Create A Membership Website To Sell Your Knowledge

ByMargaret Winfrey

You can create membership sites to sell anything, but if you are knowledgeable about any specific topic then you can use them to sell that knowledge. You can do that in a number of different ways including articles, eBooks, videos and MP3 audio files, and which is most relevant to you will depend upon the type of knowledge you have.

People use the internet to seek information. Sometimes it is simply to have one question answered: a crossword question for example, or to find the answer to a question needed to enter a consumer sweepstakes. Perhaps they need information for school homework, or are trying to compile a trivia quiz. Whatever the reason, they are looking for information.

However, others are looking for more than that, and might be looking for information on the best way to find carp, how to lose weight or how to bring up their children properly. If you have that knowledge then you can create subscription sites to sell your knowledge and make money.

Take Golf as an Example

Let's take an example: golf, and how to cure your problems and improve your game. In discussing this example, keep in mind that you can apply exactly the same principles in your specific interest. Whatever it is that you are knowledgeable about; you can apply to this example - even if it's fishing, gardening, internet marketing, training dogs or quilting. People will join a subscription site to learn and to meet others with the same problems or interests.

You can have a page or two on solving golf problems, such as a slice or hook - one is the opposite of the other, and if you understand how to cure a slice, then sorting out your hook is the mirror image! Strengthen your grip for one, and weaken it for the other. Take a step back for one and forward for the other. In fact, you could have a whole page on the slice and hook.

You could then have sections on improving distance, the flex of a club and so on. More on training equipment, from weighted clubs to laser systems and full circle swing trainers. You could include information and tips on choosing golf balls. The whole point is, this is only for members of the subscription sites, and you do not offer this information anywhere else.

Create a Product to Sell - or Give Free

Another way to sell your golf knowledge would be to write an eBook including all your golf tips. Try to make it about 90 pages plus: it will take time to get together, but you could pay ghostwriters to do it for you. Once it is complete, get an account with ClickBank if you don't already have one, and put it up for sale, for say $47. It doesn't matter if it sells or not - if it does, great, but if not, it doesn't matter because that's not why it's on ClickBank.

Offer your members the first two chapters free - in fact you could offer the first chapter free on your squeeze page in return for their contact details. That way you can keep in contact with prospects that visit your website, but don't join the membership site. Then offer the first two chapters free to members on the site.

What you do then is to offer your eBook "Add 40 Yards to Your Golf Swing in 5 Easy Lessons" at 'less than half price' to members: $23. You can prove it is genuinely under half price by showing them your ClickBank price - that's why it's there! That is sure to get you some sales, so you make money not only from the membership fees, but also from sales of your eBook!

A Subscription Site Forum is Popular

You could also start up a forum: make sure the membership software you choose enables you to create subscription sites with a forum. There is some very good free forum software online, and a good membership software package should be able to integrate that into the site. That will then enable your members to discuss their golfing problems between themselves.

Once your members feel that they are in a club or 'family' of people with the same problems and issues as themselves, then they will keep on paying their monthly subscriptions - often just for that contact with like-minded people! A forum can make the difference between average subscription sites and great ones.

Apply These Principles to Any Niche

There is lot more you can do with your membership site, but do you get the general idea? The golf example can be applied to any niche. You can sell your knowledge both on the site and in the form of an eBook. Rather than the ebook you could offer members affiliate products on golf and also provide them with a monthly training course on improving their golf swing.

You could offer a similar course in 8 parts as a gift on your squeeze page for those providing their email address: that can be delivered by autoresponder along with a link to your registration page. It is easy to create subscription sites to sell your knowledge if you have a good subscription software package with which to run your site. Membership sites can be very profitable.

If you wish to create membership sites to sell your knowledge, and make good money doing so, then check out MemberDesk.com which is one of the most powerful membership software packages online, and also enables you to run blogs and a forum in addition to a subscription website.

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25 Simple Ways To Monetize Your Website

ByJulia L West

Here are 25 techniques for making money with your website or blog. Adding just a few of these income streams to your website could positively affect your bottom line!

25 Simple Ideas For Generating Income From Your Blog or Website

1) You could sell forum advertisements. You could also promote your online talents (for example, being a business manager).

2) You might market advertising on minisites. You might also sell your business skills (such as being a information researcher).

3) You can promote article byline ad space. You can also market your offline skills (for instance, being an investment broker).

4) You may sell advertising within your blog posts. You should also promote your Internet abilities (like being an Internet consultant).

5) You should publicize website ad space. You may also publicize your computer expertise (such as being a virtual assistant).

6) You could sell banner advertisements. You could also promote your graphic design specialties (for example, being a web site designer).

7) You might market syndicated ads. You might also sell your business skills (like accounting or bookkeeping).

8) You can promote viral advertising space. You can also market your offline professions (like being a finance specialist).

9) You may advertise backlink ad space. You should also promote your writing experience (for example, being a press release writer).

10) You could publicize chat room advertisements. You may also publicize your other skills (such as being an employee recruiter).

11) You could sell advertising space packages. You could also promote your expertise as a graphics designer.

12) You might market insert ads. You might also sell your specialized business services (such as being a licensed attorney).

13) You can promote footer advertising space. You can also market your talents as a proofreader.

14) You may advertise classified advertising space. You should also promote your other attributes (such as being a motivation specialist).

15) You should publicize signature file ads. You may also publicize your experience as an advertising broker.

16) You could sell pop-up advertising space. You could also promote your specialized abilities (like being a commutations specialist).

17) You might market corner advertising space. You might also sell your other business expertise (for example, being a chat salesperson).

18) You can promote "thank you" advertising space. You can also market your willingness to be a product tester.

19) You may advertise eBook advertising space. You should also promote your Internet skill as a market researcher.

20) You should publicize ad space on order pages. You may also publicize your computer technical skills (such as being a website repairer).

21) You could sell text link ad space. You could also promote your online experience as a contest promoter.

22) You might market blog advertising space. You might also sell your business experience as a forum message poster.

23) You can promote keyword advertisements. You can also market your ability to transfer an offline skill to the Web, such as being a human resource advisor.

24) You may market advertorial ad space. You should also promote your skill as a report writer.

25) You should sell "hover ad" advertising space. You may also publicize your computer talents for example being a skills trainer.

That makes 25 website monetization secrets for you to choose from. You have NO excuse for not generating some income from your website!

Julia West in a homeschool mom of three and full-time Internet marketer. She is dedicated to helping Internet marketing newcomers realize their dreams of generating income from their own online businesses. Pick up her FREE mini-library of SEVEN Internet marketing reports at http://JuliaWestOnline.com.

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Generating Content for A Membership Website

ByMargaret Winfrey

Subscription websites can be very profitable if you are able to keep your members. Most membership sites fail because of a lack of maintenance: the content is not updated often enough, and members feel that they are not getting value for their monthly subscription. What type of content is acceptable to members and how do you generate it?

Before we discuss that, we should first comment on a membership website itself and how to create a membership site to make money - then it will be easier to understand the importance of content. Fundamentally, you make money from member sites in two specific ways:

1. From the membership fees paid each month

2. From products or services sold from the membership site

There are also two fundamentally different types of subscription websites:

A. Those offering a continuing service

B. Those offering information and products

A. Continuing Services

Examples of a membership site offering a continuing service is a web hosting service, where you join up and pay a monthly fee to enable you to have your website hosted. Another is Wordtracker, where you pay monthly for continuous use of the keyword tool, or Submit Your Article where you pay monthly for their article submission service.

It is not essential with such membership sites to offer content other than the service itself. However, many do, and the last example stated frequently offers advice on how to write and submit articles. It is not essential, although it may persuade members to use that site rather than a competing membership website offering a similar service.

B. Information and Products

In this case, you are not offering a continuous service. When your members join, they get the content on your site at the time they join. They consider that value for their payment. However, next month, they expect more. They expect something different and equally as useful to them as last month's content.

Unlike Type A, you are not offering a service they need regularly such a keyword tool or an article submission service, but content in the form of information on their niche and products they can purchase. Unless you offer new content each month then you will lose members. That is not always easy to achieve.

Here are some tips on how to do that.

Article Content

If you write one article a week, you will have four fresh articles for your members each month. These should be unique to your site; generating content for subscription websites means unique content. It should not be something you have found online, or articles that you are also submitting to directories or search engines.

These articles could be split in focus. For example two could be informative, offering information on the niche, while two could be designed to solve a problem. State a common problem in your niche and then solve it. For example, in article marketing many people don't understand LSI. One article could explain what LSI means, and another could explain how to use it in writing an article.

Video Content

A lot depends on the niche, but instructional videos are easy to make if you have a simple webcam that allows you to save your videos. You could show yourself wiring a plug, changing a wheel bearing or grafting fruit trees. Get Camtasia, and shoot videos of you carrying out tasks online, such as changing a WordPress header or formatting text using HTML or CSS.

If you have a proper video camera, or have video on your digital camera, you could shoot videos outside of you training dogs, gardening, fishing, car maintenance and so on. Any of these would be good content for subscription websites on specific niches.

Product Content

Offer products for sale through your affiliate links. Don't push them too hard, but let your members know they are there is they want them. ClickBank is a good source of affiliate products in a wide range of niches. Some subscription software packages offer products with the package, and refresh them regularly. You can often personalize these, and even change them to make them uniquely yours.

You can offer your own products at discount prices, if you have them. Purchase resale rights and then sell the products at your own prices. Members love discounts if you can show them the same product on sale at a higher price elsewhere.

Satisfied Members are the Key to Success

If you generate content for subscription websites that keep your members satisfied, then your site will be a success. You must do this regularly, and the secret is to create content regularly throughout the month, so you are not struggling to get it all done on the last day. Although people will join your membership site at different times in the month, it is best to upgrade on one specific date - such as the 1st of the month.

This enables you to plan your content generation program, and review the content before putting it live on your site. You can retain existing content in an 'Archives' folder on the site for members to access, while fresh content should be more exposed. As your site matures, you will have an ever-expanding content library that you begin to categorize to help your members access what they need: members love fresh content for subscription websites, but they also love sites with lots in the archives.

If you are seeking one of the top membership packages in the world, used worldwide to create a membership site and offering regular new products for you to sell, then check out Member Desk on MemberDesk.com and find out for yourself what a high-end membership package should look like. Member Desk is the authority on all things membership website!

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How to Promote A Subscription Website Using a Squeeze Page

ByMargaret Winfrey

It is important that you know how to create membership sites as well as promote them if you are trying to persuade prospects to join your subscription website. There are many way to do this, although a squeeze page will figure in a number of them. Before discussing how to design your squeeze page, first a few words on general website promotion, and where a squeeze page would figure in this.

Although a squeeze page is a promotional tool designed to get the contact details of visitors to your website, it is not a means of advertising: it comes once the potential customers have been persuaded to visit your website. Before a squeeze page becomes operative, your basic advertising must first have been successful in prompting a prospect to click to visit your landing page: that page can be a pre-selling page, a sales page or a squeeze page, but whichever it is you should offer an opt-in form to your visitors before they leave your website.

Persuading Visitors to Stay

When you promote membership sites you have several problems:

1. Persuade people to read your advert or web page listing

2. Persuade them to click to visit your website

3. Persuade them to stay on your website long enough to read something

4. Persuade them to click to your sales page

5. Persuade them to click on your purchase button

6. Persuade them to part with their cash

That's a heck of a lot of persuading and is why 99% of people that try, fail to make anything online let along make a profit. Where most fail is between items 2-3 and 3-4 above. We must assume here that your advertising has been successful, and that you actually get a visitor to your website.

What Site Statistics Tell You

If visitors click on your advert or listing they must have an interest in your product: in this case your membership site. Your advert might have been "Join our membership site for secrets of a successful marine aquarium." Anybody clicking on that must be interested in the topic. If they leave between 2 and 3 then your site is either no good or they made a mistake.

Your site statistics should tell you how long visitors stay for, and you may have to improve the impact of your site to meet the promise of your advertising. If they leave between 3 and 4 then they might not be ready to join your subscription site. They might be thinking about it, but once they click away you will almost definitely never see them again.

That's what a squeeze page is for! You can use it three ways: you can make your landing page a squeeze page, you can add an opt-in form to each page on your website or you can use an exit popup form. Let's discuss the landing squeeze page, because that's what this is about.

Designing a Squeeze Page

Your landing page should back up your advertising. It should scream out at the visitors exactly how they will benefit from a membership site. Explain all the benefits in bullet points. Don't offer them a big long article to read - provide bullets and bite-sized chunks of text to explain what they will get out of a membership site.

Then offer them a free gift: perhaps the first chapter or two of your new eBook, maybe a free report on a topic relating to the niche, or best of all, an 8-part course on a topic related to the niche. For golf, for example, offer them 8 ways to improve the length of their drive in 8 parts, or 8 ways to catch the best carp and so on. They receive one part every day or two. It has been generally agreed that it takes 7-8 exposures to a product before the average person buys it - hence repetitive TV advertising!

The Opt-in Form

Then provide an opt-in form, explaining your need their contact details (first name and email address) to deliver the gift or course. Stress that their email address will not be given to any third parties, and used only by to contact them with information regarding improving their golf.

Then go on to explain what they get from your golf membership site. Your visitors will either click to your sales page (include your opt-in form there as well) or just fill in the form to get their free gift and leave.

If they leave without filling in the form, you could also use an exit pop-up form that pops up only on exiting the site - with an abbreviated form of your offer. Many dislike pop-ops but if they are leaving the site anyway, what's the harm. There are pop-ups available that show only if the visitor has not already filled it in or purchased a subscription so you don't annoy customers.

That's how to how to promote membership sites using a squeeze page: you can then keep in touch with the prospects by email, and they get the 7-8 exposures to your product when you send them the 7-8 parts of their course.

Although you can promote a subscription website in a number of ways, your site must meet the expectation of your customers once they buy. Check out MemberDesk.com for one of the world's top and most flexible subscription site software packages that can be used to create membership sites to make sure you keep your members happy.

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How to Use a Membership Website Profitably

ByMargaret Winfrey

To use a membership website profitably, you need three things: subscription site software, subscribers and products. Many people believe that it's sufficient just to have the subscribers, but if you fail to make use of them then you are leaving a good part of your potential income on the table.

Let's have a close look at each of these three components, and how to use them to your best advantage.

The Subscription Website

First the subscription site itself. The site should be managed by a good membership site package that enables you to make it uniquely yours and not just another member site, looking the same as everybody else's does that is using the same software. You should be able to use your own logo, graphics and name so that you brand it as exclusively yours. This is a very important aspect when you create a membership site.

There are subscription website packages available online that enables you to run it from your own domain if you wish to, and to use your own site as the membership site. That offers complete customization, so there is no sense of a loss of identity or branding. Each site produced using it will be unique, and you can also use the same package to run a number of different domains and membership sites.

It is very important that your site is populated with information of interest to your members. Try to mix it up a bit, and not have it all in the same format: such as all articles, or just a list of videos. Offer some articles, some videos and perhaps one or two PDF eBooks for them to download. Anything that gives the impression of value for money is good. Simple instructional videos are easy to make using a webcam.

Keep in mind that your members will be paying you every month, and expect to get value for their subscription fee or they will go. Your content must change monthly, or at least be expanded with something new each month to offer value for the money they are paying.

The Membership

You must attract members, which means promotion. You should promote your member site just as you would any other product. There are several ways to do that, including blogging, article marketing, search engine marketing and using social network sites. You could set up a Facebook fan page on your niche, with a link to the membership website included.

You should respect your members when you have them, and offer them good content. Pull yourself back each month, look at your site dispassionately and decide if you would pay the membership fee for what you are offering them each month. Perhaps you have a unique form of software that people will use regularly, and is worth the monthly fee - examples of that type of subscription site run by others include Wordtracker and some article distribution services.

Unless your product is of that type, you will have to keep on updating your site and adding fresh content. Members might agree that what they get on joining is worth the fee, but why should they keep paying you if nothing changes next month, and the month after that?

The Products

If you are to use a membership website profitably, or as profitably as you possibly can, then you should also sell products as well as offer information. Yes, you get paid each month by your members, but keep in mind that you now have a captive audience, so why not make use of them and sell them products that should interest them? Don't stuff products down their throats, but have them available for any member that might consider them useful.

There are membership software packages available that you don't purchase outright, but use by subscription. Your first few members will easily cover your monthly fee for using it, and in return you get the membership site software plus new products added each month.

Some of these products can be customized as though you originated them. You should also seek out your own affiliate products, from ClickBank for example, and you might even add a few CPA banner ads that relate to the niche. Check out Offer Vault for good CPA offers to add yet another stream of income to your site. There are many ways to monetize a membership site including selling advertising space once your membership has grown to a reasonable size. You can find out how much to charge online - it is usually based on your membership numbers.

These are the three important elements of a profitable membership website: the membership software, the membership and the products. The content is also of extreme importance, because without fresh content appearing each month, you won't have a membership. If you look after each of these three, then your subscription website will be profitable and you will be ready to get started on your next member site. That's the secret of online success - find out what works and then repeat it, again and again.

Information on how to create a membership website is available from the Member desk site at MemberDesk.com where you will also find one of the most powerful membership software packages available online. Member Desk is the authority on everything membership website!

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