In this world you only have two types of assets: Money and Time. The easiest way to drive traffic to your site is to buy it. But if you are an Internet marketing beginner you probably don't have much money to invest in traffic building. In that case, you will need to invest your time.
The following traffic techniques are time consuming, but they are 100% free and will get you a fair amount of targeted traffic. If your site is properly optimized for monetization, you will soon be earning enough money to invest in buying traffic, and save your precious time to build new money making websites.
So here are 11 surefire free traffic techniques:
This tip is so obvious it will not even be counted, but it is often overlooked: submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and to as many other search engines as you can.
1. Use this proven Bum Marketing technique, write 5 to 10 articles and submit them to the free article directories. Of course you must include a link to your site in the article itself or in your bio box. The articles should be optimized for a keyword your site is targeting.
2. Find blogs related to your topic and leave useful comments with a backlink to your site. In the same way you could go to answers.yahoo.com, and answer questions related to your site’s topic. Off course put a link to your site in each of your answers. Another thing you should consider is joining the most popular forums that deal with your site's topic and becoming an active poster. Include a link to your site in your signature.
3. This one can be very powerful. Write a press release about your site and submit it to press release sites such as prweb.com. If you are not familiar with press releases, take some time to do a little research: a press release is not written like an article.
4. If you are happy with a product or service you have used, write an unbiased testimonial and trade it for a backlink to your site.
5. Start a blog on blogger.com and a blog on wordpress.com, link them to your site and submit them to the hundreds of free blog directories. This will get you plenty of quality traffic as long as you keep your blogs updated.
6. Try posting ads with a link to your site on all the free classified ad sites you can find (such as craigslist.com). The best ones will allow you to post a live link. But don’t neglect the other ones. If your ad is well written, people will go out of their way and type your url in their browser. Off course you must post in the appropriate category.
7. An easy way to get extra free traffic is to add a link to your site in your email signature.
8. Start a page on myspace.com and on any other high page rank social bookmarking site you can find. In the same way, go to Squidoo.com, open a few accounts, create a few lenses and link them to your site.
9. Submit a viral video to youtube.com. You don’t really need any video producing know-how as a simple PowerPoint slideshow with some background music will do the job perfectly.
10. Search your main keywords on Google and see if you can exchange reciprocal links with related websites that come up in the top results.
11. You could write an ebook or a short report (say 10 to 20 pages), or find a product with giveaway rights that you can brand with a link to your site. Then submit it to all the free ebook directories you can find online.
This last tip is not free, but is worth the extra buck. Check out the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors. If you find a good available domain, grab it and redirect the traffic to your site.
Now all this looks like a full time job! These techniques work, but you don’t have to use them all at once. Just pick the one you feel the best with and act now. Invest 30 minutes to an hour daily in building your free traffic. Then step to your next favorite technique and within a few weeks you should be earning enough money to afford to buy traffic and concentrate your time and efforts on building your online business.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
4 Essentials for Creating a Successful Paid Membership Site
For an Internet marketer, the biggest reason for setting up a paid membership site can be summed up very easily - recurring income. A small amount paid monthly by every member can quickly add up to either valuable extra income or even a full-time income if you have several membership sites and if you have a higher priced membership fee, you can quickly earn a very substantial annual income.
People will buy information that they could probably find on the Internet themselves if they had time and knew where to look, but often there is a higher perceived value when they have paid for it.
The challenge then is to find customers and then provide them with such good value that they will retain their membership month after month and hopefully also recommend your site to others because you pay them a generous affiliate fee.
There are four main criteria you need to consider to achieve this and they are:
1. Your site must be in an established membership type market.
2. You must provide excellent value content or service
3. You need to use software that will password-protect your site so that non-paying members cannot get the content for free.
4. A marketing system to attract new subscribers and retain them once they sign up.
Criteria 1 - Your Membership-Site Market
In assessing your potential membership-site market, consider both online and off-line habits. Ask yourself whether people with an interest in this subject would buy monthly magazines, belong to a club or organization about it and perhaps whether there are books on the subject on Amazon's best popular seller lists. Online, check if there are eBooks that sell well, blogs, forums or other on-line communities about this subject.
The topic must be popular enough to have many potential subscribers or you will be wasting your time. It is worth offering some free material, perhaps an ebook on your subject to see how many people have an interest it it. Another strategy to test your market is to set up a simple survey, asking what issues people have. You can offer free membership to your new site as an incentive for people to reply; the answers you receive will guide you as to what kind of concerns people have on this subject.
The information most in demand on-line is that which solves someone's immediate problem, so it is worth considering whether your content or service solves just a one-time problem or whether there could be an ongoing or related issues that you can address.
An example of a one-off problem would perhaps be a remedy for snoring and for an ongoing problem, think of new parents, who have many worries and sleepless nights when their baby cries, perhaps in the middle of the night and there is no-one they can ask for advice. A membership site that contains suggested solutions for the numerous problems new parents face would be a valuable resource for them.
Criteria 2 - Quality Content
The four main types of content are: written, audio, video and web-based software solutions. Naturally, the media type you use will depend on your site topic as some will be more relevant that others. Most sites will include a significant percentage of written material as this is still the primary method of sharing information on the Internet, but audio recordings are increasing popular because people can download them and listen when they are walking, driving, exercising or away from their computer for any other reason.
Video content is preferred when the information you are providing is instructional; "how-to" in pictures or a video can make a process very easy to understand compared with following a written list of instructions.
Another situation where pictures are helpful is showing symptoms of something. For example, for the new parent site mentioned above, there could be photos of the types of spots or rashes a small child might have on their body if they have caught any of the various common childhood complaints such as measles, chickenpox or have been bitten by an insect.
There are many sources of good content apart from writing your own if you are qualified to do so. Your own material is obviously the cheapest, but will take the longest to prepare and you need to know enough about your topic to keep providing fresh material on a regular basis.
Use other people's material by utilizing royalty free articles from article directories such as ezinearticles.com and free content sites, free to use videos from YouTube, metacafe.com or ehow.com or good quality PLR (private label rights).
Outsourcing is another option that will be less time-consuming although you will have costs for the ghost-writer or freelancer you contract to produce your work. Apart from the well-known elance.com & rentacoder.com, there are hundreds of other sources as a simple web search on "outsourcing" will reveal. If you plan to outsource on a regular basis, it is worth the time and effort to find a freelancer and develop a relationship with them, rather than going through a ghost-writing service provider.
Interviews with experts are something you can do yourself with basic equipment. Prepare a list of open-ended questions before the interview and send a copy to the person you will be interviewing two or three days beforehand. Any sooner and they might forget about it and any later doesn't give them time to prepare.
The following are some suggestions for interview questions that will give an expert the opportunity to give you excellent material for your membership site:
1. What is so good about .........?
2. How did you get involved in .........?
3. What do you consider the top 3 things someone should know about ......?
4. What would you suggest would be the best way to get started?
5. How long would it take to be proficient at ..........?
An hour is a good length for a value interview but you may want to go longer and edit the script later. This is easily done even with a free audio editor such as audacity.
Criteria 3 - membership site software to protect your subscriber's investment and save you time
If you can, invest in a specialized memberships-site software package or script. There are quite a number of good choices of varying prices, for example Membergate, Memberspeed, & Wordpress plugins like Wordpress Wishlist, Digital Access Pass (DAP), YourMember & aMember. The advantages of using one of these is that so many of the member functions are done automatically, for example:
1. Membership levels
2. Membership types
3. RSS Feed encryption so that non-paying members cannot access your content through the RSS feed
4. Sequential delivery so that someone cannot sign up and download all the material & then unsubscribe - the longer a person is a member, the more content they have access to
5. Payment gateways - preferably more than just Paypal
6. Training and Support
7. A good strong guarantee
Criteria 4 - Strategies for Recruiting & retaining members
1. Instead of focusing on trying to sell memberships, focus on how how one particular article of your content can solve a specific problem a person might have so that you are providing a solution to that problem and also giving one month's membership to the site for free.
2. Use free advertising by writing & submitting articles & reports, posting on blogs & forums, make squidoo lenses, hubs & other web pages.
3. Buy Pay per Click advertising and banner ads etc
4. List your membership site on Clickbank, Paydotcom etc
5. Email your list & if you don't have one, form a joint venture partnership with someone who does & pay them a generous affiliate commission.
There are many other marketing tactics that have been written about at great length and can be found in a web search.
In summary, if you can address the four main criteria of using an established membership type market, providing premium value content, using appropriate membership software and attracting subscribers, a paid membership site can become a very profitable business model.
People will buy information that they could probably find on the Internet themselves if they had time and knew where to look, but often there is a higher perceived value when they have paid for it.
The challenge then is to find customers and then provide them with such good value that they will retain their membership month after month and hopefully also recommend your site to others because you pay them a generous affiliate fee.
There are four main criteria you need to consider to achieve this and they are:
1. Your site must be in an established membership type market.
2. You must provide excellent value content or service
3. You need to use software that will password-protect your site so that non-paying members cannot get the content for free.
4. A marketing system to attract new subscribers and retain them once they sign up.
Criteria 1 - Your Membership-Site Market
In assessing your potential membership-site market, consider both online and off-line habits. Ask yourself whether people with an interest in this subject would buy monthly magazines, belong to a club or organization about it and perhaps whether there are books on the subject on Amazon's best popular seller lists. Online, check if there are eBooks that sell well, blogs, forums or other on-line communities about this subject.
The topic must be popular enough to have many potential subscribers or you will be wasting your time. It is worth offering some free material, perhaps an ebook on your subject to see how many people have an interest it it. Another strategy to test your market is to set up a simple survey, asking what issues people have. You can offer free membership to your new site as an incentive for people to reply; the answers you receive will guide you as to what kind of concerns people have on this subject.
The information most in demand on-line is that which solves someone's immediate problem, so it is worth considering whether your content or service solves just a one-time problem or whether there could be an ongoing or related issues that you can address.
An example of a one-off problem would perhaps be a remedy for snoring and for an ongoing problem, think of new parents, who have many worries and sleepless nights when their baby cries, perhaps in the middle of the night and there is no-one they can ask for advice. A membership site that contains suggested solutions for the numerous problems new parents face would be a valuable resource for them.
Criteria 2 - Quality Content
The four main types of content are: written, audio, video and web-based software solutions. Naturally, the media type you use will depend on your site topic as some will be more relevant that others. Most sites will include a significant percentage of written material as this is still the primary method of sharing information on the Internet, but audio recordings are increasing popular because people can download them and listen when they are walking, driving, exercising or away from their computer for any other reason.
Video content is preferred when the information you are providing is instructional; "how-to" in pictures or a video can make a process very easy to understand compared with following a written list of instructions.
Another situation where pictures are helpful is showing symptoms of something. For example, for the new parent site mentioned above, there could be photos of the types of spots or rashes a small child might have on their body if they have caught any of the various common childhood complaints such as measles, chickenpox or have been bitten by an insect.
There are many sources of good content apart from writing your own if you are qualified to do so. Your own material is obviously the cheapest, but will take the longest to prepare and you need to know enough about your topic to keep providing fresh material on a regular basis.
Use other people's material by utilizing royalty free articles from article directories such as ezinearticles.com and free content sites, free to use videos from YouTube, metacafe.com or ehow.com or good quality PLR (private label rights).
Outsourcing is another option that will be less time-consuming although you will have costs for the ghost-writer or freelancer you contract to produce your work. Apart from the well-known elance.com & rentacoder.com, there are hundreds of other sources as a simple web search on "outsourcing" will reveal. If you plan to outsource on a regular basis, it is worth the time and effort to find a freelancer and develop a relationship with them, rather than going through a ghost-writing service provider.
Interviews with experts are something you can do yourself with basic equipment. Prepare a list of open-ended questions before the interview and send a copy to the person you will be interviewing two or three days beforehand. Any sooner and they might forget about it and any later doesn't give them time to prepare.
The following are some suggestions for interview questions that will give an expert the opportunity to give you excellent material for your membership site:
1. What is so good about .........?
2. How did you get involved in .........?
3. What do you consider the top 3 things someone should know about ......?
4. What would you suggest would be the best way to get started?
5. How long would it take to be proficient at ..........?
An hour is a good length for a value interview but you may want to go longer and edit the script later. This is easily done even with a free audio editor such as audacity.
Criteria 3 - membership site software to protect your subscriber's investment and save you time
If you can, invest in a specialized memberships-site software package or script. There are quite a number of good choices of varying prices, for example Membergate, Memberspeed, & Wordpress plugins like Wordpress Wishlist, Digital Access Pass (DAP), YourMember & aMember. The advantages of using one of these is that so many of the member functions are done automatically, for example:
1. Membership levels
2. Membership types
3. RSS Feed encryption so that non-paying members cannot access your content through the RSS feed
4. Sequential delivery so that someone cannot sign up and download all the material & then unsubscribe - the longer a person is a member, the more content they have access to
5. Payment gateways - preferably more than just Paypal
6. Training and Support
7. A good strong guarantee
Criteria 4 - Strategies for Recruiting & retaining members
1. Instead of focusing on trying to sell memberships, focus on how how one particular article of your content can solve a specific problem a person might have so that you are providing a solution to that problem and also giving one month's membership to the site for free.
2. Use free advertising by writing & submitting articles & reports, posting on blogs & forums, make squidoo lenses, hubs & other web pages.
3. Buy Pay per Click advertising and banner ads etc
4. List your membership site on Clickbank, Paydotcom etc
5. Email your list & if you don't have one, form a joint venture partnership with someone who does & pay them a generous affiliate commission.
There are many other marketing tactics that have been written about at great length and can be found in a web search.
In summary, if you can address the four main criteria of using an established membership type market, providing premium value content, using appropriate membership software and attracting subscribers, a paid membership site can become a very profitable business model.
Crafting a Terrific Close to Your Sales Copy
Now that you have grabbed your reader's attention with your riveting headline and presented your product with great enthusiasm dispelling all possible resistance, included some killer bonuses that make your offer irresistible, it is now time to bring your sales copy to a close.
The close is as important as the beginning of the sales page. This is where the final hurdle is overcome. Therefore, it is to be crafted with great skill.
So what do you write in the close of your copy? And equally importantly, how do your put it across?
Most offers include multiple bonuses that complement the main product. To encapsulate the entire offer for your prospective buyer, summarize everything that he will be getting when he buys. The best way to do this would be by putting all bonuses and products into a table so that everything can be seen at one glance.
Next, the thing to do is to remove ALL risks for the buyer by offering a money-back guarantee. Most guarantees consist of merely a few lines giving assurance to the prospective buyer that he will get a full refund within a specified period of time. Here are two tweaks that you can make to have your guarantee really stand out.
Firstly, you should use an image of a certificate and put your guarantee wording in it. This gives your guarantee a more official and professional look.
Secondly, you can word your guarantee as a personal undertaking or agreement. In other words, instead of the usual "In the event that you are not satisfied for any reason, you are guaranteed a 100% refund...", you can word it as "Should you have any dissatisfaction at all, I promise to give you a no-questions-asked refund of every penny you have paid. All you have to do is email me...". Can you see how this makes your guarantee seem much more personal?
Also, your close should ask for your prospective buyer's action of accepting your offer. This is where your words must be very clear and specific. In fact, give your prospective buyer instructions as though he were a four year old child without treating him childishly.
You do this by giving explicit step-by-step instructions. For example, you could say, "Click the 'Order Now!' button now and you will be taken to our secure order page...".
To complement your order button, you could add some words that reflect the feelings you want your prospective buyer to have. For example, just above the order button, you could say something like, "I understand that I am getting XYZ product at the lowest price ever to skyrocket my sales. And along with that, I will also be getting ABC and DEF bonuses that will give me an unbeatable edge in my business. And if that were not enough, I will be getting a 100% 'love it or leave it' money-back guarantee...".
Lastly, you should sign off with your signature and name. One last powerful piece of copy you should include is a PS after your signature and name. Research has shown that people read PS's more than they do the main copy. Therefore, you would want to add a compelling statement in your PS such as a reminder about your guarantee or your amazing discount, etc.
These are the little tweaks that top Internet marketers use to really add more punch to their close. Now you can do it, too. for more information visit my website
The close is as important as the beginning of the sales page. This is where the final hurdle is overcome. Therefore, it is to be crafted with great skill.
So what do you write in the close of your copy? And equally importantly, how do your put it across?
Most offers include multiple bonuses that complement the main product. To encapsulate the entire offer for your prospective buyer, summarize everything that he will be getting when he buys. The best way to do this would be by putting all bonuses and products into a table so that everything can be seen at one glance.
Next, the thing to do is to remove ALL risks for the buyer by offering a money-back guarantee. Most guarantees consist of merely a few lines giving assurance to the prospective buyer that he will get a full refund within a specified period of time. Here are two tweaks that you can make to have your guarantee really stand out.
Firstly, you should use an image of a certificate and put your guarantee wording in it. This gives your guarantee a more official and professional look.
Secondly, you can word your guarantee as a personal undertaking or agreement. In other words, instead of the usual "In the event that you are not satisfied for any reason, you are guaranteed a 100% refund...", you can word it as "Should you have any dissatisfaction at all, I promise to give you a no-questions-asked refund of every penny you have paid. All you have to do is email me...". Can you see how this makes your guarantee seem much more personal?
Also, your close should ask for your prospective buyer's action of accepting your offer. This is where your words must be very clear and specific. In fact, give your prospective buyer instructions as though he were a four year old child without treating him childishly.
You do this by giving explicit step-by-step instructions. For example, you could say, "Click the 'Order Now!' button now and you will be taken to our secure order page...".
To complement your order button, you could add some words that reflect the feelings you want your prospective buyer to have. For example, just above the order button, you could say something like, "I understand that I am getting XYZ product at the lowest price ever to skyrocket my sales. And along with that, I will also be getting ABC and DEF bonuses that will give me an unbeatable edge in my business. And if that were not enough, I will be getting a 100% 'love it or leave it' money-back guarantee...".
Lastly, you should sign off with your signature and name. One last powerful piece of copy you should include is a PS after your signature and name. Research has shown that people read PS's more than they do the main copy. Therefore, you would want to add a compelling statement in your PS such as a reminder about your guarantee or your amazing discount, etc.
These are the little tweaks that top Internet marketers use to really add more punch to their close. Now you can do it, too. for more information visit my website
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