Monday, June 15, 2009

How To Get More Members Into Your Membership Site

By Trevor Weir

Depending on which niche you have chosen, you will be looking at web properties that have lots of people every day in that niche. In the Internet marketing niche, you can go to high trafficforums such as the Warrior Forum, Digital Point. These are the best places to look for members and advertise what you have to offer. Forums in other niches are a little more sensitive to advertising, so you'll need to check with the individual rules and regulations of each forum you're interested in.

The most common way to use Forums commercially without spamming involves first respecting the fact that others don't want to be spammed. We suggest that you register, read a few existing posts to get the flavor of the conversations, then contribute to the ongoing conversations without leaving a signature. Just comment meaningfully.

After you have commented a few times, go back into your forum profile and add a sig that includes just one of your websites. Behave like the exemplary citizen Kane by commenting and being responsive to others, then sometime in week two, add another website link ( if you wish to ) inside your forum signature. Your signature appears underneath every comment that you make, so twenty comments per day on 10 sites gives you 20 more ways that people can find your site and your material.

In addition to using sig links and creating special offers, you can broker JV deals with the forum owner, or purchase banner ads. The point is that forums are a hotspot because this is where members in your niche hang out.

Another thing you can do is advertise with a pay per click engine like Yahoo Search marketing. You will be able to target your chosen keywords. Picking keywords consisting of just one word is typically too broad to do much good and the commercial intent of most one word keywords is far too low to be useful for a membership site. Try using 2 or 3 word ( called long tail) phrases with low competitiveness and less than 1000 monthly searches. PPC can be a stunning option because you can pretty much get feedback right away to see if your sales letter is good enough to convert.

Search engine optimization is also something you will want to look at rather closely. Sales pages can rank for certain key terms but more often than not content-based pages do a lot better in terms of serps(Search engine Results Pages). Our advice therefore is that, you should create articles that relate to the niche of your membership site. Have these articles link back to your conversion page.

You can also take advantage of other sites out there. Article syndication has a fairly good record and it is possible to get both the benefits of potential clients who browse the article directories, and there will be times when your content is in the top 10 on the search engine result pages.

Some of the best things in the world are free and the web has a few of these too. Free sites such as Twitter.com, Hubpages.com and Wordpress.com are the best free website builders available. You can quickly and easily create webpages that will direct potential members to the conversion page. This type of marketing also has the benefit of getting back links to your website from sites hosting your articles.

Persistence pays off so keep the faith!

Trevor Weir

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