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I’m trying to keep these videos short but they keep getting longer. This one is over 7 minutes! Sorry about that, but I promise you it’s worth watching all the way through!

This videos discusses some basic tips for using posters to market your business.

I cover these basic principles -

• Less is more when it comes to poster design
• Use large fonts to grab attention from a distance
• Ensure your poster has one purpose and one message to promote
• Use a single point of contact to reduce customer service queries
• Don’t forget the power of offline marketing

As I promised in the video, here is a copy of one of the current posters that evolved from all the previous posters I showed you in the video.

BetterEdit Essay Editing poster [ 11KB PDF ]

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Read previous articles in this series:

• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 3: Technology
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 4: Content and Pricing
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 5: Triggers

With your basic understanding of triggers now in place from part five of this series, lets take a look at how you implement a prelaunch and then a launch for your membership site.

During prelaunch and launch you use the marketing channels and relationships you have established to build buzz about the content you are about to release (or really, the offer you are about to make), using the technology you set up to deliver the content and communicate with potential customers.

If you did your hard work leading up to this stage much of what you are about to do will be reasonably routine, it’s almost “paint by numbers” easy, but I doubt there is ever any launch that goes according to plan, mine certainly didn’t, so you must prepare for the unexpected and be ready to react to any situation that is thrown at you.

Launch Vs. Prelaunch - What is the Difference?

There is not much difference in terms of the overall strategy for your prelaunch vs. your launch, which is to build buzz and convince people to join your membership site, however what you communicate to people and what you are attempting to achieve during each phase is subtly different.

I consider the “prelaunch” everything you do leading up to the launch day and “launch” being the actual day you release your membership site (you take on paying members) and the days following it. Your prelaunch is designed to pre-sell your membership site, where your launch is designed to sell it. That may sound very similar, but the psychology is slightly different.

The Prelaunch

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Many of you reading this blog do so through an RSS reader so you may not have seen the wonderful sponsors who help by providing funds for mortgage payments, food and clothing. I also have some new sponsors to introduce to you today.

Here are the banner sponsors of Entrepreneurs-Journey, in no particular order.

Nick Stamoulis SEO Services

If you need your website rankings improved and you want more traffic from search engines, then Nick Stamoulis and his team can help you. Nick has various SEO packages available from his website and best of all, until September 1st he’s offering Entrepreneurs-Journey readers $125 off any SEO package, so you better act now if you want to take advantage of this special (tell nick you want the “Yaro special” to get the discount ).

uVme Training

uVme Training is a new sponsor, one of two business opportunity advertisers here at Entrepreneurs-Journey. Check out the site, create a free account and watch the videos to learn more about this opportunity and see if it is right for you.

Search Engine Guide

Search Engine Guide are doing some serious work on becoming one of the authority sites on search engines. Jennifer Laycock is the most prolific writer at the site and you will find plenty of information on building traffic from search engines and web marketing for small business.

You have probably seen their banners all over the web at many of the most popular blogs, they seem to be working a saturation approach to advertising and it’s paying off - they have over 5000 daily RSS readers, a PageRank of 7 and an AlexaRank below 10,000.

Pitney Bowes mailstation

Pitney Bowes mailstation is digital postage meter designed for small businesses and one of the latest sponsors of this blog. As the landing page describes, “mailstation digital postage meter with its built-in scale lets you weigh and calculate postage at the touch of a button. You get exact postage every time - no guesswork. You can even print promotional messages on your envelopes!” - Nice! Best of all you can try it for free for 60 days.

Thousand Dollar Profits

Ty Coughlin of the ~Inner Circle~ offers to train you in his Reverse Funnel System and is the latest Entrepreneurs-Journey sponsor and another business opportunity you might consider looking into. Check out the landing page and you will see Ty sitting in Hawaii with his laptop and you can listen to him talk about his system.

I haven’t seen inside Ty’s system, but he has asked me to do a review so that might change soon. If you are curious now, you can take a look at the Reverse Funnel System for yourself.

Sponsor Entrepreneurs-Journey

As you can see I’m full up with banner sponsors for the time being, but I still have positions available for text link sponsors and I’ll be doing a post to thank them soon too, so if you want a blog post here on Entrepreneurs-Journey linking to your site like these sponsors, better get in quick! (Wow, I so feel like John Chow after writing that sentence ).

If you are interested in sponsoring this blog please see the advertise page.

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I’m experimenting again with these short video blog posts (vlogs). This time I even added a few callouts to the video, which was really cool (for me anyway).

Click play below to hear what I have to say about blog design in this 4 minute video.

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Read previous articles in this series:

• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 3: Technology
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 4: Content and Pricing

I’d like to tell you that your hard work is done, but really you have only just laid the foundation for a successful membership site and now the real work begins. Everything you learned so far in this series - building and demonstrating preeminence, finding ways to market, bringing together the right technology components, deciding on the content you will provide and how much you charge - all come together during the prelaunch and launch phase. This is the make or break time for your membership site - it’s the money time.

Triggers

Before discussing what you do during the prelaunch and launch phases in the next article I want to briefly relate to you some of the major triggers you are attempting to elicit in people. It’s these triggers that create the right conditions for people to feel comfortable making the decision to join your membership site - in fact they should feel an overwhelming compulsion to join if you use these triggers well.

Note that many of these elements are going to feel like you are “tricking” people, that you are attempting to force them into a decision that isn’t necessarily in their best interest by manipulating their emotions. Guess what - it’s true!

I don’t want to jump into a deep philosophical debate over the current state of our capitalist driven, self-serving, environmentally destructive, self-esteem crushing society in this article, but I can’t lie to you - everything you are about to learn is designed to make people desire something they don’t need (in most circumstances anyway).

Marketing is a social science - it’s the study of human behavior - and everything you are learning in this series relates to human behavior. Remember that marketing and these triggers are not inherently wrong, they are simply understandings we have come to as a result of testing. It’s what the knowledge is used for that the potential for abuse arises.

The problem is - and this is where the agitation many people feel towards marketing arises from - that we use our understanding of human behavior to manipulate people into making purchasing decisions for things they don’t need, purely in the interest of profit. It’s a self destructive formula that we feel the negative effects of every day, no person is immune to it and most of the problems in western society are at least somewhat related to it.

It’s not my job to present alternatives to these methods and frankly, I don’t have any good answers anyway. I personally make the decision every day to be a marketer and use these triggers when I run my business and I don’t think I could argue that anything I sell or recommend are necessities in life. I offer “wants”, not “needs”, chances are you do too.

What I can say to you is when you use these triggers that you attempt to be as “honest” as you can, which is the philosophy I apply. Don’t say anything you can’t back up, don’t make promises you can’t keep and use your own internal compass as a guide.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at these triggers.

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