Building Your Membership Site Step by Step

Free membership websites can help Internet marketers in so many ways and they are relatively easy and inexpensive to set up that it’s a wonder there aren’t more of them. Don’t ever underestimate the power of ‘free’! Everybody loves ‘free’. Those who don’t have a lot of expendable income like free for obvious reasons but those who have plenty of expendable income LOVE ‘free’… maybe that’s why they have so much expendable income.

The fact is that people who are surfing the Internet are all looking for the very same thing… INFORMATION. Granted, they are not all searching for the same information but they are nevertheless searching for information… and they love nothing better than free information about whatever topic they are interested in and that is where a free membership website comes in.

There are two major parts to building a successful free membership website. The first one is to actually construct the website on the Internet. The second one is to get members to join the free membership website. Here is how to go about doing both of those…

Building a Free Membership Website:

Building a free membership website is pretty much like building any other kind of website with just a couple of additions.

1. Choose a topic for your free membership site.

This topic should be one that will attract the specific group of people to whom you want to market your products or services. In most cases you are advised to narrow your topic but in the case of building a free membership website, it is better to make your topic a bit broader.

2. The next step is to register a domain name that reflects the subject of your free member ship website.

3. It is true that web hosting comes with a domain name but you need a web host that will allow you to have as many domains as you want on the same server.
(I wrote about some great resources for registering domains and web hosting in my previous post.)

4. You will need a membership script for your free membership site.
(I also wrote about three membership scripts that you can check out in my previous post.)

5. You might want to add a ‘Refer a Friend’ button, as well.

Two sites on which to get this program are Send to Friends , and KC Scripts Refer a Friend.

6. You might also want to include a helpdesk option on your free membership website. This is strictly optional.

7. You need content for your free membership website.

The name of the game for free membership websites, as for all websites, is content, content, content. There are many ways to obtain website content. You can download and reprint articles from article banks or you can join a PLR website and get articles which is better in that you can do some rewriting of the articles to avoid duplicate content and make them your own. Check out PLR Wholesaler for some great plr content and training.

If you have the ability you can write your own articles or you can hire a ghost writer to write them for you.

The above are the information and tools needed to build a free membership website (or a paid membership website for that matter). Now you either build your site or have someone build it for you. Your web host service will have features that will provide for you to set up a blog or forum on your website and you will need to include that when you are constructing your website. Additionally, there are other features that will likely be included in your web hosting service such as polls or content management systems that you might also want to include in your website.

Promoting Your Free Membership Website:

Promoting a free membership website is done exactly the way any website is promoted. When you build any website the only person that is aware that it exists on the Internet is you so it is up to you to promote and advertise your site and let the rest of the world know where to find you.

You accomplish that task while you are building your own credibility. One will not exist without the other. A free membership website builds credibility and credibility builds a free membership website. There are several very well established ways to promote a website on the Internet…and the first three listed here are free.

1. Write (or have written for you) short articles, 300 to 400 words, and put them into article directories for others to use.

Your resource box will include a link to your free membership website. The same is true for eBooks. Either write short 10 to 15 page ebooks or have them written for you. List these ebooks at free ebook sites for others to download and be sure that there is a link to your free website on every page.

2. Post to blogs and forums on other related websites after you join them.

Don’t go in promoting your free membership site outright…Simply include a link to your free membership site in your sig tag and post thoughtful and helpful information.

3. Find link exchange partners and exchange links with them.

Since you are not actually selling anything it should be very easy to find link exchange partners.

4. Buy advertising for your free membership website in related E-zines.

This is a very cost effective method of advertising. The cost of advertising in E-zines is usually less than $20 and the advertisement is sent directly to those people who are going to be your best prospects for your free membership sites as well as for the products and services that you will be marketing to them.

In no time, your membership site will be off to a rip roaring start…

Feel free to check out these free membership sites, see how they run, how things are operated. You’ll see that it’s really not that complicated.

Free Monthly Websites
Social Bookmarking Exposed
Resell Rights Weekly

What You Need Before Getting Started

Building a free membership website is actually easier than it may sound..not super easy, but not that complicated either. There are so many associated advantages to having a free membership site that the little bit of trouble and expense will be well worth the time and effort that are required.

To get started on building your free membership website you are going to need some tools. The first thing that you will need to have is a web hosting service. There are actually two web hosting services that are excellent, reasonably priced and effective. You will have choices to make when you visit either of these two websites.

Web Hosting:

Host Gator

(This one is my personal favorite and the only one I use) You will see that there are several choices of servers ranging in price from a measly $6.95 per month to a whopping $174.95 per month. The service that will most likely serve your needs for a very long time can be found under the fist choice of ‘Personal Hosting’. When you click on the ‘learn more’ link, you will see that there are several choices beginning with a ‘hatchling’ account and all the way up to a Semi-dedicated account.

Net Host

When you visit this site, click on the middle button that says ‘$14.95 more info’. You will see that you are being offered 500MB of disc space and a site builder for $14.95. Larger amounts of disc space are available for more money each month. I’d start with the $14.95 and then add additional disc space as needed. There is a Site Studio offered with all of the plans but it isn’t free with any of them.

Domain Names:

Now you need a domain name. Domain names are very specific and completely unique. When you type in a domain name, your computer takes you to that website and ONLY to that website. To start with you should think up several possibilities for your domain name. Using your own name in the domain name will make it easier to find one that hasn’t already been taken. But a better way to think is to use keyword specific words related to your memberhips site. You aren’t very likely to find the simplest ones to be available so you are going to have to get a bit creative. Here’s a two places that you can register your domain name. There are others…

Name Cheap

Here you will see that it will cost you only $8.88 to register your domain name. There will be many offers for additional names and products. What you really need here is a domain name for no less than two years. You do not need to pay for anything additional that is offered.

GoDaddy

Here you will see that you can register your domain name for $8.95 per year. Again…you will be offered many extras but all you really need is to register your domain name for two years. The reason you need to register it for two years is that search engines really don’t like domains that are only registered for one year. Spammers tend to only register for one year at a time because they won’t be at the same location for anywhere near that long.

Membership Software:

If you are going to have a membership website, then you must have the software that will accomplish that. There are basically three sites that you should visit and look over the product offered on each site.

1) aMember

2) Launch Formula Marketing

3) Butterfly Marketing

Theme and Content:

As with every website, there must be a theme as well as content. There is a saying among Internet marketers that, “Content is King” and that’s pretty accurate. The only way that you can keep members visiting even a free membership site is to keep it constantly updated and loaded with fresh and relevant content that pertains to the theme of your site.

There are many ways to get good content. There are article banks where you can download free articles for reprint. There are sites where you can get PLR material that will provide good website content. You can also hire ghostwriters to write fresh content.

Blogs or Forums:

Most hosting services (both of the ones mentioned above) have included a utility called Fantastico. This feature allows you to set up a blog or forum on your membership site. In addition you can install such things as customer support, content management systems, polls and a host of other things. You really need to poke around in your hosting service to see what all is available.

Help Desk:

Installing a help desk is entirely optional. It is, by no means, a required feature for a free membership site. The software can be found at the HelpDesk website at http://www.perldesk.com/. The cost of the HelpDesk software starts at $99.95. Although this is not required the HelpDesk software can be very beneficial. It will allow you to you to organize your companies customer relations to a database backed browser based help desk. This can save you a whole ton of headaches particularly if you have multiple businesses.

Okay, that’s about it. You need a hosting service, a domain name registered, membership software, a theme and website content, a blog or forum and maybe a Helpdesk. This will be enough to get your free membership website off of the launch pad.

Stay tuned…and check out these examples of great free membership sites…

Social Bookmarking

Exposed Instant Bonus Page

Trafficwave Free Trial

What’s Not to Like About a Free Membership Site?

Just check out Free Monthly Websites…

Internet marketers and entrepreneurs of all kinds are quickly finding the many, many advantages to opening a free membership site. I’m actually in the process, I’ve got one in the works And even the savvy and well-established Internet marketers who already have paid membership sites are jumping on the free membership site bandwagon because they can see the obvious advantages.

Paid membership sites are usually limited to a specific number of members. This means that marketing is limited to that specific number. Limiting marketing possibilities is never a positive thing no mater what products or services are being promoted.

Of course, there are obvious reasons for limiting paid membership site memberships but the fact remains that a free membership site can be operated right along side a paid membership site and there is never any reason at all to limit the memberships available to a free site.

Three to six months is about the duration of a paid membership to most membership sites according to many paid membership site owners. Three to six months isn’t very long in terms of Internet marketing. Once a paid member drops his membership, the site owner must then replace him and that can get expensive.

On the other hand, membership cancellations at free membership sites are easily and cheaply replaced. Marketing to the members of a free membership website is absolutely unlimited. You can continue to market to free membership site members for as long as you want to. Free membership sites are easy to run and they cost almost nothing and yet the owner is supplied with an almost unlimited number of customers and potential customers to market all kinds of products and services to.

Let’s face it: Every Internet marketer must now have an opt-in mailing list in order to send bulk marketing emails. That’s the law that went into effect with the implementation of the CAN SPAM act. There is nothing anybody can do about it. If you send bulk marketing emails without the express consent of the recipients, you are subject to very heavy fines and the very real possibility of having your Internet business closed down – period.

So… why limit your mailing list to just a paid membership site? Why not build a free membership site and gain an unlimited number of names and email addresses to which you have the legal right to send marketing emails? There simply is not satisfactory reason for NOT having a free membership site…at least not one that I can see.

Free membership sites are easy to set up and easy to operate. Of course, there must be fresh and timely content but that’s a lot easier (not to mention cheaper) than constantly having to run PPC campaigns or paying for advertising in related E-zines to attract members to your opt-in list and thus gain their permission to market products and services to them. Think about it…

We all know that visibility on the Internet is one of the basic keys to successful marketing. Getting visibility is one of the hardest tasks that most Internet marketers face from the inception of a marketing idea. All Internet marketers well understand the value of writing and marketing articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums that belong to others and doing PPC campaigns, as well as, exchanging links and paying for advertising in E-zines and newsletters.

With a free membership website, you can almost guarantee yourself, not only a long list of customers and potential customers but that others will be willing to pay YOU for advertisements on your free membership sites and advertisements in the newsletters that you send to your very impressively long list.

I’ll be writing more on this topic soon. In the meantime, check out some other free membership sites:

Social Bookmarking Exposed
Instant Bonus Page
Trafficwave Free Trial

Make Money Online with PLR and Resell Rights

I have found one of the best ways to make money online, and actually establishng your own business is through acquiring private label rights and resell rights products. After acquiring these types of products, i.e. ebooks, software, etc… you can then turn around and sell the product as your own.

One of the many reasons why obtaining the resell rights and private label rights and then selling them is so great is because most of the work has been done and you do not have to do a ton of work, (like writing an ebook from scratch). For example, if you purchase the resell rights to an e-book or a software program, you will not have to create the e-book or software program. This is ideal because the development of these products not only takes time, but special talent or skill. Private label resell rights allow you to skip the hard work, tweak it a little to make it your own, and then concentrate on selling the product.

And you can probably find a product in any niche you are passionate about…

Make sense? You bet it does…

But, you’re probably asking, where do I find resell rights and private label products? They are all over the internet, just google it. There a quite a few membership sites out there that provide these products, and the prices are really reasonable.

But even better, just this week a site opened it’s doors, Resell Rights Fortune, and it has to be the largest searchable, fully categorized database of resell rights products ever. This is a breakthrough in the internet marketing scene – no more searching all over the web for these types of products, because now they are all in one place! It’s like having your own personal library of resell rights products that you can access anytime.

If you are already using resell rights and private label rights or if you are considering it and looking for more ways to make money online, definitely visit Resell Rights Fortune and get started…

I don’t think it can get much easier…

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Okay, so I just wanted to take a few moments today and share some extremely valuable information with you. I’m not kidding, this is quite good, so listen up…

We all know that list building is a very important part of affiliate marketing, or any kind of internet marketing for that matter, but have you heard any talk of new list building strategies as of late? I guess everyone goes along, using what we already know, day in and day out, gathering subscribers. That’s all well and good, but don’t you really wish a completely new strategy would surface, something completely “outside the box” and one that won’t cost you an arm and a leg?

(Drumroll…please…)

Guess what… I have some totally excellent news for you…that strategy has surfaced… infact two awesome strategies have surfaced – both have the “wow factor” AND => You can learn these strategies free, yes free of charge. I was blown away by both, couldn’t believe how simple these were to implement, had an “ah ha” moment, and actually set them up – yesterday.

I’m sure you have heard of Socrates Socratous, a brilliant internet marketer. Well, something I did not know – he has a subscriber list of over 250,000 people. Someone to pay attention to, I’d say. Socrates has just revealed two new list building strategies AND he is sharing them – with all of us. He is just too cool

Seriously guys, you will want to check these videos out. The content is excellent, there’s absolutely no sales pitch, no hidden agenda, just pure powerful content. And it’s not the same old stuff…trust me, most of you probably have not seen this before. Just look at the size of Socrates’ list…do you think this might be powerful?!

Take a few minutes, visit this page, and you’ll get full access to both list building, subscriber generating videos.

Don’t “wait ’til later”, do it now – you won’t be sorry!

Enjoy!

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