SUBJECT: Membership Sites Lesson #6 - Driving Traffic

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Every membership site needs new members and whilst you can get a
lot of traffic from affiliates and from joint venture partners,
it is important that you get some traffic direct. This will
capture more of the market and help you to get new members to
your site.

Unless you have a waiting list for your site or a substantial
mailing list, then traffic is one of the best ways to replace
members that have left your site.

Now you can use pay per click (PPC) marketing for instant
targeted traffic and many marketers have great results with it.
The only download of this is that it costs money. If you know
how much the life time value of a member is then you will know
how much you can afford to spend in order to acquire a new
member.

Of course, you don’t need to rely on PPC for your traffic, not
everybody wants to get involved with it. If you optimize your
website for the search engines and then work on getting inbound
links based on your keywords through article marketing etc then
you will start to get organic search engine traffic.

Depending on the keywords that you are targeting this may take a
lot of work, but with some good keyword research you can easily
find some long tail keywords to target.

A good way to get traffic is to participate in forums and groups
related to your niche. If you can advertise your membership site
in your signature then you will get people clicking through from
your posts. You will get a high click through rate if you
establish yourself as an expert through authoritative posts and
being professional.

There are many newsletters and e-zines in most niches and some
of these accept paid advertising. If you can’t joint venture
with list owners then you can always pay to advertise in their
newsletter. A well written advert can get a good click through
rate and you can easily get new members from a single advert.

Of course, we must not forget that there is an entire world
offline you can advertise in. There are many niche related
publications and groups offline that you can market to and get
new members from. These are largely untapped sources and you
could always create a physical offline product from your
membership site and market it completely offline.

Your existing members are an excellent source of traffic. If you
set up an affiliate program and automatically make your members
affiliates you can encourage them to spread the word and to get
paid for their efforts. It only takes them to recruit a couple
of members and their membership is paid for, which is a very
powerful marketing tool.

The social networking scene is also a great place to get
traffic. If you build vibrant social networking groups relating
to your niche you can market your membership site to them. This
includes sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and more.

By working to give your membership site a reputation of being
the “place to be” you will find it helpful to you in recruiting
members. Traffic is something that you need to be considering at
all times in order to keep a fresh flow of new members in to
your site.



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