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.