Building a GPT Website & Growing Your Business | How to Make Your Own Incentive Website

5 Mar 2009

Make Your Own Incentive Website: Building a GPT Website & Growing Your Business

Author: Jim | Filed under: Features, GPT Insider, Web Development

Ever wanted to start your own Get Paid To (GPT) business on the internet? Completing offers and surveys for money online has been a thriving industry in 2009, as more people have begun to look for reliable sources of alternative income in recessionary times.

In part one, we talked about how you should come up with your concept and lay the groundwork by signing up with affiliate networks and filing licensing agreements. Now, we will talk a bit more about setting up the actual system, and how you can eventually get your website designed and marketed professionally to have long term success. Let’s get started!

What You’ll Need

In order to successfully make your corporate vision a reality, you will need to do a few things. First, we need to find a compelling script to run our website. There are many pre-made software platforms online already that can get you started with your own GPT website, so picking the right one is especially important. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone go out and hire a coder for a custom-built platform until you start pulling in at least $1,000 in net profit every month. Second, we have the issue of design. It is very important that your website is not only functional, but easy on the eyes, so make sure you hire a reliable designer from the get go if you can. Finally, we will need to market our business once it is online, so I will discuss some of those tactics as well.

Our steps to success:
1. Choosing a Platform
2. Designing the Website
3. Growing Your Member Base

1. Choosing the Right GPT Platform

There are many so-called “incentive” or “GPT” scripts floating around on the internet. The most popular is without a doubt a service called “ShiftCode.” I highly advise against using this platform, as it is one of the worst. On top of lacking the customization ability, ShiftCode is easily sniffed out as “amateur” and many people will be immediatly turned off from using your website. If you are looking for the easiest path, go ahead and order up… but I would only hope that you aren’t looking for the easiest option, but the best option.

Instead, I would highly recommend that you go ahead and purchase a professional system for $100-$500. If you are serious about owning your own company, this will be pennies to you in a few months time. I have tried and tested many of these, and I believe that these top three options are truthfully your best options:

FSRevolution (Editor’s Choice! - USE COUPON “THENETFOOL”)
Cash Crusader
Aurora GPT Script

I actually own and currently use FSRevolution, and it is definitely superior to it’s peers. First off, I wouldn’t recommend that you use anything other than these “top three” as most systems nowadays are broken down with no more support available. FSRevolution actually has people posting on a daily basis in the forums, and they are actively signing into new partnerships so you can have offers available for you to promote to your users faster than ever.

2. Designing the Website

Going along with the first part of this series, I believe that if you don’t have a great design in place, than you simply won’t be getting the kind of traffic that you deserve (and crave). The bottom line here is that visitors don’t trust websites that look like they were built overnight, so you should spend an extraordinary amount of time shoring up your website and making everything look as good as possible.

Color scheming is very important with any GPT website, and I have seen some pretty bad combinations (none of which have ever succeeded as websites). In addition, it is essential to use the most lively graphics and high-tech logo/identity options that are available. I, myself, am in no way a graphic design professional. Therefore, I typically contract out all of my work. There are many websites where you can go to hire freelance designers, and they honestly do great work. I have worked most with, and would conversely recommend, either oDesk.com or GetAFreelancer.com. With both combinations, you get a way to interview your candidates beforehand to see who is really the best man (or woman) for the job. I’ve had some great work done very inexpensively here, and will actually be displaying a design I had made in an undisclosed project I have been working on shortly.

Don’t be hesitant to pour in $200-$400 for an initial design. You can always upgrade, but I find that sticking in a lower range keeps things reasonable on your books… allowing you to get “net positive” on your investment sooner rather than later.

3. Growing Your Member Base

Now that you have the software in place, along with a killer design, it is time to pick apart the daunting task of marketing. Honestly, because the industry has so many “crash and burn” websites around, it is very difficult to have much success in posting randomly throughout the internet like you could potentially do in another niche. Instead, I recommend the following:

Jimvesting’s Cookbook for GPT Site Traffic:

Join other GPT websites and participate
Focus on Google search engine keywords
Start up a contest, and advertise it around!

If you are starting up your own website, the first thing that you will want to do is actually to join your competitor’s websites. Why would this make sense? Well, by becoming a member of other websites, you can use this to turn their users against themselves and steal them away! I would join up any GPT website that has a forum, and slide a link to your own website in your forum signature. Start forum marketing from within your competitors’ businesses, and you can get a great user base coming in for lasting success. After all, if they are active on another website, they will make you more money than the average user.

Your second option, and perhaps a trickier option, is to get focused on Google keywords. If you can hit on the top of Google search results for things like “complete surveys for prizes” (just a random example), you could start to rake in new users that don’t know the big sites from the small. Because of this, I feel that it is imperative that you start to open up a Google SEO campaign to get your website on the top of the charts as soon as you can. I don’t want to get into marketing too much here, since this post is not about that, but you can check out more information in one of my old articles on Google SEO.

Finally, you should be offering some incentive to switch, and I would recommend a contest. Many of the people who you will be recruiting are going to be members of other GPT websites. Because of this, you need to prove yourselves to everyone that you are truly the best in the business… you are the company that they want to trust to pay them time and time again. In order to encourage users to sign up to your gpt website and use your services, you should start by giving away lots of prizes and gift cards (on top of the money that members are already earning) to boost your stats. Why not offer them extremely high payouts for a time? It will hurt your margins, but it will really drive your growth.

Bottom Line: I hope that you enjoyed this two part series on making your own GPT website. Hopefully, you have all learned a lot about making your own GPT company, which is something that I have actually done myself and have been mildly successful in. Once everything is up and running, you really start going when you gain entry into new affiliate networks, and more and more users start to come in. Eventually, it will be a momentum story and you will start to make money with little to no work!

-Jimvesting

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