A parent who “heard you made money online” asked me yesterday at a kid’s birthday party how we got our first members for our first niche membership site. I hadn’t thought about that story in a while so I decided to put here in writing.
Obviously one of the first questions everyone has is how to start building a list and building traffic to a niche content site when you have:
a) a tiny (or non-existent) budget
b) limited time
c) limited patience (a biggie for me, especially)
So this is what we did to get a jump start on traffic and exposure for our first content website and it still works like GOLD today. Gold, Jerry, GOLD! (for you Seinfeld fans).
I’ll try to get to the point as quickly as possible, but I need to give you a little background so you understand how this works.
Back when I owned a few trade shows, the most important marketing we produced had two goals: get more attendees and get more exhibitors. We needed to not only make people aware of our events in the first place, but to also make the workshops and panels so compelling that they’d get on a plane from across the country and and attend the paid conference.
After we confirmed a speaker for one of the conference workshops, I’d take the typically boring, lame and otherwise uninspiring text that the speaker would send us for their session and turn it into something that sounded exciting, interesting and “can’t miss.” The more enticing the workshops, the more likely the attendee will attend the show and also sign up for the conference.
Conference organizers are always looking for ways to make their workshops sound great. The more ways they can do this, the better it is for them and for the attendees who sometimes have to choose between 5-6 concurrent sessions.
There are conferences and events for every niche imaginable. You wouldn’t believe how many trade shows there are. If you can think of a niche, I can almost guarantee there is a trade show or conference out there that addresses it. (There are even two large trade shows for people who own trade shows. I know – I’ve attended them both.)
Anyway, years ago we started a paid content site in a niche that had two very large trade shows. However, we weren’t very well known in the industry. But knowing that all trade show and conference organizers are looking for ways to make their conference program interesting, I contacted each of them and proposed the following.
I offered to do very quick 2-3 minute interviews with each of their conference speakers about who they were and why attendees should attend their specific workshop. At the beginning of each of these interviews, I would of course say, “Hello, this is Tim Bourquin from XYZ.com, and I’m here with John Doe who’s here to talk about his workshop at the XYZ convention coming up this Fall. John can you tell us what you’ll be teaching in your session…”
We would then provide the conference organizer with a piece of code that they could cut and paste next to the speaker name and workshop title. The code would produce a flash player (in this case it was a tiny graphic of a microphone), that when clicked, would play the quick audio interview of me talking with the speaker about why attendees should be at his session. We hosted the audio for free to make it dead simple – cut-and-paste simple, for the organizer to put the interview on their schedule page.
At the top of each conference schedule page it would say, “Click on the microphone to hear the speaker discuss their session.”
The conference and trade show organizers loved it because their prospective attendees could get more information about the sessions, it made their schedule more interactive and interesting, and it didn’t cause them to do any more work or take visitors away from their website.
We loved it because every interview had our URL right at the beginning of every audio clip and every single person who heard it was a prospective member because they were already interested in the trade show which was, of course, focused on the topic of our membership site.
It was instant promotion for our brand-new content site and we very quickly built our list, traffic and memberships with that first effort.
The key to getting the organizer on board is to be very low-key with your promotion. Agree to say the URL at the beginning and that’s it – and that’s all you need to do anyway.
So there you go – free, super-targeted traffic for your new membership site using interviews.
You can find trade shows in your industry at a few different sites like TSNN.com or BizTradeShows.com. Or simply use a search engine and type in ["your industry" conventions].
A quick search of various trade show sites revealed all kinds of schedules where quick interviews with the speakers would be terrific additions, like this one, this one and this one.
This is just one of many, many ways we get traffic, content buyers and new subscribers for our membership sites. And we’re going to be teaching all of them soon on InterviewIncome.com including the nuts and bolts of recording the interviews, creating the flash player code, and turning that traffic into members.
creating content, site marketing interview income
Interviews are the easiest, fastest and “funnest” way to get keyword-rich content for your blog or website. We reveal all of our “top secret” sources for great interview subjects in the Interview Income course, but here’s one I’ve used recently to get some great interviews – book publisher publicity lists.
I alluded to a new project we were working on a few weeks ago. Although we’re still working on it, we’ve put up a sneak preview for you.
The Interview Income blog is written by Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. The Interview Income Blog is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
