Use a Blog as a Membership Site?
Wordpress has become one of the most powerful marketing tools on the internet today. When you create a membership site for marketing purposes, you are opening the door to tons of revenue in the end; if you are using Wordpress. This is due to the fact that Membership sites are very lucrative and easy to use if you structure them properly.
Many people have a mistaken belief that Wordpress is just for blogs and a website. However, this belief is totally false and if they use Wordpress correctly and to its maximum flexibility, they will discover it is a great marketing tool. One of the newest marketing tools that Wordpress has begun is membership sites. There are a number of internet businesses that are using membership site plugins but not every one of them are made the same. There are a few basic criteria which your plugins should have to create a great membership site to support your marketing efforts.
1. Membership levels and types: When you have the ability to create multiple levels of membership you will have the flexibility to allow special promotions or even higher membership levels in which you will give members access to more in-depth information if they pay more for it. Also it is important to have levels that are free, subscription based, and also a onetime payment.
2. RSS Feed Encryption: You will want to make sure that any information that you want members only to have access to do not get broadcast through your RSS feed. If your RSS feed is not encrypted then anyone who would visit or join your site would see the information you are limiting to visitors without even paying for it. Failing to encrypt your RSS feeds can result in losing thousands of dollars in revenue.
3. Content Teasers: This will allow you to have a small portion of certain content for visitors to your site. In order for them to read on they will have to click on a link which will tell them they will have to subscribe to read the rest of the article.
4. Sequential Delivery: If you have a membership that you are training people or are just wanting to make sure that visitors gain access to certain content that you are offering on a monthly basis you will need to be sure that you have sequential delivery. If you do not have this then someone can gain access to all of your content from the very first day.
5. Payment Gateways: Some membership plugins only work with PayPal which gives you major limitations. You will want the ability to work with any merchant processor you wish.
6. Training and Support: You need to have a strong customer satisfaction which is important for any business. If you do not have access to the owner of the plugin then do not use it because it would not work with your marketing business.
These are all necessary parts of your membership site for your marketing site. If your plugin does not have any of these then you will need to search for another plugin that does.
While I was writing this article I realized that I had missed something out! This site runs on Wordpress, although hopefully that is not too obvious, it was my goal to remove WordPress branding as far as possible from the site. I looked at many, if not most of the membership tools for WordPress and found that almost all, including very costly plugin sets were deficient. For example, I wanted to be able to protect individual links whilst having other links on the same page accessible to everyone. I found only one plugin set that could do this basic task. That’s Micro Membership from Ralph Pruitt cost is among the lowest but in its current form is a very competent piece of software. Ralph has been very accessible in terms of helping me to get this site running pretty much as I want it and a new version has just been released which answers pretty much all the queries and quibbles as well as enabling a new way of offering subscriptions.
I am offering my services to online businesses to build out membership sites based upon the Micro Membership script, with the exception of Ralph himself there are probably very few people with more experience of setting up and running a membership site with Micro Membership. Drop me a line below and we can get in touch to discuss the possibilities.
