How to Create a Membership Website With Wordpress
If you want to build yourself regular income and a great online community, then creating a membership website is the time-proven route to success.
This morning I’ve been looking at ways to create a membership website with Wordpress and right now it seems the solution that suits my needs best would be Wishlist Member.
It’s easy to use, affordable, does stuff I know I want to do now - and things I’d really need within the next year, so it makes sense to go with this strong product now rather than trying to cobble together some freebies and getting sucked down as I wasted days/weeks trying to force things to work how I want them too. Sometimes it’s just worth spending a little bit and getting a proper piece of software from the start … especially as Wishlist Member is only $97 - I can make that back just by having my site ready this week and not end up ploughing a month or two into setting it up, only to abandon it (done that before - and I bet you have too!).
Create a Membership Website with Wordpress and Wishlist Member
It’s a Wordpress Plugin: Wishlist Member is an extremely powerful instant Wordpress plugin that creates a membership site and appears to do everything I need and more. There’s no installation … as Wishlist Member is a Wordpress plugin, you simply upload it and activate it. Easy peasy!
Multiple Membership Levels: With Wishlist Member you have a choice of multiple membership levels, including free/trial memberships - a GREAT way to get people hooked and coming back for more.
Offer a Free Trial: One way to get people to join your membership site is to offer them a sample, as part of a free trial - and Wishlist Member does this seamlessly though their Sequential Content Delivery System. You can give them a free month’s trial, for example, to a training programme, yet time release the content so they can’t get to further lessons until after their free trial runs out … nudging them to join!
Extend Member Longevity: Using this method, you can extend the time people are members. If you give them everything on Day 1 then they might cancel once they’ve had access to everything - and you don’t want that! I wouldn’t have even thought about wanting this functionality until maybe a year’s time, by which time I’d have lost the chance to set it up.
Easily Control Access: You control access to posts, pages, categories and even comments for each of your membership types - you decide what people can and cannot see. Maybe you want your free and trial members to see just 90% of your categories, with the other 10% being for members only - it’s all so easy with Wishlist Member.
Provide Secure RSS Feeds: Increasingly people are using RSS feeds to read content. Wishlist Member enables you to deliver your private/members only information through secure RSS feeds - something I’d have not thought of now … yet this will be a powerful tool over the next couple of years as more and more people only use RSS feeds to keep updated with information and sites they’re interested in. If you don’t even know what this means yet, it doesn’t matter because once you’ve got a membership site and members you’ll be looking at things like this and embracing them before you know it! With secure RSS feeds, if a member cancels and stops paying, then their access to the RSS feed automatically stops too!
Superb Support: Support for Wishlist Member is second to none. There’s a full-blown Helpdesk system, as well as video tutorials. This means that Wishlist Member is ideal for somebody who wants to create a membership site but feels they might get out of their depth or stuck - there’s a LOT of help out there for complete newbies or those who are just pushing the boundaries of their Wordpress blog by changing it into a membership site.
Use Any Wordpress Template: Wishlist Member works with any Wordpress template. This is really important because it means you aren’t restricted at all and can get your designs from anywhere you want.
Buy It Now: Of course there’s a cost to buy Wishlist Member, but it’s just $97 for a single site use ($297 for multi-sites) - but what you’re buying is a system that will MAKE you money. The cost could easily be re-couped within just a couple of months of setting up your site. For the cost of a cheap developer for one morning, you’re getting a fully functional, well-written and tested system, with support!
Build It This Week: Depending on your existing experience, it can take you just a couple of days to have a brand new membership website on a Wordpress blog, all set up, with memberships defined and prices set, content in place. Then you’re ready to start telling the world about it and start seeing people join up! By this time next week you could be logging on to view your member list!
