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.

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 Upgrade WP Wishlist Member

This site has been getting traffic that is people looking for how to upgrade WP wishlist member.

It is tricky to do the first time.

To upgrade WP Wishlist Member, just go to the dashboard, then click into the management area of WP Wishlist member.

If you have a registered, valid copy of the software it will present you with an option to download the new version of the software.  It is just a plug in and you just overwrite the old one with the new one.  Be sure to follow their instructions – you usually want to deactivate a plugin before upgrading.

The hardest part of upgrading WP Wishlist Member is finding the link.  Then it is really just like adding a wordpress plugin to the 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.

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.

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.