Wishlist Member – Top Membership Site Software

You need to buy Wishlist Member if you are thinking about doing a membership site.

Read my Full Review of Wishlist Member.

Here is a top 10 reasons to buy wishlist member:

1. Easy To Implement
2. Easy to Make Money with
3. Great Video Training BEFORE you buy.
4. Membership sites make great upsells
5. Create a membership site for your affiliates or sales team in minutes
6. Powerful and integrates with other products
7. Wishlist Member has a 30 day money back guarantee
8. Wishlist Member is built on WordPress
9. By making some pages public, you can build a self promoting membership site
10. Vegas – The Wishlist Member team is doing events in Vegas for the people that need more training.

I give wishlist member my highest recommendation.

Membership Sites and Email

A critical part of running a membership website is the use of email to remind people of the site and to keep your members updated.  If they do not feel like they are getting an excellent value, they will leave your membership site.

You need to have a great email system – ideally an autoresponder – so you can automate the follow up with your members.

Read my review:  AWeber Review

I consider aWeber the best tool for making money online and keeping your members updated/

Easy Membership Site

First, let me say that I do not believe there is anything easy about setting up a membership site.

Membership site software is easy.  But creating content and keeping up with your schedule, along with marketing your membership website all both not easy things to do.

If you are setting up your first membership site, here is some advice.

1. Keep it simple and low cost.  Even if you only make a few hundered dollars the first time out, that is better than most people do and it will teach you a lot.
2. Use Wishlist Member to auto schedule content to be released after each month.  That way it is more like an autoresponder and less like a course that needs fresh content each month.
3. If you use 1ShoppingCart because you dream of a big affiliate team, just be ready for a lot of work.  Building a good affiliate group is a long and difficult journey.
4. Start a blog on the site where your membership site will be and start writing to it long before the membership site is ready.  This will help you rank better in search engines and get better future results when you are ready to really start marketing that membership site.

That is all practical advice I wish someone would have given me when I was first starting out.

Membership Site Blog

Should your membership site blog be private or public?

In the membership sites I run, I find it depends on what the goal of the membership site is.

I have a public membership site blog if I am as interested in developing the website as an expert website as well as a private members only website.

If I am only selling the membership aspect you can just have a sales page and then you can use a blog to publish information in the members area.

If you use WP Wishlist Member you will be able to make the front page of your membership site blog public but visitors will need to join the site if they want to read beyond the summary of what they can see.  You can even make some of the pages public and some of the pages private.  That makes the whole thing much easier and it makes your marketing site a better sales tool as well.

How to Upgrade WP Wishlist Member

This site has been getting traffic that is people looking for how to upgrade WP wishlist member.

It is tricky to do the first time.

To upgrade WP Wishlist Member, just go to the dashboard, then click into the management area of WP Wishlist member.

If you have a registered, valid copy of the software it will present you with an option to download the new version of the software.  It is just a plug in and you just overwrite the old one with the new one.  Be sure to follow their instructions – you usually want to deactivate a plugin before upgrading.

The hardest part of upgrading WP Wishlist Member is finding the link.  Then it is really just like adding a wordpress plugin to the site.

How to Set Up a Membership Site

Setting up a membership site has a few important steps that you must follow to ensure that your membership site will be a success.

#1 Pick a great niche market – Don’t sell what you want to sell, first make sure there are buyers and then build what those buyers want to see.

#2 Choose Easy Membership Site Software – This is critical.  You do not want to spend too much time on setting up the technical side of the membership site.

#3 Plan Your Content – Map out your information.  Keep it simple and easy to navigate.

#4 Know how you will market your membership site.  When you first decide on what membership site you will set up, start marketing it right away, even if people cannot sign up yet.  You can always use aWeber to start building a wait list for the membership site.

WordPress Membership Promotion

Even if you decide to go with Moodle, Drupal or Joomla for your membership website, still consider installing WordPress on the root of the website as the promotional tool of your Membership site.

WordPress gets great seach engine results and it will help you keep your paid area and your members only website separate.

This will allow you to post parts of articles, videos and more to your promotional membership marketing materials.

Personally, I think that WordPress with Wishlist Member is the best solution for you to run your membership site and manage things.  However, if you already have experience with Drupal for Membership sites or Moodle for Membership sites – I understand that might be a better option for you.

Just don’t assume one is exclusive of the other.

Website Membership System

Having a website membership system to manage your membership site and run your online publishing business is important.

If you are new to the idea of website membership systems then you are probably thinking it is one piece of software you need to buy.

Actually, every business needs systems that help it run.

Without systems, the business is really just based on the owner’s expertise and it is not really a business.

What kind of website membership systems do you need to build to run a membership website business?

1. Writing and Content – You need to have a system to identify topics, produce content, review content and post content into your membership website.
2. Website Membership Marketing – You need to have a system for promoting your membership website.  Do you use affiliates for website membership promotion?  Do you promote your website membership business through blogging, social media, etc?  What does your schedule look like?
3. What do you use to process payment and membership?  Paypal, Clickbank, 1ShoppingCart?  What do you do when someone joins your membership site?  Is there a set of emails they get?
4. Membership Site Support – What happens when a member has a question or an issue?  Have you set up open source help  desk software to support your membership site?  Do you reply or do you have a virtual assistant reply?
5. Of course – There is the website management software – which should be a solid system that helps you manage members, automatically grant member access when they pay and when possible stop access when the membership payment bounces.

Building systems for you membership website business will make it a real business, with real income.  If you are just starting out, remember that your Website Membership System will be a work in progress and will need reviewed and imprved from time to time.

Free Membership Site Startup Plan

Did you download our free membership website startup plan?

You can visit the main page of this site and download your free memberhip website startup plan.

It has some important things that you need to consider, like how you are going to market your membership site once you build it.

Membership Website Design

Your membership website design has several goals.

1. Your design should make it easy to read text and view video
2. Your membership website design should be as professional as your target audience would expect.
3. A good membership website design is going to organize and navigate information easily.

The real concept behind good design for your membership site is simplicity.

That is not as lame of a comment as it first may seem.  I have built many membership sites and with each new one, I took out more bells and whistles and focused more and more on those membership website design elements I mentioned above.

So when you are thinking about how to design your membership site, you should be thinking about how to cleanly structure and display the kind of informtion you are selling access to and not overdo things.

I highly recommend WordPress Wishlist Member because a WordPress Blog has many free membership website designs and templates that you can use.  Then you can lock down the site with WordPress Wishlist Member and integrate it with Paypal or even with 1ShoppingCart if you want to build an army of affiliates.

Now that I have the right tools and understand to keep things simple when it comes to my membership site design I can launch new membership sites in a matter of less than an hour – other than the content.

To find the kinds of designes available for wordpress, do a search on wordpress themes and you will be able to find thousands of free membership website themes – actually wordpress themes that can be used for membership sites.

This really is a great option and if you are still in the stage of experimenting and trying out different membership site software and platforms, trust me, I just saved you a lot of headaches if you take my advice.