Category: Software

Contrary to what a lot of internet marketers and membership site teachers tell you, a theme is not very important in your membership site. Now let me explain. I am all for having a membership site that looks good, that looks professional, and that’s easy to navigate, but unfortunately, the majority of membership site creators think that the theme of their membership site is the most important thing and as a result, end up using search for a theme as an excuse not to get anything else accomplished.

Here is something to think about. If you had a membership site with a good-looking theme and no content, would people pay for it? The answer is no. But if you had a membership site with an average-looking theme and some content, would people be more likely to purchase it? And the answer is yes. So, a theme is not really the top priority for you. Is it important to have an okay-looking theme? Of course it is, but it’s not that important to go out and find a different theme every single time you create a membership site. It’s not that important to get a custom theme created every single time you make a membership site.

Personally, I prefer just to reuse my favorite theme. I use a theme called Cutline on most of my sites and it’s a simple black and white theme where I can find everything. So, I just reuse my favorite theme for new membership sites. That way, I can create the membership site quickly while I am still excited about it. Something that’s very important with themes is that they are able to navigate. So, on your theme, can somebody easily search for something? Can they easily find old posts? Can they easily go to an old category? Can they easily leave a comment? Can they easily see what the newest posts are? If you can say yes to all those questions, then you have an easy-to-navigate theme and you should probably consider it.

Personally, I prefer blue or black and white themes with a single right sidebar. If according to your personality, you prefer a two-sidebar or a three-sidebar themes that’s purple, go ahead and use that, but I know what I like, you know what kind of theme you like. Go look at the blogs you frequent and what do those themes have in common, and just duplicate that on your own sites.

But the thing that’s important to me is that WordPress themes and membership themes don’t need to be fancy. There’s no rule that say you have to have a membership site theme that has giant magazine-style pictures everywhere or that has content sliders so that the blog flips around about the different posts better around. Personally, I think these kinds of additions distract people instead of helping them find exactly what they’re looking for.

So, a theme is not really too important with your membership site. You should definitely choose a theme that looks good, but once you found that good theme, reuse it in your other membership sites. Make sure that they’re easy to navigate and avoid a lot of the fancy stuff like magazine style themes or slider style themes.

Now that we’ve gotten that issue out of the way, go ahead and create some content, and market your membership site, and get the first few members.

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A missed “thought of” solution for not having a membership site is to instead take a WordPress blog and password-protect that folder using your web host control panel. I’m here to tell you today that that is a terrible terrible idea. Membership software these days is so cheap and so easy to install that there is absolutely no reason you should be using the password-protected blog solution, and it’s for these reasons – with proper membership software, you can cut off individual users who cancel or refund, you can prevent sharing and you can provide different access levels for different kinds of users.

I have tried the password-protected blog model, and the problem with that is that everybody has the exact same password. So, you might tell everybody, “Okay, go to this site and the username and password are both strawberries. Type the username strawberries, password strawberries.” Great. Right? Until one person leaves the membership site and then I have to say, “Great. Change the password to bananas” and then email the entire membership except for that one person and say, “Okay guys, I’m sorry but the old password was strawberries, now you need to type bananas when you log into the membership site.” So that’s the first headache because that – then you have members emailing you saying, “Wait, I thought that the password was strawberries. You mean it’s been changed?” And then it’s just a big headache.

The next problem is that people can share the password. You have no way of tracking which users logged in if they log in from different IP addresses. So, if the only thing protecting your membership site is a simple password, then there’s nothing to stop people from saying, “Oh hey guys, let’s all go to the site, type in password “bananas,” and now the 20 of us can all get into this site.” But with membership software, where everybody has their own unique username and password, then you can track and figure out if somebody logged in from 3 or 5 or 10 different IP addresses from the same account and then that usually means the person is passing around their membership information and you should cut them off.

Finally, access levels. With membership software, you can provide different users different levels of access. For example, I like to run classes as live webinars first and then turn them into monthly membership sites. So, I’ll create a live level and give people the webinar sign-up links. Give them the direct download to the webinar recordings. But when it comes time to run a monthly site, I don’t want them to have the live webinar links and I don’t want them to be able to download the videos and only watch them streaming on the blog. So, when it comes time to run the site as a monthly membership site, I will create a level called “monthly” and specify only the streaming videos to be allowed to be displayed on the blog. That way, I can give one group of people one kind of content, the other group a different kind, but it’s all the same membership site.

So, that is exactly why you should avoid free membership software, you should avoid the password-protected solution – because with the password-protected solution, you cannot cut them off, you have no control over sharing, and you have no ability to have different access levels.

Stop using that password-protected solution right now and instead, use the best membership software on the planet.

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There are so many different membership site solutions out there that it’s very very easy for you to get confused or distracted about which membership software you should use, especially because some of them are free. There are some membership solutions that have a live version, where they will give you some of the features disabled or even add on the software itself and in exchange it’s free, or even it comes with a 30-day free trial, so you install it and then have 30 days to decide if you want to keep using that software or not. I know it’s really tempting to try out free membership software, but there are a few things to think about. Who’s going to support it? Is it any good? And should you really base your business around free software?

If you use WordPress at all, I want you to think for a second about how many thousands of WordPress plugins are out there. And if you ever try to find the right WordPress plugin to do what you want to do, think about how many times you found some old plugin that’s broken or a plugin that simply did not work on your web host and when you tried to get support, there was none to be found because it was a free plugin. Think about how many millions of software titles are available for free on download.com but many of them are old and broken. And again, if you try to get support, it’s nowhere to be found because it was a free piece of software. So when you’re paying for a software, a lot of what you’re paying for is the support. So, that’s something to keep in mind. If you ever get stuck, if you ever want a feature added, or if you’re simply having trouble installing the membership software on your particular web host, it really helps to be able to email somebody or even call somebody on the phone and get that issue resolved. Free software is not supported. Paid software is supported.

Next, think about, is the software any good? Everybody knows in their mind that OpenOffice which is a free Office suite, will never really be as good as Microsoft Office simply because it’s just not valued as much, it’s not updated as frequently and it’s not used by as many serious businesses to warrant putting tons of time and effort into it. There’s no reason at all for free software to be any good. So, that’s something to think about. Free software is usually much worse than paid software. So, even if you happen to be able to find some kind of support for free software, it probably won’t have all the features you want as it comes in paid software.

The final thing to think about is are you running a business or aren’t you? If you are trying to make any amount of money from a membership site, then you are running a business, and therefore, you should invest in that business by purchasing a membership site software. I always find it funny that people try to pinch every penny and try to get $10 off here, 10 cents off there, and yet when it comes tax time, they wish they had more write-offs. This is your write-off, get membership software.

Those are the reasons why you should avoid free membership software like plague. The only advantage a free membership site software has is that it’s free, but everything else sucks. Free membership software is usually unsupported, it usually has less quality than paid membership software, and it’s not something that you can invest in for your business. So, go ahead and use a paid membership site software right now.

I want to provide you complete tutorials and training on how to set up your very own membership site right here.

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If you don’t have a paid membership site yet, you might not yet know the big picture about how are you going to take payments, how people are going to get access to the content, and how are you going to be taking even more payments month after month, and I want to explain to you the components of taking payments on membership sites and the exact process somebody goes through when they purchase from you.

So, here’s what happens. Somebody goes to a webpage of yours, it’s called a sales letter. This is where you convince people why your membership site is so good and why they should give you a chance. They click on a button. Let’s just say that you’re taking PayPal payments. They click on a PayPal button, they get sent to PayPal, they go and either log in to their PayPal account or enter their credit card details manually. Then they click on the finish button and they get sent back to your site. At this point, they have paid this third party provider – in this case, PayPal – and now, they are on the registration page for your site. Now, they can fill out their username, first and last name, email address, and password. At this point, their email address and first and last name are already filled out for them. It’s up to them to figure out what username they want, which usually is just the first and last name, and what password to put in, which they’ll just put in twice. After they fill out their username and password, they’ll click the “next” button and get logged to the membership site, and now, they have instant acces. They also get an email, a confirmation email, where they can pick up and get their username and password at a later date, so they can now log in at any time.

So, the key to that is that they went through what’s called a payment processor. They were on your site, they were on the sales letter, they clicked over and left your site, went to PayPal, processed the card, then got redirected back to your site, at which point PayPal said, “It’s okay. They’ve paid,” and the membership software handles that. So, this second part of it is called the integration. After you set up your membership software, they’ll usually give you instructions, step-by-step instructions, on how to create what’s called a payment button in PayPal. You log in to your PayPal account, generate a button people can click on and just copy and paste this directly to your webpage. You follow about three simple steps, and if you add in certain codes and numbers, so that when somebody pays you money, the information gets passed back to the membership software that says, “Okay. They bought this particular product from the membership site. They joined this particular level in the membership site.” So, that integration allows membership software to process the payment and say, “Okay. They paid this through PayPal, now what do they have access to?”

The final component of the membership payment site integration is called the IPN or Instant Payment Notification. All this means is that if somebody cancels their monthly subscription or they refund their one-time payment, it will cut off user’s access to that thing they paid for. So basically when you set your payment button, using the instructions your membership site software gave, it will notify that membership software if somebody cancels PayPal, will do the notification on its own. So that way, even somebody cancels your site, even logged into their PayPal account, PayPal will hit your script, will contact your membership software directly, and it will say, “This guy right here cancelled his access.”

So, those are the three steps in taking payments for your membership site. First, involve a third party payment processor like PayPal. Second, involve membership software, such as Wishlist member, to process the payment. And third, and this should be built in after you’ve created the button, is have what’s called IPN or Instant Payment Notification enabled in your PayPal account, so that if somebody cancels in PayPal, it will cancel their membership level access in your membership software.

Set up your membership site and start getting a recurring income today right now.

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There are many scripts available, many pieces of software that provide simple product download management. Somebody pays a one-time fee and they are sent to a special download page where they can get their ebook, report, or video for the next 24 hours. So, if a software like that adequately manages your download links, why would you use anything else? What is the big idea about having it on a membership site? I’m going to explain that to you today.

My big reasons for that is the lost password functionality, the ability to have membership levels, and the ability to cut off access, and the best part is that many membership software already allows you to expire your download links. So, the big advantage for me is that I don’t have to give people their lost download URLs, I don’t even have to reactivate old expired download links. They could simply click on the lost password button, and even if they don’t know their username, they can fill out the email address they used to pay and WordPress will not just create a new password for them, it will email that password to the email address they used to purchase. And even when they log back in, there is the ability to change their own information. They can change their contact email, their name, their URL – any of that stuff is all managed without you having to do anything. It’s all managed in WordPress. So, that is the number one reason for me why I prefer membership sites over download areas because they can recover a lost password.

Next is the ability to have different membership levels. So, imagine you had five different one-time products, somebody could buy five different things from you. You could put each of those things on your membership site as a different page of your blog. Then set those pages onto different levels. And then set up your payment buttons so that if they bought your first product, that would get them onto one particular membership level and give them access to that product. Now, if you wanted to go and add bonuses later on, just add those bonuses onto that same membership level. So, when somebody buys the one product, they get the product plus the bonuses.

The cool thing about different membership levels is that much of the popular membership software, such as Wishlist member, allows you to set an expiration date on your membership level. So, if you are paranoid, if you want the same functionality as many download managers and cut off access to a download after two days or seven days, you can set that level to expire after several days, if someone purchase this, they get access, they can download, but after sever days, their access is expired and they are now canceled from that level, and they have to contact you to get access again. So, if you want to duplicate the same exact functionality as a download solution, you can do that in a membership site.

And finally, if you decide to refund somebody or if they ask you for a refund or for any reason, if you want to add them to a specific level as a bonus, you can make one click in Wishlist and it adds into that level. If you want to remove or cancel somebody from a level, you can do that in a few clicks as well; whereas with many download scripts, it’s a long and tedious process. With a membership site, it’s just a few clicks.

So, that’s why I prefer a membership site over a download area for the lost password functionality, the ability to have different membership levels and expire any of those levels you want after as many days as you want and add or remove access to different levels and different products for a particular user anytime you want.

Stop using download manager scripts or avoid those download manager scripts if you haven’t already. And instead, get this membership plugin available right now.

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I realized that you have a choice in what membership software to use. I am extremely happy with my selection of membership software, but you might have your heart set on some other solution. If that’s the case, I want you to be aware of some specific things to look for when choosing a membership script, and those things are drip content, protected downloads, membership levels, and autoresponder and payment integration.

The biggest thing you need to look for is protected downloads. After someone pays you, do they have a way of creating their own membership account, where they log in with their own unique username and password, that no one else in the membership site has? If the answer is no, then you do not have a membership site. So, definitely look for some download protection. And in fact, most modern membership software also has sharing protection. So, if somebody is passing around their username and password, the system will notice that they are all logging in from the same IP address and will shut off their account for sharing.

The next thing to look for are membership levels. So, can you create a silver and a gold level, where the gold level gets twice as much content as the silver level or vice versa? Can you make one level a free level and one level a paid level? This is definitely very important when having membership site software.

Next, does your software drip the content? Can you schedule a bunch of information ahead of time and when somebody joins your site, they get a little bit at a time until they had completed the entire course? That’s very important, but it’s even more important that if somebody quits your site and joins up later, they do not have access to all the information they missed out on. If somebody joins your site, they start at the beginning of the training and the longer they are in your site, the more they get, but if they quit and come back, they begin right back at the very beginning.

The final piece of the puzzle that you should look for in a membership software is integration with third party services. If you are going to have a paid membership site, you need a way to accept payments. It’s just that simple. The most popular source of payments on the internet in internet marketing is PayPal. So, make sure that your membership site at least supports PayPal payments. So, if somebody can click a button on your site, pay you instantly either with their PayPal account or with their credit card, you get the money and they get their instant access. This should not be a requirement for you to manually add users. This should be built in and integrated with the membership software, so that when somebody joins, it is completely on autopilot and 100% hands-off on your part.

And finally, make sure that the membership software supports third party autoresponders as well. An autoresponder is a mailing list software, a mailing list service. The most popular one is called AWeber, and the membership software you have should have the capability that when they join your membership site, it automatically subscribes them to your email autoresponder mailing list as well so that you can send notifications via email to your entire subscriber base.

So when looking for a membership software, check for protected downloads, membership levels, drip content, PayPal integration, and AWeber integration.

Do you want a membership software that satisfies all the requirements listed above? I thought so. In that case, get the best membership solution on the market for free that satisfies all the criteria you saw today.

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The simple fact is that no matter what your ideas for a membership site, you are nowhere unless you have a membership software. So, which membership script is right for you? There are literally dozens of membership solutions out there and they all behave in different ways and I want to tell you exactly the way I set up my membership sites. It involves three components: WordPress, Wishlist member, and a Drip plugin.

Let’s first cover WordPress. When people log in to your membership site, they need t go somewhere. Right? In the past, the membership login used to be a separate component than, for example your WordPress blog. The idea was that somebody could charge for access just to a forum or just to a WordPress blog. But recently, developers have figured that usually people want to end up on a WordPress blog, so you should definitely use WordPress to host your membership site content. This is great because with WordPress, you could have multiple authors, you can schedule posts, categorize posts, make posts searchable, embed video, allow others to comment on that post and more, and best of all, it’s free. A very small minority of membership sites run on Joomla, but I definitely would not recommend Joomla simply because it’s slightly more complicated than WordPress and not as mainstreamed. So, use WordPress as the blog inside your membership site.

Once you have that blog, you should install a WordPress plugin to keep the wrong people outside of your membership and allow the right people in. My favorite WordPress plugin that runs a membership site is not my plugin, but it is called Wishlist member. Other solutions such as Rapid Action Profits or Digital Access Pass require you to install multiple plugins or modules just to get the basic membership site running, but Wishlist member is one simple plugin that you install and now you have a membership site. It allows you to have different levels, it provides sharing protection, sequential content, autoresponder integration, and more.

Finally, install a Drip plugin to make sure that your membership site acts more like a training course, like an autoresponder. Without a Drip plugin, you control the access to your membership site, but if somebody leaves and comes back to your site six months later, they can see the entire archive of six months that you posted in the meantime. With a Drip plugin, however, it changes the way WordPress behaves and makes it so that when somebody joins on day one, they see day one worth of content. If they quit and come back in six months, they are still back at day one. So, the longer they are in your membership site, the more content they see.

What membership software should you use? You should use WordPress for your blog, Wishlist member for the software, and the Drip plugin for the training functionality.

I wan to give you all three of these membership site components right now tonight.   Claim your access to everything you need to create a membership site right now.

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As you may or may not know, WordPress, the blogging software, gives people the ability to install plugins or add-ons to extend the functionality of their WordPress blog and make it do some cool stuff. This might include things like removing the dates on posts, adding pop-up and more. But to use your blog as a membership site, as the most simple and basic membership site possible, I want to give you my top 3 plugins. Those are Wishlist member to get people a simple way to register and log into your blog after they’ve paid you for information, Psychic Search which would show you what people search on your blog including Google searches, it will take Google searches plus actual searches on your blog’s search box, and Subscribe to Comments plugin, which notifies your commenters that other people have replied to their comment.

Wishlist member is what I consider to be the best membership script out there. You install one simple plugin and now, you can control access to your site. Take a couple of extra steps and you can charge via PayPal, ClickBank, 1ShoppingCart, QuickPayPro, or even Infusionsoft to get access to your site. That can be a single payment or a recurring set of payments. You install this plugin and now people pay you money, fill out a form to register themselves, and now they are registered and able to log in to their membership area anytime they want.

Now, if they’ve logged in, people tend to search for things in the search box to find what they want, and if they don’t, then put a message in any of your blog posts to type in the search box. The great thing about the search box is most people don’t consider the fact that you might be saving the searches. People tend to ask you one thing and actually look for another.

So, let’s say you had a membership site about “how to soup up your car,” and people might be asking things like, “Well, how do I make my car go faster?” But searching for things like, “How do I get a better fuel pump?” So, if you saw a lot of searches for the term “fuel pump” and you didn’t have enough content about fuel pumps, then you would know that you would need to add more membership content and that can be video, audio, or written materials about fuel pumps. So this way, you can get down to this specific exact thing people are searching for. Likewise, if someone is searching for the phrase “fuel pump” in Google and it takes them to your blog, that script, that plugin will also record that search, and you have one more source of knowing exactly what people are looking for.

The third and final plugin I would recommend to you today is the Subscribe to Comments plugin. You might have seen this on many other blogs. You go and leave a comment and below the comment form, there is a small check box that says something like “notify me of follow-up comments via email?” So, if you left a comment on a particular post, and others left more comments on that post, the WordPress blog would shoot you an email after every single person left a comment. That way, you would have a reason to go back and respond to other comments. It’s a great way of building a community and getting more participation and it works just as well, if not better, inside paid membership sites as it does on free blogs.

Those are the three plugins I would apply right now in your membership site – Wishlist member, Psychic Search, and Subscribe to Comments.

You don’t have a membership site yet? Let’s fix that. Lock in your spot right now.

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Most people who have never made a membership site before, who want one, ask me, “Should I have a form in my membership site?” They have these huge grandiose plans for their membership site and they want things like a community. They want things like a forum, and in my opinion, that’s the wrong thing to be thinking about. A forum is extremely difficult to control for reasons I will explain in a minute.

The first thing you need to consider, however, when having a membership site is how easy is it going to be to deliver the product, how easy is it going to be for people to get access to your information. I don’t know about you, but whenever I try to find any kind of downloadable materials inside a forum, the navigation was clumsy, it was hard to find things, and it was hard to get back to where I was before. So, do yourself a favor, make the delivery easy, have a blog, and provide your downloads on the blog area. I do not like forums inside membership sites, but if you want to add one later on, go for it.

But here’s something else to think about. How well are you going to be able to control the discussion? Every forum I’ve been to falls into one of two categories. Either it’s empty and the last post was made months or years ago and therefore, it looks bad because it looks like it’s a place where nobody posts and no one reads, so therefore, why should I post. The other type of forum is the one that is too successful for its own good. What happens is you have a selected group of people who just completely take over the discussion, who post everywhere, who argue, and nothing you do can tone them down.

So, are you going to be able to control the discussion? Well, the answer on a blog is usually yes but on the forum, it’s usually no, especially because many forum owners create 50 different subsections when really people only hang around to two. So, a lot of posts go unnoticed by the administrator, but these people who take over the forum post everywhere they want to.

So, my solution for this is why not have a blog just a regular blog, and if there are really good comments or if a post kind of goes off-topic, promote that comment into a post. Copy and paste it and make it a new post, change the author of that post to the person leaving the comment, and then use the Move Comment plugin to move all the other comments underneath that post. So that way, the discussion is still kind of like a forum where anybody can create a new discussion topic but you are in control, it has a very clear linear fashion so we can still drip it out, but you organize the way the information is presented. That way, the advanced topics can come later in the membership site and the easy topics can come right away. And then you can also specific these people who regularly contribute good content and change them from subscribers to contributors. That way, they are people who if they want to make a new blog post in your membership site, they can but you have to approve it.

So, instead of creating a forum, what I would do is remove the forum for now and stick with a regular membership site WordPress blog. This keeps the delivery easy, allows you to control the discussion, and gives you a chance to promote good blog comments into full-blown blog posts.

Instead of having a huge crazy idea for a membership site, start with something simple. Start with a one-time membership site, which you can set up in just a few short minutes.

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The best type and the most profitable membership site you could ever create is what’s called an accountability blog. This is a blog where you are accountable for the things you do every single day. You set it up exactly the same as any other membership site, but this is a membership site that only you are going to log into. In this site, you’re going to post your four daily tasks to make sure that you get at least four things completed everyday, it’s going to give you mutual motivation if you let other business partners inside that blog, and it’s going to measure your progress. You can look back on any day of the week or any month or even last year and figure out exactly how much stuff you got accomplished each and everyday.

So, you set up this membership site and you are the only subscriber to this membership site. Nobody else can buy in, there’s no way to register, you are right now the only subscribe to the site. So, what do you do? Well what you do is you make one single post in the site and you list out four things you’re going to complete today. That’s it. Four things. Not six, not eight, not two – four simple things you’re going to complete today in your business. I’m not saying these are going to be the only four things you’ll do today. These are just four of the most important things you will do today.

An example for one of my days might look like “send an email to my list, write five new articles, record one new how-to video, and answer all customer support that comes in today.” It does not include non-business-related tasks. So, you wouldn’t put things like eat dinner, send thank you cards, wrap presents – none of that, only things that are in your business. Don’t do five, do exactly four. So that way, you’re guaranteed to at least finish four things. I found if I have less than four things, I’ll spend all day on just one or two tasks, which is not good. And if put six, seven, or eight things per day on the blog, then I won’t even get four things then because it will be too overwhelming.

Once you start posting your four daily tasks for a while, if you have another business partner, give them access to this blog. I definitely would not post your to-do list out in the open where other people can see it who you don’t trust because you don’t want to divulge your future business plans to anybody. But if you have a business partner, give them access and have them post four daily tasks as well. The interesting thing about this is even if they don’t necessarily read your tasks everyday, just the fact that they might read it will keep you motivated enough to complete those four daily tasks.

Finally, you can measure progress. So, if you feel like last week you didn’t get as much done as you thought, go back and look at last week. You will be surprised. If you feel like on a certain day of the week or a certain week of the month, you don’t get that much stuff accomplished, go back and look at your accountability blog so you can know for sure, you can know if you really don’t get as much done or if you get more done at night or more done on Tuesdays, you can know for sure, you can have the facts and see what exactly you completed in this accountability blog.

So, an accountability blog is a simple membership site that nobody else can buy into, that nobody else can register in except you. You’re the one member and you go and you post your four daily tasks and let a trusted business partner see your to-do list items as well.

Did you know that the to-do list method is only the beginning of what you can do to make more money with your business using an accountability blog?  Discover the six business models to apply using membership sites.

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