Month: September 2010

It is possible that you’ve been lied to by people teaching membership site marketing. They might have told you that the only way of selling a membership site is on the back end, as a bonus offer, as an upsell. This is not true. Membership sites can be sold on the front end – that means directly – as log as you use the right positioning and the right terminology. This makes your site look even more attractive than a one-time payment transaction.

What do you need to know about the correct positioning of a membership site? First of all, think about how people buy homes, cars and other similar things. Then, sell them on individual payments, a thing that would make them get their foot in the door. Finally, instead of putting up for sale a membership site, refer to it as to a payment plan, as if you were giving them a fixed-term membership option.

This is the way the world works: if you’re buying a house, a car, if you’re getting a loan, then you have a certain balance that must be paid until that balance is done. If, at any point you stop paying for the thing you bought, you simply aren’t going to get it. If you make all the payments for your house except the final one, then you lose that house, but if you go through with all the payments, then you own it.

You have to think about the way in which you are selling your membership site in the exactly same way – they make certain payments. Once all the payments are made, it is theirs. Meanwhile, you are doing them a favor by offering them an interest-free loan to use your membership site.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a $1000 training course and people are paying $98 every month for the next ten months. It is a lot easier for them to pay only a small sum at a time than to pay the entire sum from the beginning.

It is true that there are customers who will say “hey, that’s a $1000!”, but the general idea is that it is easier to present your product this way and your customers don’t have to make all the payments. They can quit whenever they want and you’re offering them a really easier way of getting in because they only have to pay $100 for entering your $1000 training course. And certainly, you must use an appropriate vocabulary and terminology.

People must be told things like this: you pay a certain sum every six months and after that, it’s all free. Then, if an extra month is added, you get it for free. You can come back to it forever. No matter how much time has passed, you can go back to the site after all the payments have been made. Present this as a payment plan. No matter if there’s a $1000 worth of value and customers are paying it to get in, you’re offering them a plan. They can make smaller payments and only pay for things as they use them.

So let’s ask ourselves again: “Is it possible to sell a membership site on the front end?” Of course, if you position it as best as you can, if you are a good vendor and if you explain it all as a payment plan.

Now that we have talked about presentation, let’s concentrate on setting up a site, on getting traffic, on keeping members and doing all the things we need to do in order to ensure success. Join http://www.membershipcube.com right away.

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If you are one of the people who have a membership site or want to have a membership site, you probably want to have the best and newest accessories. Furthermore, if a certain feature or marketing tactic exists, you will surely try to pursue it, isn’t that so? No, it isn’t! You must keep your site simple because you really want to launch it, don’t you? When it comes to fancy stuff such as split testing emails, there are a lot of reasons for you not to go that way.

Firstly, you should be focusing on split testing your sales letters, not your emails. You could spend your entire day tracking, testing and understanding things, but in the end you too have 24 hours just like everybody else. Why wasting them on things that don’t worth your while?

If you have some people in your email list and you’re planning on sending them 5 to 10 emails every time you launch something on the market, they will have to open your mail and click on your link eventually. If this is not the case, it means that they are not responsible subscribers. It is unimportant to split test your emails, what matters the most is to send as many emails as you can.

When it comes to open rates, the technical procedure is as follows: your autoresponder embeds an image in your email messages. Regrettably, spammers use the same technique to see if the junk mail they send is actually opened. Because of this, many clients block these trackers, so your open rate tracking won’t be very precise. If you receive a 50% open rate, that doesn’t always mean that only half of your clients have checked out the email you sent; the number of respondents might be higher, but the tracking image is blocked in their email client.

You should stay away from fancy stuff such as open rates and subject line testing. They are not very accurate. What you need to do is integrate an autoresponder with your membership site. This is indeed very important.

If you want to get on your list a person who buys from your membership site, you need to have an opt-in box inside your membership site and some sort of auto-subscribe functionality to do this automatically. This feature is included in most membership software like Wishlist Member.

Let’s see why you should have both the auto-subscribe feature and the manual feature included in your membership site. First of all, somebody might join your site and then accidentally unsubscribe from your autoresponder and they want to get back in. Ease the things for them by creating a way by means of which they can log in, enter their name or email address and get back on the list. Secondly, some people may have two different email addresses: one for processing their payments and another for receiving emails. If they, by any chance, happen to use their payment email when they sign up for your site or they accidentally type in the wrong email and for unknown reasons they’re not receiving your emails, they can opt in by making use of that form on the inside to the email address they are accustomed to for getting the messages. As simple as that!

Although most fancy stuff such as split testing emails and tracking open rates are unimportant, some of them like integrating your autoresponder and your membership site make the difference. Instead of being told what to do, choose to watch a real how-to step-by-step video by visiting http://www.membershipcube.com right away.

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Monthly fees are not the only source of revenue one has when offering access to a membership site, there are many other avenues of revenue one can explore successfully.

You are aware that the Individual components of you membership site have resell rights so then why not sell them off? As the owner of your membership site, you are in position to do with your site as you wish which does include selling off the rights to the individual product pieces of your membership site. Your selling price can be substantially higher than what the component of your sight actually cost you but it then allows the buyer to use it together with his own products. This is also a good form of advertising your own products and you will sell even more of your products whilst they are advertised on other people’s membership sites at no cost to yourself.

Selling the whole membership site too is another option together with being a major source of revenue. All you have to do is to show the buyer exactly how your site became as profitable as it is and to show the buyer just how long it took to become profitable. Also show that the traffic to you sight is consistent which will prove than the site is profitable. The price to ask is the monthly income multiplied by twenty four months and you will sell it very quickly thus giving you the added time to work on developing your next membership site

Another good method of making money is to sell the blocks of licenses with the resell rights. This is very similar to the resell of the individual components of a membership site.

Selling advertising space too is a huge generator of income. Providing your membership rate is high, you can increase your income by selling space on the site by selling adverts to the members. These buyers would tend to be buyers of a specific niche who would be glad to have their paid ads on a paid blog.

If you happen to have more than one site, there is nothing to stop you from selling any of these site whether they are complete or incomplete membership sites. Anyone can finish a site off even if the person is a new member to the membership site. So why not start a new membership site if you are able to afford the payment. Being alert to new ways of bringing in greater revenue for yourself through the activities of the membership sites. The resell rights of the access to the site, selling the whole site off, blocks of licenses can be sold off, advertising space is another money spinner for you and then the selling of another membership site that is incomplete.

This is an exciting area to be in and all that needs to be done is to visit http://www.membershipcube.com to get started.

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Not many people may have heard of the 100% commissioning model, even if you fall in this category, it highly unlikely that you haven’t heard of an affiliate program. An affiliate program involves somebody else sending you new buyers or leads and a certain commission is paid based on the sale generated from the lead. Normally people used to only get paid 10% commission. Here, if someone generates a sale of say $100 a commission of $10 is paid to them and you keep $90. This commission rates then started slowly rising through to 50% where the price of the sale was shared equally with the affiliate who generated that sale. However a newer and totally revolutionary strategy came into play. This strategy employs the 100% commission being paid to the affiliate responsible for generating the sale.

You are probably wondering how you will ever make any profit if you employ this method. You will be essentially paying that affiliate for getting a proven buyer on your mailing list. You can send them any future sales offers without having to pay anyone for the sale that may be generated. This method of building your network of proven buyers is 100% proven and it is even made better since it can be applied on any recurring membership sites. This model generates a lot of traffic since it is very lucrative and hence attractive to many new affiliates, the buyers you get can be saved for reason of up selling them later and it gives guest webinars an easy way to get their feet in the door.

As we have seen affiliates are accustomed to getting ten to fifty percent commission for the sales they generate. Giving 100% commission attracts more affiliates since they know that they will get the whole sum of the sale generated than when they just get paid partial commissions. Once the buyers get on your list, you can decide to do anything with is customer base. Up selling them to different products later own is one. You won’t have to pay affiliates commissions this time from the sales generated here since this isn’t the same product that the affiliate referred this customer for. Though some affiliate system use lifetime tagging, many systems do not charge commissions from up sells.

Which do you consider to be better; someone approaching you to do a guest webinar just for its sake or if that person intends to do the guest webinar in order to get paid for all sales generated? What someone offers to pay you for all sakes generated from your guest webinar since that person’s only purpose is to expand his/ her list of buyers? Offering 100%commision is the easiest way o getting a webinar. Seriously consider generating leads through this 100% commission method since it is very popular among affiliates, the customers you get can be added to your up sell list and joining joint ventures like guest webinars is made much easier.

A more in depth discussion of the 100% commission model can be found in the member’s area at: http://www.membershipcube.com

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Offers for different forms of traffic appear all the time. The newest and best thing reaches your eyes and ears on a daily basis. However, not all of these methods work as well as they are advertised. The three top overrated sources of traffic are, in my opinion, social marketing, press releases and guaranteed opt-ins.

Social networking has become very popular in the last few years. Giant social networks such as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace get more traffic than Google. It seems that these are the places where you should advertise. However, this is false. There are people who have tried and tried again to post Twitter updates from their Twitter and with no results. The reason may be the fact that nowadays many people on Twitter are following thousands of other people. When making an update, you are moved from the Twitter feed’s front page in just a few seconds. If you are wondering whether social marketing and social media will have an important role in the traffic you will get in the future, the answer is “maybe”. Still, for the time being, the traditional techniques of putting up a list of emails and mailing whatever you need to that list prevail over any amount of Twitter users.

Press release may seem appealing especially when it includes pictures, audio and even video. The problem is that there are a whole bunch of press releases on the web on different subjects and exactly as for article marketing you have to submit lots of press releases. There is no such thing as only one press release. More than this, the technique is not as reliable as regular article marketing.

The last but not the least, guaranteed opt-ins are one of the worst traffic methods ever used. This method is a little different from the idea of cost-per-impression model or cost-per-click. The method consists in paying somebody a fee to promote you or your site until you get a certain number of email addresses. The problem that arises is that most of the times you and the person who sends you the traffic are not in the same niche. The person is sending you people who are only trained to sign up for something even if they are interested in that thing or not. Not all the email addresses must be fake, but the people opting in to this list may not be interested in reading what you have to say, not to mention buying from you.

Instead of using something like guaranteed opt-ins, try a pay-per-click campaign or get back links and send them to a web page with a free inducement and an email course. Like I stated previously, social marketing, press releases and guaranteed opt-ins don’t do the trick, not nowadays, anyway.

If you are interested in setting up a free membership site and getting traffic to it right away, go to http://www.membershipcube.com in order to learn it all now.

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The concept of controlled access to the download area of a membership website is one that most people grasp straight away. Sometimes the idea of membership levels is less easy to assimilate so let’s go over this great way to make your site more effective.

Membership levels allow you to take your site and give a variety of user’s access to different parts of the content and materials. Let’s look at a basic set-up where you have two access levels, Premium and Ultra. Premium members pay a lower monthly membership fee and get new content at that amount; let’s say two new training videos per month. Ultra members are paying a higher membership fee so as well as being able to access all the material that the Premium members can, they will also be able to download Ultra-only material; perhaps an extra two videos per month or a live training session. You could break this down so that the less expensive monthly option is aimed at novices in your field and the more expensive membership with more features is aimed at experienced people. This will have the effect of your lower priced members wanting to move up as they learn; that’s good for you and good for them too.

One of the best things about modern membership software is that it allows you to choose who sees what material on your site. Gone are the days when you needed to make multiple sites for multiple users; now you can put everything on the same membership site and program the software so that people at each membership level only have access to the content that they’ve paid for. As you add more content and your users become more advanced you could add more levels if you wished, giving members even more access.

We mentioned a couple of names for various levels earlier but you are going to decide on your own. How many levels are you going to have? How will they be delineated? If you begin with two levels then here are some suggestions.

Have a ‘full’ membership that includes the basic content and materials on your site in return for a one-time payment. This will help you bring in members and establish your site

Then you need a ‘monthly’ membership where the members at that level get access to all of the new content that you are publishing. With a little marketing you should be able to get most of your full members to become monthly members. This is good for you as it creates recurring income.

Modern membership website software programs make it very easy for you, the website owner, to publish large amounts of content on your membership site while controlling who has access to the various materials. This makes it simple to create a site with multiple membership levels that make it easier to market your site and gain membership at the lower priced levels. As your members learn more on your site they will be encouraged to move up in the levels creating both greater and recurring revenues for you and your site.

Learn do this and a lot more at: http://www.membershipcube.com

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Many people are always asking me how I get so much traffic to my membership site. Is the marketing strategy of getting regular traffic to my membership site any different from that employed when charging for say, one time traffic? It is actually not vary different. The marketing principle should still be the same as when you the one you employ when selling other products like reports and e-books. Don’t get into doing all that fancy things like up sell of you membership site. Not trying hard enough in the right way is simply the only reason that can hinder you from selling your membership site.

A One click up-sell, a dollar’s worth of trial is not what you need to have in order to get people to join your membership site. It also becoming harder and harder to sneak membership site through the back door; Never try to use this trick, rather do it he same way you will use to proudly market one time products. Selling a membership site is not as complicated as you may think it to be. People buy and get access; this is the way regardless of whether this membership site requires one lifetime membership payment, an ongoing monthly subscription or any other method you might choose to bill the clients.

You probably may be having your doubts thinking that it could be different. Wont people end up paying a larger sum of money if my membership site is $200 than if I was selling say a $20 e-book? If you need people to pay recurring installments for you membership site, or a high lifetime membership fee for that matter, then you have to improve your marketing skills. It could mean that you have to create a mailing list and get these people on it, or you could start promoting a low ticket product. Gather people on that list and utilize the list by giving them more reasons to purchase and fewer reasons not to purchase. Reiterating this message and sending them back the offer may just yield success.

There is no much difference between membership traffic and product traffic. The steps required to market a one off payment membership site are the sake as those needed to market any other product. First you need a mailing list, many different traffic resources, a follow up sequence and a good split tested sales letter is also very important to ensure that as many people as possible are getting into your membership site.

The basic thing to keep in mind is that thee is no difference between product traffic and membership traffic. At http://www.membershipcube.com you can get tips on how to promote your membership site.

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There are many different reasons why people want to create a membership site. One of the ways that a membership site can be used effectively is as a download delivery site. Done in this way your site could begin as a simple, one product site looking for a single payment and then evolve in time as you add material into being a full content monthly membership fee site. Three good ideas that you can use for the download area on your site are structured membership levels, measured content drip and a lost password function.

Membership levels allow you to present content aimed at different groups. For example, if you have a Premium membership that can access all of your content consider adding an Ultra level that has access to specific materials of value such as live training. This level can be made available for an extra cost or be given by you as a reward to existing members. Not long ago you would have had to set up two distinct sites to accomplish this. With modern membership site software it is now easy to put different levels on the same site with you choosing what each level will be able to see when they log on to your site.

Most of the commonly used membership site software will show you a series of boxes under any new material that you are creating using WordPress. These boxes can be ticked in order to let the software know whether to show the material only to specific levels or to make it available to all levels.

By having levels in your membership site you will be able to carry a lot more material on the same site that is aimed at different user groups. As members log in to their level they will see only the download links that lead to the material that you wish them to have access to.

Using a membership site it is also easy to give your members new content in a measured way or ‘drip’ it to them. This means that you add new content, lessons and materials on a regular basis but in small, easy to assimilate amounts. This will keep your members paying their monthly fees and you can also add extra material to give away as loyalty bonuses.

Even if your site does not have recurring payments this method will keep people interested in your site and perhaps help avoid refund requests.

Another big plus for you as the membership site owner is that the amount of time that you need to service your customers can be reduced. This is possible because good modern membership site software uses the WordPress platform and that includes a lost password function. If one of your members forgets their password all they need to do is click on the ‘forgot your password?’ icon and the software will automatically email them a password reminder.

Membership sites are good platforms for download delivery because you can place content on structured membership levels, you can give your members new materials in a measured way and your members can find lost passwords automatically.

Robert Plank wants you to have a functional, profitable membership site. He will show you how at: http://www.membershipcube.com

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Many website membership marketers seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. You can learn from their mistakes in order that you don’t make them yourself. Learning what mistakes not to make will save you time and help your site to be successful.

Three mistakes that you don’t want to make are; split calls to action, cheesiness and unclear navigation.

A ‘call to action’ is the term used to describe asking your website visitors to do something. You want them to take action and click on a link. On an opt-in page the call to action could be “Enter your name and address in the form”. In a sales letter the call to action is often “Click on the button to make payment and get access to the membership site”.

Inside a membership site the call to action could be “Watch the video below” or “Leave a comment below”. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that people will watch the video just because it’s there. Give your visitors clear instructions on what you want them to do.

Now that we’ve discussed calls to action let’s look at a mistake that you don’t want to make; split calls to action.

Split calls to action are just what they sound like; giving people a choice of two or more actions. For example, a sales letter might have both a payment button and an e-mail opt-in form. This can be confusing to the person visiting the site. Another example of a split call to action is offering two choices for the same action, such as having a payment button with the choices of full payment or a payment plan. It is better to give the potential customers only one choice in order to help them continue the purchasing process.

Another common problem on membership websites that is similar to split calls to action is unclear navigation. If your website has a lot of links going to many different pages it will be confusing for your potential customer. If you have a sales letter or a page that is offering a product or service, give the website visitor a single button to click in order to buy what you are offering. Then there is no confusion; the visitor buys your product or leaves the page.

When someone is visiting your membership website is it easy for them to find what they want? Are recent posts and other new information at the top of the screen where they are easy to find?Your menu bars should allow visitors to get to any content that they would like to see. It should be easy for people to search for something and to leave a comment.

Make the navigation of your site as easy as possible.

A membership website mistake that you really want to avoid is being perceived as ‘cheesy’ or clichéd. There are hundreds of websites out there featuring pictures of tropical islands, Ferrari’s and all the other things that will be yours if you create a membership site with ‘only’ a thousand members. The site tells you that you can do this by only referring two or three people. People will not be inclined to believe it because they have seen the same claims at many other membership sites.

You need to write in a clear, concise and informative manner about the contents and benefits of your membership website. There is no need to use big words or fancy language. Tell people the truth about how you think that you can help them. Visit http://www.membershipcube.com for more.

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Every so often people ask me how they can ensure their servers can handle traffic and that their members would be able to gain access to their online membership sites without trouble. It is amazing that these people do not own a membership site in their whole lives, some have never made a sale in their lifetime and yet, they are already worried about traffic. From this one can decipher that these are some sort of roadblocks one may be putting in front of oneself to procrastinate. I host a number of sites, with each having 20-50 people at any given moment, and my server does not act up, as it handles the traffic.

Before you worry about your server handling the traffic, ensure that the site is up and running. A membership site can also be run on a shared account. One can choose to move the membership site to its individual server, if it is able to make some money at the end of the month, say a couple of a hundred dollars. For as low as a hundred dollars, you can an excellent server. This server will handle the traffic from thousands and thousands of subscribers, even without fancy software, all one is required to do is to avoid clustering. On top of this, WordPress blogs enjoy caching add-ons like a built-in Cache add-on, and a Super Cache add-on. This generates a page on order and saves it for future use, so that it doesn’t recreate the same WordPress page recurring.

WordPress comes with built-in components, which keep the load down for your computer, even though computers are normally fast and in most instances do not need a dedicated server, but it doesn’t hurt if you are making the money and have a lot of online traffic, to acquire a dedicated server.

It is advisable to manage your membership site traffic by dripping the information they are after. By dripping the data, you will keep people coming back for more as opposed to if you did not, they would access your site, download all the content they need, even if it runs in to gigabytes and go for good. This might overwhelm your site, and cause inconvenience to other subscribers.

Dripping enables the administrator control the member site traffic and manage it. Have your site up and running and worry about traffic and shared account change, later, when the site is earning you $ 500 monthly or more. If it poses a threat, you can use cache add-ons as an alternative to store pages and posts made by WordPress, until later and drip the data still. Restrict the downloadable data to avoid congestion as people might start accessing data that runs in to gigabytes at the same time.

Join us http://www.membershipcube.com for a great and enjoyable course on how to construct a membership site so that it can be out of your way.

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