Month: September 2010

In your membership website you want your members to be participating and becoming a part of the sites’ community. You also want to know that they understood the material that you taught them. How do you do this? No one likes homework! One good way to do this is to set up a membership challenge. This is a method where you challenge your members to answer a set of easy questions or follow some simple directions.

You might have to encourage people to complete the challenges at first but once they become accustomed to doing them they should enjoy the participation and want to keep on doing the challenges. This will have the added benefit of giving you material to use in marketing testimonials.

Setting up a challenge for your members is not difficult. Prepare a new area in the blog post that relates to the material that you want to challenge the members on. Then give them some questions that they need to answer. The questions should be on the material that you have recently taught to them. If you have recently been covering joint ventures, for example, challenge them with questions like; who are four people that you will get in touch with to offer a joint venture, what will you offer them and when will you do this by? Then you should give your members a deadline to respond to and post their answers before that time.

Sometimes people might not want to answer the challenge questions. If that happens you are going to need to keep after them and remind them by email that they need to do so. If they still haven’t responded by the deadline time then you should disable the challenge post and only allow people to comment after they have posted what their intentions are. This should have the effect of making them commit to answer the questions and help ensure that they will follow through and finish the task.

Once most of your members have done this you will have some testimonials that you will be able to put to use in an upcoming sales letter. Challenge questions also allow both the member and yourself to keep track of what they are learning and how well they are learning it. It will enable the member to see the value of what you have taught them when they finish the course.

If for some reason your members are reluctant to participate in the challenge questions you should try offering them a reward for doing so. A bonus video or a protected sign in live training session or re-sell rights are all examples of rewards that could be offered to your members in return for their participation. Go to http://www.membershipcube.com right now to discover more.

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When you have authority in a niche, a message to deliver or some sort of expertise, you must find a way to share it with other people. Now, how could you do that? Should you host a physical seminar in a hotel room or create a digital membership site? This remains to be seen after measuring the pros and cons stated below.

A physical seminar gives you a lot of authority and is good for the ego. It offers instant credibility because it is a real event that takes place in the real world. However, in order to do this, you must have a serious sum of money. You must pay for the hotel conference room, a camera and the person who handles it, you must personally fly to the location of the seminar and book the room that will be used and you must find a way to make people to come to your seminar. These things take both time and money. Besides, if nobody comes to your seminar, you might look like a person who has no authority and this might affect your ego.

Having a physical seminar is both stressful and expensive because there are many costs, people might not come to your event or they might find it boring and leave. Also, it is a very exhausting experience as you might be the only presenter and you might have to present all day long for one, two or more days. So, remember: a seminar is expensive, stressful, scary and exhausting.

An online membership site, on the other hand, is less costly. There’s no room to be booked and no travel costs. The only things to be paid are web hosting and software. The problem with a membership site is that it may take a while to get the same number of subscribers that you would get at a physical seminar.

If you’re new at membership sites, it might take a while to start off. Also, a membership site may require more work or the same amount of work stretched on an extended period of time. The site is not a one-time event and it must be maintained regularly in order to get new people buying. The best advantage when it comes to membership sites is that they can be automated. You can use an automatic follow-up sequence, set up a pay-per-click account and automate both traffic and marketing. You can also use a sales settler that is online for 24 h a day and have the money pour in no time.

So, after reviewing both the pros and cons of membership sites and physical seminars, you must know that both solutions are good for you. Plan on doing an online membership site now and a physical seminar later if that’s what suits you. No matter what, choose the easier thing first. Create a membership site first because it is cheaper and can be automated. Then, take care of your physical seminar.

Choose to avoid making more mistakes and get your own membership site created by 5 o’clock this evening at: http://www.membershipcube.com

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The first step in setting up your own membership site is deciding on a subject. This can be difficult and if you get it wrong it can ruin the rest of the process. There are many questions to ask yourself about what kind of membership website you want to produce. What kind of content will it have? How will the content be delivered? What market niche will it be in and how much should it cost? Let’s talk about five things you can do to help you answer the questions you have about starting your site.

What is your competition doing? What are the other membership websites in your niche presenting? What price do they charge and how to they expect payment; monthly quarterly or yearly? What is the content and presentation like? Do they have a live component? What makes them unique?

There are not too many ideas that have not already been tried on membership websites. There’s no need for you to try to use new, untested techniques; just look at what your competitors are doing and do it better.

What hole in the market can you identify? What can you provide that your competitors are not?

If other sites in your niche are doing all of their training by video, perhaps you could offer live sessions where people could ask questions and receive advice. Try to make your services unique.

What do you like to do or teach? You need to make your membership site in an area that interests you, there’s no use trying to write about or teach a subject that you don’t like. If you teach a subject and find that you go over the same materials all the time, you can create a membership website to hold your teaching presentations so that people can see them on demand.

What are people asking you to explain to them? As you’re teaching, take note of the questions that people are asking you and incorporate that material in your presentations. If one person asks you a question regarding your website content it is quite possible that many other people were wondering about the same question.

What solutions are people already paying you for? You should enter the market with a low-priced single payment report or a video home study course to test the market place. If the product sells well then create a membership website to hold and expand the content. Let the customers tell you how they like your content by voting with their wallets.

There are five things that you can do to help you decide what kind of membership website you should create.

Look at your competition, look at holes in the market, consider what you like to do or teach, examine what people are asking you to explain and look at what solutions people are already paying for.

Now that you know what kind of membership site you want to make, go ahead and create it at: http://www.membershipcube.com

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There are pros and cons to introduce a membership site affiliate program.

An affiliate program offers a system whereby they will refer a buyer to your site for a fee. Often this is at a cost of 50% of your sale. Your product may sell for $10 and you then pay the affiliate program $5.00 for their referral. This sounds fair provided you are making enough profit to cover your cost of product together with paying the affiliate member 50% of the selling price. Should a membership site affiliate program offer a commission?

Membership affiliate programs do have their uses as you get to do business that you would possibly have lost to a competitor. The fact that some of these affiliate programs find it difficult to retain their membership is something that needs looking into. Make the membership affiliate sites more attractive and affordable.

This can be done by reducing the costs of the affiliate membership program and receiving exposure from the members own sites by advertising thereon. The member just needs to place a banner of the membership affiliate program on their site and in turn receive a discount in the commission they pay back to the membership affiliate for supplying a buyer.

Affiliates enjoy promoting products and services as it becomes a recurring commission for them and a regular monthly business. The previous affiliate system used a once off commission system whereby you would earn say $10.00 for the first referral and receive nothing for further referrals. This system has been over ridden by system which pays an affiliate member a commission on every sale, that is say $10.00 for every referral that is sent. This makes having a membership with the affiliate person financially worth while.

The only way to keep this affiliate membership program running is to make it worth while and not be greedy as you will find members who will offer a high introductory commission and a small commission for sales thereafter. Affiliate members tend to ignore this type of member as it is not worth there while as the commission payable is too small.

Keeping the commission higher and constant motivates the affiliate program to promote your product over a longer period of time and also to a wider audience and you are make regular money. You could call it your bread and butter lines.

People often wonder how they are going to promote their product after they have become a member of the affiliate site. They actually need to look no further as providing they have a good product coupled with a good commission system, they will be able to market themselves amongst the member affiliates which usually have a substantial pool. With a good recurring commission payable to the affiliate members, you will find you will be raking in the business almost immediately.

The best way to start earning big money as a membership site owner is to learn from a reputable expert in this industry. Contact the membership site expert Robert Plank on setting up a profitable membership site in no time at all on: http://www.membershipcube.com

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The content of a new membership site always seems to become a problem when in reality; it should not as one does not need to be concerned about the content of their membership sites. The marketing of your new membership site is actually the most important factor as without clever marketing you will not entice many viewers to the site. So, the content problem will be dealt with first. All one needs do is access a site called ‘Private label rights’ where you can have access to loads of material for your membership site. Material such as videos, audios, interviews and webinars are available here for your use. This is probably the only place you need visit for your membership site content.

The marketing of your site requires not only enticing people into your site but also to make sure you keep them on your membership site.

Private label rights are materials such as videos, books, reports, software and also articles of which the rights are available for purchase and use or even re write the articles for your own membership site. At times some of the purchased articles are not great but all that needs to be done is for you to do a quick rewrite and it will be usable. This however is not the easy with videos. If the video is not very good, it will always be not very good!

When it comes to doing interviews and webinars, being able to converse makes it easy to create the content for a membership site. Your partner in the conversation needs to be good at communicating and must also be really good in his field of interest. You need pose leading questions to the person such as how he got started, what ideas are in the pipeline, and when will he implement them and mistakes made and how to avoid them in the future. You will need to conduct this conversation for a period of approximately twenty minutes. Remember to takes lots of notes during the conversation as you will then be able to use that information in finishing off the conversation with a recap of what had been discussed and how they could implement the given information in their membership site.

Interviews are always audio but when you get to doing webinars remember that they are where you will be chatting to a person on screen and you can also actually demonstrate was is in the process of being discussed. For an eBay post you would show your browser and advise them exactly how to post a perfect listing for eBay. Then you will get to making your own videos which is really exciting by using a software program called Camtasia which allows you to demonstrate in the browser and develop power points showing them on a full screen. You can recap too what has occurred with the materials you obtained from PLR.

An expert will always assist you with content for your membership site when visiting: http://www.membershipcube.com

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It makes much more sense to develop a product that is flexible enough to allow for future improvements rather than striving to come up with a perfect product. That is why split testing is done to your sales letter to ensure that it is improving with time.

The idea behind split testing is you come up with several versions of your sales letter, with each sales letter bearing a simple change either in wording or formatting. These sales letters are sent out in equal numbers then you observe the sales letter that generates the most response. Select these letters with the most responses and change something else and send again. With time, you will find that you gradually develop a sales letter that is very effective in marketing your business.

The theory of split testing sounds easy enough but how exactly does one go about it? What could prove to be more difficult is how to do the test on a membership website. The answer to these is as simple as using the Google Website Analyzer. This is a free service being offered by Google that will do the analysis for you and give you the results in form of figures, diagrams, charts and graphs. You will be prompted to post your sales letters for the service to analyze and give you all necessary information that will allow you to judge which sales letter is more effective.

To create separate sales letters, take the original copy of the letter and duplicate. Then proceed and make a change to the duplicate e.g. change the title or some colors. After making the changes, input the letters and all the information you will be prompted to enter in the new experiment you just created in Google Website Optimizer. Ensure that you specify what your homepage is going to be, any variation pages and the member registration page.

Some web applications that handle subscriptions such as Wishlist allows you to list all the subscription pages for all user levels. In this case, you will be prompted to specify your conversion page. Once you specify this, you will be asked to copy/paste this code to the sales letters that you specified as the homepage for your website and it’s duplicate.

To include the conversion code into your subscription page, all you need to do is to allow insertion of custom code at the bottom of your member subscription form. When you paste this conversion code at the bottom the form, you will get two different versions of the sales letter. It will now be up to Google to analyze and decide which form traffic will be directed to. In the event that a sale is recorded on the site, Google will be in a position to determine which one of the sales letters delivered the sale. This method will allow you to test different components of your sales letter step by step, starting with your header to order button etc. That is how split testing can be carried out successfully using Wishlist Member in combination with Google Website Optimizer.

You can do your first split test by visiting: http://www.membershipcube.com

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Now that you have your membership website up and running, one of the things that you will need to consider is whether or not to offer lifetime memberships or one-time payments. While it might seem a good idea at first to get a lump sum of money from prospective customers up-front it is not a good long term solution. There are three reasons why you don’t want to accept one-time payments for your site.

You want your members to be conditioned to paying you a regular fee.

You don’t want your members to overload on new material.

You want to avoid download collectors.

On your membership site you are always in the process of training or conditioning your members to do something. One of the first things that it would be good to teach them is to pay a monthly fee to enjoy access to your site. This will be better for the success of your site in the long run, both in terms of financial returns and in the participation of your members. You will have healthy monthly cash flow from the membership fees and your members will be reminded to log on and participate when they receive their bills.

You also need to be concerned about members getting an information overload. If you let people give you a one-time payment that lets them access all of your sites content at once the amount of information can be intimidating and overwhelm them. If they are members of more than one site this can be even more of a problem. New members are also less likely to appreciate the value of your materials when they receive them all at once. When they pay a monthly membership fee people are more likely to use the site regularly and participate in its activities.

When you condition your members to pay you on a monthly basis you will help to avoid download collectors. These are people who join a membership site in order to download all of the available materials and then quit once they have all of your content. The point of a membership website is that it is a community where people learn and interact together, so you don’t want ‘hit and run’ members who just take materials and don’t want to participate. People who pay monthly will get more involved in your membership site.

When you are in the process of deciding how you are going to charge your members for access to the membership site you need to remember that there are three good reasons not to let people pay a one-time or lifetime membership fee.

You want your members to get accustomed to paying you a monthly fee.

You don’t want members overloading on new materials.

You don’t want members only looking to download content.

These three reasons help to show why it is better for you to charge a monthly membership fee in order for members to access your site.

Get expert membership site training from Robert Plank today at: http://www.membershipcube.com

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Now that you’ve decided to make your own membership website you need to think about what kind of site it will be. We will talk about five of the most common ones in order to help you decide which kind is best for you.

One of the easiest ways to create a membership site is by correlating all of the resale materials that you have in your computer and packaging them into one site. Offer monthly access to people who join the site and give them new resale rights each month. This can be especially effective if you have rare and hard-to-find items to include in the site.

You can provide members with some type of software service that runs on your web servers. Some examples of these are website hosting and email auto-responding services. People will pay you a monthly membership fee to access these types of services.

You could also provide a video submission site where members pay you to retransmit their video to other sites. They receive this service in return for a monthly fee.

Produce a teaching or training membership site that lets people learn a new skill or hone old ones. Pass on your knowledge and sell products as well. If you work in a creative field and work online, think about making a site where your clients can follow the progress of the work you are doing for them. They will have an ongoing record of your work and never have to worry about losing a file from you.

Build a social networking site or a forum where people can meet and exchange views. There are simple software programs like the BuddyPress and SimplePress plug-ins for WordPress that allow you to create your own Facebook style network or add a forum to your membership site.

If you do work for other people such as article writing, website critiquing and testing or logo designing, you should think about repackaging and bundling your work and software into one membership site package.

You could explain and show in your site how you went about creating the work and selling it, giving members valuable real life insights that they could emulate. You can provide them with all of your experience along with instruction and coaching and materials in return for a monthly membership fee on your site. The people who join your site are getting access to your personal knowledge vault.

You can use the information that we have just covered to help you to decide what kind of membership website you want to build.

Some of the most common types of membership site are; packaging monthly resale rights, providing a software service, teaching and training sites, social networking services and the personal knowledge vault.

All of these types of membership websites work well, now it is up to you to decide which kind will suit your site best.

Now you know how to make your site unique go to: http://www.membershipcube.com

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When setting up your membership site you may not be sure of whether to tackle each and every problem or whether to handle only one problem. The big debate is whether to have one big membership site or many small ones.

Usually when I am creating a site for one-off products I prefer to have one solution for one problem. However, the dynamics are different when it comes to creating a membership site especially in cases where you are offering various options like upsells. This requires that people log in to the various membership sites.

Most of the membership software available, for example Wishlist Member, is advantageous in that if a person has an existing account they can upgrade their level of membership. This means that by clicking on a special link the person can have an extra level added to their account without having to get another account. It is for this reason that I recommend that if you have a recurring membership site you should create only one membership site per each sub-niche that you have.

You may be wondering what a sub-niche is; this is simply a niche that is found within another niche. What this means is that I use the space I have wisely by making sure that I do not waste it. For example, instead of having a membership site that deals exclusively on internet marketing, I would have a membership site that deals with list building. By doing this people in the membership site can use the same site if I have upsells about list building. This means that I would have enough content in the site to charge a monthly fee of up to $97 to those willing to be members of the site. Use one membership site per sub-niche.

However, having one membership site that caters for all that you have to offer has its limitations such as it makes it more difficult to navigate in it. For instance, I am also involved in programming which means I deal with PHP, WordPress and JavaScript. It would not be practical to have one membership site for all elements of programming. This means that I would have a membership site for PHP, another for WordPress and another one for JavaScript. When you have a site that is too big it becomes difficult to explain it as well as to make an elevator pitch for it. The trick is to have a site that is sufficiently big for you to be able to have multiple products that will allow you to charge a recurring monthly fee but which is still small enough for you to be able to give an elevator pitch.

When you have drip content it is advisable to have a specific site then have lessons for the respective weeks in consecutive order. It would be very confusing if the site has multiple products as the information given would be too much which would overwhelm the people using it.

These guidelines are important and worth considering when you have to decide on whether to have a single big membership site or to have many small ones. After settling on a niche you should work towards having a membership site for each sub-niche which is not too big until people are unable to navigate in it neither too small which would require people to join many sites.

With this knowledge go ahead and create your own membership site by clicking on http://www.membershipcube.com

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You may or may to be aware, but WordPress, the blog application, allows people to install Plug-ins (add-ons) to boost the usability and make their WordPress blog cool to use. This is inclusive of actions such as; date removal on posts, pop-p addition, etc. there are however 3 top add-ons if you want to use your blog as a membership site that is easy and convenient for use by a beginner. For easy registration and logging-in, use Wish-List member, Psychic Search shows you who searched the blog inclusive of Google searches and takes all searches and subscribes them to the Comments Plug-in, which alerts your contributors on comments on their posts.

Another script is the Wish-List member which is considered the best membership script in the market. By installing a simple plug-in, one gains control over your site access. By taking a couple of steps you will be charging through PayPal, Click-Bank, 1ShoppingCart, Quick-Pay-Pro, or even Infusion-soft, in no time at all which would enable you members to gain access to your membership site.

A search box enables the members to search for what they want, and if they don’t find it, they can leave feedback in any of your posts on the blog.

Another great feature is the search box. This is perhaps something that most people may not care unless the need arises. One may ask for something and you look for something else that is totally different. This can be detrimental to your membership site.

For example, if you host a membership that revolves around the idea of how to power up your car, people may enquire on things such as improving their cars’ speed. Perhaps the search query such as “Where can I buy a fuel pump for my ride?”, would give many hits with the phrase, “fuel pump” . If you have little information about fuel pumps, then you would realize you have to acquire more content for your members, which can be videos, an audio series or literature on fuel pumps. This way, you help out those who search for the specific data.

You can even create public blogs to share some of the information so that if one searches “fuel pump” and Google redirects them to the blog, the add-on records this search; thus you have an alternative resource for knowing what people are searching for.

The third final add-on recommended nowadays is the Subscribe to Comments plug-in. This can be seen on several other blogs. Once you submit a comment, under the comment form, is a small check box with the caption; “notify me of follow-up comments via email?” If you are among those who left a comment on a particular post, Word-Press blog updates you through an email for every additional comment left. This gives you a reason to re-visit the blog and respond to some of the comments. This is an excellent method used to build a steady following and increase participation. It is as effective, if not better, as paid advertising as well as advertising on free blogs.

Wish-List member, Psychic Search and Subscribe to Comments are the three useful add-ons that will boost your membership site.

To acquire more information on how to build successful and profitable membership sites, visit: http://www.membershipcube.com

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