Internet Profit System

Author Archive

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Your online business, large or small, relies heavily on the use of email. Almost immediately, the volume of emails that must be responded to will become overwhelming and take up a huge percentage of your time. At some point you begin to realize that investing in an autoresponder has become a necessary business expense.

With the aid of an autoresponder, keeping up with emails becomes much less of a chore. Once it’s installed and a few scripts have been written, your business begins to run on autopilot, freeing you from an onerous task and allowing you to spend your time more productively, creating products, researching money-making opportunities, building partnerships, or cultivating the connections you’ve already made. The efficiency of an autoresponder not only gives your business an edge, and allows you to maximize your time to better effect, but also makes your customers feel as if they’re being treated with consideration.

Visitors to a website expect an immediate response when they send you a business related email. If you delay or procrastinate in replying, the visitor you’re hoping to convert into a paying customer may conclude that you’re too busy, too uninterested, or too unprofessional to give them the courtesy of a swift response, and will turn their attention elsewhere. With an autoresponder, they will get the instant acknowledgment they want, as there is no lag time between their request and the automated email reply.

When you are ready to purchase an autoresponder service, bear in mind that they aren’t all built the same. They will differ in terms of exactly what they offer, and you need to shop around, keeping your personal situation in mind as you review the features in each individual program. Of course, price is a consideration as well. But there are many different programs you can compare and contrast, and finding one that meets your unique needs and budget is no problem. Take the time and do your research into what’s out there; it will pay off in the end if you do your homework first.

This is your business – your livelihood. You don’t want to cut corners when it comes to customer service. Email is the best way to communicate with customers and visitors to your website. While there are certainly impulse buyers who feel no need to contact you before buying, there are many who are reluctant to part with their cash until the questions that will help them in their decision making process are answered. Your providing them with a prompt acknowledgment of their request for assistance will go a long way toward impressing them and persuading them to give you their custom.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

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.

You visited a few times and I would appreciate your thoughts on this post, why not comment?

Google offers a free statistical tool to analyze your website visitors. It is called Google Analytics. It is very easy to use. Once you sign up with the service and add the URL of your website, you get a snippet of Java Script code that you add onto every web page you want to track.

Google Analytics tracks visitors from all sources, including display ad campaigns, PPC (pay per click) campaigns, organic searches from search engines, email marketing, bookmarks, websites that have your inbound links, and other digital sources like URLs embedded in PDF files or Power Point slides. It designed for online marketers who want to track visitors to their sites for improving user experience and conversions.

Why do you want to use Google Analytics? There are several reasons for that.

You want to know if your marketing campaign is going in the right direction or not. For example, if you are doing article marketing to drive traffic to your site, you want to know the article directories that are the most effective in sending visitors to your website.

You don’t want to waste your time submitting articles to directories that are not sending you any traffic or a very low amount of traffic. You can write more articles and submit to only those directories that are sending you a good amount of traffic.

If you are using a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, you should use split testing to test the effectiveness of different ads. You want to know which ads are performing better than the others in terms of conversions. If you integrate Google Analytics with your AdWords PPC campaigns, you will be able to track the effectiveness of each ad you are using in your PPC campaigns.

Using data from Google Analytics, you will be able to find the pages that are getting the most traffic from search engines, bookmarks and inbound links. Knowing this information helps you spend time on optimizing only those pages that are getting the most traffic.

You can work on providing improved user experience of your site on those high traffic pages. Make it easy to navigate those pages from anywhere in your site. Place a “What is new” about your site on those pages.

If you’re selling ads on your site to advertisers directly, you need a visitors portfolio of your site. This portfolio contains information about the number of monthly unique visitors to your site, visitors’ geographic locations, the number of page views per visitor, the bounce rate of visitors, etc.

The more information about your visitors you can provide to your prospecting advertisers, the better is your chance of commanding a premium price for advertisement spots on your site. Google Analytics will help you develop a visitors portfolio of your site.

Even if you are not going to use visitors data immediately, you can still sign up for Google Analytics and let the tool start collecting visitors data about your site. When you need those data, you will have them in your Google Analytics account.