I am thrilled to share with you some information on how to maximize profits from your membership websites because I’m sure these keys will help you multiply your membership income.

In the last couple of years, membership websites have literally taken the internet by storm. Today, paying for online information is the norm rather than the exception. More and more ‘infopreneurs’ are making money with membership websites because this business:

• Guarantees steady, recurring income.
• Has high profit margins.
• Requires negligible to low startup and ongoing cost.
• Can be expanded easily as your business grows.
• Allows you to make a supplemental  income doing something you love and know.
• Allows you to earn extra money through affiliate marketing and cross selling.

In this era of super-specialization, a membership website is the easiest way to get paid for what’s in your head. What’s more, if done correctly, you can develop several highly paying streams of income from a single website.

So let’s get started straight away and look at Key #1: The Internet’s Best Paying Niches.

Obviously, the very first step towards creating a highly profitable membership website is to figure out the products that sell. Notice, I am not talking about finding a niche market. I’m talking about finding a niche market that sells. There is a difference.

These days, you can easily find a niche using tools such as ClickAdEqualizer. But just because you’ve identified a popular keyword phrase does not mean that people are willing to spend their hard-earned cash on it. The trick is to find topics that people are willing to spend money on, and develop them.

Here are some of the most popular moneymaking categories on the internet today:

1. Business research, information and content sites: Includes business news, business research, corporate information for investment purposes and investment advice.
2. Community sites: Subscription based member-only websites that have been formed by a close-knit community of users.
3. Personal growth and self help sites: Information on self-improvement in specific areas like goal setting, building self-confidence, parent-child relationships and educational counseling etc.
4. Health and fitness: Concise guidance on proper eating, diet and exercise regimes are very popular with thousands of people. In fact, the term ‘losing weight’ is one of the most researched key phrases on the internet.
5. Games: Online games are opening up in a big way.
6. Home business: Nearly everybody wants to know how to make money from home. The market is huge and growing at a tremendous pace.
7. Sports: Sports news and news on sporting personalities and avenues.

How do you spot your niche?

Well, what are your hobbies? What do you do on a regular basis? Is there anything there of value to others? Zero in on a topic that you feel passionate about and start building up your knowledge base. Become the expert. How? Go to Membership Riches to find out now.

Popularity: 47% [?]

So, you’ve done everything from building a dapper website to creating rich content. Members have started trickling in and you feel jubilant.

What should you do next? Sit back and gloat, or look for ways to multiply your income, easily and quickly? If you’ve chosen the latter, as I’m sure you did, I have the perfect solution for you: Viral Marketing.

Viral marketing is marketing that spreads news of your website at the same speed as a virus rushing unchecked and undetected on the Internet. It is quick, effective and easy.

• Attract search engines: Using keywords effectively has been the age-old formula for attracting people searching for information. However, there is a new twist to this old game. Instead of using keywords, use keyword phrases. These phrases should be two to three words in length, should explain your business aptly and succinctly and be placed in all the right places like the page title, meta description, alt tags, headers and meta keywords. Paid ads in important search engines are a very good way to attract traffic. Why pay when you can get it free? In the world of online business, walk-in customers are many but only a few of them convert to paying customers. To succeed, take measures to ensure that the maximum number of people visit your website. This way, you will get traffic large enough to attract that small percentage of buyers who will make you a handsome profit.
• Put up some free stuff: These days, you get to see so many websites offering free e-cards, free e-books or free web hosting. Why? Viral marketing, of course. A good free e-card will find its way to a large number of people. This will pull in more visitors and a few of them may browse through the paid section and buy. Do you see the logic here?
• Hold contests, games and quizzes on your website. For instance, you often see end-of-the-year poetry contests on several poetry websites. Every time an aspiring poet sends in a poem, a new prospective client is spotted.
• Spread the word: Did you know that the ever-so-common ‘Tell a friend’ link can double your traffic? Suppose you read something that you like, and you feel that a close friend or relative might benefit from the knowledge, what do you do? Tell a friend! There are other ways to spread the word. Be sure to add a link to your website in all your printed material. Send out regular ezines and newsletters.
• Blog it: Blogs are the easiest way to lend a human touch to your website. Blogs give you permission to speak about yourself, your values and your hopes. This allows visitors to get to know you personally. Blogs encourage new ideas and discussion threads, which will give you ideas for new paying products.
• Offer a discount: use an auction site to auction off a limited number of memberships at a reduced cost. This is a great way to pull in those people who are sitting on the wall. Even if customers don’t buy right away, your website’s name will register and stick.
• Exchange links: Search engines love websites that network. Solicit and offer links. This will boost your traffic almost immediately. Make sure that your website has a link resources page, which makes it easy for others to set up their links with you.

Following these techniques will help you build a flood of traffic. Once your traffic picks up, it is only a matter of time before your paid membership site starts grossing money.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Membership websites are a great source of recurring income. One reason for this is that people love to belong to a community that is as interested and passionate about the same thing as they are. Look at golfers, for example. The golfing community is crazy about golf and are willing to spend big money on it. People like these are actually looking for an honest environment where they can interact and gain knowledge. The ‘money’ factor becomes negligible when they consider the benefits.

What that translates into is this: the biggest money-puller of your membership site is going to be your content, not your design, product or your name. You need content that sizzles!

Obviously, we are not talking about one-time content here. We are talking about intelligent, trustworthy content that is updated on a regular basis. This will give your visitors a reason to keep coming back for more. So, the foolproof formula for membership income is: provide great content consistently and you should have no problem getting a regular influx of visitors.

However, we all know how difficult it is to keep churning out fresh content every week. More so when your client base is beginning to expand and you’re not well and truly equipped to deal with everything at the same time. Suddenly, there are newsletters to send, blogs to post into, queries to answer and products to evaluate. In the mad rush to get everything done, your content is sidelined and it becomes stale.

How can you prevent that from happening? How can you ensure a steady flow of quality content to your marketing website?

The written word: Use articles, ezines, graphs, charts and reports on your website. Writing your own content is the best option for your website but it is not always the easiest. Hire ghostwriters to write for you. Many paid sites give you a fixed volume of articles every month for a small fee. Subscribe to them. Mix and match them to create unique content. Suppose your niche deals with ‘Making money online’ and you buy 45 articles about your topic. The easiest thing would be to simply post the articles as-is, but do NOT give into that temptation. Rewrite the articles you buy in your own words or string them together to form an e-book, distill them for their gist or use only the headlines. The possibilities are endless. The trick is to make the articles genuinely yours.

Audio content: This is a very nice variation to the staid and boring written word and a real attention grabber. Speak to an established expert, record the interview, and upload it to your website. Monthly interviews will keep visitors glued to your website if the content is good. Or add audio content by podcasting your blog and putting it up on your website.

Video content: This is another attractive alternative. Use QuickTime, Flash, MPEG or AVI to upload video to your site. Just keep one thing in mind: your objective here is to provide content that is more valuable than your competitors and not to show off. Let me give you an example. Suppose your niche deals with the makeup industry. Put up a video highlighting some of the fine tricks of applying makeup. Great way to attract visitors. However, if you were to have a video of yourself detailing the makeup process, people will be miffed. Why did you waste their time to show them what they can very well understand in a reading? Reeks of publicity, doesn’t it? Surest way to drive away traffic!

RSS feeds: RSS feeds will spice up your web content because they provide both audio and video content. RSS allows you to source headlines and summary content from other blogs. So every time these blogs are updated, your content too is updated!

Crosslink: This is another great way of encouraging traffic. Refer to other websites that provide helpful information in the same niche. Comment on their information and link to them. This way, your readers know that you are updating your knowledge. You will also get incoming traffic from the other party who will link back to you if your own content is good enough.

How can you decide if your content is ‘good’ enough? Simple. Good content is information that your visitors will enjoy reading and will benefit from knowing. Ask yourself this: would you pay for this information? That would be the litmus test for good content.

Popularity: 46% [?]