Are Membership Sites the Right Choice?

Membership sites are gaining a lot of popularity both for the Internet marketer and for the consumer.  They are a great way to market products for the marketer and a convenient choice for getting needed products or information for the consumer. So in essence, this type of site is a win – win situation for everyone. The viewer gets his needs met and so does the Internet marketer.
The Benefits for the Internet Marketer
When you look to the Internet to produce money, you are always on the lookout for new products, or new ways you can produce money online. You need to sell and selling online can be difficult because there is never eye-to-eye contact and this causes the Internet to be somewhat impersonal and a difficult sale, but Membership sites solve a lot of these problems.
A membership site allows you to give qualified information away for free or for the price of the membership fee. This information pertains to the interest of a certain group of people. If for instance, you are a teacher and have all kinds of interesting activities, downloads on your site, information that in general will help all teachers with their skills, then this would be your niche, or the group you want to market to. You can either offer free membership to your site with all of this great information or charge a small by monthly fee. You can even do both. Offer certain information for free, but make a paid membership available for people that want more detailed information. Using a membership site in any of these forms will produce you money.
The Paid Membership Site
If you charge a membership fee no matter how small it will give you a residual income. Let's say for this same teacher activities site you charge a membership fee of $5 per month and you get 1 new signup a day for a period of three months, that will produce $500 at the end of those three months with the income continuing to increase each and every month. Now imagine if you had three or four such sites, which targeted different demographic groups.
The Free Membership Site
Believe it or not, many free membership sites make more money than those that require a membership fee be paid. Just look at Google to figure that one out. Free membership sites make money because they have an advantage over other web sites that only market products.  They create a rapport between the viewer and the owner, and a relationship occurs. Of course, this is what any Internet site owner could wish for, because once there is a relationship, a sale can be made.
Free membership sites offer products on their sites. It can be anything from informational products as in an Ebook or DVD. It can be a product that is mailed to the viewer, and these products can be received from other companies by signing up as an affiliate marketer and offering other peoples products that relate to your site on your site. You in turn make a commission on the product that is sold.
How Expensive is it To Start a Membership Site?
One of the greatest benefits of this type of website is that they are not at all expensive to start. If you do your own web design work and use creative marketing methods and SEO practices, your site should be up and running for a couple of hundred dollars, a truly inexpensive venture for something that can produce a substantial amount of money.
Membership Sites are Hot
To get the point across quickly and efficiently membership sites are the new craze in the Internet industry, a great way to make residual income and to get a professional status in the chosen industry. If you are looking for a way to make money on the Internet then the membership sites are the answer to your problems.

Building and Running a Membership Website with Ease

Selling fish is entirely different from selling access to a membership website. It can be a bundle of joy putting a membership website together. When you start running a membership website it can become lucrative, particularly if you have recurring monthly members format. Membership websites are often something that most people wanted to design for years. Another advantage of running a membership website is that the start-up cost is affordable. Despite that one can afford to open a membership website, not everyone is prepared for the change. Operating and running a membership website is no walk through the sunny park. Membership websites build communities' of users, but the first thing a person must do before joining the site is to research the company or person that runs the website. If you do not have a top quality web site with the security the user is expecting, you could very well fall on your face.

Building a membership website in all aspects is not a quick task. One of the hassles of running a membership website is creating quality content on a consistent basis that your members will find useful. One the most labor exhaustive chores of running a membership website are to come up with fresh valuable content for your visitors. Growing a membership website is a full-time job, but it is one that I utterly something to enjoy. The membership website is full of downloadable resources in addition to articles full of insight.

Discussing articles, when you start running a membership website you will need to know some basic SEO stuff. Trust me; this stuff is trickier than most people think. If you do not get it right, well, ask Google and other major search engines the big, fat WHY!
SEO and the basics of Yahoo Knowledge
Brief SEO Stuff Description
Keywords and your web text links are essential for increasing your chances of reaching the top ranks at the search engines. Rich keywords will only get you noticed at the top search engines. SEO missions to help you cutback cost and time; what you need:
1.    SEO - On-page – Meta Tags, Text, Keyword Density, Title page, description page, relevant links, etc,
2.    Off-Page – SEO Links – focuses on quantity and quality, and make sure that your pages content has strong links to associated pages.
3.    BLOG – relevancy and quality informative pages is important, Yahoo searches with crawlers every two to four weeks and will mechanically discover content on web pages purposed for its index.
4.    SEO Keyword Rich – Content is important – Stuffing any keywords on your page will decrease your chances of reaching the top ranks.
5.    Description – You want to create unique pages for your title page. When you are running a membership website, you want to make sure the content is readable to various audiences.
6.    Users – These people will type in keywords into the search engines to find relevant keywords or links. Be sure to choose relevant terms for your title page.
7.    SEO Meta Tags – Make sure that you add relevant, quality rich and informative links to your tags. Narrow your keywords instead of adding broader content.
8.    Links – Your have a choice of incoming links, outbound, inbound, PR2, back links, and other links, just keep it relevant.

Be sure to focus on relevancy, quality and informative keywords and links when considering your title tags, or your headers. Consider the keywords based on what your targeted audience may consider when searching for relevant information.
Yahoo has crawlers that will not recognize any copy that is within images. Display the ALT Text clearly on your pages 
HTML – add a site map.
If you design any web pages with undesirable links or content that is not relevant, Yahoo may penalize you. Keep it honest. Do not spam or try to manipulate the search engines. Any redundant, inappropriate, or low quality content or links will get pushed out. Avoid-
1.    Invisible use of redundant text –
2.    Any pages that solely intend to direct users to other pages –
3.    Adding several web sites that use the identical content –

Do not abuse any cross-links – do not add artificial link popularity –
4.    Do not try to push deceptive web pages, fraudulent pages or add excessive deceptive pop-ups that will interfere with a user's navigation –
Yahoo, like Google is an honest search engine and their mission is to make sure that users find relevant, quality and informative information as quickly as possible with few interruptions. Discover more basics on building and running a membership website. 
 

Making Money with Articles: Free Article Content

Some webmasters try to use articles from free content directories to get visitors to their site and make some money. This is mostly important for those who have just begun working as an affiliate for several companies and do not yet have any funding, yet need to built small niche websites to visitors to their site so that they can begin making revenue.

Although this can sometimes be the only option for those who are running on a non-existent budget, it is not a way that will effectively build your website or revenue. There are a few potential reasons why this may be detrimental to your business building efforts.

Problem #1 - Search Engines

Search engines will only look down upon your site if it has the exact same duplicated content than other sites. The more sites that share your content, the less it will help you achieve good search engine rankings.

Good search engine rankings are essential in getting visitors to your sit so that they have a chance to click on your affiliate links. If you cannot even get visitors, then will never make an revenue. Working on the search engine optimization of your site so that you will eventually be high enough in the results to get customers, should be priority one.

Problem #2 - Getting visitors to click

Although getting your site high on search engine result pages and acquiring site visitors is hard work, unfortunately this is only half of the battle. You must also be able to convince those visitors to click on your affiliate links. If your visitors see the same content they have seen on a multitude of other sites, they will be least likely to click on your links. This is because most people want to buy things that are recommended by people that they trust or whom they feel like are an expert on the subject.

If your content is just duplicated from other sites, you will be exposed as someone who does not really know what they are talking about and therefore will not look heavily on your product recommendations. This will reduce the number of website visitors who will be willing to click through.

Problem #3 - Author Bylines

Most free content is only given to you if you agree to place the authors byline under the article (you can get into trouble if you try to use it without following the stipulated rules). This poses a problem because most author bylines include links. When a reader gets done reading a really intriguing article, there is a strong possibility that they will click on the author's byline link rather than your affiliate links. This is the entire reason why these authors offer free content to begin with, so that they may get their name and links out there to the public. Using this type of content may mean shooting yourself in the foot and losing possible profitable website visitors.

Once you put these three problems together, you are looking at a serious decline in revenue simply because you used free website content from article directories. Although it may be the only option for some, if you have the funds to buy your own original content, then you should go this route. If you don't have the finds, however, you may be better off writing your own content and then hiring professional services once you have made a profit to work with.
 

Making Money with Articles: Article Directories

Article directories are websites that house free articles. These articles are usually put there by whoever owns the copyright to them as a promotion method. Each article has the owners byline placed under it so that those who eventually read the article will know who wrote it (or at least who owns it) and will be able to get in contact with or visit their website for further information.

Articles directories are a great place to put your articles so that they will make you money. By using this method, people who are interested in your product or service will see your article, view you as an expert in the subject, and will visit your website. Even if you cannot write or do not have any knowledge on the subject on which you are promoting (for example for you run an affiliate website), you can always hire a writer to do the work for you. Getting quality articles written will be expensive up front, but they will pay for themselves in no time, either through affiliate sales or selling your own services, and everything from then on is pure profit.

Let's take a real life example. Imagine that you are an accountant working from home. You write an article on an accounting topic and place it on various article directories. Those who are looking for the subject you wrote about will read your article, see that you have the knowledge and skill that is needed to do a job for them, and visit your website or contact you via e-mail. Your article just gained you a new client who may use your services regularly, but will definitely give you a nice profit at least once.

Furthermore, since you have posted it on a free article directory, others who have affiliate websites about accounting will inevitably use your article for their website. Since they must attach your byline to it, this will bring you even more exposure for every website that re-posts your article. This because you will be benefiting of off the traffic that they get to their website.

There are numerous article directories out there for you to utilize. Your bet best is to put a copy of each of your articles on every one for maximum exposure. It will eventually help to bring more traffic and customers to your website, which will lead to new orders and more profit.
 

Management by Walking Around

The MBWA method is a management concept that has gotten a lot of "buzz" and popularity in the last decade or so because it is part of a business model for cultural change within the enterprise that has proven successful in a lot of businesses. The original concept was created by David Packard during the early days of the Hewlett Packard organization, a Silicon Valley company that was well known for its loyal and highly creative employee base that seemed to achieve levels of productivity and employee satisfaction far beyond the norm.

"The HP Way" which the "management by walking around" method was a part of was based on the concept that employees, particularly the subject matter experts in their fields, are capable of being part of the problem solving process and that a team approach to creating new business ideas and innovate ways to solve problems was far superior to the "top down" approach of management coming up with all the answers and dictating them to a mindless but obedient staff.

Packard was a believer in the open space, no walls and easy access to management corporate culture that MBWA exemplifies. By enabling frequent and unscheduled interactions between employees and between management and staff, new ideas were given maximum opportunity to be birthed and encouragement to be developed which leads to a more responsive and flexible business culture and one that has a robust approach to growth and change.

In order to implement MBWA, the manager must embrace the concept of a flexible and relaxed relationship with staff. The details of the method that MBWA promotes is summed up nicely in the title, management by walking around. It suggests that instead of only meeting with employees at scheduled times in formal settings away from other employees or in a staff meeting where the agenda is published in advance, many opportunities for employees to talk to management are encouraged. When the supervisor or manager walks freely amongst the employees throughout their work day, the opportunity to ask questions and to interact about new ideas the employees are considering is frequent. From those unscheduled and frequent visits as the manager walks from cubicle to cubicle, great concepts can be birthed which can then be nurtured into new product ideas or novel solutions to problems.

However, if the relationship between management and employee is formal, based on fear or intimidation or not otherwise grounded in warmth and friendship, the MBWA system will go from a powerful method of collaborative problem solving to a tremendous nightmare for everybody. You don't want your employees dreading your "drop in" visits and seeing their productivity drop as you enter their work space because they are so concerned with impressing and serving management that they dislike your arrival in their world. It is amazing how quickly a network of employees can detect and set up an early warning system when the manager is walking around so everybody "gets ready" for what they perceive will be an unpleasant sudden visit by management.

To avoid this, the supervisor should in other ways foster a relaxed relationship with staff. The employee must feel free to discuss issues and questions openly with management without fear of being scoffed at, mocked, belittled or punished. Many a company has generated a "HP Way" concept that comes out of the human resources department that amounts to little more than color posters on the wall and a suggestion box but nothing changes in the corporate culture or how each manager interacts with the staff. Employees are quick to notice the hypocrisy of such a program and the result is management because an object of ridicule instead of inspiration.

By making your visits enjoyable, a welcome experience and one where the employee doesn't fear your arrival, you can expect outstanding results from the MBWA method. And you will know you have achieved true change in your corporate culture when not only do you walk around to visit employees but employees "drop in" on you by walking around if for no other reason than to share a joke or a donut. That is an ideal setting for team work and proactive problem solving.

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A Hidden Gold Mine in Every Business

In many companies, most of the company seems to operate by a completely different set of rules and communicate in a different language than those the IT or computer services sector of the business. This division is somewhat artificial and partially maintained by the IT people themselves because of a certain culture technical people have about their specialized knowledge and application areas. But at heart, those strange people down in IT have the same goals as every other business person which is to succeed both personally and corporately in shared projects.

But those of us on the business side of the corporate landscape depend on the computer folks to let us know how things are going with that highly valuable asset that we have in our IT systems, hardware and software. Most medium to large businesses run very high capacity computers or multitudes of computers connected through a network and those systems must perform at top capacity each day to accomplish the goals of the business.

The upgrade and maintenance budgets for the computers that run your business no doubt represents a fairly sizable percentage of the corporate budget each year. But because those systems are what make you competitive in the marketplace, that investment is worth the money to assure that the mission critical jobs those powerful systems do get done on time each week and month.

When a computer begins to show signs of straining under the load of work, we are giving it, that can be a cause of significant concern for a business. If your business paradigm dictates that the load of traffic or system resources could be pushed to beyond what the computers can do with their existing computing power, that weakness in the IT infrastructure represents a significant risk to the company should the system become overloaded when there is a large body of work to be done by these machines.

What not every business person knows is that there may be a hidden goldmine of computing capacity already resident in your IT resources that simply is not being tapped to its fullest. You know that it isn't uncommon for your IT professionals to report that your systems are at 80-90% capacity and must be upgraded to handle the next big increase in business.

That hidden goldmine is a discipline that has actually been around for quite sometime but is infrequently tapped in the modern business world. That discipline is called "capacity planning". By implementing a capacity planning office and monitoring function, you can put the tools and the talent in place to precisely measure scientifically if your computer systems are at capacity of if there is just a need for system tuning or realignment of computing schedules to get more out of the systems you already own.

Recently a large oil company in the Midwest noted that many of its mission critical functions were being delayed in processing, seemingly because the computer systems were overloaded and in dire need of an expensive and time consuming upgrade. Capacity planning measurements were taken and the system was diagnosed to determine what the real problem was and it was found that job priorities of new functions were not tuned to the load of the system at critical time frames. The adjustments were made by talented systems administrators and the IT infrastructure continued to perform at top-notch capacity and the delays were eliminated with no additional hardware or upgrades needed.

By utilizing capacity planning software tools and enabling your IT team to take advantage of this highly scientific computer measurement and prediction method, the business can get the most out of its computer resources and use its corporate resources to further the business objectives of the company. And that benefits everyone.

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How to Use Forums to Promote Your Blog

Having a blog is a great thing: you can promote your products and services and get a lot of attention for your business; you can promote your work, whether as a painter, photographer, or writer, and maybe even get a job related to the things that you love; or you can simply express yourself and even update your relatives and friends on the goings-on in your life, which can be great if you live in a faraway place and cannot update your relatives and friends more than once.

However, a blog can also be a good way for you to earn money, over and above mere expression and promotion.

Thanks to a lot of different online money-earning methods, you can earn commissions when visitors go to your blog. For instance, you can put up advertisements on your site through an affiliate network or through an advertising program. If one of your visitors clicks on your ads, then you get commissions. The ads are tailored to fit the contents of your website, and they are made so that your visitors will most likely be interested in them and thereby click on them. Therefore, you need to have good website content, as this is what the ad companies need in order to know what kind of ads to place on your site.

Moreover, the more visitors you have, the greater the chance that someone will click on your ads and that you will get commissions.

This means that you need to invite more and more people to your blog, and not just to get money, but to get attention. After all, if your blog is interesting enough, you may get a lot of people linking to you. One way that you can promote your blog is through posting on forums.

If you are interested in posting in forums and getting your voice heard, and if you want to get your blog noticed in the Internet universe, then you may be interested in the following tips. Take note, however, that these are only a few tips to guide you on your way to blog superstardom, and you need to learn on your own along the way and pick up your own lessons, too.

- Post in a forum that you are actually interested in. Believe it or not, the degree of your understanding of and interest in a topic in a forum will shine through your post. If people see that you are interested in the forum topic, then you may get more attention than people just reading your forum post.

- Post in a forum whose topic is related to your blogging topic. This can be critical when you are dealing with die-hard fans of a certain artist or film, because posting off-topic posts in a forum concentrated with users who have a single interest and aim can be distracting, not to mention grounds for kicking you out of the forum.

- Be dignified enough to spell right. Text shortcuts can make texts almost unreadable, and you can annoy a whole lot more people. If you make the effort to write in your blog, make an effort to write well on the forums, or you may find it harder to invite people to read your blog. Why should they read your blog when they can't even understand what you are posting on the forum?

- Extend help to other forum members when they need it. Remember, people do not care about what you have to say until they find out that you care about them first.