Archive for membership site
How to Crush It
Posted by: | CommentsDo you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.
As you know part of my monthly income comes from having a membership site for guitar lessons. 
If you pick up a copy of the Wishlist Member plugin for your membership site (the one I use) during this month of October, you can get a free copy of Gary Vaynerchuk’s newbook called “Crush It”. The second gift is an exclusive interview with Gary. Later this month they will be interviewing Garyin person and during the interview they’ll dig deeper into Gary’s strategies for creating anonline following and how it relates to membership sites.
You can get more information about the Gary Vaynerchuk Special Offer on their home page (click the image).
The Importance of Getting Traffic to Your Website
Posted by: | CommentsMost of us appreciate the need to get traffic to our websites but this important factor is often lost on newbies when they aren’t making sales. In many cases the lack of results, when it comes to online sales for well-converting products is due to low traffic. It might take 100-200 visits to a sales page before you get a sale so many times this amount of traffic has not been obtained.
I don’t know about you but when I see blog posts about how someone made $70,000 in 7 days it is not only NOT motivational, it also makes me angry (serenity now!). What they don’t usually tell you is all the up front preparation that went into getting those sales, in other words, the pre-launch efforts. And for many of the gurus they have huge email lists and larger than life reputations and usually many joint venture partners and affliliates. So in other words there are getting large highly-targeted traffic to their offers. The other issue is that making money is not usually a big bang approach but a daily and consistent effort over time. Having said that I am happy for people who are able to achieve this level of success.
Of course you need a purpose before you get traffic. Are you trying to get opt-ins to your email list? Are you trying to sell something? Are you trying to send traffic to another of your websites or pages? Once you set up this page for its specific purpose you then should work to get traffic to it.
You also want qualified traffic. This is traffic that is interested in your niche. If you have a guitar lesson blog but you get people who are looking for guitars then this is not qualified traffic. You want to make sure the keyword phrases for your niche are in your content. Try using less competitive keywords as well. Trying to compete with ‘guitar lessons’ for example may be almost impossible for most of us.
It’s also great to get repeat traffic because it often takes many repeat visits for people to buy. This traffic usually comes from those in your email list, those that have subscribed to your blog posts, those that subscribe to you Youtube channel, or those in your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc). Search engine traffic is most likely people that are new to your website. So you want to capture them either via email, subscribing to your blog, or following you on Twitter, Facebook and so on.
Educate Your Market
Posted by: | CommentsIn yesterday’s post on the Online Learning Market, I explained how huge the e-learning market is and how we all need to educate our customers whether we sell our own or other people’s products. If you’re not educating your customers you’re probably not very successful today.
Today I want to give you some examples of how I educate my customers and what the different goals are for each. One of my main goals is to give you real examples that are working for me and others today, not a bunch of theory.
Adsense Revenue
I use YouTube videos with YouTube’s revenue sharing. Go to YouTube to see my free video guitar lessons.
I also have Adsense on my free guitar lessons website. Notice the right sidebar near the bottom has the Google ads.
You need to evaluate whether you want to get revenue from the readers or from businesses. I see it as a motivation question – Who is more motivated to pay for your content? Often times, businesses who want to be noticed by your readers are motivated to pay because they want to sell their products.
Affiliate Marketing
Sometimes in the YouTube videos I link directly to the affiliate product in the video description. Some people prefer to send leads to an opt-in page where they get their email address and market to them later. I do that in many cases too, but you need to mix things up and see what works. There’s something to be said for impulse purchases. They see your video or post, get pumped and go and buy.
In the right sidebar of the following sites I put some affiliate links in there, so they appear on every page. Here are some examples:
-Free guitar lessons
-Membership sites
-Work at home (this site)
Social Networking
I often blog on my sites to educate my readers. You can see that in this blog but also on the ones already mentioned. This is also good for the search engines as they will find your content and hopefully serve it up to searchers in your niche.
I use Twitter and Facebook to post links to these blogs as well. The goal is to educate my readers. I don’t do much of any selling directly in the social networking sites.
Email Marketing
I usually offer something of value to obtain my reader’s email address and build a relationship with them. Then over time I send them useful information that is hopefully helpful to them. You can see an email signup form at http://willkriski.com on the right sidebar. I use Get Response for email collection. It improves your chances of getting read (not filtered as spam) and allows you to send a series of automated follow-up messages and broadcasts to large groups of people all at once.
Articles and Other Sites
You need to get your educational content out there, not just on your own sites. One such site that takes articles is EzineArticles.com (my profile there). You can post your content on other sites such as Wordpress, Squidoo, HubPages, and help people in forums and other people’s blogs (via the comments area).
Information Products
A more direct method is to actually sell your own educational content. Here are some of my own examples:
-Overnight Membership Site Course – a video course on how you can set up and market your own membership site quickly
-http://onlineguitarcoaching.com/fretboard-blueprint – learn how to solo over chord changes and visualize the fretboard
-Get Rich as an IT Consultant – my e-book on how to make big money with IT subcontracting
Membership sites
If you want to create an online learning environment of your own, you might want to create a membership site. Here’s an example that I have created for learning lead guitar. This is a private members-only area where people need to sign up and pay on a monthly recurring basis. They need to login to get access to your site. I use Wordpress and the Wishlist Member plugin. I’ve created 7 video courses and continually add new content there.
So whether you sell your own or other people’s products, you will need to educate them first, which is often called ‘pre-selling’. So hopefully that will give you some real examples of how you can educate your readers, and how to monetize that readership!
Make More Money, Even in Bad Times
Posted by: | CommentsPeople have a lot of debt these days. And they’re worried about losing their jobs. There are lots of practical tips out there these days for consolidating loans, reducing spending and so on. I consider that to be only one side of the equation. And I don’t know about you but it sounds pretty painful to cut back on healthy foods in favor of cheaper junk food, selling your home, and other restrictions.
You rarely see anyone talking about how to make more money, especially when times are tough. I think this is a fatal mindset. You need to be taking action at all times. As I mention in my ebook, you need to find a niche market. This is probably the number one thing you can do to increase your rates. Getting higher rates is also a matter of psychology – how you feel about yourself – that comes across in discussions and interviews.
Another area you might want to consider if you have a full-time job is to start an internet business. These can be started fairly cheaply these days. It’s a good idea to test your idea first, but creating a small basic offering and test it with some Google adwords for example. I’ve seen many people invest their life savings into an idea they’re passionate about and end up broke.
My advice is to create some information products like an e-book or better yet a membership site. If you don’t have any specialized knowledge (most of us do) such as a hobby or job skill, you can find someone who does and partner with them. They provide the content and you set up and run the site for them. If you don’t have any technical knowledge drop me a line and I’ll send you some pointers. I’m looking at setting up a new site to help people like you set up their own membership site step by step. Most of it isn’t that technical, there’s no software to install for example. And you can work on this on the side. At a minimum it can help pay off some of your debt, and best case you can quit your day job and work on it full time!
