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.

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.

#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.

First, they really do have great videos on their site that make it easy for anyone to add the Wishlist Plugin to WordPress.  It should not be a technology issue.  It does take time to configure and get working just the way you want, but that has more to do with your shopping cart and how you want your membership site to flow.

Wishlist Member Setup for WordPress

I offer our Membership Site Setup service not because it is my primary money steam, but because I have gotten better and better at doing this and I can save you time and hassle and put those membership site skills to use.

If you are thinking that there are people out there that will set WordPress and Wishlist Member up cheaper for you, you are right.  Have fun hunting them down and working with them, then firing them and finding another.

Personally, I would rather work with someone that feels like they better do a great job because they value you as a client.  But that is just me.

Remember, you can do Wishlist Member Setup for WordPress yourself.  It just depends on how much you value your time and if you want to work with a professional with experience working with Wishlist Member and WordPress.

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.

Once you get past that, and by no means is that easy for new people, you have a couple of additional issues.

Marketing a Membership Site

Marketing your membership site is essential to your success.  You may feel proud of finally launching your membership site – but if no one finds out about it, you will not be proud for long because you will be the only member of your membership site.

• Do not assume that your marketing site, no matter how good, will create members.  You need a membership site marketing plan.
• Promote your membership site every day.  There are a lot of ways to promote your membership site online.
• Don’t assume 3% of china will buy your membership site.  If you are a new entrepreneur, this is for you.  A common error people make in a marketing plan for membership sites or any other product is that they will look at the big market and then say, “I just want 1%” – Come on and get real.  Look at your market and ask yourself – “how many of these people in this market can I reach 5 times with my marketing budget?”   That is a more realistic number.

Membership Site Participation

This is the other thing that will annoy you the first time you start a membership site.  Many of the members of your membership site will not participate, or even use the membership site.

• Know that it is coming and don’t be dissapointed.  People join because they like the idea, but they sometime do not take action.  For that reason they stay in but do not use it.
• Members may hit a stumbling block in your membership site.  You might need to find out where people get stuck and create better content to get around it.
• You need to participate to get other people to participate.

Membership Site Reality

The simple membership site reality is that even when you launch, you will have a lot of new, ongoing issues around membership site marketing and membership site participation.  Be ready for them.

So you either need someone that understands how to work with Amazon S3 or you need to take some time to figure out how to use the tools.

Info about how to  embed video hosted on the Amazon S3 Web Service.

First, why Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 offers storage of files at a very low cost and provides very scalable and reliable storage and backup at unbeatable prices.  Its the best 50 cents I spend each month.

How to Embed a Video stored on Amazon S3

Lots of websites are offering courses and membership areas to help you embed video into your blog or membership website which are stored on Amazon S3.  I did not want to pay and I am fairly technical and  I knew I could figure it out.   But I was pulling my hair out because I kept almost getting it to work, but not quit.

After a lot of testing and effort  I downloaded JW FLV Media Player, posted the files in the root directory of my website and used the site setup wizard to get the code just right.

Finally, I found that this works with FLV files which is one video format.  So now I am making all my videos in the FLV format.

The great thing is that with this code and wizard I can now embed video into my private membership sites that are hosted on Amazon S3.

Eventually I hit another problem.  The embed code did not work well in WordPress.   I found that WordPress has disabled the embed tag because of security issues.  Luckily, I found the Wordoress Plugin pb-embedFlash – The documentation was not great because it lacked the basic examples in a clear way.  However, I experimented with it a bit and found I could simply type [flash url] and it would replace the tag with the flash player and play the FLV file.  Like most things in WordPress, once you get used to it, it works very well.

If you are looking for the best video hosting solution that will allow you to embed video into your blogs and websites, I assure you the above solution using Amazon S3 and the Free Video Player are great options.  Remember that if you are using the video player to make money, you need to buy a license.

Hosting Video on Amazon S3 is the professional option – just be ready to put some time into figuring out the details.

There are several reasons to pay for a membership site template.  I will warn you that these things will not be fun if you are not at least slightly technical in nature.

#1 A purchased WordPress theme is going to have fewer users so your site will look more distinct.

#2 Support – Some WordPress themes that you purchase have a degree of support.  If there is a message board and a develop to ask questions from, that is great.

#3 Tools – Many new templates not only have a great look and feel, but they also have great tools built into them.

#4 SEO – Some professional templates are highly designed to get maximum seo results.

#5 Features – Many WordPress Themes will have wonderful features built in.

#6 Time Savings – Because of all the extras, purchasing a WordPress theme can save you a lot of money.

Here is the bad new.  Anyone can build a WordPress theme and you can use it for your membership site template – but you have to know what you are looking for and how to evaluate the tools and features to make a good buying decision.  You could do searches on Google to find WordPress Themes that people are using as membership site templates and contact the person using it.  You can ask them if they like the WordPress Theme, if they found it easy to set up, etc.

Carefully evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of purchasing a wordpress theme for your membership site template.

I believe that you should minimize your startup costs for your membership site.  That means going with a low cost website host.

However, you need to know what you are buying with a low cost membership host.

I use Bluehost as my low cost membership host.  But here are the risks.

1. I need to do my own backups, and even occasional database repairs.
2. There are regular outages that usually do not last more than a minute.
3. They have great software in the c panel that help you set up wordpress  – but you will not feel comfortable with this if you intimidated by technology.

I have provided people with full service hosting in the past.  However, it can run hundreds of dollars per month when things do not go wrong, and even more when there are problems.  For that reason, my feeling is to live with the occasional headaches of an inexpensive host.  Make sure you do regular backups yourself and have a tech person on call that can help you when you need it.

If you decide to use a host like BlueHost, the good news is that you can put a lot of membership websites on one hosting account.  So you should be able to cover your hosting costs with one member per month.  Just plan for problems and make sure you have back ups handy.

PS:  This blog is hosted on the very bluehost account I am talking about.

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.