the forum where you are promoting your new site. This means having been on the forum for at least a few months and have made a decent number of contributions that are both useful as well as informative. Also, it helps if you get along well with other members and do not constantly get into flame wars with others. When a reputed member of an IM forum advertises their site, he is more likely to be taken seriously and listened to than a newbie with 4 posts that just joined yesterday.

It also helps to make some friends in the internet marketing community. This way, you will have some people who would be willing to review your site and vouch for its credibility in front of other members. If several well respected members of the forum say that a site is useful, then people are once again more likely to believe them.

Promoting via forums is simple and the exact steps to take depend on which forum you are in. All the big IM forums have a “Products for Sale” section. Some allow you to put a link to your site in your forum signature, while others will even let you purchase banner ad space on the forum that can be used for the purposes of promoting your website. This may cost a bit of money, but will attract much more attention to your offer.

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.

In the internet marketing world, many people run their own business from home and thus run everything by themselves, a “one man show” of sorts. However, there are many cases where running everything by yourself could prove to be very difficult. So if you want to expand your business, you may find it necessary to partner up with others in the IM world or to hire some workers to perform certain tasks for you. This, of course, does not come without its risks. While in a perfect world, everyone would be honest and reliable, in reality this isn’t the case. More so in cyberspace.

Now let’s say you find someone on a forum to team up with on a project or do some work together, there are ways to reduce the risk of getting scammed. Here are some easy things that you should consider:

• Look at the person’s reputation and history. This is quite easy to do on a forum, since you will be able to see how many posts the user has made and when they have joined the forum. It goes without saying that someone who has made hundreds of useful contributions, been part of a community for several years and has had many successful deals with other members is much less likely to pull a fast one than a guy who just signed up yesterday. But don’t completely let your guard down either. There have been cases where long time users and even moderators on some forums have been involved in scams that robbed users of over six figures in total.
• Think about the deal or offer… does it seem right to you? Use some basic logic. If someone claims they can design a complete web site for you for $5, or that they can bring you thousands of targeted visitors just by joining their $29.99 a month membership site, do you see that something seems fishy here?
• If possible, ask to see samples of their work. When you order a service, such as logo creation or article writing, ask to see some original work from the service provider. If they make excuses as to why they can’t, or send you something that looks like it was simply lifted from a random website, once again, something doesn’t seem right.
• Do a quick Google search of their user name, business name, email address, etc. to find out as much information as possible about a user that you are planning to do business with. This will sometimes let you find some interesting information, such as whether complaints have been made against them on websites like scam.com or RipoffReport.

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