If you’re going to be successful in internet marketing, you need to build a list. This is the most important factor in your long-term success. After it’s built, it’s yours to use any time you want. Just push a button and print money – literally.

How’s how to build a list:

Here are the three components of list building:

• Your Opt-in Page
• Your Bribe
• Your Confirmation Page

The Squeeze Page – Your opt-in page is the page you send visitors to to build your list. This is where they will enter their email address. So, obviously it has to be well designed. It’s also got to be free from distractions. And have a clear call to action.

Failure to include a great “call to action” will result in failure. This “close” tells your visitors what you want them to do. Without this your opt-in rate will plummet. It’s strange, but if you don’t tell people what to do, they won’t do it.

You can take your opt-in page to the next level if you add a compelling video to the page. You only have a few second to get your visitors attention – video helps! Plus it give you a chance to tell them to opt in multiple times. Then at the end of the video you can print “sign up now” on the video.

If you don’t know how to make video, don’t worry. It’s very easy to hire people for a couple hundred bucks to make one for you. You can also find ready-made list building tools that give you squeeze page templates.

Your Bribe – Next, you’ve got to figure out what your bribe is. You have to give people a compelling reason to give your their email. Nobody likes spam, so most people guard their email closely. So make your “bribe” a good one!

You have to provide value in your bribe for it to be good. Then it becomes something people want to get from you. And can benefit from. For example:

• A report
• A piece of software
• Training videos
• A multi-part email series

You’ve got to create some great content. And make it both helpful and informative. And of course it has to be free. But to get the email, it’s got to be a good offer.

Now, if you don’t know how to create the bribe don’t worry. Here again, you can hire freelancers to create this for you. Simply tell them what the topic is and they can write the content. One easy and effective bribe is a 5-part email training series. You can have ghost writers create emails for under $25 an email. So, a great premium will cost you around $100 – $150.

You can also get email list building tools that include the premium. There are two important things about the email series. First, it must provide value to your subscribers. And it’s nice if it earns you some money, too. One very easy way to make some money from your list is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate products are easy because you don’t have to do anything at all. And make money right away from your list.

The Thank You Page – Finally, you need to consider your opt-in confirmation page. After subscribing to your list, your visitor is redirected to this page. It’s a great idea to give them some valuable information right on the thank you page. That way, they feel glad that they gave you their email address. It also helps to build the relationship. It also makes them more likely to open your emails.

This is another case where you can get a complete marketing package. Or you can go the DIY route. And do your own writing for this content. Or hire ghost writers to write them for you.

Summary

Whether you decide to build your email funnel yourself. Or if you hire people to do this for you. Or go with a complete package. The important thing is that you build your own list starting now. Because once its built… You’re free to make money at the push of a button.

Preselling for profit

The most important thing you can do to increase your affiliate commissions is to presell properly.

Before we begin, we need to first define what preselling is. Preselling is both an art and a science. The goal is to get your reader prepped to make a purchase. Then sending them to the product sales page to make the purchase. And if it’s done properly, the process is completely sub-conscious.

In a nutshell, you provide value. And give them a link to the product you’re preselling. In a second we’ll talk about how to do actually it. Before we get into that, you should understand what’s in it for you. Just a few of the reasons you want to presell.

• It helps your reader trust you – And gaining the trust of your readers helps them want to click your links. Which obviously means you’ll make more sales.
• Preselling is disarming – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. Unguarded reading means they’re not filtering what you say. And your intention is conveyed more easily.
• It creates buying readiness – Your readers are now receiving your message. Being open means, they are open to everything you give them. Like the info on product sales page you’ve linked to. Sending them to the sales page in this state makes them more receptive to the actual pitch.
• Your commissions go up – They arrive at the product website prepped to buy. With the guard down and trusting your recommendation. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
• It increases customer satisfaction – Plus, they feel they’ve made the buying decision on their own. Instead of feeling pressured or “sold”. And this leads to greater satisfaction with the product.
• Your profits go up – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

Obviously, it’s important to presell. You earn more commissions. And increase your customer satisfaction. Everybody wins!

Now, here’s how preselling works:

Now you know whey preselling is critical. And I hope you’re resolved to being preselling, too. You’re ready to learn how to do it properly. Like we talked about before, it’s an art. And it’s a science.

Mastering the art

The first step is in getting your readers to trust you and open up. Honestly, the only way to do this is to provide real value in you content. The art of this is to provide enough information to be of value, but not enough to satiate the hunger. So you send them to the product website with a hunger for more of what the product provides. Plus they’re not guarded, so they’re more open and likely to purchase the product.

Scientific preselling

You also have to include some very specific things.

The first is how you present the information. You’ve got to map out your strategy before you start writing. Your goal is to sell the product you’re promoting. How can providing information accomplish this goal? One way is to give them enough info to whet the appetite, but not enough to satisfy it. The other method is to explain all the details and expose how difficult it is to do what you’re explaining. Whichever method, you send them to a product website that solves the problem you just created.

But you can’t link to your affiliate link. You have directly to the home page of the product. That’s because nobody likes to click on affiliate links. But how will you earn affiliate commissions if you don’t use your affiliate link? Well, that’s part of the science of this whole process. You “pre-cookie” your reader before sending them to the sales page.

Next, you want to make sure you’re linking on related words and phrases. It’s habitual to click on words and phrases that are hyperlinked. Plus, if you link on relevant words, it only makes sense to click on there.

Putting all of this together creates a powerful affiliate marketing formula for success.

Unfortunately…

Doing all of this right is really hard! Think about everything that goes into crafting an effective preselling article: Awesome content. First and foremost, you have to be able to write a great article that provides valuable information. To do that you have to have enough information to be valuable and be able to present it in a useful way. Writing to presell. Yes, you must providing useful content. You also have to present the info in a way that provides real value. And still leave them wanting more. Or make the information so overwhelming they realize they can’t do it on their own.

Choosing your products. After that you have to figure out which products you want to promote. Even if you can pull off writing and great article. All your efforts are wasted if you send your reader to the wrong sales letter.

Techy stuff. To be most effective you have to use the “covert cookie” method. This is fairly simple – you use a 1 X 1 image and set the “source” to your affiliate link. (Just don’t mess it up. Otherwise, you won’t get credit for your sales.)

Wrapping it up:

Now you know what it takes to be a Presell Pro. Using these techniques will increase your affiliate sales by 500% or more! The important thing is to use these techniques for everything you promote as an affiliate. Take action now. Put in the effort to reap the greater rewards.

If you’ve got traffic coming to your site, you’re 99% there. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. So, the critical step is to generate a steady flow of visitors.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Articles Directories
• Video Sites

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

The term “Web 2.0″ is associated with websites that facilitate interactive information sharing and collaboration in a social media setting. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. Because these sites get so much traffic, Google and the other search engines treat these sites with greater importance in their algorithms. And that’s important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. Getting free web 2.0 traffic is a big topic that we’ll discuss more later. This is good overview of the reason to get into it, though.

Article Websites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. And the hidden benefit here is that your reach grows as other people take your articles and put them on their blogs and sites. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:

• First, spend the time to determine your keywords
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Hyperlink these keywords to your website – both in the content of the article and in your author’s info section.

Video

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Once again, this is really a sub-set of web 2.0. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And if all that wasn’t enough, you also stand a much stronger chance of getting a high search engine ranking for the keywords you want with video than you do with text-based content.

OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?

• Get a YouTube account
• Turn off all the modules in your account profile
• Add tags to your profile
• Include a link to your main site in your profile
• Add at least one video to your profile
• Include your keywords in the title, description and tags

In closing…

If you take action on the items listed here you’ll have free traffic in no time.

In order to make sure your membership business is profitable, you have to select the right market. Here’s how.

First – Look for Fanatics

The first step in developing a profitable membership business is to find a market with fanatics in it. Simply put, a fanatic is someone who’s willing to spend time and more importantly money on a topic they are interested in. OK, so we know what a fanatic is, but how do we find them?

• Look at magazine racks. This is an often overlooked, yet extremely simple way to find niches that people are interested in. In today’s economy, running a magazine is tougher than ever – some of the best ones are going out of business. So if it’s on the shelves, it’s making money, which means there is a big market interested in this topic. If they can make money in a print version, you can probably make money with a membership website.
• Pay attention throughout the day in your regular activities. See what people are talking about on the radio, TV, at parties, in public, etc. People generally talk about things they are interested in. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Conventions, clubs, and organizations. Once again, if there are enough people interested in a topic to create a club or organization, then there are enough people to build a membership business around it. Conventions are expensive to hold and attend, so if one if going on that’s another strong indication of a good niche to go into with your membership website.
• Think about the things that you are interested in. There’s a good chance that others are interested in these things, as well. And, as an added bonus, it’s much more fun to build a business around things you’re interested in.
• One simple and easy way to find out what’s hot is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. These topics are the hottest topics because lots and lots of people want information about them. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.

Step 2 – Determine the financial feasibility

After selecting a possible niche to build your membership site around, the next step is to find out if it’s a profitable niche to be in. One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.

OK, how do we figure that out?

• First go to Google and type in the name of your niche followed by “blog” and “forum”. If there are blogs and forums related to it, that’s a good sign. This lets you know there is a market (a group of people actively interested in the niche.)
• See if other people are creating and selling product in this niche by searching in Google Shopping, ebay and Amazon. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
• Watch Google Adwords for a period of time and look for ads the run again and again. Adwords ads are expensive, so people only run them repeatedly if they are profitable. And to be profitable, they have to be selling products and making money.

Last, but not least… How hard will it be to break into this niche?

Once you’ve found a niche and figured out that there is money to be made in, you need to determine if you can break into this niche. How do you gauge the ease of entry?

• Look at the product types in this niche. You want to find a niche where information products are being sold as the norm. The easiest membership website to create and maintain are information membership sites.
• The last thing you want is a marketing filled with tons of competitors. A few means it’s a profitable niche, but too many means you won’t be able to take a piece of it.
• Compare the size of the market versus the number of competitors. Some competition is a good sign – just make sure the market is big enough for you to join in.
• How ready is the market for marketing messages, and how willing are the fanatics to buy. Some niches are made up of people who require lots information and have a very long lead time, and some markets are filled with people who will spend lots of money right now.

In Summary

OK, now that you’ve figured out what niche you’re going to go into. Determined there is money to be made and that the competition is not too strong to break into it. You’re ready to start your membership business. If you’ve followed along with these steps you’re success in practically guaranteed. The only thing left to cover is exactly how to run your membership business…

The best way to ensure your success is to build automated traffic sources to send you visitors day and night.

Before we begin

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. This is because you will building your traffic funnels around specific keywords. So you need to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are worth targeting.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

• How competitive are the keywords you’re going after? This involves doing some competitive analysis to determine the ease of entry for each keyword
• Will the keywords you’re targeting bring buyers? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. This is not what you’re looking for.
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So make sure you are also targeting keywords to attract affiliates.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Hiring someone else to do it costs a lot of money. Which is why practically none of your competitors will do this! If you’re smart you will use website traffic software to help you with this process. Using tools like this speed up the process and improve your results, too!

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Only after doing your keyword research correctly can you start targeting these keywords to get you traffic.

Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…

• Surveys
• “Help” Websites
• Video Websites

Surveys

People love filling in surveys. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. This allows you to get free website traffic from other people’s sites! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Answer” Sites

Maybe you’ve seen these help sites where people post questions and other people answer them. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. The other thing they can be used for is to get traffic to your site, leads for your business and sales! Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. But a much smarter method is to use website traffic software to do it for you. Then you just get a daily batch of fresh leads delivered to your inbox.

Video

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. In fact, YouTube has over 2 billion videos watched per day! So don’t miss out of this incredible source of free website traffic.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then simply record yourself reading the text and you video the screen with a simple screen capture program. You can even get software that will automatically do this for you.

In Closing

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. Just be a creative and think outside the box a bit. And today there are tons of options for software tools that can help with every part of this process.

Don’t waste any more time:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Next, set up a survey or two with viral appeal
• Take advantage of the “help” sites
• Capitalize on video!