The Truth About Membership Sites

Receiving phone calls and emails is something I handle every day of every week. Individuals write to me often on the advice of programs they join, or from finding me in the search engines. They come to me for clarification on how to market and advertise online.

Often the case is that the person making contact has joined a program designed specifically to address the questions they are asking me. In the back of my brain, I'm often thinking, "What's not right with this scenario?"

In order to be considered a viable program or service online, the website owner is required to provide something in return for your hard-earned dollars. Typically, that something is information. Information in the form of ebooks, software, or training are the most common kinds of membership sites.

When considering joining any online program, there are two questions you need to address, whether it is a membership site or not. These two questions are:

1. What is the program giving you in return for your money?

2. Other than promoting that program to others will it also show you how to make money online for any business?

I can tell you what happens, because the picture is painted ever so clearly to me by my mail companions and phone callers - they do not know what they joined!

It's true. As the individual was reading about the membership program, and all it's exciting details, somewhere along the way they forgot why they were hunting for a membership, and they got caught up in some fantastic offer of income that might result from their plugging said program to others.

Another possibility is the person really has no current viable idea for starting a business online and, instead, opts to promote that program as if it were their own. Therein lies the problem. You become an affiliate of the program, not the sole proprietor.

When you elect to sell to others, ethically shouldn't you know what it is in the first place?

Simply put... the details are completed avoided. It's not hard to pinpoint which category I'm talking or writing to... someone really wanting to make their dream of making money online a reality or someone hoping to get by on the bare minimum of knowledge.

Keep your priorities firmly in mind. If you joined to learn how to build your own business, sure tell others about your membership, but use the tools (assuming the site delivers the goods) to do just that... build your business.

If, conversely, you joined purely for the allure of telling others and thus gaining financial benefits for yourself in the telling, at least know what you're offering. Believe it or not, morally you do have that responsibility. Know thy product.

If you can't explain it to me, how are you going to help the guy under you?

People can sense the difference.

Related Information of Interest:

Conversation In An Age Of Confusion
What do people talk about when they all believe different things and nobody is sure what the other person believes?

Then you add to that the usual courtesy that most people don’t want to offend other people, especially when it comes to the topics people disagree about with the most intensity, such as politics and religion, which all but the most foolhardy consider way off limits, at least, in what is referred to as polite conversation.

Actually, the silence of the times is far wider. In fact, the silken muffler of a feared indiscretion is wrapped around virtually every significant area of human thought, from philosophy to economics.

So what are we left with? Certain relatively safe topics, like poetry, unless you’re among poets whose egos are hair-trigger ready to fire back their own preferences vehemently. History might also be a good bet, since the overall tale has been pretty well agreed on, unless, once again, you’re with historians who may be simmering with their own disagreements.

The result? Conversation generally defaults to entrancing topics like the weather. Many spend entire evenings discussing such substitute content as one trifling entertainment or inconsequential entertainer after another. Things get really exciting when someone happens to mention how someone else may look tonight. Then there’s always the daring raconteur who’s arrayed with an evenings worth of sexual allusions.

Listening to such excited vapidity, one’s mind wanders to the legendary salons of France, at their epiphany, home, we read, to forthright conversation about the headiest topics of the time, generally centered around the new insights and old illusions of The Age of Reason.

At vagrant moments, you cannot help but ask yourself if the human race ever get to another time when it has enough beliefs in common to enliven its social occasions with conversations that really are interesting.

Tom Attea, creator of Newslaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway and has written comedy for TV. Critics have called his writing ""delightfully funny" and "witty" with "good, genuine laughs."

I Finally Took Guitar Lessons
I have a huge list of goals that I want to achieve during my life time. Some goals are small like learning to keep a goldfish alive for longer than a month. Other goals are more significant like traveling to all fifty states or learning a second language. As I continue to learn new things and accomplish goals on my list it seems that I also add new goals to my list so that it never gets much smaller or much bigger. I think I'll always have more goals than I can accomplish. I recently accomplished a goal that has been on my list since its beginning. I started taking guitar lessons.

Sound like no big deal? If it doesn't, then you obviously do not know me well. You have no idea that I have wanted to learn how to play guitar since I was eight and you have no clue that I have been saving my spare change for years to buy a guitar and begin taking lessons. You see, for me, starting guitar lessons was the sign of so many other things that had happened in my life.

Starting guitar lessons was a sign that I had been faithful to save spare change for over six years and it was a sign that I finally got up the courage to do something I am not good at. I have this tendency to only spend time on things I can do well at, so most of the goals on my list that involve learning new skills get left undone. So it was a real feat for me to begin guitar lessons. My first lesson symbolized my desire to stop living afraid of things that cannot hurt me. Guitar lessons are the first step in a direction I have been wanting to head for quite some time.

Starting guitar lessons has also helped me to cross off another goal from my list: getting over my fear of meeting and spending time with new people. The man who is giving me guitar lessons could probably go down in history as one of the least intimidating people on the earth, yet it is still significant for me to have taken this step. I will never forget the feeling of anxiety I felt as I knocked on his front door on the afternoon of my first lesson. I felt like my heart was going to pound out of my chest. Within five minutes I had entered his house, learned a little about him, began my first of many guitar lessons, and could cross off two goals on my list at the same time. Not bad for just five minutes.

Denton Krypps is an accomplished guitarist and an advocate for all people taking guitar lessons or learning to play another musical instrument. Discover more at www.guitarlessonsnews.info

Meet Bryan Singer: Superman Returns
It must have been fate that Bryan Singer would direct the new film Superman Returns, the fifth in the series of Superman films. Singer loved the George Reeves Superman TV series when he was young, and was a huge fan of the Dick Donner-directed films from the 70s and 80s that starred Christopher Reeves as the Man of Steel. “I identify with Superman. I am adopted, I am an only child, and I love the idea that he comes from another world, that he's the ultimate immigrant. He has all these extraordinary powers, and he has a righteousness about him,“ said Bryan.

After attending the School Of Visual Arts in New York City (but not graduating), he graduated from the USC cinema school (where, incidentally, he met John Ottman who wrote the score for Superman Returns), Singer’s first commercial success was as the producer/director of The Usual Suspects in 1995.That film saw him work with Kevin Spacey for the first time, and Singer and Spacey are re-united, again in Superman Returns, as Spacey plays arch villain Lex Luther, just out of prison and again set to rule the world.

However, it is as an adapter of comic books, bringing superheroes to life, that Singer has carved a niche for himself in the movie world.

In 2000, as writer and director, he introduced Wolverine, Magneto and the rest of the X-Men to the movie world in a hugely successful adaptation, before reprising the characters in the follow-up, X2. Singer left the X-Men franchise to develop Superman Returns and did not work on the 3rd film The Last Stand.

Now an established player in Hollywood with a number of big projects lined up for the future, who would bet against his favourite being the recently-announced sequel for Superman Returns in 2009?

Filmography

Superman Returns (2006) (producer/director/writer)
X2 (2003) (executive producer/director/writer)
X-Men (2000) (director/writer)
Apt Pupil (1998) (producer/director)
Burn (1998) (executive producer)
The Usual Suspects (1995) (producer/director)
Public Access (1993) (executive producer/director/writer)
Lion's Den (1988) (director)

Niall is a huge fan of the original Superman film, and is looking forward to the release of Superman Returns. For news and information about the new film visit his site at www.SupermanReturnsNews.com. All rights reserved. Copyright www.SupermanReturnsNews.com.

Marketing a new business without a big budget
Anyone who has started a business without a lot of start-up capital has faced a vicious catch 22. You have to market your company in order to increase sales, but until sales have increased (and you've received payment) you can't afford to market your business. Fortunately, you've got more options than you realize, after all, more than a few other businesses have gotten past this hurdle. So can you.

First of all, don't advertise in the newspapers, on television or the radio because it can take considerable time to see results from these mediums and at this stage of your business, your budget will likely be gone long before you see them.

One powerful way that a business with a small marketing budget can gain exposure is by innovative marketing company that specializes in guerilla marketing techniques to help smaller companies compete with larger companies and win.