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Membership Niche Selection Tips

03 Sep

This article explains how to select a profitable niche for your membership business.

Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market

The number 1 thing you have to do is find fanatics if you want a profitable membership website. Fanatic is defined as someone with an irrational enthusiasm. These are the people you’re looking for because they are so enthusiastic they’re willing to spend money on their topic of fanaticism. Here’s how to find fanatics:

Here’s something you may not have considered – magazines! We’re so internet-based these days, it’s easy to forget about them. In today’s economy, running a magazine is tougher than ever – some of the best ones are going out of business. So if it’s on the shelves, it’s making money, which means there is a big market interested in this topic. That doesn’t mean definitely that it will make a good membership business, but it’s a good starting point.
Watch and listen for fanatics in your daily life. Pay attention to conversations, social events, TV, restaurants, public places to see what people are talking about. If people are talking about something, they probably want to know more about it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
Don’t forget about clubs and organizations. If there are enough people to to build a club, there are certainly enough people to start a membership site on the same topic. Conventions are expensive to hold and attend, so if one if going on that’s another strong indication of a good niche to go into with your membership website.
Think about the things that you are interested in. Chances are that if you like a certain topic or hobby, other people do, too. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
One simple and easy way to find out what’s hot is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. These topics are the hottest topics because lots and lots of people want information about them. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.

Step 2 – Determine the financial feasibility

After selecting a possible niche to build your membership site around, the next step is to find out if it’s a profitable niche to be in. An easy way to determine this is to figure out if anyone else is making money in this niche.

Here’s a punch list for figuring out if anyone’s making money in your niche:

Are there blogs or forums in this niche? Take the name of your niche and search for “niche name blog” & “niche name forum” in Google to see if there is an active group of people talking about and interested in the niche. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
Watch Google Adwords for a period of time and look for ads the run again and again. Adwords ads are expensive, so people only run them repeatedly if they are profitable. And to be profitable, they have to be selling products and making money.

Finally – Figure out your barrier to entry

After figuring out a good niche and determining that other people are making money in it, the last thing to do is decide if you will be able to enter the market. How do you gauge the ease of entry?

Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it’s mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. That’s because it’s much easier to build a membership business around information vs. any other kind of product.
The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Some niches are made up of people who require lots information and have a very long lead time, and some markets are filled with people who will spend lots of money right now.

Putting it all together

So far, we’ve talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you’ve determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. Now that you’ve prepared properly, you’re success is 99% guaranteed. How to actually run your membership website is the only thing left to talk about…

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Traffic is King, but this comes FIRST

01 Sep

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

Before we begin

The first thing you need to do before you start going after any traffic is keyword research. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. So you need to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are worth targeting.

A couple things to keep in mind when doing keyword research:

Will you be able to rank for these keywords? You’ll have to analyze the competition and see what’s out there for this.
What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don’t buy anything. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
Another thing to think about is affiliates. If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

Of course, this all takes time if you plan to do it yourself. Hiring someone else to do it costs a lot of money. And that’s why most people skip this step! The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

Once you know your keywords…

Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.

Here’s a short list of sneaky traffic techniques:

Surveys
“Answer” Sites
Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

The truth is that people really enjoy taking surveys and finding out what other people think. You can use this fact to provide “sticky” content for other website owners. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. This allows you to get free website traffic from other people’s sites! This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Help” Websites

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. The other thing they can be used for is to get traffic to your site, leads for your business and sales! Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video

Video is huge and sites like YouTube and Vimeo are extremely popular. In fact, YouTube has over 2 billion videos watched per day! If used properly, video sites can get you more website traffic than you know what to do with.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you’ve written. Then simply record yourself reading the text and you video the screen with a simple screen capture program. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

The Bottom Line…

Getting traffic is not that difficult. Use your noodle and come up with things other people aren’t doing. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

So, start right now and:

Do your keyword research
Set up some viral surveys
Take advantage of the “help” sites
And don’t forget about video

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Affiliate Marketing Secrets

31 Aug

Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they do all the hard work of developing the product, making the sale, delivering the product and supporting the customer, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission, which for digital products can be 50% of more.

These are a some of the benefits

You can get started right away because you don’t have to create a product, set up a website and sales page, develop the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
There’s practically no investment of time on your part because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

There’s no denying that these benefits make affiliate marketing the best thing going!

There is one major drawback…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

Is there are way around this?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. If you do that, you can contact them again and send them back the product website multiple times. This will increase the number of sales you make. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
You’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

A lead capture page, preferably with video
One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

You’ll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. These kinds of services will build the whole system for you and then just give you a video squeeze page (with video), pre-written emails, content pages, etc. On the plus side, you’ll save a ton of time and money vs. trying to build this yourself. Plus you can get started instantly. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these compnents. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get an affiliate marketing system like this in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.

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