Posted in Membership Website Tips	May 14, 2008

Make 2.0 Work for You

- Find a technology or platform that’s a good fit for you

MarketingSherpa’s Entrepreneur of the Year was Paul Allen, CEO of FamilyLink.com, a venture-backed startup in the genealogy and family space. The company’s genealogy site, WorldVitalRecords.com, provides access to nearly 2 billion family records, has 30,000 paying subscribers and is growing by thousands a month.

Allen spoke about some recent success he’s had in building out a Facebook application called “We’re related”. It’s had more than 3 million installs and nearly 100,000 active users. While his demographic is typically 55+, who are primarily interested in learning about family history, his goal is also to connect living relatives, which is where Facebook came in.

Thanks to the “We’re related” Facebook app, traffic on WorldVitalRecords.com has gone from roughly 500K monthly unique visitors to 1.5 million in less than 2 weeks. And while the conversions he’s gotten from Facebook are only .26%, there are more than 10 million people in that funnel, so it’s certainly worth it for him.

He predicts Facebook could grow to be his #2 sales channel, right behind affiliate marketing, thanks to the reach in new demographics and off-the-charts engagement metrics.

- View 2.0 as a long term strategy

When thinking about social networks, it’s important to look beyond the immediate ROI and consider the potential for viral growth.

- It doesn’t have to be hard

There are ways to take advantage of 2.0 features without spending 6 figures. Adding links to social bookmarking sites is very easy. Another idea is to expand your comments policy – allow users to comment on all of your content, not just some of it. You should think about building communities from your existing platforms. For example, membership websites already provide their users with user names and passwords. Why not take it one step further and allow them to create a sharable profile?

TAKE-AWAY #1: Adapt to changing subscription models

TAKE-AWAY #3: Optimize your marketing mix

TAKE-AWAY #4: Defend against economic downturn