Of course, having your members do your promotion for you is a very good strategy when you run a membership site, due to the fact that it is free and would actually not require any marketing efforts on your part. All you would need to do is to create a decent membership site and give your members a few incentives to promote it for you. But there are a few more free methods for promoting your membership site. Let us examine them here:

• Social Media

Again, social media. This is something that is talked about a whole lot in internet marketing circles. Of course, there is one big reason for that: it works. Think of it, if it was ineffective, there wouldn’t be thousands of guides, forum posts, etc. about it. There are two things that you would need to do if you are promoting your site on social networking websites:

• Create a page for it

Facebook lets you create a fan page for a business. You should do so for your membership site. Give a bit of information about it and make a nice looking, but not too pushy, sales page as well. People can also “like” your page. The more people like it, the more popular it becomes.

• Make a post about it

With Facebook, you can post on your wall that you’ve created a new site and invite your Facebook friends to check it out. On Twitter, you can send out a Tweet with the link to your website included in it.

But to make your social media use even more effective, consider creating a promotion for those who access your site through social media. A discount on the membership price works very well, but there are also other things you can do to add value such as adding an additional product, or giving a free personal consultation with you, etc.

• Email marketing

If you already have a mailing list, email marketing could be an excellent way to market your new site. This would work even better if you have released products before that were liked by your subscribers. All you would need to do to make use of email marketing would be to send out an email to your subscribers and let them know about your membership site. If your list is made up of people who have already purchased products from you, then they will be more likely to join your site.

Another way to build a list would be to release a free product and give it to people in exchange for opting in to receive emails for you. That would allow you to build a list of subscribers who are interested in internet marketing course products and might want to join your new membership site. While building a list from zero would take a bit of time, it is nonetheless a very good marketing method and something that you can consider doing alongside other promotion methods such as forum posting or social media promotion.

Everyone notices that the world around us is always changing at a fast pace. After all, we don’t live in the dark ages anymore, so technology, culture and society are always evolving. The same can be said for the internet and especially social media sites.

If your business is not on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, it is the time that you consider joining them and create a page for your business or website on these social networks. It doesn’t cost anything and it can be done in less than an hour if you are not the most computer savvy user, or a few minutes if you are an internet expert.

But how do you truly take advantage of all the social media sites? To do this, you need to be aware of one thing: the social media world is always evolving as well. Let’s take a look at Facebook. It currently has over 500 million active users around the world. But there is a fact about the site that very few people actually know. At first, Facebook was only designed for students who were currently enrolled in a college or university. The site then opened up so that anyone could sign up and also create fan pages for businesses. This created a wealth of opportunity for business owners to promote their offerings on the site.

Besides the most famous sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there are plenty of smaller social networking, social bookmarking and video sharing sites that, while being used by thousands of people, are often ignored by marketers. Not expanding your reach to the smaller sites out there could be a big mistake. Here’s why:

1. The potential for growth

The internet world can be quite unpredictable at times. There is obviously no way to predict whether a certain site will one day detrone Facebook or YouTube in terms of popularity. But it could happen. By creating a profile and being active on various social media sites, you will be one of the first ones in should a site explode in popularity. And it doesn’t take much time: creating the pages and making regular posts only takes about an hour each day. You can outsource it if your schedule is really tight and you want to save time.

2. These sites still have traffic

Even if they aren’t as popular, smaller social sites still have people who visit them, otherwise their owners would simply close them down. Even though having a presence on a certain site may only bring you a few hits a day, this is still good traffic that is going to your site. With online traffic, you never know which visitor will be profitable for you. Out of these few visitors that you get from small social sites, one of them could become a great client who makes regular orders, or could turn out to be an excellent business partner who could help your company get even more online profits than it is doing now.

In order to make money online with a product it has to be successful. To make a successful product you must consider products that will attract the most attention, products you are extremely knowledgeable in, and can enjoy creating.

Attracting Attention
Do some online research and you can easily find products that are sought after in today’s market. If you are looking to create a product for use on a social media site, it would only be fitting that you focus on the more popular sites for social networking, like Facebook and Twitter. If you were to focus on a media site like MySpace, it is a less popular subject today than it once was, therefore it will not make as much profit as possible.

Knowledgeable
Products you market online should be related to a niche that you are familiar and knowledgeable in. Your consumers want to know that you are an expert in the particular topic you speak about. In order to ensure your consumers a product they would want to pay for you need to deliver information that is not easily accessible in other places. If a consumer finds value in your product you are more likely to receive recommendations and repeat business.

Creativity
Use your creativity to market your product and share information in ways that other sources do not. Since you will be dedicating a lot of time and attention to your product you need to make sure it is something you enjoy doing. The more you can enjoy creating one product the more information you deliver to your consumer, who can easily tell if you are passionate about your particular topic of choice.

Consider these three things before you develop any product to market online, especially if you are looking to generate money from your product!

Image source:http://www.syjytv.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/make-money-online.jpg

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Each theme has been custom designed with advanced theme options within the wordpress dashboard to make it easier for the user to work their way around the website.  They are very easy to install, with one click install and can have your theme up and running within 10 minutes.

We also have a support forum and will soon be launching video tutorials on how to setup and use our wordpress themes

All our themes are setup so they will be fully optimised for search engines and also have social networking features intregated into the theme.  They will also be adsense friendly so you will be able to add google adsense to your theme to make money from.  You can also make money from a number of ways from our themes (e.g linking in clickbank products, selling advertisment space, affiliate products etc)

If you’re using Facebook as a marketing tool, you know how important it is to have a lot of active Facebook friends. One of the biggest challenges of using Facebook as a marketing tool is keeping those friends happy, and keeping their attention. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to keep them from losing interest in you.

Wall Posts

Be careful about what you post on other people’s walls. If you feel tempted to post messages advertising your products or services on other people’s walls, resist that urge. If you do, the only thing you’ll achieve is getting people to unfriend you. Instead, post friendly messages on other people’s walls, and try to get them to visit your Facebook page. You don’t have to directly advertise to your Facebook friends to get their attention. Try being friendly, and drawing other Facebook users to your profile, and from ther, let your profile do the rest of the work for you.

Be Social

Take the time to interact with other Facebook users. Social networking is all about being social, and if you don’t take the time to be friendly, and interact with other users, you’re not going to get all you should be getting out of Facebook. Be sure to answer any messages you get, and take the time to comment on wall posts. The more effort you put into being social on Facebook, the more it will pay off for you in the long run.

Talk About Them

People love to hear about themselves. Take the time to look at your friends’ Facebook profiles, and talk to them about their interests, and their projects. By taking the time to get to know your friends, and talk about them, you’ll be sure to get their attention, and draw them into your profile. The more interest you show in them, the more interest they’ll show in you.

If your Facebook friends are happy, and interested in what you’re saying, you’ll be more likely to get more out of them. Keep that in mind as you use Facebook, and you’ll be able to use it as an effective marketing tool.

Using a forum to market and monetize your website is a great idea. There are two different ways you can do this, one is by marketing on other people’s forums, and the second is to create your own forum.

Forums are a great way to market to a very specific area. Sure, you sometimes see a forum that is about general topics, but mostly the topics discussed are very narrow minded (in a good way). For example, there are massive forums on cycling, soccer, social networking, making money online, or knitting.

There is really no limit of what a forum can be about, if there are passionate and interested people about a subject, they will most likely find their way to a forum to discuss the topics.

Using Other People’s Forums
The easiest and cheapest way to market your website via forums is to use someone else’s already established forum. This way, the cost of entry is much lower, in both monetary and time terms. All you need to do is register on the forum, read the rules, put your website in your signature with a catchy phrase that will entice people to click on it, then start posting on the forum. It is important to engage in conversation, rather than spamming the established members already (they will not take kindly to that). Engaging and holding an intelligent conversation is essential here, because this is the first time your potential visitors will ever see what you have to say. Make sure you add value to the forum and post several times a day or week in order to maximize your results.

Creating Your Own Forums
Another way you can use forums is to create your own forum to allow your followers to engage with you and one another. This will help create a sense of community around your site, especially if you are already getting comments. The problem with this method is that you need to have viewers already to leverage them into becoming forum members. This is usually one of the later aspects of a website to come along, simply for that reason. But once you do have established readers, it could be a great way to promote your topics, engage in conversation, and even get new ideas for content and products.

Making money while blogging is a great sounding idea, but it is even harder to put into practice. Writing takes time, dedication, and creative thoughts. Then there is the promotion, networking, social networking, blog design, and blog maintenance to keep up with. The other areas take away from the core of writing for a purpose and should be the secondary thing after your content. If you write an article per day, do that first, then promote and maintain second. Great content is still king.

Making money should be the next thing to worry about – after you do the other stuff and after you have some great content. There are plenty of ways to make money from your blog, such as advertising, but today we are going to touch on three very different ways you can make a great profit from your website. Most professional bloggers do at least one of these, allowing them to rake in sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. But don’t worry, most of us aren’t that lucky. Being able to break even on a blog is a great start, then after that focus on paying for your gas every week for your car. Once you have reached that, try to pay for your cellphone bill and gas. Keep moving up until you have scaled to the point you want to be at that you can maintain while staying sane. With that, let’s look at 3 ways to make money blogging.

Affiliate Revenue
Signing up to be an affiliate for products that are close to your niche can be a great way to create some income. You can promote established products and link to them from your blog. You will receive a portion of the sales of those products when someone visits and purchases the product from your affiliate link. This is a great way to get your feet wet before trying to create your own products. A good example is Copyblogger.com where he promotes professional blogging software such as Thesis theme.

Create a Product
Creating your own product related to your niche is a great way to make a lot of money, especially if you have a big audience of 2-3k unique visitors per month. Create an enticing ebook, membership site, or video series and promote them on your blog and through affiliates on other websites.

Write for Someone Else
If you are just getting started, don’t be afraid to write for someone else so that you can start getting some income right away. It will help offset your startup costs and give you some real cash to spend.

In order for a website to be profitable, it needs visitors. The more people that see your site, the more products you’ll sell, and your ads will get clicked more frequently. There are a number of ways to bring in more traffic to your site. Let’s take a look at a few of the more effective ones.

PPC Advertising

PPC (pay per click) advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your website. Use a service like Google Adwords to create some ads, and get them out to your audience. If you’re going to go this route, it’s important to set a budget for your ads. You don’t want to spend more on advertising than you’re going make. For example, if you spend $10 per day on advertising, you should be bringing in at least that much from sales, or ad revenue.

Article Marketing

Article directories can be a great source of traffic. Just find one that represents your niche well, write a few 300 – 500 word articles every week, and post them to whatever article directories you like. Include a link to your site in each article, and over time, you’ll begin to see a solid amount of traffic coming into your site from your article marketing efforts.

Social Networking

You probably know a lot of people with Facebook and Twitter accounts. That’s because a lot of people in every demographic imaginable are using those services. Facebook alone has over 500 million users, and some of them are bound to be a part of your target audience, so setting up a Facebook page for your website is a good idea.

Spread The Word

Put a link to your site in your profile on any sites you visit frequently. If you comment on a popular blog a lot, make sure your account is linked to your site. If you post on forums a lot, make sure your site is listed in you signature. Everything you can do to spread the word about your site will help to bring in more traffic.

Each method listed above for driving traffic is simple, and effective. Aside from PPC advertising, they’re all free too. You can bring in more traffic to your site quickly, and for very little money if you know the right methods to use.

Facebook and Twitter have become a part of the lives of a great number of people, so it only makes sense to try and use those services to get your message out to your target audience. So all you have to do is sign up for them, and put up a few links to your website, and the traffic will just pour in, right? Wrong. There are a lot of things to consider before diving into marketing your site through socian networking services.

The most important thing to remember whether you’re thinking about a Facebook or Twitter account is that there has to be an actual human being running the account. There is plenty of software out there that will post updates about your website to either service automatically, but that software should be used alongside a person making regular updates, not instead of a person making regular updates. Just remember, the key word in social networking is “social”. People use Facebook and Twitter to connect with other people, and giving them that connection is a big part of using social networks effectively as marketing tools.

When using Twitter, make sure you take the time to talk to your followers. If someone @ replies you, be sure to answer their question or address their statement. Same thing goes for direct messages. If you have a healthy number of real tweets crafted by a real human being, your followers are way more likely to click on links to your site when you tweet them.

Facebook works a little differently. When you’re setting up a Facebook page, you should take a minute, and think of something elated to your niche, and create a page about that rather than about your specific website. For example, if you have a website that sells luggage, start a Facebook page about travel. Once the page has a good number of fans, start throwing in some links to deals on your site in between posts about travel. That way you’re certain to reach your target audience in a meaningful way.

If you’re careful to give your social marketing campaign a friendly, human feel rather than just letting software post updates to Twitter and Facebook for you, you will drive more traffic to your links, and get more attention from your target audience. With no sign up fees or other costs involved, Facebook and Twitter can be affordable, and powerful marketing tools if used correctly.