Internet Profit System

Archive for the ‘Make Money Online’ Category

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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.

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A few years ago, it was easy to make a few dollars on the Internet. You simply placed an ad on Google and let it run.

Clicks could be purchased for a little as 5 cents. With a little luck, a person could get customers.

But then a guy began to apply sales technics and psychology to produce sales without content. Using the combination of fear, greed and shortage, he began to produce massive income.

Then he started training others to do this and soon a group of men was dominating the Internet, promising much and giving little. They took in thousands of dollars and benefited very few.

Today it is so out of control that the government is beginning to crack down and for a change, that is good. To see these people hit with massive fines is refreshing.

You see their ads everywhere. Over night wealth, make money on autopilot, copy my ad, free report, etc, etc. Appealing to people with the idea basically that they can get something for nothing.

They began bidding on popular keywords and drove the price through the roof. With calculated effort, they began to get the top places on Google search.

When the sales begin to drop, they employ a cadre of affiliates to milk the market dry. Then they start a “new” launch, offering similar things with a different twist.

New people are suckered in and spend thousands more. When they finally realize the program does not work, it is usually too late to get a refund.

So the “gurus” keep marching on, devising new ways to peddle worthless, regurgitated information to the masses. They enlist affiliates to help and finally the word gets around and people stop buying.

Then you see their inflated prices cut drastically in a effort to sell more stuff. They begin to offer ‘free’ things in order to get a person on the mailing list.

Then the person gets hit with a barrage of ’special’ offers and “buy more stuff” until they finally tire of the game and unsubscribe.

You can always tell because these offers create a need to “buy now”. All merchants use some form of this in their advertising in order to motivate buyers.

But the hucksters imply you are getting the whole enchilada until you buy. Then suddenly, you find that for only $$$ more, you can get an “upgraded” version.

Then more emails offering you ad ons etc. You continue receiving the emails until you either buy or unsubscribe. It is a continuing practice because it works for them.

This makes it almost impossible for the “little” guy to make any money on the Internet. Because now the shysters have moved into “niche” markets as well.

The reason 97% of people fail with Internet marketing is because they just keep doing the old thing over. Simply changing gurus and offering the same old thing in a different package is a recipe for failure.

It was Albert Einstein who said: doing the same thing over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

It is still possible to make money on the Internet, but it is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Whether you have a job or work from home, The reality is, you do have to show up for work every day.

Sorry to tell you this, but, the idea of making money without working is a pipe dream.

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Selling products on the Internet can be a lucrative method for making money. However, selling a single product is not necessarily the best business model. It is much easier to make sales to an existing customer than to generate that first sale. Existing customers have already shown that they are willing to purchase and are not just tire-kickers. In addition, if they like your product you have probably generated trust so that they are interested in other products you provide. Clever marketers usually have a raft of products to offer on the back-end to take advantage of this.

Another method for tapping into this is to develop membership sites. In this way, every sale sets up a recurring income stream. However, there is an impression that setting up membership sites entails a lot of work. This can be the case if you want everything to be perfect before even opening such a site. In this case, you may spend months creating the site. The problem with this is that you may find that it is not very successful in generating members and that the time and effort has been essentially wasted.

Perhaps a better model is to develop membership sites quickly and be happy to ‘fail fast’. In reality, there will be some markets that a membership site is not suited to. It is better to find this out early and to cut your losses. On the other hand, if the site starts to generate interest then you can work on improving it.

One of the easiest ways to generate a membership site quickly is to use a content management system such as WordPress. Content needs to be placed on protected pages so that the casual observer or search engine cannot access them. After members sign up, you can use an autoresponder sequence to deliver the links to the content along with a password on a pre-determined schedule, such as once a month.

Of course, there are problems with such an approach. Security is not tight because a member could simply share the password. However, in many non-Internet related niches, such as gardening, you will find the members less technically savvy and less likely to try to breach security. If you are willing to spend some money there are many scripts and plug-ins that can take care of security and other features such as membership cancellations. This can be a wise investment, given that they tend to cost in the order of several hundreds of dollars for use on multiple sites while the potential for gain from even a single site is much greater. For example, a site with a conservative number of members such as 500 paying a paltry $10 a month would generate $5000 every month.

Remember, this is from one site. If you are willing to take action and are not afraid to take action you could easily have a number of such sites.