Tips on Improving Your Membership Site

Improving and improving again your membership website is what will keep it dynamic and making a steady and reliable income. It is a law of nature (and the Internet) that everything either grows or dies. Constant improvement of your membership website will insure it grows and lives.

The content of your membership website needs to always be kept up-to-date with relevant and useful information. Keep your eyes open and all of your feelers out for information that your subscribers will find interesting and helpful. If you have always relied on only print information up to this point, try adding some audio or video. People today prefer to hear or see information rather than just to read information. Setting up audio or video feeds to your website isn’t very difficult and can make a huge difference in the traffic and membership.

Each e-zine or newsletter should be filled with vital and timely information so that your subscribers eagerly await the next issue. Spend as much time and energy as you need to insure that your e-zine or newsletter isn’t just deleted when it hits the in-box.

Use your autoresponder to your greatest advantage. You already use it to send out emails and ezines and newsletters. Now use it to send out vital NEWS FLASHES. Make the autoresponder get the attention of your subscribers.

If you don’t already have a blog, forum or message board on your membership website, then set one up as soon as possible. Members like to have input and you will benefit greatly from constructive member input. You can ask them what they would like to see on the website and then act on suggestions that are viable.

Invite a guest who is a guru in the field of your website theme to participate in an online chat discussion. Set a specific starting and stopping time and be sure to outline the discussion topics.

The Main Focus of Your Membership Site

Whatever the theme of your membership website is, it should always be your main focus. Every piece of written content, audio content or video content should be about the main theme of your membership website. Little side trips into very closely related fields is alright but even very closely related subjects should never detract from the main focus of your site.

When you chose the theme for your membership website, you chose it because it was something that you knew a lot about and/or were (and hopefully still are) passionate about.

I saw a sign in a convenience store not long ago that said something like….we strive to always be kind, considerate and helpful. However, it is hard to remember that the main objective is to drain the swamp when you are up to your ears (cleaned up) in alligators. That is true for owners of membership websites. It really is hard to stay focused on your objectives when you have so many things to distract you from doing what you need to do to keep your website focused on the main theme.

No matter how many distractions you have, you must still keep new, fresh, relevant and timely content on your website that pertains to the theme of your site.

Your ezines and newsletters need to be filled with helpful and useful information. Be sure to continually check for new products that would be helpful to your membership. New products come out daily and you don’t want to fall behind.

You need to make full use of your autoresponder to keep your members informed and to keep them focused on the objective, as well.

Your blog, forum or message board topics can become unfocused and off-topic very easily. They must be monitored daily…maybe even several times each day.

The Importance of an Affiliate Program to Membership Sites

Affiliate programs are important to membership sites for a number of good reasons. An affiliate program isn’t really a program. It’s a business arrangement.
Affiliate programs are also known as associate programs, associates programs, referral programs and even bounty programs. Most affiliate programs are free to join. Affiliate programs are a way to earn money without producing your own product.

Affiliate programs allow a membership website to generate additional (other than the membership subscription) income by advertising products that are relevant to the site’s theme. For example, let’s say you own a membership website whose theme is golf. You would recommend products that you like yourself like golf books, magazines, videos and golfing gear. When you have an affiliate agreement with the merchants selling those products, they provide you with affiliate links which you paste into your site. Then when members click on those links and buy those products, you earn a commission. Affiliates programs can earn commissions in three ways: per click, per sale and per lead.

The members on a membership website are helped by the affiliate programs as well. They are given easy access to products that they would otherwise have to search the internet to find.

On the other side of the aisle, you can let other companies post your ad on their sites and pay commissions for sales of your product or memberships. Sure, you may give away 10 percent of your profit to an affiliate; but 90 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing. You’ll make up in sales quantity what you may lose in percentage of your own net. It’s quite worthwhile in the long run.

Use your e-zine to advertise your affiliate program. Always encourage your newsletter subscribers to forward the newsletter to a friend.