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.

Pricing a Membership Site

Pricing is an interesting topic when it comes to membership sites.

The best advice I can give you is to start lower, build a happy group, then use the upcoming price increase as a marketing tool.  Keep raising the price every couple of months until your membership site subscription rate goes down.

Then you can back it off to the level that was most profitable for you.

I have heard that $27 is a good rate to maintain your membership site members while earning a good profit.

I certainly got more members at $9 instead of $27.  But one at $27 is like three of the smaller sales – and they members all seem to stay just as long.

When it comes to pricing your membership site, the only way you are going to be able to know what your best price point is will be to keep experimenting with it.  Just remember that it is easier to raise your price than lower it.  If you lower it, you end upneeding to cut what existing people are paying you.

How Fast Can I Make Money with a Membership Site?

You might be asking yourself how fast can I make money with a membership site?

The fact is, membership sites are harder than a normal ebook site and will take longer to make money with.

However, membership sites have a great monthly reoccuring revenue, so they are worth the effort as long as you are willing to put in the work up front.

There are several places that you will get slowed down if you are setting up your first membership website.

1. Membership Site Technology.  I went through 6 different technologies until I found the WONDERFUL WP Wishlist.  If you are familiar with WordPress and you buy that plugin, you will save months of headaches setting up membership sites.  Since I was already using 1ShoppingCart to integrate my membership site, it was even easier.
2. Membership Site Content Creation – It is easy to get lost in too much content creation upfront.  You have to have a core value and then you need to keep adding to it monthly.  People spend too much time here initially before they even know if the concept is going to sell well.
3. Membership Site Marketing – Even before you set up your membership site, you need to set up a blog or basic website to start marketing the domain where your membership site will eventually reside.  Search engines look at the age of the domain and the content and topic of the domain as a way to rank your membership site in search engines.  Start now and get your domain noticed in Search so when you really launch your membership site you are ready to get some traffic.

How fast you can make money with a membership site really depends on how fast and efficient you can master these three issues.  There are some other issues like retention and your sales page, but ultimately they fall into being part of the membership website content creation and membership site marketing categories.

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.

Membership Site FAQ

Here are some general facts about membership websites.  This does not apply to any particular membership site software or membership site service.  Just a general membership site FAQ that is food for thought.

#1  Will I Make Money with a Membership Site?

It is highly unlikely that you will create a great, profitable membership site on your first try, especially if you are doing all the work yourself.  Worrying about membership site technology, membership site shopping cart integration, membership site content and membership site marketing is a lot of work.  Your best bet is to outsource the parts you can and focus on marketing the membership site and guiding the content development.

#2 What Membership Website Software Should I Use?

Because it is hard to build a profitable membership site on the first try, we suggest not going overboard with expensive website membership management software.  You can get the single licence of WP Wishlist for under $100 and you can get many wordpress templates for free to use for your membership site.

#3 How Do I Market My Membership Site?

Marketing is something you get better at over time.  You need to build and test different landing pages for membership sites and try different advertising avenues.  It also helps if you use a Search Engine Strategy to generate organic search results.  If you target your niche market that is likely to join your membership site, this should produce regular members.

#4 How Do I Retain Members in my Membership Site?

The first thing you have to do is understand that you will not retain members forever.  I have seen statistics that membership sites have an average membership retention of about 4 months.  However, it really depends on your offer and what your membership site contains.  For example, we have a much longer membership site retention at the Virtual Marketing Assistant network.  The reason is that it produces regular job leads for the members and has tools people can use, like blog posting to a blog network and a directory where people can review the virtual assistant profiles.

What other questions do you have about membership sites?  Leave your question in the comments below.

Secrets of Membership Websites

I do not think that there are “Secrets” to many things.  Instead, I think there is True behind the hype.

Membership Sites are not an easy way to get rich.

Instead, they are a great way to build residual income that can keep growing.

And eventually, if you get the right combination of niche audience, good content and sharpen your membership websites marketing skills, you can eventually make a good living running multiple sites.

The secret?  The secret is that it is work, it does take time and it is not a get rich quick scheme.

If you want a secrets besides this, invest in the membership website tools that are not too expensive but are better than the free membership website tools.  The free memebership website tools will only make you spend too much time figuring things out.  Look to the right to see what membership website tools I recommend.

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.

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.