One effective way of gaining targeted traffic to your site’s sales page is to utilize viral marketing. Viral marketing is where you allow people to receive a product, such as an ebook, for free and enable them to pass it around to people they know.

The key behind this concept is to have links to your membership site’s sales page inside the ebook. That way, people who open the ebook and read the contents will see a description of what your membership site can offer them and a link to the sales page.

Of course, you need to give a reason for why other people will pass around your ebook with links to your sales page in it. Some may just do it because the information inside the ebook is quality information about what your membership site can offer them, but a more convincing reason for people to pass around your ebook is to allow them to rebrand the ebook with their specific affiliate links; that way, if someone signs up for your membership site via their link, they will get a percentage of their recurring membership fee as a profit.

While this will cut into your profits somewhat, you’ll still gain profit you likely wouldn’t have otherwise without your affiliates passing around the rebranded ebooks.

For more information on viral marketing to promote your membership site, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

This is why many Internet marketers have embraced the idea of having their own membership sites – a business model that enables them to make residual income again and again from the same customer who purchases access to their membership site.

This is not to say that successful membership sites don’t involve hard work – they do. You have to have a good target market to present the site to, which involves building the site around the right topic or niche so that it is sustainable for the long-term. You also have to have the proper web hosting, software platform, and/or payment processor in order to be able to take the recurring payments and allow the right people access to your site, while keeping those who haven’t paid the membership fee out. You also have to be able to update the membership site continuously with current news and resources regarding that topic or industry.

However, the thought of making residual income from each member is enticing to many Internet marketers, especially when compared to having to create multiple ebooks and/or software products each week or month and selling each one or a combined package repeatedly just to try to make ends meet. When selling ebooks and software products, your success will depend solely on how many individual sales you can make. With the membership site business model, if you can keep a paying customer for the long-term, you will keep earning residual income from him/her for months and even years to come, which is considerably easier than trying to make individual sales repeatedly.

For more information on membership sites, read “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

However, it’s not always easy to come up with new fresh content, especially if you’re not overly familiar with the topic or niche your site is centered around. While it’s likely a good idea to always have some knowledge of your topic or niche before building a membership site around it, there are also other ways to add new fresh content to your site. One way is by outsourcing the job of creating new content for your membership site.

You can post on sites such as eLance.com your assignment of coming up with new fresh content on the topic or niche your membership site is built around. Of course, you’ll have to pay to have this done, and the amount of money you pay will depend on how much work you are outsourcing and how much the freelancer asks for. While it’s not always the case, more money spent will often lead to better work produced.

Utilizing a quality freelancer can be a great way to provide quality content on a topic or niche that you are not that experienced in and are unable to write quality content on. While you can build a long-term relationship with the freelancer to regularly provide you with quality content for your site, you can also take advantage of this by learning more about the topic or niche your site is centered around so that you can write up quality content on that topic or niche in the future as well. Then you could provide twice the amount of quality content each update period, which will likely go a long way toward pleasing and retaining your members.

For more information on membership sites, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

The answer mostly centers around the idea of residual income. Residual income is where your customers will pay you on a continuous basis for work that you mainly do once. In the case of a membership site, you do have to update the website with new fresh content, so it’s not exactly “work just once and get paid repeatedly,” but you don’t have to create another membership site from scratch or sell another product such as an ebook or software product in order to gain more income from the members of your site.

In the offline world, residual income often comes from being the owner of a property you rent out to tenants or if you have stock in a company, but whereas you have to pay money to repair any damage done to the property or risk losing profits if your stock goes down, with membership sites, you just have to maintain and increase the value your customers are receiving in order for them to remain members of your site and for them to keep paying you residual income. You continue to provide value and you’ll continue to get paid continuously. That is mainly why many Internet marketers are incorporating the membership site model into their businesses.

For more information on residual income and membership sites, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

There are many effective ways to do this, but one of the most popular methods in recent years is by utilizing the social networking websites, such as MySpace and Facebook. These social networking sites involve people creating profile pages that identify who they are, what they like to do in their spare time, what occupation they are in, and other information that identifies who they are.

These sites will allow you to invite other people as “friends” and accept other people’s invitations to become their “friends.” You can often find many people who are in the same industry as you and who you had never heard of before. This can open up the possibilities of joint ventures and affiliate marketing opportunities with these people, since they are in the same or similar industries and are out to make their businesses more profitable as well.

Additionally, you’ll likely meet people on these sites who make up the target market you are looking for. By utilizing the features of the social networking sites, such as the blogs they allow you to post on and even the profile pages themselves, you can put up links to your membership site’s sales page so that people who read your profile page and/or your blog can check out your membership site offer and join up. An additional benefit in regards to the links you place on your profile page and/or blog is that they will be one-way links, which are more highly regarded by the search engine rankings when it comes to ranking your membership site in their listings.

For more information on social networking and membership sites, read “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

However, there will be many people who will not purchase membership on their first visit to your sales page. Recent studies have shown that it takes at least 12 contacts before you can expect a person to purchase an offer.

Therefore, you’ll need to contact a person an average of 12 times before he/she will be willing to purchase membership to your membership site. The problem is, if your visitor leaves on the first visit, how do you expect to contact him/her again after he/she leaves?

This is where autoresponders are quite useful to your business. On your sales page, you should make sure you contact the person’s name and email address so that you can follow up with him or her in the future until he/she is ready to purchase access to your membership site. If you don’t collect the person’s contact information, you’ll have no way of following up with him/her, and essentially, lose any realistic chance of having that person sign up for membership to your membership site.

For more information on autoresponder marketing and membership sites, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

This is why autoresponders are so important to the success of an online business. Autoresponders enable you to follow up with that person until he/she is ready to purchase access to your membership site. Utilizing follow-up marketing can greatly increase the amount of residual income you can make.

One good way of making sure you gain the person’s contact information when he/she arrives at your sales page is to have a web page appear upon arrival that will require him/her to give his/her contact information before he/she can proceed to the membership site’s sales page. This way, you can be sure that you have that all-important contact information.

Some Internet marketers may be fearful that this will just drive people away, but most argue that those people who are not willing to give up their contact information to access the sales page will be very unlikely to give you more personal information such as their credit card number or logging into their PayPal accounts, so essentially, you’re weeding out those people who have virtually no chance of becoming members to your site, so the squeeze page strategy is considered to be an effective strategy for gaining the all-important contact information you need for follow-up marketing.

For more information on following-up with your subscribers and membership sites, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

However, in order to be able to utilize autoresponders and follow-up marketing, you need that all-important contact information. One effective way of getting that information is via squeeze pages.

Squeeze pages are web pages that will require the visitor to submit his/her contact information before he/she can proceed further on the site. One way you could utilize squeeze pages in your marketing strategy is to offer to give free access to select areas of your membership site in return for their submitting their name and email address.

After they have submitted their contact information (which your autoresponder has record of), they can take a free tour of your membership site. Of course, they won’t be able to download anything or access the forum, etc., but they’ll be able to get an idea of the information and value contained within.

Once you have the contact information in your autoresponder, you can send some follow-up messages recapping what your membership site is all about, what they thought about the tour, and the link to the membership site’s sales page so they can purchase access to the site.

For more information on follow-up marketing and membership sites, read “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

Unlike offline selling, where people can see each other face-to-face and ask direct questions, online selling involves a sales letter that will lay out the benefits of the offer being presented. You will likely never see the faces of your potential customers, so your sales letter needs to be convincing enough that they will be willing to purchase access and set up a recurring fee.

Writing sales copy is not always easy for people who are skilled at it, as they will often take many hours to come up with certain parts of it, especially the headline and captions. You will likely need to practice your copywriting skills repeatedly using well-established techniques you can find in ebooks and other online sources before you can become proficient at it. However, this may be preferable to paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a veteran copywriter to write your sales page.

One important point to consider when writing sales letters: You should be able to summarize the main points of your sales letter using the headline and captions that are present throughout your sales letter. The reason why is because many people will not read websites word-for-word; they either are too busy or don’t have the attention span to focus all the way through a lengthy sales letter. But if you are able to summarize the main points throughout the headlines, subheadlines, captions, and P.S.’s of the sales letter, they’ll be able to scan through the sales letter and still grasp the offer you are making and the value you are presenting to them, which can lead to them ordering access to your membership site.

For more information on sales letters and membership sites, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”

You should consider the amount of hours you spent on working on the site. This includes creating the site, purchasing the domain name, purchasing the bandwidth, the cost of the software platform that maintains the membership site and the recurring payments, the time and money it took to provide the resources and information you have inside the site, etc.

You should also look at competitors’ websites, especially membership sites that cater to the same or a similar market as yours. See what they offer if possible; you may have to be a member of their site to see exactly what strengths and weaknesses they have, which you can do if you choose to do so. Looking at the site’s sales letter may provide you with enough of an insight to determine what strengths and weaknesses the site has. Check to see what price they are charging for access to their site, then compare your site and the benefits it will provide its members and price it accordingly.

You can also send out a survey to members of your target market to see how much they would be willing to pay for access to a site that provides specific benefits to them. Use that information as well to determine a fair price point for access to your membership site.

For more information on pricing and membership sites, check out “Membership Sites Made Easy: How to Cash In On Your Own Membership Site.”