Building Your Member List

In order to build a list, you need an autoresponder.

An autoresponder is nothing more than a program that automatically sends out your e-mails on a schedule you pre-determine. You use an autoresponder to help build your member list by offering visitors to your site something for free. It may be a free report, a free newsletter, a free training series. In our hamster example, you might offer a free series on how to select the proper diet for your hamster.

Once people sign up for your series or free report, you introduce them to your membership site. You can do this in every third or fourth e-mail message or as a PS at the bottom of each e-mail in your series, or a combination of both. Getting people into your autoresponder series is the first step to getting them into your membership site.

There are two primary autoresponders on the market. I use Aweber, and it’s been wonderful. Easy to use. Never have had a problem with them. There’s also GetResponse. While I haven’t used them, I’ve heard great things about them. You probably can’t go wrong with either one.

Membership Software

Okay, you can go on the cheap to top of line with membership software. The choice is really yours. I’m going to suggest two programs that land in the middle, but I also want to show you two ways of avoiding membership software altogether.

First, you can set up your membership in a number of different ways. If it’s a free membership site, as we covered earlier, then you really don’t need anything more than a blog and a landing page to get started. Here’s how it works: you set up a landing page for your free membership site, and when visitors sign up they’re taken immediately to your blog, where all the information is displayed under various categories. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works fine. If you want to have an upgrade area, then you simply password protect that area. Once the member upgrades his or her subscription, the member is mailed the URL and password in order to access that area of the website.

The second way to get around using membership software is to deliver the material directly to your members through an autoresponder series. They sign up and pay through a program such as PayPal or 2Checkout, and are entered into the series. Every day, week, or month (however, you set it up), they receive the next installment of information, training, free ebooks, etc.

If you want more control, then you’ll want to consider a membership script. A good program should be able to offer multiple subscriptions, payment options, automatic new member account with login details, forgotten password problems, the ability to send an email to all members, the ability to control content (so someone doesn’t sign up, download everything, and request a refund), complete control of your pages, control of backend offers, affiliate management and even integration with payment processors.

A membership script can get very expensive. But here are two that are reasonably priced and can pretty much do anything you’ll need to run a membership site: Easy Member Pro and
aMember Pro. Check them out for yourself.

Okay, next time out we’ll talk about getting started.

POSTED BY Rick on Jul 11 under List Building Tools