wp wishlist plugin

Five Reasons to Buy wp wishlist plugin (Go watch the videos if you don’t believe me)

First, what is wp wishlist plugin?

WP stands for Wordpress.  Wordpress is the top blogging software that is free, easy to set up and supports all kinds of free templates and free wordpress plugins.  Many of these things are great to set up your membership site.

Wishlist plugin, also called WP Wishlist Member plugin, is a premium plugin (membership software)  that you buy, download and drop into the plugin folder of Wordpress.  (It really is that easy once you find the right folder)

Then you activate it and you have a very powerful membership site set up.

You can integrate wp wishlist plugin with paypal, 1ShoppingCart or many other payment processing gateways.

I looked at many different options, including using the free membership site wordpress plugin, but wp wishlist plugin was by far the best deal.  I puchased it once, I can use it on many sites and it nearly automated every part of my membership management.

I probably spent more than an hour watching their excellent videos and reading their website before buying.  They do the best job I have seen at helping you make a great decision to buy or not buy.  If anyone returns the product, it is only because they did not watch the videos first.  It really does work exactly like the wp wishlist plugin videos show.

Free Membership Website Software

Here are five reasons you should think twice before you try to use free membership website software.

1. Support – I think free is great.  But free plugins and software do not have any support and that means they just might stop working.
2. Affordable Options – I do not think it is wise to spend $1,000’s on membership website software.  However, there is membership website software that works great for under $100.
3. Free Membership Website Software is not really free.  You have to figure out how to set up and integrate the software, and since it is just an free open source membership website software, it may not have any instructions.
4. Versioning – When Wordpress upgrades, I feel confident that the Wishlist Member team will upgrade thier plugin and I will not have any major outage.
5. Use a combination of free software and paid components for the best, low cost solution.  Wordpress is free, and it is big enough so you can have faith that it will be around.  However, the free membership website software plugins for wordpress are not feature rich enough to make managing your membership website easy.  For that reason, take the free software that works well, but spend a little to get good plug ins and services to make your membership website a success.

WP Wishlist Member for Membership Websites

In an earlier article, I wrote about my experiences with using six different Membership Site Software Solutions.

Ultimately, I used WP Wishlist Member which is a premium Wordpress Plugin for Managing Membership Websites.

The first thing I love about them is the extensive set of videos they post on their website.  You do not have to wonder if it is going to work for you or not.  They have many videos that show you exactly what WP Wishlist Member does.

Next, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee.  When I bought the premium membership management plugin, I fully intended to ask for my money back if it did not work.  Instead, I found the Membership Website Solution I’d been looking for over a six month period.

WP Wishlist Member was easier for me to use for several reasons.

1. I was already used to Wordpress and it was easy for me to set up and customize.
2. Wordpress is simpler than Moodle, Drupal, DotNetNuke and Joomla.  It is also more publishing oriented than Ning.  And yet it was far less expensive than things like aMember or other premium membership site solutions.

Don’t take my word for it.  Go watch the videos and then buy it and try it – and ask for your money back if it is not the best membership website plugin you have ever tried.

Free Open Source Membership Site Software

This article is about Free Open Source Membership Site Software which you can set up in seconds.

There is a catch with open source software.  You need to be able to install it, upgrade it and customize it yourself – or hire someone to do it for you.  There are great forums and a lot of information on the web, but it is not easy.  Open Source means that the code is open and you can use it.  It does not mean that it is easy or will do what you want it to do.

Also, your open source free membership site software is free, but you have to put it in a place that people can find it.  That means you need to host it on a server (not your home computer) that is always on and is set up to serve webpages and run the kind of software you choose.  That costs a little money.

You will also need a domain name for your membership site.  That should cost you $10 or less per year.

I recommend Bluehost for an inexpensive place to host your open source membership site software.  I have short occasional outages and problems, and you will need to back up the site yourself, but overall it has been a great, low cost solution.  I have also had my own servers – and the cost is huge and the headaches are much higher.

Open Source Membership Site Software

If you use Bluehost, or many other hosting companies, you should get a Linex server (usually that is your only choice) and you should make sure they have a C-Panel, Fantastico and/or Simple Scripts.  (Simple scripts may be only a Blue host tool)

These tools make it easy for you to manage your website and set up the open source membership software.  Typically, you need to do things in this order.

1. Register Your Membership Site Domain - If you do not do it through your host, you will need to configure it to point to your hosts IP address or name server.  If you do not know what that means, just register it at your host and you will not need to know.
2. Using Simple Scripts (or Fantastico) Set Up Membership Site – With those tools, you just select the open source membership software you want and it will walk you through the install of the membership site software.
3. Customize your Membership Site - The hard part is learning the software and customizing it.

If you are not fairly technical, keep things simple.  You can spend months getting to know the open source software, trying out various plug-ins, uploading and changing various hemes, etc.  I really suggest you hire someone to do this part and keep it simple.  Your goal should be to launch a professional, stable membership site that makes money and has great content.  Don’t get lost in too many bells and whistles.

Review of Open Source Membership Site Software

The reason I went into so much detail above is that I am going to review open source membership site software that I have used on my Bluehost account.  There are other options out there, but the ones I am going to discuss are the most common, are easy membership sites to set up, and there are a lot of experts out there that can help you customize these open source membership site solutions.

1. Wordpress – You may think of Wordpress as just a blog, but with the right skills on setting up your Wordpress Theme, your Wordpress blog can be a great membership site.  This is the only solution I use now because I focus on valuable content and not too many tools and such.  I use Wishlist Member to easily automate the membership sign up and access.  I use 1Shopping Cart integrated with Wishlist Member to automate monthly billing and build my membership site affiliate program.

   Wordpress is a good option if you want to focus on fresh, quality content each month and not get lost in the technology.  I also see that Wordpress sites usually get the best search engine results out of the box.

2. Joomla – When it comes to these open source membership website software solutions that are open source, it really comes down to how much time you spend with them.  I really like Joomla and it does a great job of building a membership site.  However, I found customizing it more difficult and the resources for it were more scattered.  It is much better as a community tool if you want each member to have their own blog, communicate back and forth more, etc.  From my experience, most of those community features do not get used by the majority of the membership.
3. Drupal – I loved how quickly I could build a site in Drupal.  I did not love trying to customize it.  As with all the open source membership site solutions, if you spend enough time with it you can make it do almost anything you want.  With Drupal, I got frustrated after two days of trying to find how to change stuff so I stopped.  However, some tech people I know love it and my experience was over a year ago, so it may be much better now.
4. Moodle – The first open source product I used to build a free membership site was Moodle.  Moodle is the open source learning software that many universities use.  However, it was far too complex for what I wanted to achieve and it never looked nice to me.  I am fairly technical and I can use photoshop alright, but I spend days trying to make Moodle look good and it was just never to my standard.

   The reason you may want to try Moodle is that it has things organized in courses with quizes, threaded chat, etc. all integrated.  However, I found it to be very confusing and way too many options for a simple membership site.

The good news about all four of these free open source membership site software options is that they are free, can be set up in seconds and you can spend a couple of hours getting to know each one.  Then pick one and stick with it.  It is better to become really good at one of these membership site software options than to keep dabbling with all four.

Choosing your Membership Site Web Shopping Cart

What do you want to consider when choosing a membership site eCommerce solution?

The first thing you want to consider is your long term goal with setting up a membership site.  The ecommerce shopping cart solution depends on your long term planning.

Do not have crazy dreams of making millions with your membership site here.  If you are setting up your first membership site, you are going to take a while to make money and it does take a lot of work the first time.  If you are going to be making this a big business push, then you will want to consider an affiliate program for your membership site.

Affiliate programs are a bit funny.  Here is why.  Many people may sign up for your affiliate program, but very few will actually produce sales for you.  The biggest reason is that they need to take action, and few people will take the action needed to develop an affiliate sale.  You will have to manage your affiliates just like you manage your membership website.  You need to interact with them and keep them motivated.

I like paypal because of the ease of use and low startup.  But this is where you have a decision to make.  The PayPal Affiliate program does not exist.   You have to buy 3rd party tools to manage an affiliate program with paypal, and at that point it seems better to go with the leader in online shoppping carts, 1ShoppingCart.

Just a warning:  This runs $99 per month if you want the affiliate tools.  That is why I said you had better be sure you want to take the business side seriously.  If you are just dabbling with membership websites as a business model, then do not invest in a professional shopping cart with affiliates.  It takes too long to get to break even.

Another option is ClickBank.  ClickBank does offer reoccurring membership fees and includes affiliate sales, but I have avoided that option because it just seems messy and full of unprofessional products.  That is my personal opinion and you should definitely check out Clickbank before you make a decision as it may be a good in-between option.

How to create a membership site

I am very pleased that we finally launched the free eGuide on how to create a membership site.

If you do not mind toying with technology a bit, I assure you that you can do it yourself.  Just download this free membership website ebook for the steps you need to consider to get started.

I realize that some of you will not be very comfortable with setting these things up on your own.  That is why we have set up very simple help that you can get for setting up your membership site.  Read aboout our membership site setup.  The beauty of the program is that you simply buy 5 hours of our time at a time and we help with with items related to membership sites.

Can we do everything in the world?  No.  But we have extensive experience with 6 different membership site software solutions as well as having built membership sites for major universities.  If we do not have direct experience with your need, we will either figure it out or refund your pre-bought time and let you know that we do not work with your particular technologies.

Some people want to know why we charge 5 hours at a time.

The first reason is to make it worth our while.  We are simply not available for a thirty minute project.

Next, it is small enough that you have low risk.  If you are not happy with the work we get done in 5 hours, simply do not buy more time from us.  No long term contract.

It is not hard to create a membership site.  However, if we can help you with the technology, you can then focus on the two more important aspects, which is creating content and marketing.

Free Membership Site

Setting up a free membership site is a great option to give running a membership site  a try.  However, it is not the best long term strategy and it also lacks the commitment you need to make.  The fact is, with a free membership site you will not have expenses and for that reason you might make excuses about why you have not made a good effort at marketing your membership site.

I am a huge fan of keeping costs for your membership site low.  That is why I recommend an inexprensive webhost, free membership software and optional tools that are low cost and can be paid off quickly with modest membership.

Of the free options, a truly free membership site can be set up in Ning.  However, here is the issue.  If the membership site is hosted on Ning, and everyone knows that ning is free, how much do you think subscribers will be willing to pay for it?

If you want to set up a free membership site that charges money and has a higher precieved value, you should take a look at myNetcipia.  This is as good and as low risk as it gets.  The big disadvantage of this is that they do not disclose the percentage of the sale they take when someone joins, and they do not have an affiliate program built in.

While myNetcipia offers you a free membership site that has no risks, it makes marketing harder to do and after you have built real membership, you may regrete the much higher percentage of the fee that you are paying out.

If you already have a hosting account on a web host like Bluehost, you will probably be able to add a free wordpress blog to your account, a free membership plugin (not automated, but it works) and no additional hosting fees.  The only fee I would see in that kind of a set up is the $10 per year domain name.

So you have a lot of free membership sites available to you.  Remember your time is worth something, and you do not want to start on one system and change in a few months as it is painful for you and for your members.  A free membership site may not be free at all when you factor those things in.

1ShoppingCart Wishlist Review

For integrating my 1shoppingcart software with my membership websites, I finally combined Wishlist Membership Wordpress Plugin with 1ShoppingCart to get nearly everything I needed.  What is missing you might ask?

The only manual thing I still need to do is to deativate people when the reoccuring transaction happens and does not go through.

Sounds like a small item – and it is – if you have a good process in place and a way to track it.

Go to the wishlist website and watch the videos.  If you are interested in how to integrate 1ShoppingCart with your membership site, play close attention to that video.

When I first set it up and tried it, new releases of browsers had come out and the Wishlist plugin did build the account but in IE it kept refreshing the screen and basically froze.  My very first sale to my membership site generated a support call.

However, the Wishlist team did a great job of troubleshooting the problem and releasing a patch within a few days.  I was very impressed with their response.  After all, it was within the first 30 days and I was very prepared to use my 30 day money back guarantee if I was not 100% happy.

1ShoppingCart is good software that is widely used.  At times it is a little bit slow, but it remains the best software I have used for a combination of eCommerce and affiliate management.  If you want to build an affiliate team, use 1Shopping Cart.

Membership Site Software – Moodle

Moodle is an open source online learning tool that you can use to create membership sites.

If you get a hosting account at Bluehost, you can use Fantastico to automatically create a Moodle website.

As you know if you are a regular reader of this website, I prefer the wordpress plugin  wishlist, which can also be set up on that same bluehost account.

Here is why my Moodle Membership Site failed:

1. Too many options – and I did not ignore them – I had to play.  Too many things will kill a membership site.
2. Poor integrating with eCommerce. Wishlist auto-builds your membership accounts if you use 1ShoppingCart.  How many people want to wait 24 to 48 hours for access to a membership site when they sign up.  Please note that with enough effort I am sure you can figure out how to do it with Moodle, but I could never get it to work and I have a technical background.
3. Basic templates were terrible. To make it look nice you have to do a lot of customization and design.  On the other end, with wordpress you have 1,000’s of great, free blog templates that make great, free membership sites.
4. Confusing courses - Moodle is probably very good for a department or even a full school to manage learning materials.  However, when you are trying to set up a streamlines membership site you do not want software that requires people to enroll in different courses and such.  The whole thing simply made it more difficult to manage.

Where there some good things using Moodle as our Membership Site Software?

Absolutely.  Moodle as membership site software has some advantages, such as if you want to do assessments, quizes, have discussion boards on each course, a glossary and many other real classroom kind of features.  That said, I have found that the cleaner and simpler a membership site is, the more likely people will use it and stay in the program.