Niche Social Networks

Here is a quick outline for setting up and running a profitable niche membership website in under a years time.

Step One: Setup a squeeze page

Step Two: Begin to collect interested users email addresses in to a double opt in system like Aweber.com

Step Three: Begin to engage your members with a consistent weekly ezine.

Step Four: Create a simple viral video which  you paste on youtube.com to round up consumer interest.

Step Five: Hold  a free online teleconference for all your members
Step Six: Upsell the audience into niche ebook transcript of the conference.

Step Seven: Take the money you make and invest in content creation for your niche membership site. Hire out freelance writers on either, elance or odesk.com

Step Eight: Create an Intial 50 Articles to populate your membership site.

Step Nine: Invest in your membership site platform

Step Ten: Open the doors to your membership site with a One Dollar Trial Month Promotional

Good Luck and Have Fun!!

The number one mistake of 99.9% of membership sites startup’s is that they assuming someone wants their product before they take the time to survey the market. Take the time to do the research and survey the market. Remember the key elements of internet marketing: Fail and Fail Fast!

Here are few quick ways to determine if you have a marketable products.

1. Survey your members and ask them what they want.
2. Ask open ended questions so your members give you advice on new products to innovate.
3. Allow members to rate responses for surveys so you get a more realistic idea of their true desire

One online service which works great is SurveyMonkey.com

Here are a few tests you can run to determine if you have a good idea to sell.

1. Look For Competition, If you don’t see competition that is a bad sign.
2. Look for existing products people are already buying.
3. Look for highly viewed books on Amazon.
4. Look on youtube at high traffic videos to find Your niche.
5. Survey your existing members, ask them what they want.
7. Watch Google Trends
8. See how many groups on google are available in your particular niche.

If you followed my first tip of advice you will have initiated contact with your virtual assistant on your own terms by obtaining either their IM or primary email account.

During the instant message interview with the candidate I often ask them questions about other work they have had.

See my list below:
- What are your specific skills
- How long have you been using Odesk
- Any Referrals
- Make sure to have specific tasks for them to do

If they have an online portfolio. I also ask them about payment. For some jobs you an specify your budget. For others you can pay hourly.

Once and only if it seems like it would be agreeable to both sides. Meaning an honest transaction can occur I make the proposal to just pay the client directly via paypal.

They usually agree an we maintain an ongoing good working relationship.

It saves you both fees and builds a better long term connection.

Now here is my trick.
I include my instant messenger address and ask the perspective employee to message me on IM.

First of all if they don’t do it.. I move on.
Secondly it allows for me to make an immediate move on the project while staying focused on the work on hand.

BING the bell rings and up pops the IM message.
I then chat with the individual for a few minutes.

Often times I have a specific task ready to show them and for them to take a test on.

Competition is fierce online and its not uncommon for perspective employees to want to go way out of their way to prove to you that they can do the job.

This is good. What you want to do is find a hard worker who is reliable and capable of getting your jobs done. Once I have this person they become a member of my virtual team and I do my best to take good care of them.

It all boils down to relationships which are win-win

Often times in our chat I get an immediate sense of if the person can do the job or not. Don’t waste you time worrying about being polite. Just be direct and task oriented. It will save you time and respect the candidates time as well.

Often times you just need to say, Thanks but I can get this done faster with another worker. Then move on, but if you got a good sense this person might be better at another task.. keep them on you IM List and let them know you might need their help later.

This is a great way to keep connections and have a dynamic team. You can also let the candidate know that they should just check back with you, weekly, monthly or other.

Eventually you can build an email list which you can send out your job to. Then in the morning you wake up you are ready for the next task.

Often times posting a job  and looking for help online can results in nothing more than a flood of inquiries that become actually more work to sort through. When Posting a job position I usually try to be as specific as possible for the job which I post. I then let it sit open for no more than 1 day.

I don’t waste my time speaking with large companies who post form letter responses. What I look for is someone who has specifically addressed my job with a specific solution.

As a tip you can post an actual sample of what you need done as an attachment and then list a dummy email for prospective employees to send their sample work to.

Example: Sort This Spread Sheet

* Attach an xls file for them to sort and then email me once it is done to a dummy account. MydummyAccount@Yahoo.com

Get it right the first time don’t waste your time on the interview.

Find someone who can get the job done and then move forwards.

Seth Godin discuss how real change can occur by building small tribes of people online to succeed. This is the same principle behind building a niche social network. He specifically discusses how this issue is not about getting the word out. The platform issue has been solved.

The issue is about how to hold attention and build a demand for your niche.

The diffcult thing is to make things that people choose to talk about.

This is small tribe of people who make things better.

How do you make things interesting that people will talk about every day?

If you care about something you can stand up and lead.

If you are looking for a more robust social networking software you might want to look into services provided by ONEsite.com. Originally you could find many smaller end niche sites such as DIGGPhilly and CovenSpace.com but since the company seems to have transitioned to focusing on more high end social networks. Anyhow here is our list of the 15 best.

1) Fans.wwe.com
2) Capcom-Unity.com
3) Cavfanatic.com
4) Myoutdoorchannel.com
5) livinginhd.com
6) mipagina.univision.com
7) community.worldofgood.com
community.allhiphop.com
9) thundermadness.com
10) bedlamnation.com
11) bowlspace.com
12) club.forceindiaf1.com
13) community.ediets.com
14) weearth.com
15) my.telegraph.co.uk

We’ve probably looked at over 3000 Ning sites in the last day and have found a trend of main navigation links.

This tells us quite a bit of how a site works and how it’s webmaster is wanting to control the flow of traffic to and from the site.

Most interestingly there have been only eight consistent links.  While users have had the ability to customize these only a few of them actually have.

Here are the 8 most popular Ning Links

1) Main
2) My Page
3) Members
4) Photos
5) Videos
6) Forums
7) Groups
Blogs

An additional note is that we observed a high number of websites simply using one of the top menu links to redirecting people to outside web domains while only using ning as a social engine feature.

So if your looking for an all in one solution that might be hard to achieve with Ning.com

Example: If you have the need for a STORE button you are going to have to run an external shopping cart service… more than likely on an independent domain.

Thinking of using Ning.com to run your niche social network. Here is a little overview of the top five ways we have observed NING websites being monetized.

1) Sell Banners Ads on Your Ning Site

For $24.95 per month you can run your own ads on your ning social network. Here is an example of the best site we saw running banner ads: PagenSpace and you can see their rates here.

2) Sell Books OFF your Ning Site

The two most popular ways we noticed this occurring was

a) Placing Photos of Your books and then Directly Linking to Your Amazon Page

Example: NerdFighters.com

b) Placing a Book Store Page and then linking to a shopping cart

Note: Another Example was The Twilight Saga. The just offer FREE PDF downloads along with WHERE TO BUY THE BOOK LINKS

Sample: The Twilight Saga

3) Sell Products OFF Your Ning Site.

There are few good Ning sites which are simply social centers for selling products. One in particular which does a great job and keeps the model simple is AskaNinja.com

4) Use Main Links to Go to Squeeze Page Sales

A few sites we found were simply using the main navigation buttons of their Ning site to target squeeze pages. These are specific pages built for selling a specific product. You might recognize them since they are usually about a mile long, full of testimonials and usually have a buy now button at the very bottom.

Here is an example: MyDeejayspace.com (Click on Tutorials & Production buttons to see samples)

5) Paid Membership Gateway

This is a very rare monetization making tool currently available on Ning. We did some inquiry with Ning directly and found that they recommend approving or disapproving membership while handling payment from an outside gateway such as paypal.com

One sample site which is doing memberships and it appears alot of them is: Sta.rtUp.Biz - The Small Business Social Networ