Pay Site Article: Using Transparent Tours to Unleash Your Selling Power

[AJ Hall]

Used wisely, a transparent tour can unleash your site’s selling power. It’s one of the best weapons in a pay site owner’s arsenal and there’s no better way to increase sales through a massive expansion of your site’s reach.

A site with a transparent appears not to have a tour at all or has a tour that’s nearly identical to the member’s area. Typically the only difference between the inside and outside of the site is that once inside, a visitor has access to the content where on the tour the content may be limited to static photo previews or sample video trailers.

The tease factor this kind of tour creates makes it highly effective. It gives surfers the opportunity to sell themselves. The sales process it creates is a lot like window shopping. The surfer piques their own interest and delves deeper into the site until they convince themselves to sign up.

For a lot of pay site owners the biggest draw to this kind of tour is SEO. Due to the massive amount of pages you can have indexed by search engines this tour offers a distinct advantage. Every model, category and content link gets crawled and it’s not uncommon for a site with a transparent tour to span hundreds or many thousands of pages. This also lets you target traffic and link directly to niche pages that are rich with content matching what the surfer is looking for.

If you’ve got a CMS system that lets you build transparent tours you’re in luck, the benefits of a transparent tour are many. As far as pay site marketing is concerned it’s an ace in the hole.

Comments or questions? Email me at aj@elevatedx.com

AJ

[Bec]

That is indeed an excellent feature of the ElevatedX software. I would tend to agree with you that the more you can "put out front" the better the chances of making the sale.

How about some feedback from sponsors using the transparent tours .... do you find them to be a better sales tool than the static 2-3 page tour and a join page?

[HunkyLuke]

Transparent tours are neat, who does them here? It would be great to get some feedback on how they convert compared to static tours.

[lisa]

We have a transparent tour, which is our Guest Area, an identical copy of our member area, but limited content and it's true, it does wonders for SEO links, as you can see here,
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...g&ved=0CD4QrAM.

[AJ Hall]

Great example Lisa!

[Bec]

176,000 results, and I went up to at least page 50 in google = 500 listings, and they were still all for badpuppy's site .... impressive!