Membership sites are a pretty hot item on the Web right now. They are springing up every day for either Internet Marketing resources and techniques or for popular niches. Whatever the focus of any membership site is, there will be an assortment of marketer members there.

Products with useful resell rights are very popular on any membership site and can be easily used to market to the members. Before you do any of that marketing become an active forum member by posting solutions to other member’s problems and asking good questions that generate responses. Once you are recognized as a good source for help and advice, you can market your products if you follow the forum rules.

Check out each forum’s rules to see what is allowed. Most forums have some category that allows notices or actual marketing of your products. Keep your direct marketing tactics confined to the correct category and you will stay out of trouble. One technique you can use anywhere, though, is adding a link to your sales page in your signature. That will put your link in front of everyone who reads your forum postings or emails.

Before you start marketing to forum members, you need to understand the mind-set of the members as a group. People join forums to gain access to information they cannot get elsewhere. That information can be products like ebooks, ecourses and software or advice from other members.

The usual mix of members in normal forums will be around half newcomers to the Internet Marketing scene with the rest of the members coming from various levels of marketing expertise.

What does this mean to you? In a nutshell, your products or services will have to be created to appeal to different levels of marketers. Newcomers will need more hand-holding and are likely prospects for step-by-step how to reports or ebooks. More experienced marketers will need information about some of the advanced marketing techniques and processes, like SEO or social networking, to name a few.

Another aspect to carefully consider and address is the separate interest of each member of the forum, regardless of their experience. Some will be totally focused on Internet Marketing and will want information on every aspect of marketing online.

Others will be looking for information on any number of the hundred or more niches that attract large numbers of subscribers hungry for your products. Does this mean you have to develop different resources for several groups of buying members? You bet!

Are you feeling like you need to be a mind reader or have a crystal ball on your computer desk? You don’t. Finding out what the forum members need help with is the easiest part of your entire marketing process.

You could just post a question about what the members need for information products. Your results might be spotty and not much help. Marketers might help other forum members, but they will not advertise a possible lucrative need for information. They will keep the idea for themselves. All is not lost, however.

A better, more discreet method to use is to visit your membership forum on a regular basis and read every post in each category. Besides the inevitable banter, you will get a storehouse of current, real-life problems the members are trying to overcome. Each one of those problems is a solution-based ebook or article for you to create and sell.

Before we get into using resell products on a forum, it is critical that you have a rock-solid understanding of the workings of a membership site/forum. There is too much money to be made by marketing your resell rights products on forums to ignore this lucrative target, or to blow it by accident.

A general look at the normal membership profile for forum members has already been lightly discussed above. Let’s look a little closer at what those members were looking for when they subscribed to the forum and how that could impact your marketing plans.

Here are some needs to think about:

• Updated content is a never-ending need for marketers and customers. Provide access to current, new content with your signature link will send you customers.

• Trusted sources for information products and software. It increases membership loyalty. Become a trusted source and your credibility will increase dramatically as you become the “Go To Guy.”

• Different levels of experience among the forum members requires not only a different set of products, but several levels of prices. Make sure your inventory of products appeals to a wide variety of customers.

So, how do you use those guidelines to market your products with various  resell rights to membership forums? Let’s find out.

Your products that come with Private Label Rights (PLR) will be the most popular to the largest number of forum members. Both guru types and

newbies will like products they can easily change to suit their own needs.

Make sure that you include an explanation of PLR along with your forum announcement so the newcomers will fully understand what they can do with PLR products, or any other rights, for that matter. It might be a good idea to just post individual articles in a resource category on the forum, including your linked signature, of course.

To market your PLR products on forums, without looking like you are blatantly marketing to the members, post solutions and answers about resell rights questions as often as you can. Always, always, always have a link to your products in your posting signature. It is silent promotion and does get clicks from interested forum members.

Possibly the most lucrative product rights you will have are Master Resell Rights (MRR). These products let you resell the ebook or software and keep all the money, but the real value is in selling the rights separately. This gives you two incomes from one product and attracts at least two levels of forum members.

Seasoned marketers will jump on new products that have Master Resell Rights because they know about the two levels of income and that selling the rights can bring in more income than sales of the actual product.

Forum newcomers will be attracted to the right to sell the product and keep all the money, at least to start with. When they get a little more familiar and comfortable with marketing techniques and the real value of each resell right they’re being exposed to, they will be back for Master Resell Rights.

Forum marketers are always on the lookout for free quality products and information products they can use to gift their list members or as free enticements for new subscribers to their blogs or newsletters. Products with Giveaway Rights (GA or GR) are useful here, but their major drawback is that they cannot be edited at all. That means no imbedded link to your sales pages and no viral marketing benefits.

One effective solution to this restriction is to NOT send the product to your list as an attachment. Instead, require downloading the Giveaway products from your sales pages, with a stop on your squeeze page, if your download page doesn’t have an opt-in form on it. Your emails to your list can simply announce the gift downloads, including a link directly to the page.

At times you will purchase a product that comes with Personal Use Rights (PUR). Since the rights do not allow reselling, giving it away or using it as a bonus, this is useless for your marketing purposes. However, products with this restriction can be a useful source of information for you.

Start your own information library with Personal Use Rights products. They can be great idea stimulators when you desperately need some new insights at 2 am.

Branding Rights (BR) are another technique you can effectively use in forum marketing. When you are allowed to change all the author’s links in a product you’ve purchased to yours, you will be giving your customers for that product a virtual roadmap back to all the rest of your sales inventory.

Your opportunities for them to follow those links and buy something else from you stays on their hard drives until they delete it. They could buy something from you months later, when they read your ebook again to see what’s in it.

Marketers are very interested in products with Branding Rights included and for the same reasons discussed above. This is another 2-level income possibility. The product can be sold for a reasonable price without any rights and the Branding Rights can be sold separately for more money. The sale of those rights can be more valuable to your customers if you include the software to brand it with.

Some membership sites have thousands of members. Some of those members will be highly visible on the forums, most will not. When you are designing your marketing plan for membership sites, don’t forget about the silent majority lurking in the background and reading your posts.

Keep offering different levels of products and prices to attract sales from the lurkers. They might be “invisible” but they have credit cards or PayPal accounts just like you do.