I’ve even found a solution that costs $30,000!!  I closed that window pretty quickly, I can tell you!

What I’ve been looking for is something that I can rely on …. I will be making money from my membership site (even if it’s a free site), so I need to ensure that once I’ve put 1-2 years of effort into building it up to be successful that it suddenly fails to perform and the freebie developer that wrote it turned out to be 14 and scribbling out code from the box room at his parents’ house. Money is a serious issue - and I want to ensure that I am building a great website that has a future!

So here’s another robust, well-supported membership plugin that’s on my Best Membership Plugin for Wordpress list:

Extreme Member

What I like about this one is that there’s a 30 day trial you can try for just $2.95. 30 days is plenty to get started and have your first members already signed up and paying you! So that makes it a no-brainer because all you have to do is set your pricing at a level where the members you get in your first 30 days are sufficient to pay the ongoing monthly fees - which shouldn’t be hard!

Also, in an unsure market, it’s great that Extreme Member has the following great features:

Again, this makes it a great product to set up your membership site with because it’s taken away any worries you might have … so why not give it a go!

Extreme Member is well supported and you get instant access to over 100 videos showing you how to do anything and everything you could possibly want to … beyond that there is a full support network.  You aren’t left on your own at all - and there’s nothing difficult in using the Extreme Member system - which is probably what makes it the best membership plugin for Wordpress!

Extreme Member has a variety of packages, so you can start off at just $19/month and as your business and income grow, you can naturally progress up the scale if you wish. Remember: as a membership site will be making you money, you need to have something that enables you to grow your business.

Great features  include:

• Unlimited membership levels
• Protect pages and posts
• Protect specific content within pages or posts
• Completely hide protected pages/posts
• Custom Teaser Copy - allows people to read so much, then you simply type MORE in  your copy in the square brackets and everything after that point can only be read by paid members.  This can be used in an open Question/Answer area perhaps, questions can be indexed by Google, but people need to be members to read the answers.  I’ve seen this business model used as the SOLE way of generating memberships!
• Create Free, Standard Recurring and One Time Memberships - whatever sort of memberships you want, Extreme Member will be able to cope with it!
• Create Invitation Codes
• Create Coupon Codes - use these for promotions, give out a discount voucher to people
• Upgrade/downgrade member options
• Autoresponders automate the delivery of member/login details - your members don’t have to wait for you to login and individually email these out, they join up and instantly get sent their login details, even if it’s 3am where you are and you’re on holiday!
• Add Members Manually (great for offline payments) - this means this plugin would be great for a local club where you actually collect subs and fees in cash on site!  Or maybe you will want to use it just once when  you bump into somebody at a seminar and they hand you the cash!
• Password Sharing Prevention Tool -  essential as one password can literally be sent to thousands of people instantly on the Internet!
• Login Limiter
• Unlimited Email Broadcasts
• Unlimited Folow up Series
• Track the Open Rates (if you send out an email to all members, how many are opened/read)
• List management - create unlimited lists from your overall membership list
• Affiliate module available
• Use any Wordpress theme
• Freedom to use any other Wordpress plugins you want
• Payment Gateway Integration with many popular merchant accounts
• Email integration with top autoresponders
• Email support
• Telephone support

That is pretty much every feature and tool  you could possibly need to get your membership site up and running and keep your members happy and your content secure.

Check out Extreme Member now and see the possibilities for yourself!

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!

In the last 2-3 years there’s been a revolution on the Internet - a revolution that’s meant there’s now an abundance of easy to use, free and affordable tools you can use to achieve your goal instantly. Wordpress plugins… you know what you want your site to do and now there’s a plugin you can find that does it for you - without any complex installation whatsoever.

So, I’ve been looking at creating a directory again - only this time using a Wordpress directory plugin. I like to use Wordpress for most of what I do because it’s so easy, I simply install it (couple of clicks) and then use plugins to perform the functionality that I want. What would have taken me many months and about $1000 to achieve 3-4 years ago, I can now do in 2 hours with under $50. The bottom line is: I am making a virtually guaranteed profit almost immediately …. it’d be a real idiot that couldn’t get their money back on that low return on investment!

I spent a good few days looking into Wordpress directory plugins - and overall, I think I was very disappointed at how few options are available - and of those available, they weren’t receiving good feedback.

Overall, it appears that WP-Directory Pro is the one to go for, this one isn’t free, but if you’re looking to make money from a website, sometimes you just have to accept that you have to invest money - and it’s only $39, so it’s worth a shot in my opinion!

Why Have A Links Directory on Your Website?

A link directory can improve your Page Rank (PR). Page Rank is one of the things Google uses to work out if your site should be top of their search results or not - and it’s related to the number of inbound links to your site. How Google calculates PR is a Google secret, but for the purposes of this article, you want to increase the number of people linking to your site. A link directory helps you to do this by inviting people to list themselves in your directory in exchange for a link back to your site.

Alternatively, you can charge people to add their links to your site, thus generating actual hard cash.

Here’s what I found:

Wordpress Directory Plugins

1) Wordpress Link Directory Plugin

Wordpress Link Directory is a free plugin that gives a nice, clean layout. This Wordpress Directory plugin uses AJAX (if that means nothing, to you, then that is simply a good thing, so keep reading). The installation isn’t as easy as it could be and you might need to make some modifications to some of the files to get it to display how you want in the theme you’re using. If you’re not keen on fiddling with code for layout, then you may not want to use it for this reason. If you’re happy to fiddle about a bit, then the author of this Wordpress directory plugin does provide some theme support.

• WP Link Directory can check the Pagerank of a site wanting to link to you and accept or refuse the link based on criteria you specify.
• This Wordpress Link Directory Plugin supports SEO-friendly permalinks, subcategories, and reciprocal-link checking.
• If you are providing free links to people who are linking to you, then with just one click in the admin panel it will go out and check that everybody IS linking to you and tells you if any aren’t.
• There’s even a Premium link function so you can charge for directory inclusion, this will automatically send payments to your Paypal account.
• You can choose to display more detailed information on each link if you wish.
• It’s available in several languages.
• There’s an option to notify the admin when a new link is submitted.
• It integrates seamlessly into WordPress, adopting whichever theme you’re using because you simply create a new page for your directory and add one tiny codeword onto that page to activate it.

2) WP-Directory

WP-Directory has been around since 2007, but doesn’t seem to have moved on since then. In fact, it’s still in Beta … so not a good sign.

WP-Directory would probably be the best free Wordpress directory plugin available - although it doesn’t actually appear to be available, it’s like the software the developer just got bored owith. It’s set up is more like DMOZ, a long-established web directory, so if you like that style, this might be the one you’re looking for.

WP-Directory supports pretty permalinks, screenshots, subcategories, and a cool little sidebar widget. The installation looks a lot simpler too.

3) WP Directory Pro

With WP Directory Pro you can run a full WordPress blog and have WP Directory Pro run a full directory with unlimited categories and links. WP Directory Pro is a standalone product that any WordPress user can use.

• WP Directory Pro runs inside of WordPress, so any WordPress template will work. However if you wish you can still edit the directory pages to further customize the look but this is not necessary.
• WP Directory Pro uses SEO URL’s to help you with search engine indexing.
• If you have an existing list in a spreadsheet, then you can import them into WP-Directory Pro.

The cost of WPDirectory Pro is $39, which is for one website and includes any updates and technical support for one year, after that it’s $10/year. There are two further licenses which can be bought: for 10 domains, or for 25 domains.

The user forum is well populated and questions are asked promptly.

4) Business Directory for Wordpress

Business Directory for Wordpress is more like a Yellow Pages listing for businesses. People submitting to your directory can even add in their email and telephone numbers.

I didn’t look into this one too much as it wasn’t what I was looking for though. But it’s worth a mention.

Business Directory for Wordpress is an easy way to host a free yellow-pages-like directory page for your readers, affiliates, advertisers, community or club members. Invite them to submit a simple advertisement listing for themselves on your blog.

It does not enable you to take any payment for the listings, so is ideal for industry specific directories, or maybe local-based ones. Perhaps if you’re doing fund-raising you could list all the organisations that have donated. It’s even been used by a MLM company to list all the members in their downline.

5) Business Directory

As I was unsuccessfully finding many Wordpress directory plugins, my search extended and I found this nifty plugin that was worth a mention:
Business Directory.

The Business Directory plugin for Wordpress is an easy way to host a free directory page for your readers, affiliates, advertisers, community or club members. Invite them to submit a simple advertisement listing for themselves on your blog.

Listings include company name, a short description, and contact information including a live URL. The plugin includes an admin tab that allows you to approve of listings before they appear live on the site. You can also edit and delete listings.

They will soon have a Premium directory version available too, so worth watching out for that. The premium version will allow you to promote a listing upgrade to your directory participants; you set the cost and collect via PayPal, they get to upload a logo and appear in the top ‘premium’ section of your Directory.

I have one website that’s purely based around one local area and I think this might be useful for that, which is why I’ve mentioned it here. This might be one to watch.

6) ZeList

ZeList - this one’s actually entirely in French, so I didn’t try it out, but it looks straight forward enough - and the admin panel is in English. Included for completeness of the list.

7) WP-Business

TTIS Business Directory (TTISBDIR)

Again, I’ve included this for completeness, although the author’s webpage is in Greek (I think it’s Greek). But, as it’s a Wordpress directory plugin and the support forum is in English, I’ve included it. With this plugin you simply create a new Wordpress page and insert a small line of code for the directory to show up.

WP Directory List

WP Directory List is a Wordpress directory plugin that provides a basic directory list - it is still being developed further so you’ll be able to charge people to have a link in your directory.

This one is included for completeness.

Creating a Profitable Directory Website: Web Directory Profits

Once you’ve created your directory, the next stage is to make your fortune from it.  So, if that bit’s a bit hazy for you, then why not check out Web Directory Profits. 

Web Directory Profits shows you how to make your directory profitable and even includes videos to watch so you can quickly learn his secret techniques .

Web Directory Profits shows exactly how he built a site for under $300 and in 14 months sold it for $8,000, a ROI of 2,809%.

He goes on to teach you how to build directories with thousands of pages in less then a day, how to build up their Pagerank and start profiting from them.

He also shows you how to sell your sites or in his case why you might want to keep them because that site he sold for $8K now has an estimated worth of almost $200K.

This is pretty ground breaking stuff because I’ve never heard anyone talk about using web directories as a way to create endless streams of revenue.

The Internet is changing daily and one of the most noticeable changes I’ve seen in the last 2-3 years has been the proliferation of great software and ebooks that are now available for free that just a few years back either weren’t available at all, or would have cost you a LOT of money.

Just because something’s free doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.  I’d say 70% of everything I use is free - the other 30% are tools that I’ve decided a do really need.  But free will always be a great way to find out something that propels your knowledge or skills forward!

What you get are three super pieces of software that’ll really enable you to move your website and online business to the next level:

Free HoverAd Generator - generate HoverAds with just a few clicks
Free eBook Pro Software - create professional ebooks
Free Salesletter Generator - create professional sales letters in just a few minutes