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: 24% [?]

Branding is a strategy that has been followed by large corporate companies offline - but it is equally important for online businesses regardless of the size.

The idea behind branding yourself is to make sure that people remember you. A lot of focused effort goes into getting your visitors online to recall your product or service and not your competitor.

Now that we know why branding yourself is important, let us look at the various simple ways in which it can be done to make a big difference:

• Being repetitive: this works. When it comes to your website, make sure each web page on your website has the same design and shows your logo clearly at the top of each page. The navigation menu must be in the same place on each page rather than have the visitor getting irritated looking for it.
• If you publish a newsletter or an ezine, these are ideal vehicles to display your domain name and your signature or slogan. For ezines you can make a header at the top of the page showing your domain name and slogan. Use this header consistently through all your ezines.
• Your website domain name plays a vital role in branding. A lot of thought must go into this so that it is easy to remember by your visitors. This domain name must then appear on all your stationary, business cards etc.
• Your signature file: this is something you will have to compose - so that it is attention grabbing. Preferably let it show your unique selling point with your URL, so that each and every communication you send out has your signature attached to it, building your brand. Signature files are easy to set up.
• Each page of your ebooks must be branded with your logo, signature and URL. Then use them as giveaways and allow your recipients to also give it away freely to their visitors. Think of the viral effect!
• On your website, wherever you have online forms through which visitors sign up, subscribe, contact you or ask for more information, you probably have a thank you page as well. If not, make one and place your logo and signature on this page, so your visitors remember and recall.
• One of the easiest methods of branding is through articles. Write good articles and publish them in article directories, other websites and ezines. Ensure that you make a resource box at the end of your article and include your name, a link to your website and a brief text that will pull visitors to your site. Allow others to reproduce your articles with the resource box intact. Include a line about yourself along with something like “to claim your free ebook on 25 methods to get free traffic, go here”. Publishing articles is a great way to get free publicity and to establish yourself as an expert in your field - leading to building your brand.
• Last but certainly not the least, use your autoresponder in brand building! These tireless workers who operate on your behalf 24 x 7 to send out your emails, reports, articles etc automatically can be set up so that both the top and bottom of your autoresponder’s message include your signature, logo and link to your website.

Implement the above suggestions right away and see the difference!

Popularity: 13% [?]