December 17, 2007
Tips For Membership Site Success
Operating a membership website is vastly different from operating an ordinary website – even though there are numerous similarities. Here are some tips to help your membership site enjoy greater success.
- Depending on your audience, you may be able to find additional sources of revenue other than membership. Some things to consider are advertising revenue and affiliate products, as well as additional products of your own. Remember that these people are willing to spend money with you. Never assume that they are finished spending their money!
- Keep it fresh! The mistake that many membership site owners make is to not continue to add fresh content on a regular basis. No matter what your topic is, there will come a point in time, in most cases, when your members have perused everything that you are offering. If you want to retain them, they need new content.
- Top-notch customer service and support is vital. People expect good service when they are paying monthly fees. Make sure that you have a support ticket system in place, and that you respond to support tickets and other emails as soon as possible. If customer service becomes overwhelming, hire someone to do it for you.
- Consider restricting membership. People like to be a part of something that is exclusive. This also plays on their sense of urgency when you are promoting the site. You can restrict the number of memberships available, or you can restrict membership based on some criteria that the potential members must meet. Just be careful to keep it legal – membership cannot be restricted based on sex, religion, sexual preference, race, etc.
- Put yourself out there. You don’t have to be a nameless, faceless person that your members never see. Be visible and form relationships with your members. They will appreciate this.
- Listen to your members. Always be on the lookout for ways to make your site better. Your members will help you here. Constantly ask for suggestions – and take those suggestions seriously. People like it when you give them what they are asking for, and they will stay with you as a member longer also.
- Create public sections of your membership site as well as private sections. Make sure that he public sections lead to the private sections – where the visitor is informed that they will need to create a membership to progress. If they really want or need the rest of the information, they will likely move forward with membership creation.
- Consider selling blocks of memberships. This is a new twist on membership sites. You sell blocks of memberships to other marketers, who in turn can either sell each of the memberships that they have, or give them away as incentives. This does not work for recurring membership sites, however.
- Offer a guarantee, with one month of membership fees to be refunded. Don’t go further than that, or people will take advantage of you. After thirty days, one should know whether the membership site meets their expectations or not.
- Consider short trial memberships. These memberships can be as little as three days or as long as seven. The most effective way to do this is to require the potential member’s credit card information up front. Let them know that at the end of their trial period, their card will be billed, as agreed, unless they cancel before then. This gives them the opportunity to see what they will be getting for their money.
- There are those who will share their login information with others. This costs you money in the form of lost membership fees. Avoid this by setting up your system to automatically lock the accounts that are being accessed from different IP numbers.
- Remember that a membership site is a long-term commitment on your part. Don’t start one if you aren’t prepared to operate and maintain it for a long time, or prepared to hire someone to operate and maintain it for you. Abandoning a membership site that has active members can ruin your reputation!
- Make it a point to surprise your members often with valuable resources or products. This will keep them happy – and keep them around to see what you come up with next!
- You don’t have to be a famous marketer to open a successful membership site. You just have to give your audience what they want. Overtime, you will become famous to them – after they are your members.
Filed under Membership Sites by Almin
Spread the Word!
December 15, 2007
Marketing Your Membership Site
Membership sites can be marketed in a variety of ways. Hopefully you have chosen a tight niche, as this will make marketing much easier. Here, we will discuss some of the most effective ways of marketing a niche membership website.
Hopefully you did test, and you built an opt-in list while performing those tests. If so, the first place you need to market is to that list of opt-in subscribers – those who have taken the time to tell you what they want. If you’ve taken the time to provide them with what they asked for, the chances are good that you will have a fantastic response from your own list. Prepare an email!
Marketing to your own list isn’t enough. You also need to market to other Internet Marketers lists, and you can do this through joint ventures. This means offering them a percentage of the monthly fee for members that they bring to you. In most cases, they will expect a share of that monthly fee for as long as the member is retained. This does cut into your profits – but at the same time, it brings more members in.
Don’t count solely on your own list or anyone else’s list either! You need to take your promotions for your launch even further. Just as you ran a Google AdWords campaign to test, you also need to run a new campaign for your membership site. This should be done at launch, but you may find that you need to continue to advertise with Pay-Per-Click as well.
A more advanced form of marketing is to either host a teleseminar, or to appear as a guest speaker on a teleseminar. If you don’t want to host one, have one of your joint ventures who are experienced in teleseminars to host one, with you as the guest speaker. This is typically done in pre-launch.
Don’t ignore the more traditional forms of advertising. They are still incredibly effective. However, they are more suited for long term marketing than for actual launches. Traditional marketing includes forum marketing, article marketing, and ezine advertising.
Once the site is launched, you should also consider an affiliate program. You can opt to make the affiliate program open to anybody, or strictly to members. Setting up and running an affiliate program these days is quite easy.
It is important to realize that marketing is an ongoing thing, unless you have restricted your site to a certain number of members. Even then, as members leave, you will need to run promotions to bring new members in, in order to maintain your income.
Filed under Membership Sites by Almin
Spread the Word!
