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

Number 1 – Discover Niches with 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. Here’s how to find fanatics:

• 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.
• You’ve got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. 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.
• What about your interests and hobbies? Chances are that if you like a certain topic or hobby, other people do, too. Making money is fun and it’s even more fun if you can do it in a niche you’re excited about.
• One simple and easy way to find out what’s hot is Google Trends. This service shows you the current most popular search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. These are the niches you want to be in – lots of people actively searching means lots of opportunity.

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?

• 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.)
• Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. What you’re trying to figure out is if anyone is making money in this niche, and if people are selling products it means they are making money.
• 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

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. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
• Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
• How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Every market is different. Sometimes people are looking for information and are ready to pay for it right now. And sometimes it takes weeks, months or even years for them to make the decision to purchase.

In Summary

At this point you’ve figured out what niche you’re going into. You found your fanatics, you know they spend money and you’re confident there’s room in the market for you. 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…

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

But, first…

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.

A couple things to keep in mind when doing keyword research:

• How competitive are the keywords you’re going after? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? Some keywords will bring lots of traffic, but none of them will buy. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
• What about affiliates? Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. Which is why practically none of your competitors will do this! The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. Using tools like this speed up the process and improve your results, too!

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Now that you’ve completed your keyword research, you can begin using these keywords to get traffic to your website.

Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…

• Surveys
• “Answer” Sites
• Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

The truth is that people really enjoy taking surveys and finding out what other people think. You can use this fact to provide “sticky” content for other website owners. It’s a win-win. They get a great perk on their site and you get a link back to yours. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! Using just this one extra idea will put you ahead of your competition . . . who think surveys are for gathering information! So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Help” Websites

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. However, you’re interest in these sites is not to ask and answer questions. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. One thing you can do is to visit sites like Craigslist and Yahoo! Answers and manually extract contact info to contact other users. The good news is that it’s easy to find website traffic software that can do this automatically. Then you just get a daily batch of fresh leads delivered to your inbox.

Video Websites

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! If used properly, video sites can get you more website traffic than you know what to do with.

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. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

The Bottom Line…

Getting traffic is not that difficult. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. 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
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• Capitalize on video!