Consequently, there is no point in starting a membership site if no one knows that it exists, so getting traffic to your sales page is one of the most important things you can do to get your business off the ground. The first and quickest way to get visitors to your membership site is to encourage members already on your mailing list to join your membership site. As these people are already on a targeted list, they will want to take a look at your membership site sales page when you ask them to. Not everyone has a mailing list, but this is why having an autoresponder is so important for your business. It is the tool that allows you to build the all-important mailing list, which you can use to generate additional sales in the future.
Beyond this, there are three ways of getting visitors to your site. There is free traffic, using articles, videos, or posting to forums as a way of sending visitors to your site. These are good ways to generate traffic to your sales page because they do not cost anything besides a little time. Using articles, videos, forums and the like to drive visitors to your site is an effective way of attracting visitors, because once your materials are published, they will remain on article directory sites.
However, using free traffic generation tactics like these is a ‘slow build’ process that does not happen overnight, and there is a good deal of work involved in creating these kinds of promotional materials. For example, writing an article may take half an hour, but submitting it to article directory sites may take a couple of hours more. There are several hundred article directory sites, and the time required will depend on how many sites you want to submit your articles to. The more sites you submit them to, the more traffic you will generate to your site.
You can use software to help you submit your articles, but it is a timeconsuming way of driving visitors to your site. Every time you create new content materials, no matter where they are published, send details to the major social networking sites as well. Social networking sites have the ability to send visitors to your site. Publishing your links on social networking sites will create one way incoming back links to your site, and these links will improve the search engine ranking of your site and drive even more potential business your way.
Another thing you can do is recruit affiliates to promote your membership site for you. Affiliates act as independent salespeople for your business, and there is no cost until they make a sale after which you pay them a share of membership fees as a commission. Because there is no cost unless they make a sale, using affiliates to promote your program is another effective ‘no cost’ option. When you run a successful affiliate program, you will need software to keep your day-to-day administrative burden down to a minimum.
The second option is to use paid advertising to pull visitors to your site, which has the advantage of being an extremely quick way of generating traffic.By using something like Google AdWords, you can have visitors on your site within an hour of placing your advertisement. As long as the advertisement that you are using is keyword targeted, the visitors that you pull in will also be targeted, and the chances of them signing up for your membership site will be very good.
While you want to keep your initial outlay to a minimum, we still recommend to start your advertising campaign by using paid advertising, because it is the most effective and efficient way of testing your sales page. Keep a very tight rein on how much you are spending with an initial budget to $50 or less, but use paid advertising to test the effectiveness of your sales copy and to get members to sign up for your site.
The final and most valuable traffic strategy is to form as many joint ventures (JV) as you can. Joint ventures are always the most effective and profitable way of generating traffic. Depending on the market you are working in, they can also be a very quick way of generating traffic. If you find the right people to form a joint venture with, they can have an e-mail going out to their mailing list members later the same day. Within your industry, you are looking for the people who have influence, the well-known names that have already been building mailing lists for some time. These people will be the owners of forums or noticeboard sites or leading marketers in your niche. It is a question of e-mailing them information about what you have to offer and then taking it from there.
In some markets, such as internet marketing, the experts and industry leaders will be booked up months in advance, so send them notification about what you are going to be doing as soon as possible. These people are incredibly busy, and there is no guarantee that you will get the positive response that you want.
However, if, you can convince the expert with whom you are working to include information about your membership site in the series of e-mails that they have loaded to the autoresponder, every member of their mailing list will receive information about your site at some point and the benefits will be continual. You will enjoy a steady flow of new members, and the expert with whom you are running the JV will benefit from a steady flow of commission checks.
