Section Three: Step Seventeen

Membership Sites

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Membership Sites

What is a membership site? It is any web site that you have to log in to get the content. Think of it like those black and white movies from the 40s. You walk down a dark alley, knock on a nondescript door. A little window opens and you say, “Louie sent me,” and they let you in. Inside is all sorts of cool people doing all sorts of cool stuff.

Membership sites have been around for a very long time, almost as long as there has been an Internet. When newspapers first started going online, they created membership sites so that only their subscribers could get the news articles. There were both paid and free membership sites. Forums are a type of membership site.

Now membership sites are used for everything from building communities of likeminded people to delivering digital products in place of the traditional download page.

People have used membership sites for coupon exchanges, to connect actors with casting directors, connect workers with companies who need them, connect people who want to date with each other, regular ongoing coaching, “dripped out” content such as images, music or software, general social interaction (think of Facebook and Twitter – both membership sites), etc., etc. The possibilities are endless.

In the past, membership sites were very difficult and very expensive to set up. Now, with plugins like WishList Member – http://YourWishlistmember.com – you can easily set up a membership site right in WordPress.

Now that we know what a membership site is, it is time for…

Planning Your Membership Site

The first thing you need to do when considering a membership site is to plan.

What is the purpose of the site?

Will it be a free or paid site?

What kind of content will you provide members?

Will it be a fixed term membership or open ended?

How many levels?

Let’s look at each of these questions.

What is the purpose of the site?

As we talked about above, there are almost an unlimited number of things you can do with a membership site, but delivering a steady stream of content in your niche is a very good, reliable reason to have one. You will need to provide content, which you can create yourself, or use PLR for.

Often, a membership site is built around a weekly, semi-weekly or monthly teleseminar or webinar. This is a great way to build your content, and also to continue to get your members’ participation.

Will it be a free or paid site?

Being as we are dealing with building an online business, it would seem a paid site would be the most practical, but there are free membership sites that can also produce income, either with advertising, or more indirectly by leading the members to products, your own or affiliate products.

With paid sites, it can be a “one-time-only” payment or a subscription payment system, either weekly, monthly, semi-annually or yearly (or anything in between.) The most common, of course, is a monthly charge.

Both Connie and Geoff have “one-time-only” membership sites where they deliver the content of a course, and they also have ongoing subscription membership sites.

There are also many sites that are a combination of free and paid. The site gives one level of information to the free members, but has much more in depth information when they upgrade to a paid membership.

What kind of content will you provide members?

Once you know what the purpose of your site will be, what kind of content will you provide? We’ve already mentioned teleseminars and webinars. There are also reports, posts, recordings, etc.

Will it be a fixed term membership or open ended?

Lights, Camera, Massive Action is a fixed-term membership site. Although members who stick with it will have access to the content basically for ever, there will only be 6 months of new content.

Many membership sites, however, be open-ended. In other words, as long as someone continues their membership, you continue to provide new content for them. Armand Morin has his AM2 membership site, which is open ended. There is information that’s always available to the members, plus regular webinars, teleseminars and also discounts on his other programs for members.

Pat O’Bryan’s coaching membership site is ongoing and he provides members with tons of ready made content, but also has a weekly webinar where he talks with the members, looks at their sites, shows them new information he is learning, etc.

David Perdew’s NAMS membership site is ongoing and he provides members with a forum, weekly webinars, discounts on his live events, PLR products, access to experts in a ton of fields and so much more.

How Many Levels?

On most membership sites, one level is sufficient. Some, however, will require more. If you have some content that the general public can see, some that free members will see and some that paid members will see, you will need at least two levels. (The stuff that the general public can see doesn’t need its own level, you just don’t “protect” that content with WishList.)

On some sites, there will be more than one paid level, also. If you give general information to a “bronze” membership, more in depth information to a “silver” membership and personalized attention to a “gold” membership, for instance, each will need its own level.

Once you have your plan in place, it’s time for…

Setting Up Your Membership Site

We will assume you will be building your membership site within a WordPress installation. You can add your membership area to an existing blog, or as an “add-on” WordPress installation in a subdirectory of your site. Both Connie and Geoff often will have the membership part be a separate WordPress installation in a subdirectory called “Members”. This makes it fairly clean and much easier to handle.

As you become more familiar with working with WishList, you can do it in any number of ways, but for this, we will assume you will be using this method.

Once you have installed WordPress in your subdirectory (refer to Scene Two for a refresher), install your theme and install WishList. Once WishList is installed and activated, there is a setup wizard that will take you through a lot of the process of the basic setup, including creating some of the pages that WishList needs to function.

You already know from your planning what levels you will need, so set each one up during the wizard session.

When you create any page or post within the site, at the bottom of the edit screen is the WishList area where you can tell it to either protect the page (member must be logged in to see it) or not (anyone can see it.) In that same area, it lists the membership levels, so if you are creating a page or post that all levels can see, check them all. If only the Silver and Gold should have access to it, only check those two, etc.

Then, of course, save the page so those settings stick.

Configuring Payment

You can configure WishList to integrate with many different types of payment processors, including PayPal, 1ShppingCart, ClickBank, Infusionsoft, etc. Most will be either PayPal or 1ShoppingCart, and you can do both one payment and recurring payments with either of these. (If you use PayPal, you need either a Premier or Business account, but it is free and very easy to upgrade a personal account to a business one.)

To configure your payment processor, in the WishList admin area, go to the “Integration” tab, then click on the “Shopping Cart” tab under that. There is a pulldown menu where you choose which one you’ll be using.

Once you’ve chosen it, there are instructions listed on what you’ll need to do both on the WishList page and in your processor site to make them talk to each other. It is fairly complete, and, if you get confused, there is a lot of help over on the WishList member site.

When you integrate the levels with 1ShoppingCart, if you have tied an autoresponder to each product level, when someone purchases that level, they will automatically be subscribed to that autoresponder so you can keep in touch with them, or send out regularly scheduled emails reminding them to come back to the site.

You can also integrate WishList with Aweber so that, when someone joins the membership site, they are automatically signed up to one of your Aweber lists. This is done under “Integration/Autoresponder”

System Pages

When you set up your WishList with the wizard, it automatically set up some system pages. You can customize them very easily. WishList gives you several “short codes”, which are bits of text in brackets that you can put in your posts and pages to do specific thing.

If you want to say “Hi” to the person who has logged in, put the short code: [ wlm_firstname ] on the page and their first name will replace that when they get to the page.

If you want to put a log in form on a page, use the short code [ wlm_loginform ]

It is a good idea to create a welcome page with the login form, then have that page be the front of your membership site by going to “Settings/Reading” in your WordPress admin area and choosing “A Static Page” for the front page display, and choosing the page you created with the login short code.

It is always a good idea to create a test user in WishList with each level so you can log in as them to see what it’s like for them. (You will either have to log out to do this, or open up your site in a different browser. For instance, if you are using Firefox to create your site, open it up in Internet Explorer to log in as the test user.)

Action Steps

Decide on a the purpose of a membership site you will build

Plan out what it will look like

Get WishList, load it onto your site and build it.

Next week:

The review for Act Three!