Category: Traffic

Forums are a great way to slowly get some long-term traffic back to your membership site, but the problem is that with forums, it’s way too easy to spend all day posting and suddenly it becomes a huge time-waster. Suddenly, you’re spending six to eight hours a day posting on forums and just forming initially 10 to 20 clicks. So, how do you use all the forums have to offer, how do you get some of that traffic back to your site without it taking all day? And the answer is to combine Google Alerts and forums. So, Google Alerts is a service that allows you to monitor certain keywords that Google indexes on the internet.

Let’s say you run a membership site that contains a bunch of arcade games and if somebody mentions arcade games somewhere or they mention a particular game like Pacman and you want to go and jump in and say, “Well, I have Pacman right here for free,” that’s a good feature. Right? And it would be kind of time-consuming to every single day search Google, search around and see if anything. Instead, do set up a Google Alert. So, you set up a Google Alert for the phrase “Pacman,” and now, if somebody mentioned the phrase “Pacman” anywhere on the internet, you could jump in and respond to that.

So, with Google Alerts and forums, you can easily respond that give the easy quick answer, you could research for improvements to make a new membership site, and you can overcome common objection people have and are asking about on these forums. So, with the Google Alert, you set up alerts for Pacman or maybe even your membership site’s name or your real first and last name. That way, if anyone mentions them anywhere, you can jump in.

So, with Google Alerts, you can set either an immediate alert or a once-a-day alert. So, if you have a game on your gaming site that’s very popular such as Pacman, then you can set a Google Alert for that to only email you once a day. So, if there are hundreds of new pages on Google with that phrase, you will only be notified once a day and you can click on one simple link, go to the forum, type in your response. I would actually put in the phrase you’re looking for plus the word “forum” in the Google Alert. So, it’s an easy way just to jump in and not necessarily have to freak in the forum very often, just go where you’re needed.

Next, you can research improvements within the site itself. So, if someone is complaining on an arcade site about how it does that most sites don’t keep a high score, then you can look into changing up the software or outsourcing an improvement so that it stores a high score. That’s how you can research improvements for your existing products.

The final use for Google Alerts and forums is to overcome a common objection. So for example, somebody could be posting on a forum, “Well, I want to join this arcade side, but I don’t want them to start selling my address or sharing it.” So, if someone is mentioning that, then you can jump in and say, “Well, that’s what people commonly think, but I’m using this service that does not allow me to share and here’s the proof, so therefore, your email address is completely safe.” And they might give you ideas for things to add to your autoresponder pre-sells or your sales letter people don’t read everything you write. So, it always helps us to jump in in forums. If someone mentions a particular game or arcade sites in general or your membership site, in particular you can overcome that objection and get more people aware of your site while also disarming their objections.

So that’s how you combine Google Alerts and forums. Set up Google Alerts for things within your membership site, your niches, your name, or your membership site name specifically and the word “forum.” That way if it’s mentioned anywhere on the internet, you’ll get notified, you can jump in and deliver an easy answer, research an improvement for your site, or overcome an objection to get them into your site.

What are you waiting for? What’s left to do? All there is left to do is sign up today.

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Everyone who’s making a membership site is worried about content. They’re worried about the theme. They’re worried about “how am I going to schedule out the lessons?” But then they don’t think about the one thing that’s going to make the most difference – that’s traffic, that’s people looking at their offer. And that’s the thing. If you want to make twice as much money from your membership site, you could either change around the offer, change the sales letter, which takes a while or just double the traffic. Just do whatever you’re currently doing to get traffic and do that twice as much. But if you’re not doing anything actively to get new people to get more traffic, you might be clueless about what to do next. So, I’m going to tell you three ways to get more traffic right now to your membership site – that’s joint ventures, articles, and forum marketing.

Not everyone knows what a joint venture is. A joint venture is when you approach someone else and work out some kind of a deal. I have done joint ventures that included guest blog posting. I already guest blog posted, they put on their site. I have done joint ventures that include guest webinars, where I hosted a webinar for their subscribers. Maybe I email for them, they email for me. Maybe I tell them, “Here’s how you can promote my stuff as an affiliate and get a commission.” So, they do something and I give them something back in return. We both venture and we both jointly make some kind of money from that. That is a tough way to get somebody to say yes. It’s stuff because you have to go and contact multiple people, but once you get one yes, they can easily bring for a lot of traffic and a lot of sales. It’s just you have to get through a lot of no’s before you get to some yes’s.

One way that’s more guaranteed work but it takes more work and is slower is article marketing. This is where you usually write simple 250 to 500-word solutions to different problems that people have in your niche. So, if someone has a question, instead of writing a simple answer, write it out on about half a page and that becomes an article. Now, what can you do with an article? You can post an article to your blog, that’s what I would do first, and you can also submit to article directories, which is what I would do a little further down the line, but a lot of people simply blindly post to article directories and then wonder why they don’t have any clicks – because you have to save some of your content for yourself and put it on the blog.

And finally, once you’re in the habit of delivering these solutions, post them on forums. If someone is on a forum asking a question, simply answer it and have what’s called a signature line in that forum. This means that underneath every single post you make on that forum, there is a link back to one of your websites. You’re not going to draw any attention to the signature line, you’re simply going to answer people’s questions and then that’s it. You get your message in front of enough people and eventually people will start clicking on that signature line.

Now, once I get people from a forum to a site, then I send them either to a squeeze page, which is a forced opt-in page where they have to enter their name and email address to continue or just buy something and after they’ve bought, then they get on the list. But that’s the big thing about getting traffic – is it’s not enough to just get traffic, but once you get them somewhere, get them on the list either before or after they purchase.

So, that’s how you get traffic to your membership site. Strike up a joint venture with somebody, write some articles, and post on forums and then get them on the list.

So now you know how to get traffic, but how do you get the membership site up? Get the exact answer.

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I get asked every now and then how do I make sure that all of my traffic and all of my members will be supported by my server and I hear this question from people who have never set up a membership site in their entire lives, some of them who have never made a sale in their lives and yet they’re already worried about getting traffic. The problem with this is like a majority of questions people ask, they’re just roadblocks they’re putting up in their own way to prevent themselves from having to set something up. I have many sites where there are 20 to 50 people inside the membership site at any given time and my server can handle the traffic.

So, don’t get ahead of yourself. Focus on getting the membership site done already and then worry about your server not being able to handle the load. Yes, it is possible to create a membership site on a shared account. Then if you get enough sales, say more than a couple hundred dollars a month, move your sites to a dedicated server. You can get a decent dedicated server for about 100 bucks a month. And even then, you don’t need to cluster, you don’t need a lot of fancy software, it can handle the load for many thousands and thousands of members. And in addition, WordPress blogs have caching plugins. There’s that built-in Cache plugin, there is a Super Cache plugin. It has ways of if it generates a page for somebody, it will save it for later on, so that it doesn’t have to keep recreating the same WordPress page or post over and over again.

So, WordPress already has a bunch of built-in stuff to keep your server load down, but the most important thing is that computers are fast, and most of the time, you’re not going to even need a dedicated server, but if you happen to have a lot of traffic and you’re making a lot of money, you can’t have a dedicated server, but usually that’s the only step you need to take.

One final piece of advice I want to leave you with as far as managing your membership site traffic is drip the content. If you drip the content, if somebody joins your site and they can only stream the videos, if they can’t download, or if they can even only just see a week or two when they first joined and a small amount every few days, then people cannot join and download gigabytes and gigabytes and then leave.

So, those things will help to keep your traffic under control and keep your membership site manageable. First of all, get your membership site done and worry about the traffic later, but plan on moving from your shared hosting account to a dedicated server if and when your membership site makes you $500 a month or more. If it becomes a serious problem, look into caching plugins that will store the pages and posts generated by WordPress until later, and drip your content. Only give a small amount when they first joined and a little bit over time to prevent people from joining, downloading gigabytes and gigabytes, and then leaving.

How close are you to finishing your membership site? Let’s get that totally out of the way at www.membershipcube.com. It’s a great training course.

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You might have figured out by now that you need to be special on the internet. If you just try to be like everyone else and you just blast your offer, you’re not going to be happy with the result you get. So, you need to go a little bit of an extra mile to be a little more special, a little more unique, and a little more customized towards a particular crowd.

So, how can you give some kind of a special offer for your membership site on a webinar, on a forum, to someone else’s list, or even to your own list, how do you do it? Some easy ways to do that are to give an additional bonus for a particular crowd to deliver the content faster or even just to give them so many multiple bonuses that it’s completely a different offer than the general public gets. And additional bonus for that crowd is very easy. Simply create a new membership level and add a new post with a special bonus and give only that new membership level access. Very easy to do. And you set the membership level based on what the new community is. So, if you’re making an offer to say the warrior form, make a level called warriors and then create a bonus video just for your warrior members and call it warriors, then make your payment button, send them over to that particular level after they buy.

My favorite special bonus for a certain crowd is a one-hour webinar just answering questions. It’s super easy because you can sell seats to that before you even have created the bonus, and then the bonus is 100% customized because it’s based out from user’s questions and it’s very easy because all you’re doing is answering questions. You don’t need to think of any of the content yourself. You just answer what their problems are. But you don’t want to compete based on price. I don’t like when people give discounts for certain groups because it causes too many problems. You have people who already bought and asked you for a refund of the difference, you have people asking for you to open it up a little bit longer so they can get it at a discount, and it just trains your buyers to pay you less. You should be training your buyers to pay you more.

So, how about this. Instead of charging less, charge the same but give them the content faster. So, let’s say you had a $100 membership site, one-time payment, but after they pay, they get information dripped out before getting the main product, they will get the main product after one week. So, your special offer to a certain crowd could be instead of having it with the one who wants to get a little bit and then the main product, they get the main product immediately and then they get stuff dripped out. So, instead of cutting the price, think about doing a faster delivery of content such as removing the trial period.

And finally, you don’t have to add just one bonus. Add multiple bonuses. What if you offered one video per week, but just for warrior members, you offered two videos per week? Just schedule it as if you do two videos but only allow video #2 for every week to be on the warrior membership level. It’s very easy, it’s specific to that group, you don’t have to make a totally different membership site and it’s double the value for the same price.

So, I hope you got some ideas about how to customize your membership offer to one person or one group, but the thing to remember is not to cut the price, just add value. Compete based on not price, compete based on value.

Get up a membership site set up so you don’t have to compete based on price and you compete based on value right here.

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You probably get offers all the time for different forms of traffic. You always hear about the latest and greatest big thing. But of these sources of traffic that you hear, which of the most popular ones don’t really work as well as they’re advertised? You can disagree with me on this, but my three top overhyped sources of traffic are press releases, social marketing, and guaranteed opt-ins.

The idea of a press release is pretty cool. It’s just like submitting an article except for the idea is that it gets picked up and re-circulated by different news agencies and you get your message out more. Did you know that your press release can include pictures, audio, and even video? Most people don’t know that, but the problem is there are so many press releases out there on so many different subjects, it’s really tough to find anyone’s announcements, and there are so many press releases that are written as this guy’s ads even more than regular articles that you really have to submit lots and lots of press release just like how with article marketing, you need to submit lots and lots of articles. So, if anybody tells you that all you have to do is submit one press release, think again. It’s really not as effective even as regular article marketing.

Social networking is really big, especially in the past few years. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter are all giant social sites and some of them get more traffic everyday than Google. So, doesn’t it seem like those are the places you should advertise? You would think, but it’s not that true. I’ve tried over and over again to post Twitter updates from my Twitter following that has a mass of over 12,000 followers and it just doesn’t work. I think the reason might be that a lot of people these days on Twitter are following thousands and thousands of people. So, if you make an update, you are moved to off of the front page on their Twitter feed in a matter of seconds. Will social media and social marketing have a big part to play in the traffic you get in the future? Maybe. But for now, the old school techniques of building a list of email addresses and mailing to that list outpulls any amount of Twitter followers.

And finally, the worst traffic method I could possibly think of is an idea of guaranteed opt-ins. This is a little different than the cost-per-click or cost-per-impression model. This is where you pay somebody a flat fee and they keep on promoting you until you get a certain number of email addresses. The problem with this is that a lot of the times, the person sending you the traffic is not in the same niche as you. And so, they’re just sending you people who are simply trained to sign up for something. No matter if they’re interested in it or not. I’m not necessarily saying that these are fake email addresses. I’m just saying that the people who opt in to this list are not at all interested in buying from you or even reading the things you have to say.

So, instead of something like guaranteed opt-ins, set up a pay-per-click campaign, get backlinks, and send them to a squeeze page with a free bribe and an email course. So, those are the methods of traffic that I don’t think work, at least not in the present day. Press releases, social marketing, and guaranteed opt-ins.

Do you really want to know how to set up a membership site the right way and how to get traffic to it the right way? How to get opt-in and sales the right way? Well, I want to show you.

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You might or might not have heard of the 100% commission model. You have heard of an affiliate program, however. Right? An affiliate program means that someone sends you new leads, sends you new buyers, and you pay them a certain commission based on the sale. It used to be people would only pay out 10% commission. That means if somebody sends you over a $100 sale, you get 100 bucks but you give up $10 back to the affiliate. Then it came to the point when people started giving away 50% commission. So, somebody pays you 100 bucks, you give up 50 bucks of the affiliate who referred that person, you keep $50. But an even newer strategy is the 100% commission model. If somebody sends you a new buyer and that buyer pays you $100, all $100 get sent to that affiliate.

So, why would you do this? You would do this because now you have a proven buyer on your list, you can upsell them, and you can send them other offers in the future. So, the 100% model is a very proven way of getting new buyers and getting new people on your list, and the good news is you can also apply this to recurring membership sites, even if they are single-payment membership sites. So, how can this model get you traffic? There’s three reasons – it’s juicy and attracting new affiliates, you can always upsell them later, and it makes it a lot easier to get your foot in the door for guest webinars.

So, I explained to you a minute ago that affiliates are used to only getting paid 10% to 50%. So, when you’re selling something, whether it’s $10, $20, or $100, it’s a lot more attractive to affiliates, knowing that if they make a $100 sale, they get to keep all of that $100. So, it makes a lot easier to get affiliates than if you would only give them partial commissions. Then, once they’re on your list, you can do whatever you want with that customer base. You can upsell them to a different product later and not have to pay affiliates for that upsell because the affiliate referred that lead just for that particular product. Now, some affiliate systems allow for lifetime tagging, but on average, the average affiliate system does not count upsells for affiliates.

And which is better, if someone approach you to do a guest webinar just to do it or if they approach you to do a guest webinar and paid you for every sale? Or how about this, what if somebody approach you for a guest webinar and paid you all the sales that webinar created because they just wanted to build up a bigger list of buyers? So, it’s a lot easier to get a webinar or any kind of joint venture by offering 100% commission and a membership site makes it easy to manage.

So, think about having a 100% commission lead generation model to get traffic because affiliates like it, you can upsell your customer to other products of yours, and it makes it easier to get it on better joint venture deals such us guest webinars.

Watch me explain the exact 100% commission model inside the training at www.membershipcube.com. I’ll see you inside the member’s area tonight.

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I get asked all the time, how do I get traffic to my membership site? What should I do differently to get membership traffic than from a simple one-time payment traffic? I’m here to tell you that it’s not that different. You should be applying the same principles as you do towards selling ebooks and reports as towards your membership site. It’s the same. So, don’t do any of this fancy upsell the membership site. Sneak the membership site in. If you can’t sell the membership site on the front end, then you’re just not trying hard enough.

So, it’s true. You really don’t have to have a one-click upsell to get somebody into a membership site, you don’t need to have a dollars trial to get somebody into a membership site, and in fact, it’s becoming less and less easy and less and less compliant to try to sneak a membership site on the back end. So, don’t sneak on the back end. Treat it the same way that you sell one-time products and be proud of it.

It’s really not that complicated to sell a membership site. They buy, they get access. That’s it. Whether their membership site is a single-payment site, a payment’s plan, an ongoing site, a free site – it’s all not complicated. They buy, they get access. It really can be as simple as that.

But you might be thinking, isn’t it different? Don’t people pay a lot of money if I have a $100 a month membership site as opposed to a $20 ebook? I see your point. If someone has to pay a high price for your membership site, if somebody has to pay recurring fees to keep access into your membership site, all that means is you just need to be a better marketer. Maybe that means you need to get them on a mailing list first. Maybe that means you need to promote a low-ticket product and then get them on the list and use that list to everyday give them one more reason to buy or one less reason not to buy and keep reiterating your marketing message and keep sending them back to that offer.

But membership traffic is no different from product traffic. You still have to take all the steps you do to market a single-payment membership site. You still need a list, you still need multiple traffic sources, you still need a follow-up sequence, and you still need a well split-tested sales letter to make sure they are getting as many people into your membership site as possible.

So, keep in mind today that membership traffic is no different from product traffic. It’s the same. Find out exactly how to promote your new membership site today.

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Instead of trying to make all your stuff perfect the first time around, instead of having the perfect membership site, the perfect sales letter, why not put up something that’s shiftable, that’s sellable, and then improve on it later. The best way to be 100% sure that your sales letter is always improving is with this thing called split testing.

Here is the idea of having split testing. You have two versions of the exact same sales letter. Only one thing is different. So maybe one version has a red headline, one version has a single headline, but it’s blue. So, you have a red headline and a blue headline. You send an equal amount of traffic to the red sales latter, and the blue sales letter and whichever one got more people to buy is the winner and then you change the sales letter to be just the winner. So, if the red headline out-pulled the headline, then you delete the blue version of the sales letter and you’re left with just the red headline. Then you go and test something else, but the idea is that you are limited in the guessing, you’re seeing what it gets more people on average to buy from you, and you’re slowly making more and more money. You’re always getting better over time. That’s all there is to it.

So, how the heck do you split test? Especially, how do you split test a membership site, because it sounds good in theory but you don’t know how to do it unless you know how to do it. The service I recommend is a free service from Google that not allowed people to know about, called Google Website Optimizer. And what you do is you physically create two separate sales letters and you paste in the specific code they tell you to paste in, in what sites, and then Google will tell you when to stop split testing and when you still need more work, and it shows you charts and graphs, pictures, numbers, all the data you need to figure out which split test was the clear winner.

So, what you do is you take your sales letter and I definitely recommend that your sales letter is not part of your WordPress blog, it’s outside of your membership site. And you take it and save a second copy of it. So, if your sales letter is on index on HTML, save index 2.html. And then apply whatever small change, just make one change to index 2. That could be changing the headline, changing the buy button, changing the color somewhere. Just a small change so you can see that that one change made all the difference. And then you go and create a new experiment inside Google Website Optimizer and you give it all the URLs and stuff and then it asks you what’s going to be your original page, your variation page, and your thank you page. Your thank you page is going to be the registration page for that membership level. So, in most membership software like Wishlist member, you can list all the thank you URLs for each membership level, choose that one that is your conversion page. Then, it’s going to say, “Copy and paste this substance.” Then copy and paste this code to your index.html, this one here index 2.html, and this one to your registration page.

So, how the heck do you add the conversion code to your registration page? Well, in most membership software, you can go and set custom code to be below the registration form. So, simply paste the conversion code under the registration form and now, you have two versions of your sales letter and Google will figure out which one to send traffic to. When someone buys, it will log that and tell you which sales letter got you that sale. So, go ahead, test it out. First, test your headline, then test your order button, and that way, you can easily split test your membership site using Google Website Optimizer and Wishlist member

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If you’ve tried to get traffic in the past, you know that it’s not straightforward. There are a lot of sources that can get you a bunch of clicks but no opt-ins or sales or traffic sources where you pay money in order to get clicks or even sources like joint ventures or forum marketing that get you some short-term traffic, but then once you stop working, the traffic stops as well. So, how do you keep building up the traffic more and more so the more hours you put in, the powerful the traffic that comes in? How do you set up some autopilot stuff, so that you do the work once, the traffic comes forever. My three best sources of autopilot long-term traffic are search engine optimization, video marketing, and affiliates.

Search engine optimization simply means you have some kind of free content available in the search engines. I have written articles and instead of submitting them to article sites, I would put it on a blog, get the blog to ping the usual blog and ping addresses, and this is built in the WordPress by default, so that those pages end up on Google, and if people are searching for those search terms, they will end up on that free blog. They get to the free blog a link to the pay offer, so then I get a slow steady trickle that way. The more pages I have on the blog, the more pages appear in Google and everybody went.

You can also use this on your paid membership sites. Here’s the way a regular membership site setup works. If someone logs out, if they don’t have paid access, they don’t see anything, they don’t see any of the posts. But if you partially protect it, meaning you leave all the posts out in the open but only protect the part of that post with a download link, that means any written material, such as explaining what the video is about, show up to non-logged in users but the there’s an error message and they have to log in to be able to watch the video or download the material. The advantage of this is that every single time you make a blog post, even for a free product, that gets indexed in the search engine minus the download link. So, when people find your site, they see that blog and have to register or log in to get access to it. That way, if your membership has 500 posts, that’s 500 more pages you have in the search engines on top of all your free content.

Something that’s even easier to put together than written materials are videos. You make a video and you can use a service tubemogul.com that will post to sites such as YouTube, Revver, Viddler, and DailyMotion, the top 4, and you make one video that ends up on all these other video sites. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world. When people are looking for instructions, more often than that, they search to YouTube first because it’s better to get a video showing something than some written material explaining something. So, as long as your videos are live action videos, that’s you standing in front of a camera, they make for great YouTube content. And at the end, mention your URL and watermark your URL in the video itself so that people can easily find you.

And finally, get affiliates. Have a pre-written email that affiliates can mail to their lists, set up an affiliate program such as with ClickBank, and offer people 60% commission for referring sales. 60% might seem generous but keep in mind that these are for extra sales that you would not have had otherwise that these people brought to your site. So, those are my favorite slow but long-term autopilot ways to get traffic at search engine optimization, video marketing, and affiliates with solo ads.

Now that you’ve got your traffic on autopilot, it’s time to set your membership site on autopilot.

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