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.

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.

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.

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.

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.