You have to get your membership site up as fast as possible, even if it is ugly, even if you hate it because then you can improve on from there. It’s really easy, it’s really tempting to have some picture in your head about what your Membership Site will look like. You are going to have a beautiful landing page when someone logs in. There’s all kinds of content and it’s all dripped out and beautiful dashboards. That’s great and that’s a wonderful goal that you should aspire to build up to, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
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You need to get over your inner perfectionist and get something, anything online even if it is an ugly landing page with nothing but a payment button on it. Even if someone pays you even $10, $100 one time. Even if they log in and create or register an account with your Membership Site, and there’s only one video or one report on it, that’s a great place to start because then you have something that is functional. You have something that could potentially make you money right now. If you’re building a Membership Site for a client or something at least you now have proof of concept and you can show them what you are heading towards. It’s way, way easier to edit crap than air. We’re going to talk about the exact tools I use to create all my Membership Sites. You can get it all in one place at membershipcube.com. Whether you choose to join us there or not, I’m still going to dish all the tools that I personally use.
We’re going to break today’s program down into three components. I’m going to talk about just getting the WordPress side of things getting set up. Now WordPress is a free blogging tool or a way of making an online journal. This is a very convenient way for you to create any kind of a website. A landing page, a Memberbership Site with content, anything like that. Then we’re going to move on and talk about how to make money and how to put what’s called a payment button on your website. Then finally talk about the stuff that needs to be talked about and get it out of the way, this thing called web hosting.
I really don’t think that you should use someone’s else’s platform to run your website. One of those platforms where they promise to host it all off for you because the problem is all you eggs are in one basket. If your business depends on someone else’s business, what are you going to do if their business fails or they decide to go out of business? That is kind of a scary thought. I’d rather not think about that. Anyway, we are talking about WordPress. WordPress is the ultimate point and click way to set up a website. You don’t have to upload files, you don’t have to set up a database. The way that I do it is I first of all get my hosting at doubleagenthosting.com. They have videos and things like that where you can log into your backend, or what you call your C Panel, and then there is a icon called Quick Install. So if you even looked up on Youtube and looked up a video on C Panel Quick Install WordPress, you can find out how to click a button and install a WordPress blog.
Now what would that give you? That would give you a way to add journal entries. That’s not quite yet a protected membership site but it’s a start because you can paste articles in there. You can paste links to PDF documents and upload those. You can paste in videos or your private or unlisted Youtube videos, but the point is that you can use C Panel Quick Install to install this tool called WordPress. Now, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be on a web host that doesn’t have C Panel, you’re still in luck but it might take a little bit of a technical know how. If that’s your situation you can go to wordpress.org. We’ve got all kinds of options here. Even if you say, “I’m not very technically inclined,” then I would recommend that you go to a site called fiverr.com and search the term install WordPress and hire someone for literally $5. They will ask you for your log in details to your web host. They’ll ask for usually your password to the entire account.
That will get them access to upload the files they need and set up the database just that one time and then once they are done, change the password on them so then that way they’ve been paid their $5 and for them is five minutes of work. Now you got something accomplished for $5 that otherwise might have taken you a couple of hours to fumble around and figure out. The point is we install WordPress. Whether you download from wordpress.org and install it manually, that’s one option. If you have a web host such as Hostgator, which you can join at doubleagenthosting.com, then they will give you a C Panel area, it’s called, and a button called Quick Install where you can install WordPress.
Once you install WordPress, that gives you the ability to write some posts. Which are basically journal entries. We need a way to protect that content so that only the people who have paid us money have access and those people that have refunded or cancelled recurring payments do not have access. The tool we use for this is called Wishlist Member. We give you a free copy of this. We buy a copy for you at membershipcube.com. Now, Wishlist member is a plug in that installs on top of WordPress. That’s what I like about it, there is not a lot of confusing technical steps involved. You have WordPress, you installed this tool called Wishlist Member. Now you have WordPress, you have installed Wishlist member.
Now what is the next step? The next step is to create a membership level. The way I usually teach clients and students how to make a membership site is to create a level called Full. That is F U L L. What that means is that whenever you make a new post or paste on your WordPress site, Wishlist Member is going to add a special check box. Say, “Do you want to protect the content from the outside world?” Yes. “Do you want to apply it to a membership level?” Yes. The level is called FULL. This way if someone is not a member of your site, which means they are logged out of your site, they don’t see any of your content.
I guess potentially, you could add in one or two free articles and things like that for the public to see. To make it simple, let’s just say that if they’re logged out, they see nothing in your WordPress blog. If that member has an account and they can log in and they belong to that FULL level, then they can see all of the content of your site. That’s the basic idea, is that we have WordPress, we have Wishlist member, we created a level we called FULL, and then we say that all of the journal entries in my WordPress blog belong to that FULL level. If someone’s logged out, they can’t see my journal entries. If someone tries to log in but they are cancelled from that level, which means they are refunded, then they also can’t see my journal entries.
It’s very simple. It’s just an on or off situation. Now how do we get them to join our site. The easiest and quickest, dirtiest way to do it, a down and dirty way, I guess you could way is use paypal.com. Maybe you’ve heard to it. Everyone I know has a Paypal account. With Paypal, you can accept payments. You may need to upgrade your Paypal account to a business account, it’s called. The point of a Paypal account is that there are no upfront costs, you don’t need to connect it to- I think you do connect it to a bank account but you don’t need to keep a bunch of money in a bank account like you would with a merchant account. You don’t need to go through this big approval process, or anything like that. They just take a small percentage of your payments to handle it. The same way you would process credit cards, that’s the way the world works.
You take payments using Paypal and you can literally be up and running within a few minutes. You use WordPress, you use Wishlist member. There are instructions in the Wishlist member member settings called the integration tab on how you can log into Paypal and take a few steps and then you can begin to take payments. You can take payments for literally any price you want. $10, $100, $1000, you can take recurring monthly payments, payments once a week, payments every six months, every year, any combination of that.
The point is that you can basically, in a way, connect that Paypal button, no matter what price you are charging to the FULL level of your Wishlist member site. That means if someone goes and they see your Membership site, they can’t get in. You have a web page, let’s say for now you had a website with nothing on it, but a button to click and buy something. They click the button and if they happen to have their own Paypal account, they can pay through that. If they have a credit card or even more recently, if they have a bank account, they can pay through bank account or credit cards or things like that. Then they pay you money and it ends up in your Paypal accounts, you haven’t moved it out of your bank account just yet, but they pay you money. Then they are sent to what is called a registration page.
This is where they choose a username and a password to later log into your site. They fill that out and then they log in and they have access. So this is great for a number of reasons because if they refund, that username and password they used before will no longer function in your site. If they ever come back six months or a year or two years later and they forget how to find that video or that report, or that home study course they paid for, then they can click on a link that says lost password and recover that or maybe even email you and you can reset that for them.
The point is they click on the Paypal button, pay you money and then are sent to a page where just for the first time they create an account. They choose a username and a password. That is how they are able to log in and this way also, they don’t have the ability to pass around your download page or your download link because they have to literally type in a username and a password to then log in. We said that if you had a plain web page with just a payment button on it, that’s a good start, but that’s kind of ugly.
You’re in luck because in our membership cube course, we also include a plug in for WordPress called Paper Template. Paper Template was created on the idea that most web pages have a white background and more or less look like a plain piece of paper. Some web pages are wide enough so that you don’t see the edges of the piece of paper, but if you look at sites like Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, most of them are very plain looking or just plain white space, it’s called, and that is the idea behind Paper Template. You just have a clean, simple web page and even if all you had on that web page was a headline telling people what they were buying and a list of even five quick bullet points telling them the reasons they should buy your course on stock trading or weight loss with a button down below, that’s pretty much all you need to get started. You can get a professional copywriter who charges a big upfront fee and asks for royalties to go and improve that later, but the point is for now is the minimum, viable product. Whatever it takes to just get the most simple, bare bones basic site online that someone could buy from you.
To recap so far, we tell you to install this tool called WordPress. You can do it yourself, you can click the button to do it, you can hire someone to do that for $5. You install a plugin in WordPress called Wishlist Member that we provide you for free in our membership cube course. You take a Paypal payment button and you place it publicly on the internet so that someone can click on that button and pay you money and get access to your membership site, whether it’s low ticket, high ticket, recurring, whatever. Also, in membership cube we include the Paper Template plugin so that if you want to add text or make your web page look a little better, you can do that.
That’s all well and good. I tell you these tools to put in your web site, but what if you don’t have a web site. I really would stay away from any kind of free options for web sites. There’s Wix and Weebley, and all these. The problem with these free web sites is they look very unprofessional because they say, “Hey, this web site’s free. Do you also want a free site?” If you’re trying to make money, even if you’re only asking for $10?” It looks like you’re broke, it looks like you’re poor of you have a free website. It’s like having your site on a geocities web site back in the day. We don’t want that.
You want to own the .com version of whatever your name or your product or your course that you are selling. Own something .com not .biz, not .info. Own something .com because that makes you look more legitimate. You can grab a .com name at doubleagentdomains.com. That takes you to a domain service named Name Cheap. I believe it’s about $9 per year for you to go and grab whatever it is you want to sell .com. My sites are robertplank.com, papertemplate.com, membershipcube.com. Then you get an account at doubleagenthosting.com and this is called Host Gator. This is the place where your actual files are stored, your actual websites are stored. These are two different components. You have the place where you own the .com of your name and then you pointed over to the place where your web site actually lives. Your web hosting or host gator.
We have these separately and I believe host gator is about $7 a month or so. We tell you to get the baby account and there you go. Grab the .com at double agent domains that are pointed to dubleagenthosting, then install WordPress, then install Wishlist Member, and then install Paper Template. Those are all the tools you need to get it all basically up and running. I know I threw a lot at you. I know that it’s difficult to understand this without seeing it and that’s why in membership cube, we hold your hand every step of the way and we show you in video format. You can print out the PDF documents and screen shots. Whatever way you are most comfortable with. I want to literally show you how to set up your membership site by you going to membershipcube.com. Go there right now membershipcube.com. I’m Robert Plank from the Membership Site Podcast. Make your membership site today and be sure to go on Itunes at membershipcube.com/blog/itunes to give us a five star rating in review. I’d really appreciate it and go out there and make your membership site. Have a great day and bye for now.
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