Harness The Power of Membership Websites

April 24th, 2011 by admin No comments »

Harness The Power of Membership Websites photoLook through the eyes of your members. Look through the eyes of your members and you might be surprised. You might find new ways to meet their needs. You might find new ways to offer benefit. Heck, you might even be able to anticipate their needs – there’s no better money maker than that! You certainly want to belong to a membership site that you can be proud of and that is recognizable – this means you’ll more likely be a loyal and frequent visitor if not a frequent purchaser.

Now comes the second question. What can you do to make your membership site meet the needs and any others that you came up with? Many of the needs are fairly easy to fill. Customer relations can be automated. Billing, renewals, and auto responder thank you messages can be automated. Content, much of it anyway, can be outsourced. Terms of use and policies can be posted on your website and handed out in the form of a report when members subscribe. Affiliate programs and other wealth building tools can be automated. That leaves a few things: making sure that your customers know that you’re an upstanding site with their best interests at heart, keeping the quality content, resources, and products up to date and quality, and tying all of their needs together into a cohesive website. Not too hard, right? It doesn’t have to be. Use the resources that you have to make your membership site the absolute best that it can be for you and for your members.

Term Of Knowledge Management

April 22nd, 2011 by admin No comments »

Term Of Knowledge Management photoKnowledge Management (KM) is fundamentally about a systematic approach to managing intellectual assets and other information in a way that provides the company with a competitive advantage. Knowledge Management is a business optimization strategy, and not limited to a particular technology or source of information. In most cases, a wide variety of information technologies play a key role in a KM initiative, simply because of the savings in time and effort they provide over manual operations.

Knowledge Management is agnostic when it comes to the type and source of information, which can range from the mathematical description of the inner workings of a machine to a document that describes the process used by a customer support representative to escalate customer complaints within the business organization. Consider the example of the legal firm, whose senior partners create written templates (the information) for ease of creating specific documents. Such a firm has a KM system that can vastly increase its productivity. If the templates are moved to a word processing system, then the ease of creating a new legal document may be enhanced by several orders of magnitude. As another example, consider a small business owner who moves her bookkeeping from bound journals to a computerized system. Unlike the paper-based system, the electronic system can show, at a glance, the percentage of revenue spent on advertising and revenue relative to the same period last year—all in intuitive business graphics.

A marketing and communications company that takes all copy and images that have been used in previous advertising campaigns and digitizes them so that they can be stored on CD-ROM instead of in a filing cabinet isn’t in itself practicing Knowledge Management. However, if the company takes the digitized data and indexes them with a software program that allows someone to search for specific content instead of manually paging through hundreds of screens, it is practicing Knowledge Management.