Make Money Selling Websites
The Step By Step Guide To Creating Membership
1. Find A Niche And Domain Name
You want to find a niche with many active forums or even only one large message board. You also want to find a niche that people are mad about and dying for information on. Find a forum on Big Boards withmany active users and there’s a niche right there. Learn what they want, what they discuss and away you go. When you register a domain name for this type of project, be sure it’s a dot com and something easy to remember.
2. Create your membership site
This isn’t as hard as it sounds. When you start creating content for your membership site, you will need AT LEAST 5 unique ebooks in there, 1000+ words in length. When I write my content, I focus on giving them ACTIONABLE plans to use right away.
Step by step plans + instant = happy readers.
Be sure you update the site weekly with fresh new reports. In my membership sites I have two sections. Indepth reports in the middle of the site, which are always over 1000 words in length, and on the side, I have shorter reports or articles that are quick to read.
When it comes to pricing, you have 2 choices. You can either sell access to your membership sites for $9.95 a month without an affiliate program or $19.95 a month with an affiliate program.
It all depends on what you want to do and how good your content is. If your content is worth $19.95 a month, setup an affiliate program that pays affiliates $9 a month.
What you’re aiming for is to have $1000 in profit monthly (or 100 members) signed up to your site so when it comes time to resell, you can say that this site is making you around $1000 a month without too much work on your end. People love to buy businesses that are automated and require little work.
3. Promoting Your Site
Forums and affiliate programs. God I love them! These two marketing methods, plus article writing drive a lot of targetted traffic to my membership sites every day. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s really worth it.
Scrounge as many members to your site anyway you can. Try and build it up to 100 members as quickly as possible. Post in message boards with really informative information, setup an affiliate program and find affiliates to promote your site for you. Write articles for your membership site rather than other peoples sites.
Give away trial access to your site for some days. Get somebody in the forum who’s well known and respected to review your membership site. Get members, as many members as you can, anyway you can. Your only focus should be on finding 100 members for your membership site.
Write an ebook and put your website link in it. Give it away to anyone and everyone who wants it. Scrounge, scrounge, scrounge. I’m serious. Because once you’ve those 100 members, you have a site that will sell for 8 to 10000 dollars in the next few months. Not only that, you will also have a nice monthly income of $1000 a month. Most members stay on board for atleast 2 to 3 months. After that you do see a slight increase in unsubscribes .there’s nothing fancy about traffic generation. The basics work and work well. There’s nothing stopping you from creating 5 membership sites, then focusing on promoting them full time. Everynight after work, put a few hours into promoting your membership sites.
4. Selling Your Site
A content site with 10 to 15 unique reports, 100+ members, 2 months active will sell for around $8000 to $12,000 without a problem. But there is one pitfall with membership sites and selling them. When you accept payments with Paypal, it is impossible to transfer those subscriptions to another person without making everyone unsubscribe and resubscribe to the new buyer. I have done this before and I would say 85 to 90% of the subscribers re-signed up.
This makes it a trouble. But there are ways around this. If you have a non aggressive customer who is easy to work with, you’ll find a solution to this problem. One glimmer of hope is Clickbank has been reported to want to start offering monthly billing. If this happens, it should make life a heck of much easier. Transferring a Clickbank account is as simple as pie.
Creating Instant Info Products To Flip!
Ebooks are not selling as well when it comes to the resale of the business. Creating a video series will make you much more money on the resale. People love HOW TO video’s.
There are many many niches this would work in. Tutorials on all sorts of subjects sell well. Showing people how to solve a problem step by step by video is always going to be a big winner. You could teach people how to create graphics and profit from it. You could teach and show people how to shop online and find bargains. You can teach people anything and everything. Find out what people want to learn, look at ebooks out already and turn those ebooks into a video series. You can create a video series within a day easily. It does not have to be perfect, you do not need a radio presenters voice. Just do it!
How To DOMINATE Your Niche
We’ve already touched on forum marketing. It’s an incredibly powerful way to build up a presence in your niche, to learn how they think, and to build traffic to your websites. What you can do to push your forum marketing efforts even further is purchase advertising in appropriate forums. This can be a much more fruitful (and simple) way to advertise your site, as opposed to the cost and complexity of Google Adwords. In fact, one of the best advertising purchases I ever made was a $35 text link on a forum for a week. It made me a few thousand dollars in sales. If you’re promoting a product in the internet marketing niche or something related to Clickbank.com, one of the best places to advertise is Harvey Segal’s forum at:
http://www.clickbanksuccessforum.com
Do you want a whole host of capable internet marketers advertising your site for you… and paying for the privilege? It’s easy enough if you put together a high quality resale rights book. You just write a report or e-book related to your site, slap on an e-cover, and offer
resale rights (where the purchaser sells it and keeps all of the profits) for whatever price you like ($7 is all the rage these days and would surely work just fine). Within the book, you put links to your own site, affiliate products, and/or products you own. This can go viral quickly and bring in massive traffic without much effort on your part. A bit of good old-fashioned networking can also help you dominate a niche from all sides. If you know what the main websites are in the niche you’re targeting, you can attempt to contact the owners. It’s usually easy enough. They will end up being your best joint venture partners, and you can set up mutually beneficial advertising schemes. You can do this ‘from the inside’ by posting dynamite content for free in a forum.
Niche markets go crazy for Internet marketing tactics that we are all used to. Start posting away in forums, with really great helpful advice. Start your own threads and give people an actionable plan that can use straight away. Give them something they can go use that second to get the desired result they want.
I have already talked about article writing as a way to generate instant traffic and instant cash, but a lot of people write a great article but forget about the most important aspect…. the bio box.
If you have done any bum marketing, you know the importance of the bio box, that short blurb at the end of your article that says what the author is all about. Getting a high number of views for your articles is great, but when it comes down to dollars and cents, only the number of people that click through to your website really counts. What you have to do is put together a total package, from the article’s title on down to the article content, bio box, and the page you link to. If you get all of these elements flowing together, you’ll have a bio box that pulls in visitors and spits out cash. Even though we’re all about the bio box here, you really have to set it up right to get the desired results. Let’s face it, if the title of your article doesn’t attract attention, then no one is going to read it in the first place. What makes a great headline? You can do a test for yourself by going over to EzineArticles.com and seeing what grabs your attention.
If you get the headline right, then you’ll get yourself some viewers. But for how long? They have to read all the way to the end of your article just to see the bio box (and the all-important link). This is one reason why short articles dominate Bum Marketing… they don’t take as long to read. There is no reason to be verbose in your article marketing. Get to the point, offer the info your readers are looking for, and save the complete solution for your website.
If you manage to do that, then your readers have been perfectly primed to check out your bio box. Get this wrong though, and it’s all for naught. Let’s go over some basics:
What a bio box is NOT:
- A personal biography
- A listing of everything available at your website
- An explicit ad for a product or service
What a bio box IS:
- Targeted to the article that it follows
- A specific call to action that leads to one (and only one) website
- Ideally an offer for free information like more articles, a short report, or e-book
If your article gives the reader the kind of info they’re looking for, they’re going to be warmed up and looking for more. They’re not interested in your complete biography. Remember, this is about them and not about you. Offer further solutions in your bio box, and your readers will gobble it up.
People who read your article and click through to your website are gold, because they’re looking for what you’ve got. That’s right, they’re highly targeted prospects. You don’t necessarily want to send all of your visitors to your home page. The final step in customizing your bio box is to make your link relevant to the article’s content. Line up your headline, content, bio box, and link, and you’ll super-charge your article marketing.
Creating Article Directories To Flip For Huge Profits
This is something I have only done once so far as of this date. It was a lot of work, it took me a lot of time to create and I sold it for $12,000 to a person who was very interested in one of my business ideas I wrote. I should have held on to it and sold it for more.
Creating large article directories is a bit of a gamble in some ways and in another way it’s the smartest move you can make. So why is it a gamble? To create a large article directory with 500+ unique articles on all different topics, takes time and effort and resources. Why is it smart? Because any site, no matter how badly designed it is, with 500+ unique articles is a valuable asset.
Article directories with unique content + good search engine ranking = A gold mine.
The proccess was simple enough. I found an article directory script.
I found on the forums at digitalpoint.com a domain name with a PR ranking of 4 for under $50, so I purchased it. It was a generic domain name, with no meaning, which is what I wanted. It was short as well. I then wrote and had written just over 500 articles on all different niche subjects and I put them all up on the site in their different categories. I had articles written in batches of 5 and 10. So each niche topic would have 5 or 10 articles written about them.
The articles were written in pure bum marketing fashion, meaning each article was written to target a keyword of that niche. The site cost me very little to create other then time and writers for just over half of the articles. I found writers who charged from $5 an article. I wrote a lot of the content myself, but I am a fast writer and can churn out quality articles in 10 to 20 minutes.
I put all the articles up over a period of a few months. By the time I went to sell the site I had already a handful of top 10 listings for some of my articles and was making money with Adsense automatically. This is why sites sell. Unique content is great, but content sites with good search engine ranking and automatic money coming in with Adsense, sell so quickly, you CANNOT keep up with demand.
It really is that simple. If you throw enough mud against the wall, something will stick. Would I say this was easy work? No. Would I say I was happy with $12,000 for the work, yes and no. I like cash, but I think if I kept the site for a year and added another 500 articles, I could have sold it for 10 times that price.
An article directory or content site with 1000+ unique articles, 100+ top 10 listings in Google and MSN and a few thousand in Adsense every month, plus maybe even a forum or loyal reader base, and you are looking at a site that will sell for more then most people will earn in a couple of years. That’s no bull. If you are prepared to work and follow the plan I have set above, you will make money. It would be near on impossible not to.
Now imagine having 30 to 40 content sites up and running making a nice automated income of $20 a month with Adsense and a couple of top ten rankings to go along with it. Also imagine having 5 membership sites up and running making $1000 a month for you without much work, don’t forget having a few how to video series products earning you money while your affiliates promote it for you.
Then, your article directory with 500 articles in it takes off and you have 50 to 100 top 10 listings in Google and MSN and is earning you a nice little income every month as well.
Do you think that this above is worth something? A lot of people don’t understand just how powerful UNIQUE CONTENT really is.
Unique content makes the Internet go round. Unique content with profits = a gold mine and it doesn’t take a genius to get started! Just do something. Do you know how much you could sell all the above businesses for? You are looking at $70,000 to $100,000 in cold hard currency for a couple of months work. Do you realise that you now have a plan to follow that will give you a business that is worth a lot of money. All you have to do is follow it.