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.

• Parenting the Middle School Years
• HR
• Online Training
• Local Internet Marketing
• Book Keeping & Financials for the Small Business Owner
• Write your first book.

These are just some membership site ideas off the top of my head.  A couple of these membership sites I would probably join if they were resonably priced.

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.

About a year ago I launched my first paid membership site.

And relaunched 6 times in total. Painful.

The reason? Never happy with the software. Finally, via hard lessons, I decided simple is better and I set up a WordPress Membership Site with Wishlist Member.

Finally, a solution I love.

If you are someone that has considered premium content membership sites as something you might want to do, go watch the videos on the Wishlist Member Site.

I bought the multi-site license, and not only do I make money from membership sites, but I also set up free private membership sites as bonuses for clients and team members. It is a great upsell item and easy to maintain.

Talk about adding some buzz to existing products!

Watch the videos and see how easy the tech part can be.

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.

Then I discovered Wishlist Member – a WordPress Plugin.

This solved so many problems for me.

Publishing and membership management became much easier.

Using the option to have content public or protected, I was able to leave some of our articles public and have others only available to the members registered via Wishlist Member.  This resulted in great search engine results and potential members are able to see some of the content before they join.

Now Wishlist Member has a new version out that even integrates with membership site reoccurring payments on paypal.  While I use 1ShoppingCart because I value the affiliate program, the option to integrate with paypal is very powerful because now you can set up a full membership site for next to nothing.

I do suggest you buy the multi-site license for Wishlist Member.  For a little more you can set up as many membership sites as you want.  I even use it to set up private, free training areas that I use as bonuses for other things I sell.  The fact that launching a whole new membership site costs me no additional costs (maybe the $10 a year domain name) and can be done in a couple of hours is incredible.

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.

1. Public Blog – I always have part of my content in a public blog to give visitors a taste of the content and get search engine traffic.
2. Monthly High Value Item – Every month your members should feel like they got one piece of knowledge that is of very high value and can be used immediately.
3. Regular interaction – your membership should not forget the member site exists.
4. Multi-media – If you are only producing text and images, you are not addressing the needs of all your members.  Some learn better with audio or video.
5. Testimonials - Your sales page should have testimonials with your website membership members.
6. Tools - If possible, provide tools and downloads as well as information.  You can often purchase resale rights of a tool or ebook and then give it away to members.
7. Automation – If you want to run a profitable membership website, you need to automate your monthly reoccurring charges and account set up.  I use 1ShoppingCart because I value a robust affiliate program, but it can also be done in paypal.

Setting up your membership site takes a lot of attention to detail and adding constant value for your membership.

I highly recommend their plugin for membership sites.  It is much more robust than those free membership site software options that are out there.  I have also used their support (excellent) and they are continuing to improve the product.  Purchase here

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Over the last two months the WishList Member
team has been working extremely hard on
adding some MAJOR features.

These new features will not only make running
your membership site easier but they will
also save you a lot of time.

We’ll go into more detail with some upcoming
videos but here’s a sneak peak of what’s
coming on Thursday (Jan.22)…

———————————————
1)  Full PayPal and Clickbank Integration
———————————————

With the Full Integration, you can now have
two-way communication between WL Member and
these payment processors.

So if one of your members were to cancel
their subscription or their payment doesn’t
go through, they will be automatically
blocked from accessing your site

———————————————
2)  Email Broadcasting
———————————————

If you’ve ever wanted to email your members
right from within WordPress, now you can!

The Email Broadcasting feature now gives you
the ability to send an email boradcast
message straight to your members.

The best part is, your messages don’t have to
be generic because you can specify which
membership levels you want to send them to.

———————————————
3)  Autoresponder Intrgation
———————————————

We know many of our customers use various 3rd
party autoresponders (we do too).

So what we wanted to provide was an easy way
to send the registration info directly to
your autoresponder once someone registers for
your site.

That way you can design a follow up sequence
to keep them excited about your site.

Now that’s possible as major services like
Aweber and AutoResponse Plus have just been
added.  Plus we are working to add others as
we speak!

———————————————
4)  Email and IP Blocking
———————————————

If you have troublesome customers well now
you can keep them away from your site!

We’ve beefed up the security of WL Member by
adding email and ip blocking which means you
can keep those pests away for good

———————————————
5)  IP Login Security
———————————————

Along the same lines, we’ve also increased
the member security by giving you the option
to limit the number of logins per ip address.

That means people won’t be able to share
their login and password info to your site
with all their friends.

And if they do reach the limit, they will be
automatically blocked and you’ll be notified.
How you handle them is up to you

—–

That’s just a quick look at some of the
upcoming features but there are also a lot of
other modifications that we’ll share later
this week.

The good news is, you’ll get the upgrade to
WL Member v2.0 absolutely free (If you already have a purchased copy)

——————————-

Again, we use this product and highly recommend it.  The new upgrade makes it even better.

Buy Wishlist Member if you want to do a membership website.

This is a series of marketing tips to use to promote your memberhip website.

Marketing Tip #1 – Pay Attention to Analytics

On on of my membership sites, I had a search term that was occasionally showing up in my Google analytics.

I took a look at the team and my placement in Google, and found that by adding a few words and getting 2-3 links from other websites, I was able to go from 2-3 visitors per week via that search term to 50+ per day.

The public content on your membership site is an important part of your marketing strategy.  If you have keywords that are already perfoming ok, it is often very easy to make them perform very well.

But measure and track everything – you could also damage great ranking if you are not careful.  Marketing your membership site takes a constant effort