“Quickly & Easily Build Your Online Influence With
Membership Sites – Step By Step!”

On this Series of Blog Post you will learn (For FREE - others are charging between $50,00 and $1500,00)

Check out the previous article of Building Influence With Free Membership Sites Part 1 we talked about membership websites and what you can do with them.

On this article you will learn about " What You NeedBefore Getting StartedWhat You Need Before You Get Started"

Building a free membership website is just about as easy as falling off a log...well, maybe not quite that easy...but it IS easy. There are so many associated advantages to having a free membership site that the little bit of trouble and expense will be well worth the time and effort that are required.

To get started on building your free membership website you are going to need some tools. The first thing that you will need to secure is a web hosting service. There are actually two web hosting services that are excellent, reasonably priced and effective. You will have choices to make when you visit either of these two websites.

Web Hosting:

Host Gator

http://www.hostgator.com/

You will see that there are several choices of servers ranging in price from a measly $6.95 per month to a whopping $174.95 per month. The service that will most likely serve your needs for a very long time can be found under the fist choice of ‘Personal Hosting’. When you click on the ‘learn more’ link, you will see that there are several choices beginning with a ‘hatchling’ account and all the way up to a Semi-dedicated account. The one that will most likely serve your needs is the ‘Swamp’ account. It costs only $14.95 per month and will serve your needs for a very long time.

Bloghology Hosting

http://accounts.interactivegm.com/whmcs/cart.php

You will see that you are being offered 150MB of disc space . Larger amounts of disc space are available for more money each month. I’d start with the $2.00 and then add additional disc space as needed.

Domain Names:

Now you must have a domain name. Domain names are very specific and completely unique. When you type in a domain name, your computer takes you to that website and ONLY to that website. To start with you should think up several possibilities for your domain name. Using your own name in the domain name will make it easier to find one that hasn’t already been taken. You aren’t very likely to find the simplest ones to be available so you are going to have to get a bit creative. There are others, of course, but here are two places that you can register your domain name.

Name Cheap

http://www.namecheap.com/

Here you will see that it will cost you only $8.88 to register your domain name. There will be many offers for additional names and products. What you really need here is a domain name for no less than two years. You do not need to pay for anything additional that is offered.

GoDaddy

http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/default.asp

Here you will see that you can register your domain name for $8.95 per year. Again...you will be offered many extras but all you really need is to register your domain name for two years. The reason you need to register it for two years is that search engines really don’t like domains that are only registered for one year. Spammers tend to only register for one year at a time because they won’t be at the same location for anywhere near that long.

Membership Software:

If you are going to have a membership website, then you must have the software that will accomplish that. There are basically three sites that you should visit and look over the product offered on each site.

The first site is aMember at http://www.amember.com/. The package is $139.95.

The second site is Launch Formula Marketing at http://www.launchformulamarketing.com/. There is no price available without giving primary email address so check this one out for yourself.

The third site is Butterfly Marketing at http://www.butterflymarketing.com/. This software sells for $1497.00 plus shipping and handling.

Theme and Content:

As with every website, there must be a theme as well as content. There is a saying among Internet marketers that, “Content is King” and that’s pretty accurate. The only way that you can keep members visiting even a free membership site is to keep it constantly updated and loaded with fresh and relevant content that pertains to the theme of your site.

There are many ways to get good content. There are article banks where you can download free articles for reprint. There are sites where you can get PLR material that will provide good website content. You can also hire ghostwriters to write fresh content.

One such ghost writing site Writing and Transcription Services at: http://www.writingandtranscriptionservices.com

Blogs or Forums:

Most hosting services (both of the ones mentioned above) have included a utility called Fantastico. This feature allows you to set up a blog or forum on your membership site. In addition you can install such things as customer support, content management systems, polls and a host of other things. You really need to poke around in your hosting service to see what all is available.

Help Desk:

Installing a help desk is entirely optional. It is, by no means, a required feature for a free membership site. The software can be found at the HelpDesk website at http://www.perldesk.com/. The cost of the HelpDesk software starts at $99.95. Although this is not required the HelpDesk software can be very beneficial. It will allow you to you to organize your companies customer relations to a database backed browser based help desk. This can save you a whole ton of headaches particularly if you have multiple businesses.

Okay, that’s about it. You need a hosting service, a domain name registered, membership software, a theme and website content, a blog or forum and maybe a Helpdesk. This will be enough to get your free membership website off of the launch pad.

On the Part 3 we will walk you through a Step By Step Tutorial for Building Influence With Your Own Free Membership WebSites

Building Influence With Free Membership Sites

“Quickly & Easily Build Your Online Influence With
Membership Sites – Step By Step!”

On this Series of Blog Post you will learn (For FREE - others are charging between $50,00 and $1500,00)

Over the next weeks we will be posting all the info and tools you will need to get going your membership website. Below is a list of articles you can expect. You can Join Bloghology for FREE and Subscribe to the my Blog on the right under my picture.

What you will get:

• Why Build Free Membership Sites
• What You Need Before Getting Started
• Building A Free Membership Site - Step-by-Step
• Benefiting & Profiting From Your Free Membership Site
• Recommended Resources + Bonuses

Why Build Free Membership Sites?

Internet marketers, email marketers, and Internet entrepreneurs of all stripes are quickly finding the many, many advantages to opening a free membership site for their customers and potential customers. Even savvy and well-established Internet marketers who have paid membership sites are jumping on the free membership site bandwagon because they can see the obvious advantages.
Paid membership sites are most usually limited to a specific number of members. This means that marketing is limited to that specific number. Limiting marketing possibilities is never a positive thing no mater what products or services are being promoted. Of course, there are obvious reasons for limiting paid membership site memberships but the fact remains that a free membership site can be operated right along side a paid membership site and there is never any reason at all to limit the memberships available to a free site.

Three to six months is about the duration of a paid membership to most membership sites according to many paid membership site owners. Three to six months isn‟t very long in terms of Internet marketing. Once a paid member drops his membership, the site owner must then replace him and that can get expensive.

On the other hand, membership cancellations at free membership sites are easily and cheaply replaced. Marketing to the members of a free membership website is absolutely unlimited. You can continue to market to free membership site members for as long as you want to. Free membership sites are easy to run and they cost almost nothing and yet the owner is supplied with an almost unlimited number of customers and potential customers to market all kinds of products and services to.
Let‟s face it: Every Internet marketer must now have an opt-in mailing list in order to send bulk marketing emails. That‟s the law that went into effect with the passage and implementation of the CAN SPAM act. There is nothing anybody can do about it. If you send bulk marketing emails without the express consent of the recipients, you are subject to very heavy fines and the very real possibility of having your Internet business closed down altogether.
So... why limit your mailing list to just a paid membership site? Why not build a free membership site and gain an unlimited number of names and email addresses to which you have the legal right to send marketing emails? There simply is not satisfactory reason for NOT having a free membership site...at least not one that I can see.
Free membership sites are easy to set up and easy to operate. Of course, there must be fresh and timely content but that‟s a lot easier (not to mention cheaper) than constantly having to run PPC campaigns or paying for advertising in related E-zines to attract members to your opt-in list and thus gain their permission to market products and services to them.
We all know that visibility on the Internet is one of the basic keys to successful marketing. Getting visibility is one of the hardest tasks that most Internet marketers face from the inception of a marketing idea. All Internet marketers well understand the value of writing and marketing articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums that belong to others and doing PPC campaigns, as well as, exchanging links and paying for advertising in E-zines and newsletters.
With a free membership website, you can almost guarantee yourself, not only a long list of customers and potential customers but that others will be willing to pay YOU for advertisements on your free membership sites and advertisements in the newsletters that you send to your very impressively long list.The shoe will be on the other foot, so to speak. Other marketers will be begging you to download and post articles and E-Books which they have written trying to gain that coveted Internet visibility.
Influence is another sought after and enviable facet of Internet marketing. When an Internet marketer gains influence over even a small group of consumers, they have a great deal influence among other Internet marketers, as well. When that pool of consumers is really large, a marketers influence with other marketers increases in direct proportion to the number of consumers that he has influence over.

With a free membership site, an Internet marketer gains access to an unlimited number of potential customers in his niche marketing area. By keeping his content fresh and timely he will gain influence over the purchases that the members of his free membership make and even when they make purchases and from whom. This is commonly known as „clout‟.

Paid membership sites usually have limited memberships. If the membership isn‟t limited by the marketer, it is limited by the number of people who are willing to pay an annual membership fee... and that number for any niche market IS a limited number.

On the other hand, a free membership site that allows interaction between the owner, as well as, with other members is affordable by everybody who might even be remotely interested in the products and services that the enterprising Internet marketer will be offering to his list.

The cost to members is a big fat zero and it just can‟t get any cheaper than then. Those who might well want to join a paid membership site but either don‟t think they can afford it or simply don‟t want to spring for the membership fees will certainly be able to join a free membership site.

Many Internet marketers who have paid membership sites also have free membership sites. Often those free sites are made up on customers or potential customers who will eventually become members of the paid membership site so it becomes a win/win situation for all concerned.

 
The bottom line here is that there is simply no reason NOT to build a free membership website no matter what niche market you are in.

You will have the potential of building an extensive opt-in list and there simply is
no other way that is as easy or as cost effective out there!

What You Need Before Getting Started

Subscribe to get notified when the next Series of Building Influence With Free Membership Sites will be available

Merry Christmas for those of you who commemorate it. I believe you guys won’t have much time (let alone patience…) to read Bloghology Network today, so I’ll just leave you with a cool link that I came across last week. It is titled 10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010, and it was published at Mashable.

Here is the first trend:

1. Living Stories

One of the difficulties of the web is being able to really track a story as it develops and creating engaging formats for long-form articles. The article page is often the only thing that a reader sees and not the story in its full context. In 2010, news organizations will design stories that are more suited to the way readers consume online content.

One early sign of this is the recent collaboration between Google, The New York Times, and The Washington Post on the Living Stories project, an experiment that presents coverage of a specific story or topic in one place, making it easy to navigate the topic and see the timeline of coverage on the story. It also allows you to get a summary of the story and track the conversations taking place. This format contextualizes and personalizes the news.

Check out the full article to read the other nine.

There are basically three words that can describe spam accurately: desperate, manipulative, evil.  While that may sound like the resume of some soap opera villain, it rings true for every one of us who have ever been burned by spam.  Spam is an example of why sometimes, the means does not justify the end.

True, the aim is to build buzz for your blog but the technique used is just plain wrong.  If you're planning on leaving spam comments on other websites any time soon, know that it's not the way to promote your blog.  On the contrary, you might even do damage to your blog without knowing it.

Understanding spam comments

Spam comments started sprouting their evil seed when online guestbooks began appearing on websites.  Unscrupulous site owners and marketers bombarded these guestbooks with links (many even used purely links) back to the spammers' websites.  If any comment is included at all, it may contain highly generic ones such as 'cool post' or 'great website' or 'nice page'.

Spam appears in just about anything these days, including blogs, often in the form of a comment.  How this is done is quite simple.  Any blogger who wishes to promote his blog can simply write down keyword-heavy texts in the guise of a comment and then post it at random on another blog or website.  Sites that allow hyperlinks to be displayed are usually the prime targets.

The problem here is that this type of commenting is not purposeful at all.  It's done at random, similar to throwing darts at a huge dartboard while wearing a blindfold in the hopes of hitting something, anything.

Why spam commenting will not work for you

Leaving spam comments to promote your blog may seem tempting enough but it's best to avoid it.  That is, if you want to be taken seriously and see your blog last long enough for your grandchildren to appreciate.  Here are reasons why leaving spam comments to promote your blog are NOT the way to go:

You're being watched

These days, you spam someone once and you'll be branded for life.  Or at least the blog or business you're trying to promote will be.  The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 makes sure spam is controlled and no one can wave it around like a weapon.

Becoming associated with spam is bad news for your blog.  People hate spam… period.  They will be more than happy to report you to your host provider or even your affiliate companies and avoid your blog altogether.  And yes, Akismet and a host of other plug-ins designed to fight spam will be watching.

You will be penalized

By leaving spam comments on another website with the sole purpose of promoting your blog, you give that website's owner the permission to become a witness against you.  Your host provider will cut off ties with you and if you're using your blog to promote an affiliate's products, even your affiliate will drop you. 

Should this happen, you will have to start all over again, from square one, with a tarnished reputation.  If you leave more spam comments in the future, you'll only be repeating the cycle all over again, all to your detriment.

You'll be seen as unprofessional

Leaving spam comments to promote a blog is for the lazy, the uninformed and the desperate.  Why else would you use a technique that is generally viewed as unsavory?  If you're unprofessional, your visitors will find it difficult to trust you ever again.

You'll be violating certain unwritten codes

The reason why comments are allowed in websites is to provide people a platform with which to interact.  Blogs, forums and discussion boards are large meeting places, open to people regardless of their age, sex, location or personal beliefs, with the implicit agreement that those who participate will be respected for their beliefs.

By leaving spam comments on these sites mainly to promote your blog, you break this code of trust. 

Leaving spam comments can increase your blog's ranking... artificially

Although an artificial increase in ranking can mean good news for your blog (it will allow your site to appear high in search engine rankings), this is only an initial effect, sort of like anesthesia.  Soon, it will wear off.

This is particularly true if your blog has nothing else to offer.  Visitors who have been driven to your blog through search engine links (which you were able to achieve artificially) will sniff around your site and if they find nothing there, they'll leave soon enough, never to come back. 

Worse, word might even get around that your website is filled with nothing but air.  If you must promote your blog this way, make sure you have the content to make visitors stay.
 

Check out Blogged Money for Information | Blogging Tips and Blogging Resources

Encouraging children to engage themselves in modern technology can be disturbing especially when they spend most of their time on it. But if you recognize the advantages of being in front of the computer and knowing the basics, you could teach it to your kids and voila, a web artist, computer specialist, or a journalist might be born.

If you see the future of writing in your children, enrich his abilities. How? By starting with this, get him linked to the blogging community. Teach him the core information, strategies and benefits of being a blogger. Before you do, make sure you have the knowledge as well.

The essential tools for making his way through are support and lots of motivation. Of course a computer would be great, same with an internet connection in the comfort of your home.

Children embrace fame and loves having someone to appreciate what they do. Acceptance, acknowledgement and attention provide sufficient self-esteem for them to grow. Introducing the blogging society to your children can help expand his know-how in the English language, broaden grammatical skills, and advance spelling talents.

Development in the art of writing at a budding age is truly an enrichment of your child’s innovative mind. Furthermore, blogging can have numerous benefits:

• Trigger the sense of responsibility – let your child know that blogging is not merely posting; certain responsibilities are brought up like updating, posting daily blogs, answering reader’s queries, and more.

• Establishes communication – connection to the outside world enable kids to reach out to distant relatives and friends. Better yet, getting updates and issues of what’s going on.

• Enhances creativity – upon knowing a child’s potentials, enhance it. Attending to his talents provides eagerness in the child and he would be more confident to profess his skills.

• Enriches vocabulary – it’s doesn’t stop in learning ABC, your child has the opportunity to play with the words. Make them think. How could I construct an effective sentence that could affect both the reader and the writer? He should learn to cope with words or phrases, correctly. Visiting websites like those that have a thesaurus, dictionary, etc. Which can help the child use other words aside from those that are said every day.

As parents, provide the highest level of understanding and commitment to your kids. Be alert for the dangers in handling the internet. Some scenes and sites aren’t that suitable to visit. Children must also be reminded that privacy should be maintained. Disclosing information that is risky and jeopardizing and is unsafe for posting.

To learn more about Blogging Tips, Blogging Resources and how to Make Money Blogging