GOLDEN MEMBERSHIP

ADVICE FOR USERS OF THE GOLDEN MEMBERSHIP WEBSITE

What Is The Golden Membership Website?
It is a password-protected, membership-only, free website designed to benefit users who are all people running their own businesses in the UK.

Do Members Have To Be Company Directors?
Not at all. Members can be anyone running a UK business

this could mean self-employed Sole Traders
partners, either with informal or limited Liability Partnerships
or directors of registered Limited Companies

How Do People Get To Be Members…?
At the moment, we are offering membership only to those people who are already members of other relevant organisations and networks. We agree to membership after it has been negotiated by the ‘Network Administrators' of those other organisations. This allows us to keep tabs on who is becoming a member, and lets those other organisations benefit by promoting our website in return for advertising with us.

What Are The Benefits of Using the Golden Membership Site?
The site offers a wide range of resources picked by us to be of benefit to anyone running their own business. These might be Special Offers, Discounts and Bonuses that we have identified as being of interest to business owners. Plus there is advice and help into raising finance and obtaining insurance. But there are also lots of sections highlighting good deals, business opportunities and technical advice on a wide range of topics.

Aren't There A Lot Of Other Organisations Doing That Already?
We don't think so! We agree that it helps for every business to have a ‘Unique Selling Point' (USP), and this is ours:
“We provide backup and resources to all business owners – not just support that assumes that you know what you are doing and achieve all the success that you want, but positive coaching for anyone who wants to improve their businesses and improve their lives”.

Therefore, we put in a lot of work to identify training, information and publications that help business owners to better themselves and their businesses. So this doesn't just mean advertising courses about VAT, but sharing information about self-improvement, coaching, goal-setting, change management and personal impact, as well as about website development, search engine optimisation and internet marketing.

So What Does Golden Membership Cost To Use?
Nothing. It's completely free to all our users, and completely free to any of the organisations and networks that want to refer their members to us…

So How Does Golden Membership Make A Profit?
We have agreements with some of the business partners that advertise with us. When our members click through and take up a service that is being advertised, we can make a (very small) commission.

So Don't We Pay More For Those Services…?
No! Any time you purchase goods or services, the business that you buy them from has had to cover the costs of advertising in the price that they charge you. We offer a very cost-effective form of advertising by bringing business-specific information directly to the people who are most interested. So they never need to charge you more than you would pay elsewhere. In fact, most of our advertisers are actually offering discounted prices to our users because of the high volume of interest that they get from our site!

Do You Just Advertise Services That Pay You A Commission?
Not at all. Our priority has to be keeping as many people as possible interested in visiting the site again and again – and that only happens when we feature goods and services that genuinely represent good value for you, the business owner.

So Can I Advertise My Business On Golden Membership?
If you just a Visiting Member, sorry, but no. You need to upgrade to a Active Membership.

Once you are a Full Member, you are entitled to Contact Us to enquire about advertising. We are interested to hear about any products or services that might be of interest to our members. You may be offered a simple listing in our Business-To-Business (B2B) Directory. However, if your business is of sufficient interest to other business owners we might be willing to place a more prominent feature in other sections – or even mention you in one of our regular email newsletters to members. (And that's a lot of exposure!) See Advice To Advertisers for more detail.

What Is The Difference Between Visiting Members and Active Members?
We negotiate directly with the Administrators of existing business networks to offer Visiting Membership of Golden Membership to their existing subscribers. People coming to our site as Visitors use a general set of logging-in details that their Administrator has supplied to them. Visitors have full access to browse the site and take up any offers of interest to them. However, Visitors' membership is limited in that they are unable to fully participate by contributing their own information, advertising, offers, views and opinions for the site.

So How Can A Visiting Member Upgrade To Full Membership?
Simply go to your usual entry point for the Golden Membership site, enter as usual by filling in the log-in details supplied by your organisation Administrator for you to be a Visitor. Then fill in the form that is on the site Welcome page. We need a few details like your contact email address. This is checked by an ‘autoresponder' that sends a message to that email address to verify it, and only then are fresh log-in details sent to you as a Full Member. You can then participate fully in all aspects of the Golden Membership site, including advertising your business. (This authentication helps to keep out spammers.)

Why All This Fuss Making The Site Password Protected?
This actually has two benefits… Firstly, it keeps out the Internet Idiots who would otherwise spam our Forum and other interactive sections with advertising about adult sites etc. Secondly, it enables privacy for any business that advertises with Golden Membership who wishes to include an email address for business contacts. There are software programs that trawl websites for the @ sign that denotes an email address, harvest them in great numbers, and then sell them to spammers. So our password policy is to protect our members and advertisers.

Why Do A Lot Of Links Open Up In A New Window?
It may seem like a nuisance, but there are two definite advantages to you…

What if you are interested in our write-up about a book and you follow a link to Amazon to check the price? Then you click to read the reviews posted there; then you follow their links to look at other similar books that people have purchased; then you read the reviews about them… Very soon it takes a lot of clicks on the Back button to get back to where you started. If the link on the Golden Membership site opens a new window, then all you have to do is close that window at any time and you are back with us!

The second reason is that, as we are a password-protected site, if you follow a normal link off-site then you would have to enter your User Name and Password to click back to it. Opening a new window keeps the original connection to our site live, so, again, just closing the new window when you have finished surfing gets you straight back to us.