Building Your Business With Free Membership Sites Sample Report This is a sample of the sort of high quality, in-depth report that you will get every month as a member of our site, to read and to sell.
Click Here To Join Us Now
1
"Discover The Secret Source For Your Own Private Label And Ready Made Information Reports" This low cost, hands free solution helps you build a profitable Internet Empire, while someone else does all the work!
Loads of private label niche and marketing reports, plus a superb selction of ready made reports you can read and sell …and your own fully hosted, ready made special report shop paying 100% of every sale direct into your Paypal account!
Click Here Now For Full Details
2
Contents Introduction...............................................................................4 Why Start A Free membership Site?...............................................6 The Tools For The Job................................................................10 Your domain name..................................................................10 Webhosting...........................................................................12 Membership site software........................................................14 Using free tools......................................................................15 Optional considerations...........................................................15 Forums...............................................................................15 Blogs.................................................................................16 Help desk...........................................................................16 Populating Your Site..................................................................18 Using PLR content...................................................................18 Unique content.......................................................................19 Promoting Your Free Membership Site..........................................21 Article marketing....................................................................21 Newsletter advertising.............................................................23 Traffic exchanges...................................................................23 Post blog comments................................................................25 Forum marketing....................................................................25 Tell a friend scripts.................................................................26 Your Reputation And Influence....................................................29 Selling To Your List ...................................................................32 Automation............................................................................32 Choosing products..................................................................33 Joint ventures........................................................................34 One-time offers......................................................................35 Conclusion...............................................................................37
3
Introduction Over the past couple of years, one of the biggest and most explosive areas of growth in the internet marketing industry has been in the number of membership sites that have suddenly appeared. It is almost impossible to open your e-mail inbox without finding details of yet another brand-new membership site being launched. However, from the point of view of the person behind the launch, the idea of having their own membership site makes terrific financial sense. In fact, a successful membership site represents what is almost the 'Holy Grail ' of internet marketers, which is continuing residual income on a regular monthly basis. For example, if you were to start your own monthly membership site, and attracted only 10 new members in your first month, then, if you are charging them $20 per month, you'll immediately have a regular income of $200 coming through the door before you even get out of bed! Were you able to attract another 10 new members in your second month, then you would now have a regular monthly income of $400, and so on. This does, of course, ignore one basic reality of membership sites, which is the fact that whilst every month some new members will join, others will be leaving at the same time. Nevertheless, as long as more new members join than leave every month, then your regular monthly income will always be increasing. Therefore, it is extremely easy to understand why people would want to launch their own membership sites. It is perhaps not quite so easy to understand why people would be interested in launching free membership sites, however. After all, by doing so, it would appear that the main attraction of launching and running a membership site is the regular monthly income that it would generate, and this is lost. Therefore, it may seem that there cannot be any sense in working hard to create and launch a free membership site when no membership fees are going to be received for doing so. Yet, many leading internet marketers do create free membership sites and spend a considerable amount of money doing so. The purpose of this book is therefore to establish why some of the smartest people in internet marketing seem to believe it is worth spending time and money to create membership sites that bring them no direct revenues.
4
By doing so, I hope to be able to demonstrate how and why starting a free membership site is a very smart move indeed, and why you should give such a website very serious consideration as part of your overall internet marketing business plan.
5
Why Start A Free membership Site? So, you may ask, why would you create a free membership site? There are two different answers to this seemingly simple question, depending upon whether you are viewing it from the point of view of the web master who built the site, or of the visitors that he or she hopes to attract to visit it. In the case of the latter, the answer is extremely simple - it is free! People everywhere, from all walks of life and all points of the globe, love to receive something for nothing. So for website visitors, the attraction of a free membership site that offers good quality contents and materials on a regular basis is blindingly obvious. The attractions for the webmaster behind the site may, however, seem slightly more obscure. Do not, however, allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that because a membership site is free, it therefore has no value for the people behind it. Free membership sites do have tremendous value for all types of online marketers and entrepreneurs. This is adequately demonstrated by the fact that even some of the best known internet marketers who already have paid membership sites actively create free sites to run alongside those that are already making them money. Why are they doing this? There are several good reasons that could be put forward as possible answers to this question. The first is that the vast majority of higher quality paid membership sites attempt to retain some degree of exclusivity by limiting the number of members that they will accept. For example, most leading paid PLR membership sites apply very strict limits on the number of members who will have full access to their sites. They do this because PLR materials that have some exclusivity are far more valuable than those which are available to everybody through free membership sites. Such sites will regularly close their doors to new members once they have reached capacity, and only open them again when people leaving have created spaces for those new applicants. For the web master behind this particular site, the beauty of having a free membership site to run alongside the paid site is that members
6
from the free site are always ready to join the paid membership site when spaces become available. It is an unarguable fact that spaces will inevitably become available from time to time. Indeed, very few people ever stay as paid membership site members for more than a year. It therefore follows that the owner of such a paid membership site will always be acutely aware that such members need replacing if the overall quality of the site is to be maintained. For example, many paid PLR membership sites will produce new unique PLR materials every month, and these obviously cost money to create. This money is generated from membership fees, and so if membership levels decrease significantly, this could easily cause the site owners significant financial difficulties. Having a free membership site running alongside the paid version, however, means that this needn’t be a big problem, as it should be relatively easy to convince free members to upgrade. The cost of recruiting new members for a paid membership site should not be underestimated either. For example, if it is necessary to advertise to attract new members then this will once again add a significant sum to the bottom-line cost of maintaining the paid site. A free membership site on the other hand has absolutely no need to place any form of limitations on membership levels. In fact, the whole purpose of running a free membership site is to attract the absolute maximum number of members possible, as this represents the perfect way for the site owner to build a substantial mailing list. That is, therefore, the first reason why it makes perfect sense for any smart online marketer to create and run their own free membership site. As seen above, the mailing list that you can build from a paid membership site is going to be limited to the number of members allowed to join the site. The list that you can create by having your own free membership site, on the other hand, is literally unlimited. Such a free site is, therefore, one of the best mailing list building tools imaginable! Free membership sites are generally simpler and quicker to build as well as being easier to run than their paid counterparts too.
7
Members of a free site are not going to be overly concerned by website design or perfect product delivery systems in quite the same way that the members of paid site might be. Nor is it absolutely necessary to create unique content materials every month. There are masses of free materials available all over the net that can be used in the members’ area that will often be more than acceptable to free site members. However, if you were to do this with a paid membership site, no doubt there would be long and noisy complaints about your actions. That is never going to happen if everything that is on offer inside your members’ area is entirely free. At the same time, this does not mean that you can afford to give away junk or materials that can be downloaded almost anywhere, as this will reduce the value of your free site by a considerable margin. This book is going to show you how you can use free membership sites to build a strong internet marketing reputation, but this is never going to happen if your membership area is populated with garbage! Whilst it stands to reason that members of a free site are not likely to be as demanding as those of a paid membership ‘club’, that does not mean that they will be happy with substandard materials either. Another reason why establishing your own free membership site could be a very attractive option is that by doing so, you can open up several other income generating channels. For example, if you have a successful free membership site targeted to a particular market niche, then other marketers and entrepreneurs who are selling in that particular niche market are more than likely to be extremely interested in placing paid advertising on your site. In addition to allowing you to establish a positive reputation, owning your own free membership site allows you to develop considerable influence in your market niche as well. If you have a free site with several thousand members all of whom are extremely happy with the value that you give them by providing quality products at no cost, then you have what is effectively a captive audience who will hang on to every word that you say. This is an incredibly powerful benefit of owning and running your own free membership site, and is something the value of which should not be underestimated. I have one final consideration to put to you before moving on.
8
If you’re reading this book because you plan to create your own free membership site (and you should be!) then you should plan right from the outset to make your site as interactive as possible. The more you are able to communicate directly with your site members, the more you will be able to influence them. Most importantly, once you gain the trust of your free members, you will be able to discover from them the exact niche products and services that they are most willing to pay for. This will obviously give you a significant insight into what you should be selling in your market, and would be a major advantage for you over any competitors that you might have in your market niche. The bottom line is that many people are interested in joining highquality paid membership sites, but do not do so either because cash is too tight to allow it, or because they do not believe that the site provides good value for money. Your site is providing the best value for money possible, and this one fact alone should enable you to attract huge numbers of new members every day!
9
The Tools For The Job In order to start building your free membership site, there are several things that you need to have in place. Firstly, you will need to register a suitable domain name for your new site, and then you will need to set up a web hosting account, so that there is a place where that site can be hosted and accessed online. Next you will need some way of building your membership site, and then content materials to populate it will be your final requirement. Having said that, however, there are a few ‘optional’ tools and resources that you may want to include in your membership site either from the very beginning, or by adding them to the site at a later date. I say that these resources are optional, but in actual fact, you really should include them if at all possible, as doing so will bring significant and noticeable benefits to you as the site owner. Your domain name In simple terms, your domain name is the internet address that people type into the browser when they are looking for your website, and it is the way that most people will come to think of and address your site. It is, therefore, extremely important that you choose a domain name that reflects exactly what your website is about and what people can find there. For example, if you plan to create and launch a free PLR membership site, then you have three pieces of information that your potential site visitor might be interested in. First, your site is free; second, it offers PLR materials, and thirdly, it is a membership site. To create a domain name including all three of these facts would, however, produce something that is likely to be both troublesome to type into a browser window and also almost impossible to remember! In this situation, therefore, I would recommend that you focus on the two most critical pieces of information, which are the ‘free’ and ‘PLR’ aspects of your site (visitors will see that it is a membership site when they first visit). You therefore need to think of a few domain name variations that could include both free and PLR. And when you are doing so, be aware that you should try to register a .com domain name rather than any of the other available suffixes such as .net or .org. The majority of web surfers still think in .com terms, and will always type in the .com variation of a name rather
10
than any of the alternatives when they are in any doubt about the correct domain name. For this reason, if you do not register a .com domain name, you will inevitably lose traffic to the person who does. Having drawn up a shortlist of possible .com domain names, you now need to check which, if any, are still available. To do this, head on over to a leading domain name registration website like GoDaddy.com and enter the domain addresses one by one to check on availability. The more obvious the name that you are hoping to procure is, the less likely it is that you will be to do so. As an example, without even wasting your time looking, you can absolutely guarantee that FreePLR.com is not going to be available! Even at this early stage, you also need to give a little thought to exactly what products or services you will provide through your site, and how you subsequently plan to market it. For example, do you have a ‘unique selling point’ for your free site in mind? If not, then you should try to think of what your site USP is going to be, because without there being something unique about your site, how are you going to be able to convince people to join? As an example, there is little or nothing unusual about a free PLR membership site, so how do you plan to differentiate your site from all the others that are already well-established in the marketplace? If you can answer this question, this might help give you a pointer in the direction of a domain name that is particularly appropriate for your site. In this example, let us imagine that you plan to send out new PLR materials to all your free site members on a daily basis by e-mail. This would definitely be a valid ‘unique selling point’ and something that would allow you to make life easy for you members, which is certainly a significant benefit for them. So, how about ‘Free-PLR-Every-Day.com’ as your new site domain name (with or without dashes will probably not make a great deal of difference, but including dashes makes it easier to read)?
11
Click on the orange ‘GO!’ button and this is what you see:
Given the objectives of your free membership sites, this is a perfect domain name, and you should therefore proceed through the GoDaddy purchase process to secure the name as quickly as possible. This will cost you $9.95 for one whole year. Webhosting There are dozens (if not hundreds) of web hosting companies that you can use to host the new free site that you are planning. However, in terms of reliability, customer support and value for money, I have not found anywhere better than Hostgator so far, and I would specifically recommend their ‘baby’ shared hosting program at $7.95 per month. Whilst there are undoubtedly hosting companies who are even cheaper than this, your web host is an absolutely critical part of your business, and therefore saving a couple of dollars every month whilst sacrificing reliability is likely to represent a very poor decision in the longer term. For example, in my experience of using Hostgator, they very rarely suffer ‘downtime’ which is time when your site is ‘offline’ and cannot therefore be accessed. I do know of a couple of cheaper hosts, however, who are known to suffer significant downtime problems, and in a least one case, sales were lost as a direct result. Using the cheapest web host that you can find is, therefore, a false economy that is best avoided. The Hostgator ‘baby’ account, on the other hand, has everything you need for the foreseeable future, and at only $7.95 represents outstanding value for money. So, I would recommend that you sign up for this particular account with Hostgator immediately. Once your Hostgator signup is complete, you will receive an e-mail from them that is headed ‘Your Hostgator Account Information’. In this mail, there will be the critical details about your account, including this:
12
‘Your name servers: ns237.hostgator.com ns238.hostgator.com’ Return to the GoDaddy home page and place your mouse over the green ‘Domains’ tag at the top left. Then, when the drop down menu opens beneath it, click on ‘My Domains’:
After clicking through, you should now see ‘Free-PLR-Every-Day.com’ listed in blue. Double left click on this title line, and when you arrive at the next page, you should see this at the top left:
Click ‘Nameservers’ and then when you arrive on the next page, copy and paste in the Hostgator details from the e-mail as follows:
13
Click on the orange ‘OK’ button on the far right, and all being well, you should see that it starts ‘validating’. What you have just done is link together the domain name that you registered with GoDaddy and the hosting account that you established with Hostgator. Once you have published your website to your Hostgator hosting account, whenever a web surfer types in your domain name into their browser, what you have just done will direct that surfer from GoDaddy straight over to Hostgator in a matter of milliseconds. Of course, you have no website to publish right at this moment! The next job is therefore to think about creating your free membership site, and what you will need to do so. Membership site software Unfortunately, the nature of a membership site means that building it is likely to be a more complex and involved process than building a simple one or two page sales site. It is for this reason that most people who are creating their first membership site will use specialized software that is specifically designed for this purpose. The following are some of the better known software packages that you can buy to enable you to set up and run your own free membership site. aMember Professional ($179.95) aMember is a back-end subscription management program that includes modules to integrate sign-up, login and internal management systems into your membership site. However, you then need to be able to integrate it with a suitable content management system (CMS) such as Joomla or Xoops in order to produce a fully functional membership site. Because of this required integration, it may be a little difficult for absolute beginners to work with aMember and it is therefore recommended for intermediate users. VisionGatePortal ($100 initial fee + $197 per month) This portal program is a hosted-site solution that offers 6gb of disk space and monthly data transfers up to a maximum 50gb. It has many of the integrated ‘extra’s’ that you might like to add to your site such as blogs and forums, although your opportunities to modify or alter the underlying site structure are limited.
14
Using free tools It is becoming increasingly popular for people building membership sites (especially free ones) to use either standard CMS like Joomla or Xoops to build their membership sites, and it is even possible to build a free membership site using blogging software like Wordpress. This idea has a couple of major factors in its favor, both of which are cost related, as this is something that cannot be ignored when building a site that is going to be free! First, using either of the CMS programs mentioned or a WordPress blog hosted on you own domain is going to be free. And, if you are using Hostgator, installing any of them only takes few moments using ‘Fantastico Deluxe’ from your ‘cpanel’. Less wasted time is the equivalent of money saved! In addition, using any of these three programs is going to save you shelling out for expensive site designers, as there are plenty of superb themes or site templates available for all of them totally free. The only tricky bit about using any of these systems to build your free site is that you need to know how to do the job, and that is not necessarily something that is so easy. There are instructions on how to do the job out there, but they are not that easy to find, so you will need to search Yahoo or Google using terms like "Joomla membership sites" or an equivalent related to either of the other two programs to see what you can turn up. With a bit of luck, however, you should be able to find something, and it is worth putting a bit of work into the task considering that it will save you a least $100 if you ‘come up trumps’. Incidentally, if you do and you are looking for themes or templates around which to create your site, you can find some excellent free Joomla examples at Joomla24 with a selection for Xoops at ThemeBase and some for Wordpress using the WordPress ‘Theme Viewer’ Optional considerations Forums Setting up a Forum that members of the site are automatically enrolled in, a place where they can go to chat about your site and the products and services that you offer would be a great way of encouraging members to get thoroughly involved in their own community within your free membership site. It would also be an excellent way for you to be able to communicate directly with your members to answer their questions and basically build a rapport with them. 15
This will inevitably be advantageous for you because it will help to increase your influence in your market niche, and enable you to establish exactly what your members’ major concerns are at the same time. In this way, you will gain an ‘insight’ into the best products to be releasing into the membership area of any paid site that you run, as well as helping you to come up with new ideas for improving the free site at the same time. Having your own Forum (or even a blog to which members can contribute) also presents you with an opportunity to increase your own visibility on the internet. This is particularly important as visibility is one of the most crucial and basic underlying factors underlying the success of most top internet marketers. Achieving such visibility without it descending into notoriety is however, extremely difficult. It is nevertheless true that you should aim to be increasingly ‘visible’ throughout your internet marketing career, and hosting a forum on your own successful free membership sites is certainly going to represent a significant step in the right direction. To set up such a Forum, go back to your Hostgator cpanel, find ‘Fantastico’ again and look for phpB2B. Once again, this is a matter of only a few minutes work and so wasted time is going to be reduced to a minimum. Blogs You could alternatively set up a WordPress blog site to which all members could contribute. This would achieve a pretty similar overall result as establishing the Forum, that is, it would encourage site members to become actively involved in the day to day business of the site, whilst allowing you to gain an ‘uncensored’ glimpse of exactly what the members of your free site really want. As you know, WordPress can be automatically installed from Fantastico as well. Help desk Help Desks are a feature that you are more likely to see on paid membership sites than free ones, mainly because many Help Desk enquiries tend to be about payment problems, and this is obviously not relevant in this scenario. However, a little further down the line, in the interests of making your free site appear as professional as possible, a Help Desk facility may be something that you want to consider installing on your site.
16
Fantastico offers several Help Desk options like ‘Help Center Live’, ‘osTicket’ and ‘PHP Support Tickets’ so you have plenty of choices open to you, and they are all free to install and use.
17
Populating Your Site The next thing you need to consider is what materials you plan to give away to your free members, and how are you going to do so. Not matter what type of free membership site you are trying to establish, the key factor is that the more valuable the information that you give away, the easier it will be to attract new members to the site. Almost without exception, everybody who is using the internet is doing so to find information of some form or another. If you are in a position to give them the information that they need completely free, then it stands to reason that they will almost certainly have no hesitation about joining your site. However, if the information that you are giving away is outdated or inaccurate, then it essentially has no value, and under these circumstances it is going to be extremely difficult to keep your members happy. Unhappy members will, in turn, very quickly lose interest in your site and you will lose all the influence and reputation that you have previously generated when they do so. You must therefore give your free members high-quality, up-to-theminute information that is, moreover, valuable. Ideally it should also be information that is difficult to obtain elsewhere, if at all possible. Let us return to the earlier example of Free-PLR-Every-Day.com to see how you could go about achieving your objectives in this respect. Using PLR content If you are looking for good PLR content materials to start populating your new site, then the first place you should look at are other sites in your niche, those which you would normally think of as competition. You are doing this for two reasons: •
Firstly, this will allow you to ‘spy’ on the type of products and services they are offering, and this will almost certainly give you some new ideas for your own site.
•
Secondly, and this is particularly relevant to the PLR niche, you might want to see if there are any good-quality content materials that you can pick up from your competitors to use as content for your own site.
In the latter example, it would of course be better if you could rewrite or modify the ‘borrowed’ materials before using them, but whether this is absolutely necessary would depend on exactly how you planned to use these materials.
18
For example, if you simply wanted to use the materials that you found on other free PLR sites as ‘site filler’ for your own, then you really would not want to waste too much time working on them. Using them almost as they came after making absolutely minimal modifications would probably be okay. Unique content Quite obviously, brand new materials that no-one has ever used before are going to have far greater intrinsic value than content that has been used a few hundred or even a few thousand times before. So it stands to reason that the more unique materials that you can include in your free members area, the more value you will be giving to people who join your site. Creating your own unique materials is, however, a time consuming business. Were you to do the job yourself therefore, the more time you spend on content creation, the less you have available for more important matters like building your business. Getting others to look after the content creation for you would be a far better idea, but it is not going to be cheap to engage a ghostwriter to create an e-book or a series of articles for you, and this is particularly relevant as your site is not earning you any money as yet. In this situation, I would suggest that you would have to try to strike an acceptable balance between what you would like to do in an ideal world, and what you really can do within the confines of the real world that you actually live in! For example, if my site is going to give away some valuable PLR content every day, then there is no way that everything I give away is going to be unique. It just would not be possible to do this without huge expenditure. It would therefore be far better to create one unique ‘headline’ PLR product every month, backed up by lots of small ‘packages’ of materials that, whilst they make no claim to being one-offs, are still nevertheless of good quality (well written articles or nice sounding audio soundtracks, for example). In this way, you would still be providing quality content to your members but not breaking your own bank account whilst doing so! Whichever way you choose to look at it, running your own free membership site is going to cost you something, either in terms of cash outlay or time spent, and there is no getting away from that fact.
19
You cannot realistically expect to create anything on the internet without some kind of initial outlay. Therefore, even though your membership site is a free one, you will nevertheless have to be prepared for some form of expenditure. On the other hand, even though the site is free, this does not necessarily mean that you cannot earn any money at all from running it. We will look a little later at some ways that even a free membership site can be monetized, but in the initial stages at least, you should view any income that is generated as being nothing more than a way of covering your own outlay and costs.
20
Promoting Your Free Membership Site If you are a regular internet user, then no doubt you are used to being bombarded with sales offers of one form or another every time you open your browser or your e-mail inbox. And I have no doubt that you probably ignore 99.9% of the offers that you see. Something that is being given away for free is, however, often a very different matter. There is no long and complicated sales process necessary when you are promoting something of value that you are giving away for nothing. It therefore follows that promoting a free membership website should entail nothing more than making sure they your message is seen by the maximum numbers of people possible. It is effectively nothing more than a simple numbers game, as you’re not selling anything, and therefore anyone who sees your promotional message has no buying decision to make. In fact, the only significant difference between promoting a product or service which you are selling and your free membership site is that you most probably cannot afford expensive paid advertising in the latter situation. What you are therefore looking for are effective free and cheap promotional tools that have as much mass-market appeal as possible. Whilst there is therefore no one single ‘ magic ‘ promotional system or method that you can use to tell the world about your free membership site, a combination of many promotional avenues should do the job. Here are a few of the principal promotional methods that you should be using. Article marketing In order to market using articles, you need to create as many 400-700 articles about your website topic as you can, and submit them to the leading article directories. In your resource box, which you will include at the end of each article, make sure that you tell the article reader what they can find on your website, and how they can access it. So, for example, to continue with our earlier daily PLR example, your resource box might look something like this: ‘Joe Soap is a PLR expert who has his own free PLR membership site at XXXX.com. Sign up for free now, and enjoy brand-new PLR materials in your e-mail inbox everyday.’
21
Not only would this have the benefit of encouraging people who have read your articles to visit your site, it will also help to improve the search engine rankings of your site as well. As you are no doubt aware, most people look for particular types of information on the internet by using the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. So, it follows that if you site does not appear in the results that these search engines generate, then it will be significantly harder for people to find you. One of the most important factors in getting the search engines to notice and then rank your site is the number of other sites on the net that are linking to you. Publishing articles in the major directories is one of the most effective ways of creating such links for a couple of reasons. The leading article directory sites are themselves fairly highly rated by the leading search engines. Having a link from them is therefore highly advantageous. Equally important, the directory sites allow other website owners and newsletter publishers to download and use your article materials as long as your resource box is left in place. Every time one of your articles is published on someone else’s website, this also creates a back link to your membership site. Although no-one really knows exactly how the major search engines calculate website rankings, it is generally accepted that the more links you have coming into your site, the higher it will be rated. And, of course, the higher your site appears in the search engine results, the more people are likely to find you when they perform a search. Although there are some 500 article directory sites, you do not need to try to post your articles to every one. Concentrate on just a handful of the major directories, and this will generally be sufficient. The following are the directories that I would recommend you should focus on submitting every article that you create to: http://ezinearticles.com/ http://goarticles.com/index.html http://www.articlecity.com/article_submission.shtml http://www.articledashboard.com/ http://searchwarp.com/ Many of the major directory sites are syndicated to the smaller ones in any case, and using this handful, should therefore be adequate.
22
Newsletter advertising As mentioned above, article directories allow the publishers of newsletters (or ezines as they are often called) to download the articles that you write and include them in their publication. With a little detective work, it is possible with some article directories to find out exactly who has downloaded your article. If you can find an ezine that has used your materials, then try to contact the publisher. Offer to write a couple of unique free articles exclusively for their publication, as this constitutes excellent free advertising for you. Failing this, you can search for ezines that are published in your market niche by checking a site like BestEzines.com where there is a comprehensive list of most of the best-known ezines and newsletters. Try to contact the publisher of any appropriate ezines that you find and offer to write exclusively for that particular publication, or perhaps even consider some paid advertising. Paid advertising in even the most popular ezines and newsletters is generally going to be reasonably cheap, and it is therefore likely to be cost efficient and is also very well targeted. In addition, should you choose to place paid advertising in a particular newsletter or ezine, this might also give you some leverage with the publisher if you are trying to get them to feature your articles as well. Traffic exchanges As the name might imply, traffic exchanges are websites where traffic is exchanged between members. You join some exchange program for free, view other members’ websites and in return the program will send other members to view your site. In fact, it is quite possible that you are already familiar with traffic exchange programs, as such exchanges are often the very first type of free advertising that many internet marketing ‘newbies’ try. If this is the case, I would be willing to wager that you probably did not enjoy a great deal of success. Traffic exchanges can, however, be extremely successful and efficient as long as they are used in the right circumstances and in the correct manner. What this means is that in order for the traffic exchange program to work for you, you must have an attractive offer and you must be giving it away for free.
23
Your free membership site ‘checks’ both of these requirements, and there is therefore no reason why traffic exchanges will not work for you. Another advantage of using exchange program sites is that the traffic that they send to your advertising page is targeted traffic. Unlike an article directory, for example, where anyone can read your article, all members of traffic exchanges have to decide what type websites they want to see at the time of joining the site. They are, in turn, only shown advertising pages from the same category of sites. Continuing to use our free daily PLR membership site, it could probably be most accurately categorized under ‘marketing’ in the following example. So, my site will be shown to other marketers and I would see web pages from other program members who categorized their sites in the same way.
There are literally hundreds of traffic exchange programs, with new ones coming to the market almost daily. You can find them easily by using the term ‘traffic exchange’ in a Google search, but here are a few that I can recommend to get you started: http://www.hitpulse.com http://swattraffic.com/ http://maxtrafficpro.com http://www.eternalhits.com http://www.traffic-splash.com
24
http://deepseahits.com http://www.ilovehits.com Post blog comments Find other people in your niche who are publishing their own blog sites and visit them to post useful and helpful comments whenever possible. This will once again create incoming links to your site (although not every posting will actually do this), and as long as your comment is genuinely insightful and helpful, then it will help to drive additional visitors back to your site as well. The key to being successful with this relatively simple method of generating traffic is to make sure that the comments you post have value to the blog publisher. In other words, you should focus on what benefits they can get from publishing your comment, as opposed to what you will gain. Do this successfully, and your blog comments will almost invariably be published, but if the comments that you attempt to post are seen as useless ‘spam’ by the blog owner, then they will never be published online as almost all blog owners moderate comments. Focus on them instead of you, however, and this should not be a problem. You can find a fairly comprehensive directory of many leading blogs and bloggers at BlogCatalog.com. Even better, if you have your own blog site associated with your free membership program then that site will have an outgoing ‘RSS feed’. Whilst it is not necessary to know exactly what this is or how it works, what RSS does is send an automatic message to anyone who has chosen to subscribe to your feed to tell them that your blog has been updated and invite them to check out what you have written. So, if you have your own blog and it is going to be updated reasonably regularly, then you should activate your own RSS feed and make sure that you encourage your blog viewers to subscribe to it. Forum marketing No matter what form of free membership site you have created, there will almost certainly be online forums or noticeboard sites where people who are interested in your niche topic come together to discuss and debate their interests. Many of these Forums offer you the ability to include a signature file whenever you start a new thread or post a response to an existing thread. This is another way of advertising the free membership site that you have just established.
25
In order to find forums or noticeboard sites in your particular market niche, you can look at Big Boards to see what sites they have listed, and search Google or Yahoo using the phrase “your topic + forums”. Once you have found sites that seem appropriate, the first thing to do is check whether they allow signature files to be included in your postings. If not, then it becomes very difficult to advertise your opportunity, and you may therefore decide that such sites are not worth getting involved with at the moment. If the forum that you are considering does allow signature files to be included, then you should join and start posting. But make sure that you check the rules of that specific site before you add your signature file, as many forums require a minimum number of postings to be made before you can do so. And, in a similar manner to adding comments to other people’s blogs, when responding to other people’s threads in forums, always make sure that your comments are of value to the forum community. In the same manner, you should also strive to ensure that any new threads that you start are thought provoking and valuable, simply because if they are not, then no one will read the thread, and therefore your signature file will remain unseen. Tell a friend scripts Since time immemorial, the most effective form of advertising or promotion has been what you might call ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising. That is, I’d buy a product that I like so much that I would tell my friends about it. Because they are my friends, my recommendation of the product carries far more weight than them seeing an advert in a magazine, on TV or on the internet could ever do. Because of this increased credibility my friends are far more likely to buy the product than they might otherwise be. In the current free membership scenario, there is, of course, nothing being bought or sold but nevertheless the same principle will apply. So, when you initially build your free membership site you should include what is known as a ‘tell a friend script’ in your members sign up area. What this does is ask the new member whether they have any friends or colleagues who might also benefit from having free membership of your site. They are then asked to fill in the name and e-mail address of the friends that they have in mind in a form that is presented to them.
26
However, the really smart aspect of such a script is that when the member completes the names and e-mail addresses and then hits the ‘confirm’ or ‘go’ button, this automatically sends an invitation mail to each person on the list. Perhaps even more crucially, this e-mail appears to come from the new member rather than from you, and of course, as the mail comes from their friend, this almost guarantees that the mail gets opened and acted upon. This would be especially true as the opportunity that is being offered to them is entirely free of charge. Using a ‘tell a friend script’ is still a relatively new idea, but it has already been proven to be exceptionally successful because it is almost completely non-intrusive. After all, what could be more natural than opening an e-mail from a friend and acting upon a free offer that he or she is recommending? If you want to maximize the effectiveness of this technique, why not give an additional free gift to the member if they can recommend a certain number of friends? For example, if you have some software or an e-book that you can give away free that it is particularly useful to people who are actively involved in your niche, then this would most likely encourage the majority of joining members to get their thinking caps on! And the real beauty of this particular recruitment technique is the leverage that it offers. For example, if you offer a free gift for every three names that a joining member gives you, then that one member brings in three, who each in turn brings in another three and so on and so forth. The effect of this could snowball extremely quickly, and you can see that over time this one simple technique could bring you hundreds or even thousands of new members. There are both paid-for and free ‘tell a friend scripts’ on the market, so I would recommend that you search Google or Yahoo to see what is available before deciding what is right for your site. However, ‘tell a friend scripts’ are still new enough to be a novelty to many people who are joining websites, and I would therefore recommend that this is one promotional opportunity that you do not ignore and that you use it as soon as possible. This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the places that you can promote your free membership site, and you should always be on the lookout for additional opportunities, especially those that you can take advantage of at no cost.
27
For example, you will from time to time see time unlimited ‘free giveaway’ events, when you do, you should certainly investigate to see whether you can become involved.
28
Your Reputation And Influence It is a fact in any business that the better your reputation is, the greater your influence will be within the business community in which you are operating. So, it is with internet marketing too! The more you build a great reputation, the more people will pay heed to what you say and follow the advice that you give. In this way, your influence will naturally grow within your particular market niche. Unfortunately however, building a solid reputation in internet marketing is one of those incredibly annoying things that sounds extremely easy in theory, but can be very difficult to achieve in practice! Acquiring a great reputation requires you to be many things. You must, for example, be: •
An expert in your niche
•
Willing to help others
•
Honest, truthful and decent
•
Trustworthy and reliable
•
Diligent, attentive and organized.
Now, whilst all of these features are extremely important, some of them, such as the fact that you are honest and truthful, would be assumed as a ‘given’ by most people. In my experience, the single most important factor in establishing a reputation that positions you above others in your field is your own expert knowledge of your topic. So, it follows from this that when you set up your free membership site, an integral part of being successful will be your ability to ensure that your members see you as an acknowledged expert. You will therefore need to do anything that you can to educate yourself to the highest levels possible. It is not, however, quite enough for you to simply be an expert. You have do be able to let others know that you are a highly educated specialist in your niche market both by your words and your deeds. For example, returning to our daily PLR membership site concept, you must establish yourself as the premier expert in all matters pertaining to PLR as quickly and as powerfully as you can.
29
This is where the true value of having an active member forum or interactive blog site can be seen. In the forum area, for example, you should make sure that you start as many of the most challenging and interesting threads as you can, and that you also answer as many of your members’ questions and queries as you capable of. The articles which you are submitting to the directories and newsletter publishers should also focus on establishing your expertise in your particular market niche. Staying with the PLR niche, you would for example submit articles about how to use PLR materials, where you can find them, how much you should be paying for them, what little ‘tricks’ you can apply to cut down on the time spent creating them, and so on. Depending upon your particular niche, you may even be able to go offline in an effort to increase your reputation still further. For example, if your free membership site gave away gardening tips, ideas and news, then you might want to approach your local radio stations or newspapers to offer to produce a regular gardening tips item for broadcast or publication. Such an idea is most probably unlikely to be successful if you’re promoting a site that is only concerned with internet marketing, but if your niche is more closely related to a ‘real world’ market niche, then this strategy may very well work. How about creating Press Releases as a way of establishing your reputation? As long as you have something that is newsworthy to say, then creating and releasing a suitable Press Release could be a very big boost to your expert status. You must be aware that the simple fact that you run a free membership site in a particular niche is not a newsworthy event, and therefore publishing a Press Release that simply announces this fact would be a total waste of time. If, however, you chose to publicize your gardening membership site by locking yourself in your greenhouse for a month to raise funds for a worthy cause, then this would be the kind of slightly crazy stunt which you could most definitely create a Press Release around. Incidentally, whilst doing something so seemingly ‘off the wall’ would do little to further your expert status in itself, it would prove your determination and willingness to work hard on the behalf of others who are less lucky or favored than you. It would also make you seem considerably more human and therefore approachable, both of which will make it far easier for people to feel comfortable doing business with you.
30
In other words, it would give a significant boost to other factors which are integral parts of you being able to create an extremely favorable reputation. Inevitably, the greater your reputation becomes then so will your influence within your niche business community. Having influence is all about people being willing to listen to what you say, and then to act upon your advice. It follows that the greater your reputation becomes within your particular niche, then the more people will want to hear what you have to say and be happy to act upon it. Make no bones about it, your ultimate objective should be to dominate your niche, to become the number one ‘go to guy’ that everyone in your business automatically turns to when they need an answer to a query, or help with the problem. If you can establish yourself as the number one expert in your field, then this has significant further repercussions for the development of your business. For example, were you to be recognized as the number one online PLR expert, then it would be significantly easier for you to build closer working relationships with recognized experts in other areas of internet marketing. In any type of business, online or off, to simple business rules always apply. Firstly, people always deal with people. And, secondly, a great reputation brings with it ever increasing influence, and that will in turn lead to constantly improving profitability. Nor should you be blind to the fact that an ever improving reputation allied with growing influence in your market can make running even something as apparently unprofitable as a free membership site a very handsome money earner indeed.
31
Selling To Your List Once you have created your free membership site and have been actively promoting it for a reasonable period of time, then you will have started to build a significant membership list. This list of members will also comprise your mailing list, and having this list is the first significant step towards being able to generate an income from your free membership site efforts. By the very fact that people who are on your list have chosen to join your free site, they have already indicated that they are vitally interested in the niche topic or subject matter around which you have built the site. These people must be hungry for more information about that same niche and that they will be happy to consider any niche related opportunities that you offer to them. People who have willingly signed up for free membership of your site have already told you exactly what they are interested in. It should therefore be a relatively simple matter to find products or services that you can promote to them as a way of generating an income from the mailing list which you have built. Automation Before looking at choosing products, however, let us quickly look at one other extremely important aspect of mailing list building. When you first start your free membership site, it is likely that there will be a relatively small trickle of new members for at least the first couple of weeks. In this situation, it is not going to be too much of a strain to do everything manually. So, in these early days, it would be entirely possible to confirm every individual membership manually and to send out welcoming information to each individual member in the same way. If, however, your site is as successful as you would like it to be, then you will soon see this trickle of new members turn into a torrent of new signups, and at that point it would be utterly impossible to handle everything manually unless you are willing to work 24/7. Assuming that this is not the case, then you need to have an autoresponder attached to your new website from the very outset. This can then be set up to do several tasks for you on autopilot: •
Create a name and e-mail address capture form that you can cut and paste on your blog page and other websites. Through this, you would offer a valuable free gift and further information about your website in return for a visitor’s name and e-mail address.
32
•
Mail out your initial ‘welcome’ pack automatically so that your new member would get full details of everything you have to offer within minutes of signing up. In a world that increasingly craves instant gratification, the value of this should not be underestimated.
•
Send out all subsequent information automatically. So, for example, if you wanted to send out a new PLR gift every day, you would do so through your autoresponder account, as otherwise it would be impossible to handle the task. Similarly, if you wanted to send out promotional e-mails every two or three days, the autoresponder account is the perfect tool for doing so.
•
Whenever you want to send details of a new product or service that you are recommending to everybody on your mailing list, you can use the autoresponder to compose your e-mail, attach the product details and then send it to everybody on the list in a ‘natural’ way. This is important because, if you try to send hundreds or even thousands of e-mails all at exactly the same time, many e-mail services will block the mail because they will view it as almost certainly being ‘spam’ mail.
An autoresponder account is possibly the single most important tool that you must have in order to run your business at maximum levels of efficiency. You should go for the best autoresponder that you can afford right from the outset, and I would recommend that you should look at either Aweber or GetResponse. With your autoresponder account in place, you are in a position to start generating income from all of the names that you are adding to the mailing lists that are being built on and handled by the autoresponder website. Choosing products You generate income by offering products and services of a type that you know will be of interest to members. In this situation, there are two product options available to you. •
Option one is that you could call upon your own expert knowledge to create your own product. This would have the advantage that the product would be unique and you could therefore ask high prices for it. It would, however, have the disadvantage that it would take both time and effort to produce, and you will be busy enough without any additional work burdens!
33
•
Option two is that you find a product or service that somebody else has created and promote it to your mailing list members with your recommendation attached. This does, of course, mean that you should have tried the product yourself, and that you can honestly recommend it (Remember that honesty is an important part of your reputation!). In this case, you will be acting as an affiliate for the product producer and would be paid a share of the sale price as a commission. This has the disadvantage that the product you are promoting is not uniquely yours, and you have little or no control over it. The advantage, however, is that it is extremely quick and easy, and needs little other than an e-mail recommending the product to start generating sales.
There are many different web sites where you can find affiliate products, and the site that will work best for you will to a large extent depend upon the kind of product that you are looking for. For example, if a digital product like an e-book or software is what you are seeking, then you can find masses of them on Clickbank. If, however, you’re looking for real world tangible goods that you can promote to your list members, then you would be far better off looking at Commission Junction or LinkShare to source what you need. Promoting such products or services to your list members can become a tremendous source of income for you over time. You should, however, remember that these people have chosen to join a free membership site, and undoubtedly some of your members will have joined simply because it didn’t cost them anything to do so. Whilst you should therefore start promoting products and services for sale to your list members as quickly as possible, be aware that some of your members will probably cancel their membership as soon as you begin to do so. Be prepared for this to happen and take a view that such people would never have made you any money in any event, so it is no great loss if they choose to quit now. View it in this manner, and it should not come as such an unpleasant surprise to you! Joint ventures As I hinted earlier, as a recognized expert in your field it should be relatively easy for you to form close working relationships with other recognized experts in closely associated niches.
34
For example, as a PLR expert, it should be very easy to form alliances with experts who are involved in other ‘branches’ of internet marketing such as e-mail marketing, search engine optimization, driving traffic to your web site using eBay and so on, all of whom you could work with. Each of these experts will also have their own extensive mailing lists, and so you should contact them to see if they would be willing to offer your products to their list members. You could, for example, see if they would be interested in offering your free membership to their mailing list members. Whilst this may not at first glance appear to be particularly attractive proposition for them, you could make it worth their while with a simple little trick that I will demonstrate to you a little later. Alternatively, if you have your own unique products available, you could simply ask them if they would be willing to promote it to their mailing list on your behalf in return for a significant share of the sales proceeds generated by any sales made to their members. You can also do a similar thing in reverse by agreeing to promote their products to your own list of members in return for a percentage of the sales proceeds. Incidentally, having your name positively associated with the names of other leading and well-known internet marketing experts is another superb way of enhancing your reputation and thereby increasing the influence that you have. One-time offers When you set up your free membership site, one thing you should give serious consideration to is the inclusion of a ‘one time offer’ (or OTO) in your membership signup process. With an OTO in place, when your new member has just completed the signup process, they will automatically be taken to a page which offers them a particularly attractive ‘deal’ on a product or service that is laser targeted towards people in your specific niche. This page emphasizes the fact that the price quoted is a very special deal, and that they will only have one opportunity to buy at this price. They will, in fact, never be able to access this page again hence it is a one time offer only. One time offers of this type are remarkably successful for two reasons: •
A good OTO will place great emphasis on the ‘never to be repeated price’ aspect of the deal, and there is a natural sense of urgency created by the fact that they will only ever see page the one time. 35
For this reason, conversion rates from OTO deals can often be surprisingly high and this is a profit-making opportunity that you should not miss. •
It also gives you something that you can offer to potential joint venture partners in order to encourage them to promote your free membership site. By offering them 50% or even 75% of the sale proceeds, you are able to offer them a very strong inducement to help you in your efforts to build your membership and your all-important mailing list. In this situation, of course, you lose some of the initial revenues, but you gain significant numbers of new members, all of whom can be added to your mailing list, and will therefore become important potential profit centers in the future.
36
Conclusion At first glance, it might be difficult to understand why anybody would want to start a free membership site. After all, building a site of any type involves work, effort and perhaps money being spent as well. Therefore, it does not appear to make a great deal of sense to do all of this work only to end up with a site that gives everything away for nothing. However, as I hope has been demonstrated, having your own free membership sites can be a very powerful business building resource, and it is one that can be extremely profitable, both in the short and the long term. For example, a free membership site serves as a perfect feeder source for any paid membership site that you might be running alongside the free version. It enables you to build a reputation as an acknowledged expert in your particular niche, and from there it is one simple step to expand your influence so that your expert status becomes a matter of common knowledge. You will have a large and ever increasing ‘fan club’ of people who automatically accept that everything you say is derived from your expert knowledge and who are therefore willing to follow almost any advice that you give them. Even before your reputation and influence has reached such heady levels, having your own free membership site will present you with several new and exciting ways of making money whilst constantly adding hordes of new names to your mailing list. So, in conclusion, let me ask the same question that I asked at the beginning of the book. Can you now understand why having your own free membership site is such an attractive proposition? I hope so!
This is a sample of the sort of high quality, in-depth report that you will get every month as a member of our site, to read and to sell.
Click Here To Join Us Now 37
"Discover The Secret Source For Your Own Private Label And Ready Made Information Reports" This low cost, hands free solution helps you build a profitable Internet Empire, while someone else does all the work!
Loads of private label niche and marketing reports, plus a superb selction of ready made reports you can read and sell …and your own fully hosted, ready made special report shop paying 100% of every sale direct into your Paypal account!
Click Here Now For Full Details
38