It doesn’t matter how good your membership website is if no one known about it.  There are a variety of different techniques that can be used to increase the visibility of your membership site, however some are more effective than others.  By taking advantage of some fundamental marketing tips, you membership website will be able to consistently increase its base of members.

1. Don’t Go For the Sale Right Away

One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when marketing your membership website is to try and go for the hard sell right away.  Instead of pushing for sales immediately, it is much more profitable to focus on lead generation, by gathering email addresses.  Unlike many products sold online, a membership site is not a one-time sale, rather it is a recurring sale.  The best way to ensure that your members will continue paying for access to your membership site, is to start building the customers trust immediately.  Utilizing email marketing from the very beginning is a great way to establish trust with your prospective members.  This trust will go along way towards building a profitable long term relationship with your members.

2. Offer Discount Trial Memberships

Free trials have always been a common marketing ploy both online and offline.  However, when it comes to membership websites, it is a better idea to have a paid trial membership rather than a free one.  There are several reasons for this.  The first is that a paid trial will eliminate freebie seekers.  Not only will this ensure that your trial members are serious about joining, but also decrease the amount of the refunds that you will owe.  A lot of freebie seekers will not get around to cancel their subscription for a day or two after the trial period is over and then they ask for a refund once they are charged.  If you offer paid trial memberships, everyone who signs up already expect to be paying for access to your membership.

Another advantage is that by offering a discounted trial period, your membership inherently has a higher perceived value than membership websites offering a free trial.  Additionally, it is a great way to gain additional income as well.

3. Keep Testing

One of the worst mistakes that you can make when marketing your membership website is to not test your marketing efforts.  Only testing can help you maximize your conversions.  Once your ad is fairly refined, you should still be tweaking small aspects of your ads in order to maximize their efficiency.  If you believe that there is no more testing to be done, it might be time to create a whole new ad campaign and start the process all over again.  Keep in mind that while general ads are a great basis, creating ad campaigns towards specific types of people is important as well.

There are a lot of ways that you can market your membership website, however keeping these 3 tips in mind can make all of your marketing efforts more effective.  Remember not to push the hard sale right away, offer discount trial memberships instead of free ones, and always keep testing and tweaking your ads.

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The release of WordPress 3.0 has been in the making for some time and the official release has finally taken place.  As with all major releases, the instant reaction of many people is to find out how these releases will affect their website specifically, and this is an especially important question for people who are using WordPress to manage their membership website.

Downtime is never good for any website, but membership websites have even more pressure than most to be available to users at all times.  This is because members have already paid for access to the content.  This makes planning out the process of upgrading to WordPress 3.0 incredibly important to webmasters of membership websites.

WordPress 3.0 Shouldn’t Affect Your Membership Website

1. Testing

WordPress 3.0 went through a very long and thorough alpha and beta phase.  This should have given every plugin developer plenty of time to update their plugin so that it is compatible with WordPress 3.0.  This is especially true for commercial plugins.  It is very rare that commercial plugins are not ready to go when WordPress releases a new update.

2. Modified Features

The main features that have been modified for the WordPress 3.0 release should not affect how a membership website will operate.  The biggest changes include: integration with WordPress-MU, a new default theme, different editor styles, modified navigation menus, and bulk upgrading.  Very few membership plugins should be affected by this.  However, there may be some potential problems because of the “custom post” changes, however the remedy should be fairly simple.

Keys to a Safe Upgrade

1. Create a Test Site

It is important for every website to also have a test site as well.  This is where you can test out any changes before actually making them to your live site.  By upgrading to WordPress 3.0 on your test site first, you should be able to find out if any complications may arise.

2. Always Create a Backup

It is important to always back up your files before updating your WordPress membership site to WordPress 3.0.  While this is advice that everyone seems to know, many people either forget to do it or just don’t think they will need to.  As long as you have backup, you can always quickly restore your website in the case the upgrading to WordPress 3.0 causes some problems with your membership website.

There are a number of reasons that upgrading to WordPress 3.0 should not affect your WordPress membership website including the features that were modified and the extended time that it spent in the development and testing phases.  However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t double check this issue for yourself.  This means that you should always create a backup for your website as well as utilize a test site before upgrading on your live site.

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When it comes to creating and maintaining your membership website, the entire process can mean a lot of effort and even more time.  The most common way to bypass this problem is to simply outsource the work to someone else.  However, many people are left wondering exactly how much of their membership website can actually be taken care of by someone else.

There are several aspects of membership websites that are most commonly outsourced.  The first is the graphics/design of the website.  Learning how to create professional looking graphics is a skill that not everyone has, and the same is true for the actual design of the entire website.  Outsourcing this type of work is extremely common and can be done by an independent contractor or through a professional website design company.

Creating the actual content of the website is often outsourced as well.  Sometimes all of the content is outsourced and ghostwritten and other times only some of it is.  It is becoming increasingly common for people to outsource all of the text-based content and then creating one or two videos so that members still see their face and it also makes it appear as if all of the content was created by them.

Website management is also commonly outsourced.  This is especially true for membership websites once they have become fairly established.  Web management may include only basic maintenance and help desk support, or could include a gambit of interactive tools and traffic generation.

SEO efforts are also commonly outsourced to either businesses or freelancers.  This could be something as simple as article submissions and forum commenting to complex link building and other SEO tactics.

If you want to create a membership website that is completely hands-free, then the best thing to do is hire a virtual assistant  This person will be responsible for managing your entire website.  They will also be the person who is in charge or organizing and hiring additional freelancers (such as writers and designers)  Think of a virtual assistant as the General Manager of a restaurant.  Commonly, virtual assistants will be give cost constraints and be responsible for meeting certain goals, such as member retention or traffic generation.

Creating a membership website that requires only the most minimal amount of time doesn’t have to be difficult.  By hiring a virtual assistant, they can outsource and manage almost every aspect of your membership website, from creation to maintenance  However, if you want to be a little more hands on, you can hire freelancers to take care of any task that you do not want to do, or simply cannot do.

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