I am a fan of WP Wishlist Member and I have found a lot of great uses for the WordPress Membership Plugin that are beyond the obvious, which is doing a membership site that makes money.  So here are some alternative usages for whishlist member – if you buy the multi-site license you then have the tool (along with wordpress) to crank out private membership sites all day long.

1. Private Sales Portal – Use Wishlist Member to create a private sales portal for your sales team or for your affiliates.
2. Course – You can develop a one time course using WP Wishlist Member.  It does not have to be a monthly thing – and you can later upsell items as they stay involved in the course.
3. Intranet – WP Wishlist Member is a great way to create a simple intranet for your organization.
4. Upsell – I use Wishlist Member to manage a free membership site – but the free site is not open to the public, it is an upsell for another product where the customers that join via my reseller account get bonus training.

I am sure there are even more uses for Wishlist member that you can think of.  Feel free to leave ideas in the comments area.

WordPress is the best content management system in the world. Not because it has the most features, but because it is easy to set up, has great plugins, is open source (free), flexible, customizable and gets great search engine results.

Here are several ways to make money with WordPress.

1. Build a WordPress Lead Generation Empire.
2. Affiliate Sales – You can sell affiliate products via your WordPress blog.
3. Membership Site – Make Money with a WordPress Membership Site
4. AdSense – You may not make a fortune, but over time you can make money with Google Adsense.
5. Sell MLM Products – You can use the WordPress site to generate leads for any product.
6. Product Sales – WordPress gets the search engine results and you can sell products on the side.
7. Advertising – People do pay for advertising once you have a decent page rank and traffic.
8. Ebay – Make Money with your WordPress blog by promoting anything that you are selling in another place, like eBay or Craigslist.
9. WordPress Design and Hosting – Once you become talented at WordPress, you can use your skills to host and design wordpress sites for businesses. Since you start with a good template, you do not need to be a designer from scratch.

There are many other ways to make money with wordpress. Only a few short years ago it seemed irresponsible to tell clients to use Open Source.  Now I think it is irresponsible to NOT use open source, like WordPress, unless you have a very special need.

Content Marketing is  intentionally publishing content that attracts people to your company because the information is valuable and interesting.

The most obvious form of Content Marketing is writing articles on your website or blog that get ranked well in search engines and generate organic traffic to your website – where ideally you encourage them to start a relationship with you by downloading a free report, signing up for a course, registering to watch a video or any number of other options.

Content marketing is also when you produce interesting content for other websites that encourage people to visit your site.  For example, a video may be watched on one of the video hosting websites but contain the web address of your site, which would result in people visiting your main website after consuming your content on another website where they found it.

Inbound Marketing is another term I hear that is nearly the same as  Content Marketing.  I really like the term Inbound Marketing because it explains what makes this form of marketing very different from other forms of marketing.  You are helping people come to you instead of traditional, interuption marketing as done in the past.

Here is a summary from a Terry Dean email.

Here is the definition of content marketing from Wikipedia.

49 Creative Ways You Can Profit From Content Marketing

Using Info-Marketing to Sell Physical Products and Services

Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers?

The Future of Journalism: Content Marketing

Content Marketing – Stop Selling and Start Giving

Top Ten Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Fails

Content Marketing – The Ultimate Cheat Sheet

This blog post is a question, and I appreciate your reponse in the comments.

What kind of webinars do you prefer and attend?

I do Web Demonstrations one on one for our product almost every day.

But what I enjoy attending is a webinar with more personality and less structure.

I get invited to 2-3 webinars per day and I completely ignore them.  I do not want to see a sales presentation – cleverly disguised as a webinar.  That is, not unless I know in advance I am interested in the product.

But I do not mind being sold to at all when I get a couple of experts online talking about their experiences, giving good info and bantering back and forth.

Do you like a formal webinar with powerpoint or do you like an informal conversation that you are listening in on?  I know my preference, but I am curious what other people prefer as a webinar format.

I will be the first to admit that I like email much better than facebook and twitter for business.

But here is why you MUST take Twitter and Facebook seriously.

Most people do not go to the time and expense of building a great email list.  The email list would be more valuable, but just look at the facts.  You really have to know what you are doing to build a good email list, and it takes a long time to develop.

On the other hand, Twitter and Facebook are nothing more than lists and messages that are much more effortless.  Many people that would never consider building an email list have large lists of people that get their messages in FaceBookand Twitter.

I am sure the targeting and response of these tools is less effective than a good email list, but look at how things are going.  Many people have valuable lists in twitter and facebook and they do not think twice about sharing messages with that list.  One the other hand, if I have a great email list, I am going to be very careful about what I share on that list.

Twitter and Facebook may not be as targeted, but they make up for it in size, ease of sharing and viral growth.

To get the most out of Twitter and Facebook, find ways to leverage your relationships there to drive targeted people to your email list and grow that list more aggressively.  One is not a replacement for the other, it is just a great tool at the top of your sales funnel.

If you are like a lot of people I know, you get the occasional idea for a product or brand and then you go out to a domain registrar and buy a good domain name if it is available.  But of course, making that idea into a reality takes more time than domain registrattion, so it just sits out there, costing you a few bucks a year and teasing the back of your mind.

I suggest that you do a website audit and put up at least one page on your domain as soon as you can, even if you cannot get around to doing anything with it for a long time.  And if it is not too much trouble, link to the site from one source that is indexed by Google.  Maybe it is your personal blog, or maybe it is another old website.

Why should you take time to do this?

First, it takes a while for search engines to respect a new website.  If you have a one page website up, it is better than nothing.  It means when you do launch the site you will get much better and faster results.

Second, you can set up your one page website to either promote other things you are doing or even affiliate products.  You might be able to cover the cost of the domain, at least.

If you are not a web person, it is OK.  This can be the simplest of websites and you can use a template (but with unique content) on each domain name.

I had one domain that just sat out there for many years doing nothing for me, but when the time came and I used it for something, it got ranked so fast and so easily that it surprised even me.

My new rule for myself is that I do not buy a domain without setting up a basic article on the domain’s main page to begin with.  The investment is worth it when you try to do something with the domain in the future.

Do a website audit.  How many of your domains do not even have a one page website on them?  Take some time and get that fixed.  It will pay off.

I have found that membership websites are great, but also very upsetting if you are doing it for the first time.

The first time I launched a membership website, I used 6 differenet membership website software solutions before I found one that I loved and have stuck on.

If you are interested in setting up your own income generating membership website, I suggest you start with the free membership website guide by Yaro Starak.  Keep in mind if you want to join his training center, it is only open for a couple of days.

What I learned from starting a membership site is this:

1. Find a simple solution and stick with it.  I now use WordPress, WP Wishlist Member and 1ShoppingCart.  And with these tools I can get past the set up and ecommerce issues in under an hour.
2. Simplicity is key – I started out feeling like I had to have tons of content to justify the cost of the membership site.  Later I realized most people do not read all the stuff and it is better to focus on Quality – not quantity.
3. Marketing will be most challenging – while it is easier to set up a membership site once you get the hang of it and get the right membership site software solutions, it is still not easy to sell it.  You should anticipate a lot of work on the marketing side to make it a success.

Membership Websites are not the automatic cash machine that people make them out to be online.  However, once you get better at setting them up and doing it, you can make money with membership sites.

I have had the privilege of working with more people in very specific industries lately.  For example: Basement Waterproofing.

Working with a specific company in a specific niche, it is much easier and faster to get great results.

[Get More Waterproofing Leads from the Web]

Why?  In the case of basement waterproofing it is easy to target your prospects.  You need to define your target geographic region and then use Inbound Marketing to draw people that need your service to you.

The Basement Waterproofing Marketing results that we have been getting are great, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Any industry that addresses a specific solution to a specific problem that people are doing searches on and researching is going to get great marketing results in the form of targeted traffic and lead generation.

Granted, Basement Waterproofing is not the sexiest market.  However, it is a great example of how to pick your niche, understand your value to your prospects and make yourself easy to find.  It works like magic.