Hello, I run a membership site and it has over 1,270 active member some free some paying. My goal is to get over the 1,300 market but no matter what I did I cannot seem to reach it. I advertise daily and I get about 10 new sign ups per day however at the same time about 10 people remove their membership Right now I'm marketing using Solo Ads, PPC, Banner Ads, Articles, Twitter, Forums and a few other little things. I had this problem when I was at 900 members it took me about 2 months to crack the 1k mark. I'm starting to think that no matter what I do my membership will just never get bigger it will just stay where its at. Does this happen to membership sites at some point? Anyway what do you think I can do to increase my traffic and help get new members to sign up.
You said that 10 people remove their membership every day... Why don't you work on making a better system? 10 people daily is a big loss :/ If you save those 10 people every day you will end up with 300 more members at the end of the month Take a look at your system and see what you can do to make it better... There's obviously something wrong with your system, otherwise you won't be losing all those visitors :/ Hope that helps
Well my system removes people for being inactive or having bad emails. This helps make sure that everyone in the system is active and uses it. So even though 10 people get removed they are basically taking up space as they are inactive and are not using the system. So far to make people say I run monthly contests giving away money and other prizes, give away free gifts, create videos on marketing and put them in for members to watch. I'm running out of ideas.
Is this something that you can advertise using articles? I get an awful lot of visitors due to articles I write... about 500 daily and I'm no Rhodes Scholar. Also, perhaps some youtube videos. I just started that this week, put up 5 videos and have had 87 dits to my site from the videos. Granted 87 hits is nothing but they have only been up a couple of days and they are far from Golden Globe award material.
Yes I did write articles like crazy for it, but then I stopped my membership at articlemarketer as I wasn't sure how effective my articles where. I mainly did it to get back links and help with SEO which my site doesn't rank to bad for my main keywords pages 1 - 5 in Google for my main keywords. As for YouTube videos I don't make any videos promoting it. I should test this out, and maybe try to post a few videos each week.
For the videos, I use a program called Photo Story. It's free and pretty easy to figure out. The videos I made are less than 2 minutes as my stuff is business related and I think that if they are too long, there would be little incentive to visit my site so I give them a taste of what is on the site in the video. I also put the videos on my site and for some crazy reason, people watch them. The video info I use came from other members here that offered their expertise. I submit about 25 - 30 articles a week to ezinearticles... no other place at all and for my niche, it's quite effective.
I am going to guess that this is a forum? First - never remove users. Second - what kind of forum software are you using? Third - "who" is your targeted group of people? What special interest do you share, such as hobbies,,, or anything else. And just so you will take me serious, here are my forum stats - Threads: 53,396, Posts: 658,154, Members: 16,447, Active Members: 4,588 - and 3 million page views a month. Please provide some more information about your community, and lets go from there.
Its not a forum. My membership site allows people to send out emails, post banner ads, and post text ads. Its in my signature if you wanna have a look There are 3 reasons people either get removed by the system or remove themselves. 1) Their email accounts bounce and my system puts them on bounce mode which is temp inactive until they fix their email. If they don't fix it in 7 days the system removes them. 2) People leave because they receive to much email. Since it's an email service people get email which they agree to get and know they will get before they sign up. 3) Inactive account. My system records each time a member logins into his/her account. If they do not log in at least 1 time every 60 days the system will remove them as they are not active. There account is just sitting there so it removes it. My goal is to make sure that everyone in my system is very active so it gives the people who use it a clean and active email service. If I just let people stay inactive in the system then the quality of my service will go down. One other thing I like to point out. I keep a close eye on my competitors, and their memberships rang anywhere from 1,500 (low end) to 8,000+ member (high end). My goal when I started was 3,000+ active members. It will be a year come Aug. since I started this membership site.
Ok, we come from different backgrounds. It looks like you focus on squeeze pages, while I try to build blogs, forums and communities. Lets see if a little brain storming can give you some ideas. Your sites target an exact niche - which is email marketing. Because of spam, some people think that all email marketing is spam. As a result of the "all email marketing is spam" mentality, your sites do not appeal to certain types of people. So how can you attract different groups of people? Or at least educate them on email marketing? Install a wordpress blog - something like ezadexchange.com/blog Wordpress has some excellent search engine optimization features. This has the possibility to help your site rank better in google. Post detailed articles on "how" to promote your site with email marketing. Other types of articles could include "Site of the Month" where you detail how someone used email marketing to promote their site. Every page on the blog could be like a squeeze page - but written in a professional manner that does not say "squeeze". Install a forum - something like ezadexchange.com/forum There are some free forum solutions like MYBB that can serve this purpose. But,,, forums take a lot of time and effort to moderate and maintain. On the other hand, member of your site could have a place to discuss topics of interest. You could have forum sections on "how" to write an effective news letter, grammar, sentence structure,,,, The blog suggestion would be the easiest and maybe the fastest solution. Some of the free forums do not have very good SEO features, so they may not help you rank better in the search engines. The big difference between the forum and the blog, is how much interaction you want between your members. If you want your members posting topics, start a forum. If you want to be the only one posting topics, start a blog. Install a blog and a forum: - At this time, I would not suggest that you take on both task at the same time. If your interested in both, do one at a time. Start one - finish it, go to the next one. The goal of both suggestions is to create something more then "just" a squeeze page.
I started a blog a few months ago. I was doing good with it but its hard to keep updating it with fresh content since I run a few other sites. As for a forum I'm not sure about running one as I don't think I'll have the time to watch over it. I like the idea of site of the month. Maybe get a member to give me his/her experience using my service and see how its help their business and post their results for others to see.
Its looks like you have 2 sites that target the same exact groups and provide the same service? If you are spread too thin and do not have a lot of free time, why not close one of the sites? Or make one of the sites a blog, and use it to drive traffic to your sales site? On one of my forums, I bought a domain name that is very close to the name of the forum. I use it as a blog, and to drive traffic to my forum - this is also called a "portal". The blog is my forums' #1 source of targeted traffic with only an 8% bounce rate. In comparison, the bounce rate of my forums google generic search traffic is 48%. 8% bounce rate compared to a 48% bounce rate - that is a lot. But the blogs bounce rate from google is around 60%. So its like the blog filters the traffic and then sends it to my forum. If you are promoting both sites, personally I would stop and focus just on one site. Get that site ranking well in the search engines and with lots of traffic. And only when your happy with the first site, then start promoting the second site. I tried to do what your doing with your sites, but with two forums in the same niche. It was too much. I closed one of my forums and turned it into that portal I mentioned earlier. That was 2+ years ago. Back then I was not happy at all with the results. But now, I am very happy. I'am telling you all of this because hopefully you can see what I went through, and what I did. There is a lot of difference between your sites and mine. But we both want the same thing - lots of traffic.
Right now the main site I want to push is the Smart Safelist thats the main one. The other one is small and just started, and have my bigger site (Smart Safelist) filter members into my new site. So my second site I'm not even promoting its just members coming in from my other site. Its not so much that I don't have time to invest into advertising I do have the time. I think I've marketed so much in the same areas that my advertising is just getting old and I might be getting the same people seeing my ads in those areas and its not pulling like it use to cause I've used them so much. Thats why I'm trying to figure out new areas to use. I had this type of problem when I was around 900 members and then I had a few people pick up my site and market it for me using the affiliate program. So I was thinking of adding like a JV link to my site and see if anyone want to team up or something. I'm sure someone would be interested.
Well I reached my goal. Now I have 1,309 members finally over the 1,300 mark I just worked my butt off for the last 2 days to get 25 new members each day. Just goes to show you what can happen when you put the work and effort into something. And what makes it even better was some of the new members became paid members $$
Well,congratulations for reaching your goal.It takes time and effort to achieve your target but it is probably worthy.Keep it up.