Tag: membership

Can You REALLY Make Money With a Membership Site?

In my last post “How To Get Quality Blog Content Without Writing A Single Word” – I was talking about our Covert Social Press theme. One of the key features in the theme is that you can have real members join your site. It’s first and foremost a social bookmarking theme, but you could say that it has a membership site component too.

Membership marketing has long been one of our favorite strategies – and here are some of the reasons why…

When most marketers decide to start selling information products online, they usually start selling ebooks. But did you know that you can offer the same information in a slightly different format and actually make more money? It’s true. And that’s exactly what you’ll learn how to do in this article.

Let’s consider for a moment the different ways you can deliver content. We’ll focus mainly on the online methods, although you certainly can deliver physical products such as books and home study courses and live events such as webinars.

Here are the main downloadable options:

* Ebooks and reports. Almost everyone who sells information online offers ebooks and reports. Usually, these are low-priced ($50 or less) and sometimes free. It’s a great choice for entry-level products to pull people into your sales funnel.

* Audios. Audio interviews and audio ebooks have a slightly higher perceived value. That means you can take the same information as an ebook, turn it into an audio and charge a higher price.

* Videos. Videos are the next step up, meaning you can take the same information as offered in an ebook or audio, turn it into a video and people will consider it to be worth more. Naturally, that means you can charge more.

* Membership sites. The perceived value of a membership site largely depends on what you’re offering inside. For example, an ebook-only membership site is going to have a lower perceived value than a site that includes videos.

Now, you may want to incorporate all four of these products into your sales funnel. For example: You can use your ebooks as entry-level products, your audios and videos as intermediate products, and your membership sites for your expert-level products.

But here’s another idea…

Just skip all the other products and get people directly into your membership site. Indeed, you can use your membership site as a sales funnel. That means you can offer free “bronze” memberships and then upgrade your free members to paid memberships.

If you’ve spent any time studying membership site marketing before, then you already know just how profitable it can be. In fact, I bet you’ve even crunched the numbers before. For example, if you get just 1000 members paying you $17 a month, you pull in a cool $17,000 every month.

Well – close but not quite.

You’d pull in $17,000 every month only IF you can keep all 1000 of those members… or if you can rapidly replace the members who are constantly quitting the site. Most marketers can’t do that. And so their sites eventually just make a couple hundred dollars a month.

You see, that’s because most membership site marketers don’t consider the churn rate (that’s the number of people who’ll drop out of your site every month). Truth is, most customers who are paying a monthly fee in a recurring membership site cancel after just three, four or maybe five months (if you’re lucky). And so you need to work hard all year around just to keep your membership numbers up.

Now before you toss out the idea of running a membership site, let me tell you that there is an easier and FAR more profitable way to do it. And best of all, it’s easy to get members because you don’t even have to sell anything on the front end.

Sound a little too good to be true? It’s not. And if you act right now, you can get all the details for free. Go here to claim your free Silver Membership at Membership Marketers Club (normally $27.00) – Just Use This Special Link For Free Access! … and discover how you can triple YOUR membership site profits!

How To Create A Best Selling Product

In my last post “The Best Way To Use Youtube With WordPress“, I mentioned that Covert Video Press is our all time best selling WordPress product.

But how do you create a best selling product?

Should you sell products that people need? The answer might surprise you. And that’s because the answer is “not always.”

You see, lots of beginning marketers start out by creating products that people need. But here’s the thing: Needing a product and WANTING a product are not the same thing. If you’re creating products that people need but don’t want, you’ll go bankrupt trying to persuade your prospects that they should want your product.

Instead, start by figuring out what your prospects want. (If they also need the product, that’s even better).

Let me show you what I mean…

What does a male college student need? He needs to get good grades. He needs to attend class. He needs to start getting higher grades on his exams.

But not every college student wants those things. There’s a group of college students who want to play sports and party. Going to class and getting good grades sit low on their priority list (probably somewhere near “cleaning their dorm”).

And that means that if you try to sell something that this group needs, like a “How to Get Straight A’s” book, you’ll fail. Miserably… because they don’t want it.

If you want to make money, you have to figure out what this group wants. You have to figure out what they’re already buying. And then you have to create something a little better.

For example, maybe this particular niche market devours books about drinking games. Or maybe this group wants to know how to go on a cheap spring break vacation to party spots like Cancun. Or who knows, perhaps this group wants to know how to get washboard abs so they can look great on the beach during spring break.

See what I mean? Bottom line is this: If you give people what they want (even if you don’t think they need it), you’ll find the money. And if you give people products they both want and need, you’ll do even better.

And now for the million-dollar question…

How do you find out what people want?

Some experts suggest that you survey your market. You ask them. But you know what? While surveys can give you some interesting insights and ideas you’d never have thought about before, surveys can also be biased. Just because someone says they would buy a certain type of product doesn’t mean they actually would buy it if the opportunity arose.

So here’s what you do instead…

Find out what your market is ALREADY buying. Now you don’t have to guess whether the survey is accurate. You don’t have to predict what your market would do in “real life.” You find out for sure by seeing where your market already spends their money.

If you’re selling information products (like ebooks), then you can start by:

* Finding out what’s selling on Clickbank and JVZoo
* Finding out what kinds of books your market is buying on Amazon.com.
* Finding out what the top websites in your niche are selling and advertising. (Just search for your main keywords in Google and see what your competitors are selling/promoting.)

It’s that easy.

Now, just knowing you need to create a product that your market wants isn’t going to automatically put profits in your pocket. You also need to figure out what kind of product you should create. And you need to learn the secrets of creating hot products, fast.

You can learn about these issues and more by claiming your free Product Profits Club Silver membership (normally $27.00). You’ll save time and money once you know these product creation secrets! Just Use This Special Link For Free Access!

Three Proven Ways To Get More Traffic To Your Blog, Fast!

You can have the best product or service in the world. You can have a killer blog that could sell a pint of whiskey to a nun. But if you don’t have any prospects seeing your blog, you won’t make a cent.

That’s why we marketers spend so much time, effort and money trying to put our blogs and offers in front of targeted leads. But it doesn’t have to be that hard… not when you know which marketing methods work best for driving a lot of traffic.

Here are three proven tactics you can start using today…

#1: Social Media Marketing

Savvy marketers know that social media marketing is still in its infancy – and it’s set to explode in the coming years! Those who set up their social marketing campaigns now are the ones who will benefit the most in the future.

That’s because social media marketing is all about building relationships with others and building networks and contact lists. The sooner you get started building a good reputation in your niche, establishing yourself as an expert and building social media networks, the more you stand to gain when you fully leverage your reputation, content and networks.

So where do you start? With the some of the biggest social media sites, including:

* Web 2.0 content sites, like Squidoo. These sites let you page one-page websites around niche topics. Google tends to crawl these pages often and rank them well and they can be a real help in getting your blog indexed fast.

* Social networking sites like Facebook and Pinterest are hot – people spend a lot of time there and if you build up a following you can harvest a lot of traffic from, especially if can get people to share your content. All our covert themes work really well for getting people to do just that – but Covert PinPress in particular works really well as it build on the popularity (and familiarity) of Pinterest, almost forcing people to not only view your content but also to share it with friends and thus generate free traffic for you.

* Social bookmarking sites, like Digg. These sites allow users to share and bookmark content – they can be a great tool in your viral marketing campaigns and for gaining valuable social banklinks to your blog. Our Covert Social Press theme lets you run your own fully functional social bookmarking site on WordPress.

* Online video sites, like Youtube. People spend a LOT of time watching online video and making your own videos can help you attract a lot of traffic. You could also use our Covert Video Press theme to cash on on this video craze without ever having to create your own videos.

#2: Search Engine Marketing

You can pull in traffic from the search engines in two ways:

* By ranking well for certain keywords and appearing in the organic search engine results. This is one of the many good reasons to use WordPress blogs as Google likes the blogging format and often rewards you for it

* By using pay per click marketing to appear in the search engine’s sponsored results (for example, Google AdWords).

You should add both of these tactics to your marketing toolkit. That’s because organic search engine results can provide traffic for months (and even years) after you get your pages indexed. But on the flip side, pay per click marketing allows you to get highly targeted, nearly instant traffic.

#3: Buying Ads

Yet another way to get your offers in front of eager prospects is by placing targeted ads. You can do this by online and offline, including:

* Purchasing banner and text ads on highly targeted niche sites.
* Buying ads and solo ads in highly targeted niche ezines.
* Buying blog ads.
* Buying ads in offline publications, including niche magazines and the related topics of daily newspapers.

This is collectively known as media buying and you can learn more about it in our Media Traffic Meltdown course

Which One Is Right For You?

This isn’t a matter of choosing the one tactic that provides the best results. And that’s because all three of these tactics are proven, time-tested marketing methods. They shouldn’t be used individually, but rather as part of your overall marketing strategy.

While powerful, these three main advertising methods are just the tip of the marketing iceberg. When you use these three alongside other equally powerful marketing methods, you’ll unleash a nearly unstoppable flow of quality traffic.

And it all starts when you claim your free Silver Membership at Traffic Generation Club (normally $27.00) – Just Use This Special Link For  Free Access