If you guys want learn about a site that has a RIDICULOUS amount of upside, read on. BigWaveTrading.com is a site that could literally generate millions of dollars in revenue.

Being featured in this type of study on Court’s Internet Marketing School is a paid service that I created to help businesses to reach the next level. Most sites never get there, and these reviews can help you to expose the errors that are holding you back. You should be able to learn a lot by reading these studies, or you can buy your own review if you would like me to take a look at your site.

Here’s what I thought about Big Wave Trading:

This Domain Name Rules

If you are going to try to establish an online presence, choose a domain name like BigWaveTrading.com. It’s easy to remember and can be built into a great brand.

This Model Rules

BigWaveTrading.com is using a model very different from what most of us are using. The site is a paid membership site that has a ton of good information inside. There are a few difficulties that come along with this model, but every model has its own difficulties which can easily be overcome with the right expertise.

Now in order to see how good the content of this site was, I logged in with a good friend of mine who is literally a stock market genius. I fully expected my friend to say that the content of the site has a long way to go, but on the contrary he said that the material inside was already very, very good.

Good Business = Good Product + Good Selling

After I determined that the site’s content was up to par, I started thinking about different ways I would go about selling it. This is the section where the big wave traders are going to get their money out of this review. I’m have come up with 5 pretty major changes that this site needs to become much more effective.

1. New Homepage Layout

Once I dug into the site, I realized how great the content was, but when I first got to BigWaveTrading, I had no idea where to go. I was impressed with the site, but was also lost on the site. I understand that any site takes some time to get used to, but when you’re trying to sell memberships, you need to make sure people know what to do.

On a membership site like this, the best thing you can do is get people to download and read a free report before they see your price. That way they can get an idea of what your philosophies are before they get slapped with a higher price tag than they are willing to pay. I would give visitors two options from the homepage:

1. Download a free report. That way the site could capture their email addresses for future correspondence.
2. Learn more. This link (or button) would take them to another page that described the benefits of the program. This page would of course have testimonials and also an outline of what was contained within the membership sections of the site.

A membership site’s success usually depends largely on its ability to attract good affiliates. Getting good affiliates to help push the site is highly dependent on a site’s ability to convert the traffic it gets to sales, and making these changes will go a long way towards turning that traffic into paid memberships.

2 - Call To Action Above The Fold

On today’s internet, people have major A.D.D. and they will need to be able to easily figure out what’s going on when they get to a site like this. Right now, you have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the most important part of the site - a call to action. This is going to take people’s attention away from the primary objective.

Save the membership prices until later in the sales process so that you can suck people in a little more. Make sure you get your ‘action calls’ high on the page.

3 - Ditch The Ads

This site has the potential to sell a huge amount of memberships. The ad units and affiliate banners will cheapen the value of the site for tech-savvy people - I would get rid of them altogether so that BigWaveTrading.com is ad-free.

4 - Move Free Content To Another Site

If I owned BigWaveTrading.com, I would move all of my free content to another site. In this case I would move the content to BigWaveTrading.net. That way the .net site could be used like a regular blog that could attract a large audience and lots of traffic. This would also enable them to build the Big Wave Trading brand into something that people can trust. This will help them to get affiliates and members in the future.

For the .net site, I would use a regular WordPress blog. This will give them a chance to get traffic from a bunch of different sources, including search engines and social media sites. That traffic can then be leveraged into RSS subscribers and then paid members. As is, the site would be quite difficult to promote amongst the finance bloggers out there, but a blog on the .net site would give Big Wave Trading that extra reach. Since there would be no password protection on the .net site, it would give Google and other search engines free reign to crawl and rank the site. Google can’t reach content through a login form, and even if you give Google access, your protected pages won’t rank well.

To establish both of these sites as a single brand, I would have a logo made for Big Wave Trading. The same logo would be used on both sites.

I wouldn’t see a problem using ads on the .net site, so the Google and affiliate ads can be placed there.

5. New Graphic Design

This is a tough recommendation for me to make, because having a custom graphic design created can be somewhat expensive. Although the site looks pretty good already, selling memberships to people who want to learn about the stock market will require not only a valuable site, but also a site that is perceived to be valuable. In my opinion, this means it needs to look amazing. I would take a look at a company like CMStheme.com, who could probably do the entire thing or just a header if that’s what was preferred. They did the graphic design for BloggingZoom, and did a great job there.

Traffic Generation Strategy

When people pay the money to order a review from Court’s Internet Marketing School, I want to make sure that they get their money’s worth. In this case, I just wouldn’t feel right about this review if I didn’t give some advice about traffic generation. Here are the strategies I would focus on.

• SEO for the .net site. Believe it or not, this site will have more success targeting keywords about companies than it will targeting keywords about stocks. When there is big news about a company, this affects the stock price, and people will be searching for information about the news. This is a great opportunity to write a post on the .net site, giving thoughts about how the stock and company will be affected. These posts will bring a lot more traffic than writing posts titled ’stock tips’, etc. The target market would still be ideal. Providing good insights to these visitors will first get them into the RSS and then later into the membership site, which is the .com site.
• Serious socializing. There are literally thousands of sites about stocks and finance. Big Wave Trading needs to get to know all of them so that they can create relevant links and relationships. I know that I talk about this stuff all the time, but I do that because these relationships could leverage into a ton of money. Based on what I’ve seen from the work inside the membership section, it won’t take long to establish the .net site as a site with a serious amount of expertise.
• Affiliate relationships. Socializing will not only help to build links and traffic to the .net site, it will also allow Big Wave Trading to find some affiliates. Affiliates that believe that the site was created by experts will be much more effective at selling the service than affiliates that have no idea. This is another reason why I wanted to see the establishment of the .net site. Affiliates can be a very valuable source of traffic to the .com site, as long as they trust that they are providing real value to the people they’re sending over.

My overall thoughts on this site are as follows:

• This site has nearly an unlimited amount of upside. Creating a good product is difficult, but I believe that Big Wave Trading already has that taken care of.
• My honest opinion is that they could really take this business to the next level by creating the .net site and investing some cash into a new graphic design.