Traffic is the key to any website. Without traffic, a website can make no conversions, no advertising revenue and no income. Do you have a website? Are you struggling to drive traffic to it? A membership site that offers a specific service related to the niche that your website covers can draw traffic to your website. A membership site added to yours will work well if it adds value to your visitor’s experience. There are several types of membership sites that can be to a site such as your blog, for example.
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So, what are some examples of membership sites that can be easily added to yours? Well, there are several types that are common and that can be added to your site in a sub-folder or a sub-domain using a PHP script that is completely separated from the coding of your main site.
One example of a membership site that can be added to yours is a forum. Forums are great for drawing visitors to your site because of the fact that they bring like-minded individuals of the same niche together. Having a niche community, narrow in focus, can add a great deal of value to your visitor’s experience if it has decent traffic. A forum, of course, would have to be closely moderated so as to keep spammers from over-running it. That being said, if your forum has moderate to good activity, it is also a great way to increase the residence time of your visitors on your site and reduce the bounce rate. Both of these factors are believed by many to have an influence on the level of your sites Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Another example of a membership site that can add value to your visitor’s experience is a link directory. Many feel that link directories are outdated and they can be easily if the links in them are stale. The internet is very dynamic and domain names are registered and sold constantly. Keeping a link directory fresh and up to date is a monumental challenge, but if the focus is narrow enough, a niche link directory can be quite manageable and can add much value to your visitors experience as well as guide them to useful human-reviewed resources that they would have never found using search engines. Additionally, they provide a valuable service to webmasters working in that niche that are looking to promote their site.
A final example of a membership site that can be added to your site, if it is a static site is a blog. Blogs are great membership sites. The SEO benefit that comes from having a blog on your site is most noteworthy. Adding a blog to your site means adding fresh content on a consistent basis and keeping the search engines happy and revisiting your site on a constant basis. If you have a blog as your main domain, you can use it as a membership site simply by allowing visitors to sign up and submit guest posts. One blog script that built in membership functionality is the WordPress blog script. In the case of a blog, the value comes in the form of content related to your specific niche.
This is by no means an exhausted list of the different types of membership sites that can be added to your site. There are many others. What is unique to each of these add-on membership sites is the fact that they are all based around User Generated Content (UGC) that simply has to be moderated. However, if correctly and consistently moderated, a membership site can add value to your visitor’s experience and act so as to boost your website traffic, improve your conversion and visibility.