How can a free membership site give me traffic?
Usually, when you think about things like a free membership site, a blog, you don’t necessarily think in terms of traffic. People think “I am delivering value”, or they think “I am giving back”, or “I am getting some authority”, but really, the real reason, whether you know it or not, of having a free membership site, is to get traffic. How does a free membership site give you traffic? Well, I’m talking either a blog that’s out in the open or a blog that has some protected content that requires somebody to register and therefore optim to an e-mail list.
A free site gets you traffic from blog comments, from an optim form on the sidebar and from comments, and also from the search engine tricks, like SEO, from back-links and from re-tweet buttons. Let’s talk about those.
Blog comments are really good for blogs, because if you have a long page with a bunch of extra comments, then every single comment, every word in every comment in fact, is another chance to be picked up by the search engine, to be a search result if somebody goes and types something in.
Looking on my blog right now, I have a few pages that get me a couple hundred views per month from search engines. I have a post that got me 1452 hits in the past two weeks. Another that got me 250 hits in the past two weeks, another that got 219, 190, which on their own doesn’t seem like a lot, but if you have a blog of 100 or more posts, then 500 clicks per month times a hundred posts equals some serious traffic. And every blog comment can be new keywords which people use to find your site.
I get traffic from search engines for subjects like being banned from YouTube, time management, how to automate Twitter, things of that nature, click-bank physical products. Google likes content, Google likes helping people find what they’re looking for, and a blog, whether that’s a completely open or partially protected blog, can help normal visitors find answers.
The next good way to get traffic from your free membership site is an optim box, once people find your site from Google or from other links, give them away to get something else for free. Give them a free gift, give them a free video or a free report in exchange for turning over their name and e-mail address. This is very easy, you just copy and paste your sign up code from your autoresponder such as AWeber, edit your WordPress blog post in HTML mode and you can put an optim form right there on your blog.
As if those who share this weren’t enough, I also like to leave comments on other peoples blogs and in the URL field directly back to one of my blog posts I put a “re-tweet” button using the “Tweet MeMe” plug-in. if somebody likes a particular post, they click one button and it posts on their Twitter account a link back to my blog.
Those are just a few ways of how a free membership site can give you traffic. By having lots of blog comments, that way those key words will be indexed in the search engines. Having an optim form in your sidebar, that way when people find your blog they can sign up for your list. And also by leaving blog comments on other blogs and having a “re-tweet” button.