Let’s talk about niche selection. This is very important to ensuring the profitability of your membership website.

Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market

The number 1 thing you have to do is find fanatics if you want a profitable membership website. Fanatic is defined as someone with an irrational enthusiasm. These are the people you’re looking for because they are so enthusiastic they’re willing to spend money on their topic of fanaticism. OK, so we know what a fanatic is, but how do we find them?

• One simple idea that’s easily forgotten is to scan the magazine racks when you’re out and about. 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. This is a very good indication that it’s a good niche for you to go into.
• 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. And this means there may be a market for information about it.
• Again, looking in the physical world for clues you can tell there are lots of people interested in something if there are clubs and organizations around the topic. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
• And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! There’s a good chance that others are interested in these things, as well. Making money is fun and it’s even more fun if you can do it in a niche you’re excited about.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. These are the things people are actively searching for in Google. They’re searching because they want information. Hot topics that people are excited about make great niches for your membership website.

Step 2 – Determine the financial feasibility

Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. An easy way to determine this is to figure out if anyone else is making money in this niche.

OK, how do we figure that out?

• Are there blogs or forums in this niche? Take the name of your niche and search for “niche name blog” & “niche name forum” in Google to see if there is an active group of people talking about and interested in the niche. This lets you know there is a market (a group of people actively interested in the niche.)
• Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
• Look at Google Adwords for the same ads are running over time. If people are running the same ad over time it means they are making money in the niche. They would not continue to spend money on the ads if there were not making a return from them.

Finally – Figure out your barrier to entry

After figuring out a good niche and determining that other people are making money in it, the last thing to do is decide if you will be able to enter the market. Here’s how to make this determination:

• Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it’s mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• 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 quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.

Summing it all up

So far, we’ve talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you’ve determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. If you’ve done your homework, your business will be a success because you already know your market is a profitable one with room for you. Learning how to run a membership website is a topic for another article…

Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is send hits to someone else’s website, they do everything else (make the product, design the sale page, handle the billing and support, etc.), and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

Here’s just a few benefits

1. You’re able to start almost instantly without having to make a product, write the sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. It runs on auto-pilot for you because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already done all the research, development and testing.  So you already know that the visitors you send will result in commissions for you.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

There is one major drawback…

Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. That’s fine for the product owner because she can sell to them again and again, but you can’t.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re a super star affiliate, you’ll provide high-quality content before sending them to the product website.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
2. You’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

Here’s what you’ll need to create affiliate tools like this:

1. A squeeze page, and even better, a video squeeze page.
2. One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
3. An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

There’s no doubt it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more.  And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

Setting it all up yourself requires some skill, and if you’re not up to it, you can use a service like Affiliate Silver Bullet. With a service like that, you don’t have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. On the plus side, you’ll save a ton of time and money vs. trying to build this yourself. Plus you can get started instantly. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your affiliate marketing.

Have you ever felt like you’re being drawn and quartered and just haven’t come apart yet?

Yeah, I’m feelin’ kinda stressed around here. Trying to go in too many directions and not reaching any of the destinations.

That’s what happens if you try to do too many things that aren’t related to each other.

Having become addicted to downloading all the neat free offers and free trials, I’ve been going in too many directions for a while now.

It’s hard to resist email headlines like these:

“Last chance to download this free PDF report”
“Here’s your free report”
“Here’s your ready made income stream…”
“You can’t win without this…”
“Download this free video package”
“Did you pick up your free software?”
“This powerful report is just for you”
“This report / video/ course/ software/ ebook/ audio/ is just what you need”
“Open now if you like money”
“Download these products instantly”
“Get 2000 guaranteed visitors to your website today!”
“Have you tried this yet?”
“Grab this while you still can” or, “before it’s too late”
“Great freebie for you today”

And then there are the nifty catch words like, secret, incredible, sneaky, alarming, fun, deadline, before it’s too late, and
yes, even nifty is a great catch word.

I’m saving the headlines that make me click, for a “swipe file” of good subject lines, but I’m not the best test subject for this. I tend to be curious anyway, and it doesn’t take much to pique my interest.

And I’m not complaining about these email subject lines. They’re good. They got me to click on them. And they pretty much all have some great products. But are they related to what I’m doing? Or even to each other?

Mostly, not. And therein lies my dilemma.

It’s a funny thing about goals… you have to define them really well if you want one.

It’s time to read Alex’s modules again and get down to business… yet again.

How do you stay on track? How does anyone focus on only one subject when everything is so interesting?

I’d love to hear what you think!

This is going to be an experiment for me, as well as an attempt to share something of value with everyone.

First, this will be my first attempt at posting a video in here! If nothing shows up, I’ll cry, but if you see something, then you’ll know I lucked out.

Second, I thought this video was pretty helpful. It’s by my friend, Patric Chan, who coached me a couple years ago.

So, if I’ve embedded this video right, you’ll see as you watch it that it only shows the first five tips. Patric said he’s making another video with the last five tips, which I’ll put in here next time.

OK, here we go:

Watch for the next video! You can also visit his website at www.successtrace.com.

Oh boy, be careful what you wish for. And be careful how you visualize and focus on things…

I’ve been thinking strongly about how to make a few bucks this year, just to help me hold on while I create my ultimate success online.
I guess I’ve been thinking of that end result as too big to conquer first, and that I should do something “in the meantime” to survive while I put the elements together that will bring huge success.

This week I actually came into possession of a “buck.” A dog named Buck.

OK, you can laugh if you want to. I think it’s kinda funny myself. Maybe Buck the dog will be the push I needed, to get past the notion that the ultimate goal has to be secondary. It should be primary!

So, how did I actually end up with Buck the dog?

As part of my animal rescue work, it came to my attention that a swell dog was about to be put down because he had nowhere to go, and the shelter he was in needed the space. As is typical of shelters all over the U.S. (and probably in other countries as well), certain animals have the lowest chances of survival as they are usually the first to be killed. No one adopts them, and they can languish in a cage forever. So why bother?

Buck typifies that situation in every way: He’s black; not too big, but not small; he has no identification on him; he’s older; no owner can be found (meaning he was dumped to wander and make it on his own); to survive he was raiding trash cans; he looked sickly (thin from lack of food and care, matted hair, covered in ticks). Poor Buck was a sure candidate for the needle, all right. Who would want such a sorry looking old dog?

Well, I did. I knew he was a good dog inside but that his luck was almost completely run out, so I spoke up. After veterinary care and some recuperation time in a foster home, he became ready for his new home…. mine!

So now that I have my interim “buck” along the way to internet success, I can focus fully on that goal! (Did the universe just teach me a lesson? I prayed for “bucks” and got one!)

As a dedicated animal welfare activist and caretaker, I’ve noticed some parallels that can be drawn from that work, relating to what I’m trying to accomplish with my internet marketing efforts. It was only the other day that I realized the correlations, as I have kept these parts of my life very well separated. Now, I’m thinking, they aren’t that far apart after all. Here is how I came to realize it:

I started an animal shelter about 7 years ago and have rescued hundreds of dogs and close to 1,000 cats. Housing them has been an amazing experience that has taught me a lot about pet care, behavior and health, and how people influence those dynamics (good and bad). Working with that many animals has given me knowledge and expertise that has provided the content for several ebooks and many articles, not to mention, successful outcomes for most of the animals, because I paid attention to details, followed up on what worked best, and recorded my observations.

I hesitate to call any of it “experimentation” as that implies testing that necessarily allows a percentage of my “subjects” to suffer ill effects for comparison purposes.

However, it is correct to use the term to describe my non-scientific, trial and error, approach to determine best protocols to handle their various needs.

OK, now pay attention to this revelation, because it relates to marketing, too:

In time, I developed policies that most often ensured their best interests. For example, feeding the cats is a major endeavor, since they come from different backgrounds, with different ages, weights, breeds, health issues, environments and experiences with people and/or other animals. Often, these factors are unknown because there are no records.

With such enormous variety of background factors, it soon became obvious to me that cats are not finicky or picky, as people believe, but rather, cautious about anything that might compromise their safety and survival. Not allowing themselves to be forced into our notion of cooperation, which is only forced conformation to our convenience, is not picky… it’s individuality, a trait not generally appreciated by humans in regard to animals… and hardly to other humans.

Appetite may result from hunger, but it does not lead to consumption if the product is unfamiliar.

Just like their human counterparts, cats come to the table with many differences, though it will be necessary in a shelter to be fed foods they may not know. (Imagine you’re in Africa and have been offered a local delicacy that turns out to be sheep’s eyeballs. How eager are you to eat that? Even the common daily menu could include items you do not consider food, such as insects and grubs. You could lose a lot of weight in the process. have you ever watched that television show, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern?)

Finding an acceptable food puts a burden on the caretakers (the shelter) to meet a wide and largely unknown variety of appetites. Forcing all the cats to eat the same food may be a necessity for shelter survival, but occasionally it threatens the lives of individual cats with special needs. Unfortunately, we did lose 6 cats during the first 6 years the shelter was open.

When a cat cannot or will not eat, they die. Period. Why don’t they just eat the food in front of them, like a dog would? Perhaps this huge behavior difference can be attributed to totally different evolutionary paths, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t change a cat’s instincts. You can, however, train some cats to accept a new food, but it requires more time spent on one cat and takes away from the time needed for the rest. I do it anyway, as it is worth it if the cat makes it. But they don’t always last long enough to overcome their body’s reaction to fasting.

What keeps them from making the transition to a new food?

1. If they are depressed, they won’t eat. Cats are very emotional.
2. If the smell is unfamiliar, they may not realize it is food.
3. If they are physically unable to smell, as from an injury, they don’t recognize anything as food, even if it’s something they have always loved.

One cat we lost some years ago had been rescued from an abusive situation wherein a blow to the face damaged his sinuses. He had to breathe through his mouth and he never ate again. Veterinary care kept him going for about a week, but we could not afford the delicate surgery to repair his sinuses.

The other 5 cats died because they were in unfamiliar surroundings, out of their comfort zones, and missed their families. Nothing keeps these cats alive if they can’t transition to a new life and start eating.

Customers can be like that. While the results aren’t as dire, many people cannot or will not be convinced that they need your product or service. It is up to you to get in front of people who already know or can see your stuff has value. It is fruitless to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to make people want you, just like trying to make a cat eat new food.

Many marketers take the wrong approach… they are trying to “make a cat eat something” it doesn’t recognize as useful or desirable.

Clearly, the most difficult path is to create a product and then try to educate the public to create a market that wants it.

The more practical path, then, is to

1. Find hungry cats who already know that the “food” you have is exactly what they already wanted and have been looking for. Then give it to them.

2. Put them into a consumption frame of mind. This could mean giving them a treat to get their attention first (a free gift), then “permission” to go ahead and get the new product. Sometimes pets have been trained to stay away from an area and you have to let them know it’s OK to go there at your place. I’ve actually sat on the floor by a cat and cajoled and cooed to let them know it’s OK to eat the food, even when it’s familiar to them but the location is not. With people, you create this frame of mind with your “call to action.” Be clear, and firm if needed, by letting a customer know that yes, this is the right product, and this is the right time and place to buy it.

3. Once they know it’s OK and that you are the best person to get it from, they will gobble it up and come to you again later for more. Once satisfied, and now able to trust you, they will be willing to get other products from you, too.

Coo and cajole your cats, er, customers, and you will have devoted followers for many years.