Membership Niche Selection Tips

Let's talk about niche selection. This is very important to ensuring the profitability of your membership website.

Step 1 - Find a Fanatical Market

If you want your membership business to be profitable, you have to find a marketing with fanatics in it. Simply put, a fanatic is someone who's willing to spend time and more importantly money on a topic they are interested in. OK, so we know what a fanatic is, but how do we find them?

• 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. This is a very good indication that it's a good niche for you to go into.
• You've got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. If people are talking about something, they probably want to know more about it. And that may also mean they're willing to pay money to learn more about 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.
• And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! There's a good chance that others are interested in these things, as well. Making money is fun and it's even more fun if you can do it in a niche you're excited about.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. This service shows you the current most popular 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.

Second - Analyze the "commerciality"

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. One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.
Here's a punch list for figuring out if anyone's making money in your niche:

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for "YourNiche blog" & "YourNiche forum" and see what comes up. This tells you there are people who are actively interested in your niche.
• See if other people are creating and selling product in this niche by searching in Google Shopping, ebay and Amazon. 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.

Step 3 - Determine ease of entry

OK, so you found a hot topic and you know other people are making money on it. Will you be able to get involved and do the same? Here are some things to look at to figure this out:

• 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. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• The last thing you want is a marketing filled with tons of competitors. A few means it's a profitable niche, but too many means you won't be able to take a piece of it.
• 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.
• Market readiness. Are people ready to buy? Are the receptive to marketing messages? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.

In Summary

At this point you've figured out what niche you're going into. You found your fanatics, you know they spend money and you're confident there's room in the market for you. If you've done your homework, your business will be a success because you already know your market is a profitable one with room for you. Learning how to run a membership website is a topic for another article...

Traffic is King, but this comes FIRST

Visitors to your site are critical - getting them there automatically is even better. Here's how...

But, first...

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. The reason this is so important is that you are going to be building content and traffic sources for specific keywords. So you need to make sure the keywords you're targeting are worth targeting.
While doing your keyword research, keep the following in mind:

• How competitive are the keywords you're going after? This involves doing some competitive analysis to determine the ease of entry for each keyword
• Will the keywords you're targeting bring buyers? Certain keywords are good for generating a lot of visitors who don't buy anything. What you want is buyers!
• 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 make sure you are also targeting keywords to attract affiliates.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Experts are expensive and don't guarantee results. Which is why practically none of your competitors will do this! If you're smart you will use website traffic software to help you with this process. This will not only speed it up. It will give you better results, as well.

Only then can you start getting traffic

Now that you've completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.
Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Most people overlook the power of Surveys!
• "Traffic Traps"
• Video Websites

Surveys

The truth is that people really enjoy taking surveys and finding out what other people think. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. They benefit by getting free content for their site and you get a link to your site under the survey. Think about that - you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! Using just this one extra idea will put you ahead of your competition . . . who think surveys are for gathering information! So, get creative and make up a survey that's wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

"Answer" Sites

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. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Now, you can do this all by hand - visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. But a much smarter method is to use website traffic software to do it for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video Sharing Sites

Video is huge and sites like YouTube and Vimeo are extremely popular. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! If you're not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.
And don't worry if you don't have any idea of how to make a video. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you've written. And use free screen capture software to record yourself reading it. I've even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

In Closing

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. You can even use software to automate most of what we've talked about.
Don't waste any more time:

• Do your keyword research
• Next, set up a survey or two with viral appeal
• Make sure to use the "answer" sites
• And don't forget about video

Common SEO Mistakes

Think You Are Creating These Popular SEO Mistakes?

SEO is one thing practically every person that has a online business or blog knows about. The actual concept guiding SEO is simple acquiring the strongest rating on search engines like google so that you get the first chance at the preferred potential customers. As easy as the reasoning is, and at the same time straight-forward as the more usual tricks of getting SEO results are, a great deal of website and blog owners are making problematic problems which in turn cost them significantly in energy and time.

Tag: You’re It

Tags are many times misunderstood , and simply overlooked entirely by beginner marketers. It’s easy to skip the most uncomplicated of website or blog building elements when computer programs or systems execute the building for you. When it comes to many instances a web page creator may have meta tags hidden inside the menu bar, and drivers don’t take the trouble to re-define them. Considering that the very prevalent among majority of these software programs are WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get), people start making their blog by using the web page window , and then don’t think to alter the particular name of the saved document let alone all the underlying tag words. Monitor the top bar when you generate the web site. In a case where this tells you “home” you really really are really missing out on plenty of valuable SEO juice. One definitely should adjust the home page name on the site to help reflect your agency or internet site name, plus this moniker must display your primary leading level keyword or phrase in it if at all feasible. Unquestionably the equivalent is definitely valid with respect to blogs, except these items tend to end up being a whole lot less of a pain as you will be asked to pick a web address in almost all cases from the very beginning , plus title the blog. If, perhaps your blog’s hompage consists of “home,” found at the top , or within its actual address, find out strategies about how you has the capability to enhance that to be more SEO friendly.

Double Tagging

You would want to modify your current homepage to mirror the firm title that includes search terms , having said that you actually don’t really want each and every single page in your web-site to end up with the very same label. You actually lose your increased SEO benefits associated with variable pages any time they are all the same. You should really also steer clear of letting the webpages to be tagged using common names, like about, links, features etc. For illustration , in the instance that you have a internet site pertaining to your Arabian pony reproduction farm your hompage may well be marked My acclaimed Arabian Horses , but you wish to have your other pages to to mirror your content and articles while having SEO friendly tags at the same time. In place of “about,” utilize Our extraordinary Arabian Mating Tradition , as opposed to Race horses , introducing your stock employ something for example Our acclaimed Arabian Stallions, Arabian Mares. Rather than on sale title your site Arabian show ponies for sale , or something similar.

Non-Descript Calls to Action

Definitely one of the fundamental and most frequently found problems might be linking out to somewhat of a universal word like just click here. You might notice it all the time and it happens to be a beneficial inspirational strategy that will get people to press a web link. The actual trouble is in fact this link isn't actually search engine valuable. Every one of the web page links found on your site would need to bring in search engine juice. In place of marking them using commonly used phrases , place the follow this link within the actual text (bold in cases where you like to be extra aggressive ) as well as connect to a descriptive of exactly what you need these items to be able to navigate to. Like: To get additional information see more at selling procedures that work.

The Difficulties with Now

Last of all , subsequent to all of the challenging treatment , together with routinely working your site just about the most regularly occurring error in judgment web marketers make is in fact packing it in too early. We all reside within a “Now” world. It's been that way for many years , in addition to the impatience , and necessity to obtain exactly what people are looking for promptly is definitely particularly ingrained within your psyche. All the same , the moment the idea relates to SEO, it does take a little bit of time. You have got to make it possible for the spiders to come across you, and so permit every bit of ones hard worked pages, and articles time to reflect in the standings. Don’t count on visitors to pour on your web page the day after you submit it, even when you’ve done every piece right. It can take weeks, and perhaps months before there are real gains from your endeavors.

Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. What "affiliate marketing" means is that you just send traffic to someone else's website, they do all the hard work of developing the product, making the sale, delivering the product and supporting the customer, and you get paid 50% or more

The benefits of this are

1. You can start almost instantly with no up-front costs and no need to develop a product, set up a website and sales page, develop the website, create marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
2. You have practically zero time investment because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
3. There's no risk for you, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

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

The downside is...

Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you're losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

It's simple: You must get your visitors' email addresses before you send them to the product owner's website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you're really on top of your game, you'll then send to a content mini-site in between.
Here's what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. You'll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You'll be warming them up by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

Here's what you'll need to create affiliate tools like this:

1. A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.
2. At least a few pages of great content
3. An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails

You'll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.
You content mini-site builds the good will, so that when you send them to the product sales page, they are in a buying mood. And at the same time, the email series begins following up with them to get them back to the sales page, in case they don't buy on the first visit.
All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it's well worth the effort of setting it up. 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.
One option, if you're not up to the challenge of setting this all up yourself, is to let someone like Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. With a service like that, you don't have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. 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.
Another way to accomplish this is to hire "outsourcers" through a website like Elance to build and put your system together for you. The important thing is that you start using affiliate tools like the ones described here right now! Otherwise, you're wasting your time and money.