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.

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.

WP Wishlist Member Review

This is a review of using WP Wishlist Member for building membership websites.

First, do not take my word for it.  When I decided to buy Wishlist Member, I spent more than an hour watching the videos on their website.  They do one of the best jobs I have ever seen at showing you what their product does.  I Yes, WP Wishlist Member has a 30 day money back guarantee, but I doubt anyone ever uses it because it is an excellent product and because they do such a good job of educating a prospective buyer in advance of the purchase.

Now for the wordpress membership plugin itself, it is important for me to give you some history of what I am comparing it to.

I started my first membership site initially in Moodle.  Moodle is a nice open source eLearning tool that is used by entrepreneurs and big universities alike.  However, I soon became overwhelmed with trying to customize it and deactive what was way too many features.  I was spending too much time with the software and not making money.

So then I tried Ning.  Ning is a nice free community site and I paid a small amount to take the adwords off of the site.  Ning has a great community feel but I was not developing a real asset (developing the domain) and I could not easily structure and host course oriented information in a friendly way.

Then I tried Drupal.  Drupal is another open source community and publishing platform and I do think Drupal could have worked well, but I was forced to start learning a new technology, which I did not want to invest more time into.

Then I tried Litmos.  I really liked the simplicity of Litmos but I found it very expensive as I would be paying per person per month – and it would add a much higher cost to the opperation of the membership site and would hurt the profitability.

Sadly, it took me a full six months to realize that the best membership site software would be to use what I was already comfortable with – WordPress.  I began using the free membership site wordpress plugin but I had to manually add and remove people from the site.

Finally I found WP Wishlist Member and everything got easy.  I can now launch the technology around a membership site in less than an hour and focus on the important things, like content and marketing the membership site.

WP Wishlist Member is one of the best software investments I have ever made.  I integrate it with 1ShoppingCart and the entire thing runs so smoothly that I tend to thing of the membership site as free money.

Membership Site Domain Aging

One thing that you may not realize is that domains that are older typically get better search engine results.

Why is that important to your membership site?

Well, lets assume you are currently researching membership sites and you want to eventually start a membership site.  You know the topic, but you are not quit ready to take the leap yet.  In fact, it could be months before you are really ready.

The seemingly smart thing to do would be to not spend any money until you are ready to really get going.

But if you do not spend the $8 to $10 (annually) for a domain name, you are really hurting yourself in the future.

Go buy one or more domains right now!

The small amount of money you spend in advance will really pay off by giving you better organic search engine results when you do start the site.  Ideally, put up a landing page to even get better results.

Mosso for Membership Sites

Is Mosso good for Membership Site Hosting?

OK. Up front I have to say that I am getting ready to set up additional sites on Mosso but I have not done it yet.

This post is not about how great Mosso is.  Instead, I want to address how you are choosing your Membership Site Hosting.

I have several membership sites on Bluehost.   The total cost is less than $10 per month.  Support has been good, service is fair.  It does slow down sometimes and goes down for brief times occasionally, but I am willing to live with that for the low cost.

I use WP Wishlist Member to manage the sites.

So why am I setting up membership sites on Mosso going forward?  I will still use my Bluehost account, but I will put all revenue sites on Mosso going forward because, even though it is much more expensive, it is still very reasonable compared to having your own servers (which I do as well) and it covers many of the reliability issues I worry about with other options.

Since Mosso still costs a little over $3 per day, I can still justify that I can make that back quickly and the peace of mind from having my site on a cloud of servers is fantastic.  Reliability, Scalability and Speed are why I will take it over.  However, if you are just starting your first membership site, choose Bluehost for  hosting your membership site and grow into the better solutions.

Membership Sites – Easy or Hard?

Membership sites are as easy or as hard as you want to make them.

The first time I set up a membership site, I tried to do too much.  I had a glossary, certifications, video, audio, 20+ courses, etc.  I had to manually add people to the course after payment because I could not figure out how to integrate my Moodle membership site with a shopping cart.

After many different attempts, Membership sites went from hard to easy.  Now I use Wishlist Member and WordPress.  These two powerful tools make managing a simple membership site easy.  I also integrate Wishlist Member with 1ShoppingCart and  I easily process my membership dues and manage my membership site affiliate programs.

Critical to how easy my membership site became was realizing it was better to give less information and less features, but make the information in the site VERY good and very easy to find.

Financial Models for Membership Sites

There are a variety of membership site financial models you can consider and experiment with.

1. Reoccurring Membership Site -  One thing you can do is charge a monthly fee and people can stay in the site forever.  However, the challenge with this kind of membership site financial model is you need to keep fresh content in the site and the reality is that you will not always keep people a long time.  This kind of membership site is a lot more work.
2. Fixed Length Membership Site – The nice thing about a fixed length membership site is that you do not need to keep adding more content.  It is a course people take and at then end you stop charging them – and they either no longer have access, or you leave them in the course but there is no new material.
3. Course with Small Purchase – The most popular membership site I am seeing today is the free or cheap product in exchange for a $1 membership course trial.  This then translates to a certain % of the people not canceling the membership.  This is great for getting people to try it but can be a lot of work since many people will not stay in it.  You also need to be clear that there is not a refund after the trial if they do not cancel before the next billing.  I found this model annoying because of the amount of people that said “I forget to cancel….please credit my account.”  I did it, but I was spending too much time doing these kinds of things.

OpenSource – Joomla and vTiger

I know a lot of people visit this site looking for free opensource membership site software.

I am in the process of building a sales training portal that will give resellers training and access to a crm.  Even though I am a bigger fan of wordpress than Joomla, I kept my mind open and explored a development project that would integrate Joomla and vTiger.

Joomla is a membership content management system – and it is very nice but not the direction I went because I think it as more for building a social network or club.

vTiger is an opensource CRM that is wonderful but lacks a few essential things, such as leads from the web into the CRM.  vTiger has a module that you can configure that is supposed to do that, but I could not get it to work.  It is very poorly documented.

I like vTiger, but the modules seem worthless and difficult to add and configure.  Out of the box vTiger is very good though.

So here is the issue – 1st:  Don’t be surprised when opensource is not perfect.  It is free after all.  You are probably best off learning one tool that is really dependable, as I have done with WordPress.

2nd: Buy the premium plugins after reading reviews.  It can often save you a bunch of time and headaches.

The truth about Opensource software is that very few of them have non-tech people overseeing the development.  And tech people have a tendency to try to do too much.  (Not all, but they do love the technology)

I am going to use vTiger as my CRM.  I am going to use WordPress and Wishlist Member as my training portal.  And yes, there are going to be two logins for the different tools.  When you are looking for opensource solutions you just have to understand you are probably not going to get exactly what you want.