Tips for Choosing Membership Site Software

From experience,it can be very difficult to start a successful membership site without using membership website software. This can be rather frustrating for tech dummies like authors, trainers and speakers who would want to start their own membership sites and yet lack the technical know-how.

Every software has it’s own flaws,that’s why it’s vital that you choose website membership software with all the features you will need. Below, I have pointed out some of the vital features that you will want to look out for when selecting the right membership website software to use.

Before you look at the software features,find out the reliability of the software or company. You can do this by looking for reviews from people who have used the software before. Not only should the software be reliable, but the company which is supplying the software should be reliable as well. Make sure that the company offers excellent customer support. Try emailing the company and if you don’t get a response within 24 hours, then try your luck elsewhere.

Obviously, the next vital thing to look at are the true features of the software. List down everything you expect of your membership site and make sure that the software you intend to use has those features that will support your plans. Whereas the majority of companies list features of their software on their websites, there are no guarantees. It’s always good to e-mail the company to get more detailed information.

It won’t make any sense to use software that is incompatible with your web hosting account. For instance, a particular software may need PHP to be installed on your server,thus it won’t do any good to install it on an ASP server since it won’t work. From experience, most membership websites are run with software which require servers running PHP.

Lastly,it’s always good to consider the cost of of the Membership website software you intent to purchase. You should take this seriously because the old adage that “you get what you pay for” applies in software as well. Of course, there are some cheap software with great features but it most cases, cheap of free software have few features.

Click here for more free tips for starting a membership based website.

Three Easy Steps on How to Promote your Membership Site

After building your membership website, the next step is learning how to promote your membership site properly, in order to bring in paying customers. There are different ways of promoting your membership site. The key to promoting the membership site is to not get bogged down attempting to apply all of the different marketing strategies at once or jump from one strategy to another without focus.

Focus on not more than three tasks at a time. Plan, act on it, and evaluate the results. Continue to do things that work, eliminate those that don’t and add a new way to market your site, and then repeat the same process.

Here are three ways to generate lots of paying customers to membership sites.

Joint Ventures. This is the fastest way to get a large number of traffic to your site. You can convince joint venture partners to work with you in the promotion of your membership site by contacting list owners in your market or non-competing market and providing them a strong “what’s in it for me” value statement. Create the promotional material in advance for them to just plug into their marketing. People will be more willing to do business with you if they find you easy to work with.

Article Marketing. The best way to promote your membership site is through the use of article marketing. You can generate a large number of traffic to your site by writing short, useful articles that can help people solve problems and by posting it on various article
directories. You will create reliable and steady traffic to your site if the article marketing is done on a consistent basis.

Leaving sensible blog and form posts. Simple comments on other people’s blogs and forums can create a lot of traffic; granted that the blogs and forums chosen are in the related market. The traffic doesn’t come overnight but with consistency in valuable commenting, people view you as someone who is knowledgeable and causing them to click on your link to get more information.

Teaching Sells and Membership Software

When I first got started creating membership sites, it was because I took a course called Teaching Sells.  You can see the teaching sells video here.

The one thing I did not love about Teaching Sells is that it suggested using Moodle as your membership site software.  After using 6 different membership site software solutions, I found Wishlist Member and once I made that change I was able to create new, profitable niche membership websites in MUCH less time.

That said, the training I got from Teaching Sells was very helpful.  Thinking through how to structure your content and what kind of tools you can add to your membership site is very important and will help you minimize your expenses (by avoiding costly mistakes) and maximize profitability.

Go take a look at Teaching Sells and get the free membership website report.

Micro Membership Websites

I recently watched a video about Micro Membership Websites and I have to say that it makes a lot of sense.

More is not always better – and there are only a few things that make a membership site hard to be successful with.

1. Content – Building a micro membership course with a limit to how long it runs is better because it is quicker, allows you to focus on the best content and has an end, which in the long run may keep people in your program longer.
2. Marketing – If you spend 6 months trying to build the perfect membership site, you will have lost 6 months of trying to get your marketing going.  Nothing is worse than spending too much time on the membership site and too little time on the marketing.
3. Updates – The beauty of these micro membership sites is that you do not have to update them every month.  This is truly a cash machine instead of work once you launch it.

You can use Wishlist Member to quickly set up a series of courses that become available each month – this software is fantastic if you are used to using wordpress and want to launch a full membership site or a micro membership site.

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 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.