Creating a Membership Site – Part 2
In Creating a Membership Site – Part 1, I shared with you my technical goals for the YOAL site along with my major challenges. Today you’ll find out how I met my goals while overcoming the challenges.
With membership sites being so popular now, I thought it would be relatively easy to do what I wanted to. It wasn’t.
I tried many different plugins, apps and ASP services in an attempt to create a seamless experience for both website visitors as well as Coaching Club Members. With most combinations I came up with, members would end up having multiple log-ons and receive way too many emails. I wanted to keep things simple.
It really wasn’t that simple to put together the back-end – even once I figured out how to achieve the goals. I’ll tell you about the 5 major components I used to get everything to work and then some integration issues.
The 5 Major Components for Creating a Membership Site
1. WordPress
I mentioned yesterday that I decided earlier on that I wanted to use WordPress as the CMS (content management system). It is simple to use. New plugins are constantly developed to take advantage of Internet developments and trends. You can use Disqus for commenting so that people can keep their personal information safe.
I decided to use the Allure Theme by StudioPress. StudioPress has an excellent collection of themes that don’t require advanced technical skills to use.
Cost: Free for WordPress. StudioPress has different pricing plans depending on whether you want to buy just 1 theme or a set up themes. Very affordable either way and much less expensive than getting a designer to do it if you are on a budget.
2. Wishlist Member
Wishlist Member is a very stable plugin for WordPress that can handle membership site management. It handles the membership management and content side. It does not handle billing or affiliate program management.
Here are some features of Wishlist Member that were relevant for this site:
- It can create sequential membership levels – this allows me to advance members through content the longer they are on the YOAL coaching program. Note: The process is manual and a bit more complicated than what I feel it needs to be. You actually need to set up new membership levels for each additional access level.
- Posts can be entirely protected for members-only based on their level of membership.
- Within posts you can decide what parts of content people should see depending on their membership level.
- You can customize the page that members at different levels go to after logging on and also customize error pages.
- You can assign the WordPress role for each membership level to allow for different permissions within WordPress itself. Note: One thing I consider to be a bit of a bug is that if you advance people through levels by adding to their existing levels, it will keep the original role assigned rather than replacing with the newest role.
Support: I’ve found support has been mixed. Most questions I asked via their support ticketing system were answered rather quickly. One took almost a week and although it was during the holidays, I am not sure why it took so long. A question via Twitter went ignored. On a positive side, their written materials plus training videos are well done. I had reviewed the videos before purchasing a license so I had no idea that using the manuals would have been better in my case. It is nice that they have both options. Two things they could be doing is offering a support forum for licensed users and maintaining an FAQ. I’m sure that none of the questions I asked were unique.
Cost: A single-site license for WishList Member is $97. They also offer an unlimited site license for $297. I opted for the latter since I will be using it on multiple sites.
3. SimplePress Forum
The folks at Wishlist Member recommended using SimplePress Forum. I’ve worked with most of the major forum software and I have to say I am thoroughly impressed with SimplePress Forum.
I’ll explain a bit about SPF:
- There are built-in templates that you can modify. Fortunately, one of the templates as is was a perfect match to the template being used for the YOAL site.
- There are features like private messaging, users can upload files and much more. All of these are very customizable.
- You can create groups and then within groups forums and then levels down of sub-forums. At each level, you can restrict access or limit access to certain tasks.
- SPF defined user groups can be mapped back to WordPress roles and then restrict access accordingly. Basically this means that as someone advances through the YOAL program, I can give them access to new areas of the forum.
- It’s not as easy to deal with this role management issue as it seems. First, you need to install a WordPress plugin to manage roles. This role manager is what I opted for and it works smoothly. With a role manager plugin, you can create your own roles. Essentially creating permission sets for WordPress itself other than the standard Administrator, Subscriber, Guest, etc roles. What I did was create roles for pending members and then for each month someone is on the coaching program. Once this was done, within WishList Member, I assigned the new roles to the various member levels. Then I was able to go back to SimplePress Forum and in the ‘options’ area match WordPress roles to SPF user groups I had already configured. Caveat: as mentioned above, if you are using sequential upgrades within WishList Member that are additive, the earliest role assigned to a member is what will stay. Consequently, you’d need to change the roles manually as members advance through WordPress Users area. You’d also want to change the member’s user group within SPF to ensure they don’t have any issues.
Support: SPF maintains it’s own support forum. Most of the things I ran into or needed to figure out, I was able to get answers from searching the forum. I did run into one minor issue and posted asking for assistance. This was on New Year’s Eve and I received a response within an hour! I’m always amazed how support for free products can often be so much better than for paid ones.
Cost: Free, but donations are accepted.
4. Delavo ™
I tried several different systems to handle billing, affiliate program management, etc. Nothing allowed me to do what I wanted. 1ShoppingCart looked like a decent solution but there were too many issues with it for me to use it. The primary one is that their set-up cannot use Paypal for recurring billing.
I had already had a full Delavo license from when I was a JVManager and then Fantasos user. (The earlier versions of Delavo.) It could help me handle everything I wanted to do. I hadn’t considered this at first as an option because I didn’t know that they had a WordPress plugin available that would smoothly integrate with WishList.
Here is what I used Delavo for:
- Creating 2 products: one for up-front payment with a 1 year subscription and a second for monthly payments for a year.
- Creating 2 affiliate programs: one paying a higher amount to existing members and the other paying a lower amount to all others. The affiliate program allows people to link to any blog post, simply appending their affiliate ID for tracking, and get compensated for referrals.
- Creating coupon codes to allow early bird discounts.
- Creating a points-based loyalty program.
I will also be using it for:
- Managing a store where some products/services are offered by others and they will have access to their sales data.
- Managing registration and follow-up messages for attendees of teleseminars, webinars and live events.
- Follow-up messages for coaching club members and affiliates.
I have not yet customized the ordering pages and other templates for YOAL itself. But this can be done.
Delavo is really full of capabilities – especially when you look at the plugins available.
Support: They do offer 24/7 support. It has been mixed. Sometimes answers are immediate. I had one ticket marked urgent that took 2 days to get a response on. I am paying an annual support/upgrade fee. There is a forum for users which has low activity. There are a lot of videos and manuals available for users. It’s not a difficult system to learn how to use but because there are a lot of components, you can expect to spend a lot of time setting everything up your first time.
Cost: It used to be a paid software you could install under one domain and run across multiple sites. Then it was free for a short while for the guts of the system. You’d have needed to pay around $1000 to get the plugins necessary to bring it to the same level of the paid software. Now, I think you can only get it when you become a member of John Delavera’s Turbo Club. You still need to pay for plugins. Probably the best bet for most people is to look for a reliable hosting company that offers Delavo access on a monthly basis.
5. Hosting
I already have dedicated servers with Rackspace, so I simply set up YOAL on one of them. Rackspace uses Plesk as a control panel which means that WordPress has to be manually installed. (Not really a big deal but the way Rackspace presets some things, there are some minor tweaks that need to be done.) I recommend you consider a top-tier hosting company for a membership site. If I didn’t already have servers online, I’d probably opt for Rackspace’s cloud service.
I set up email to run through Google Apps for Domains.
The program and site itself will involve a lot of media files, so rather than host media files on my own server I am using Amazon’s S3 service. There are several free WordPress plugins that allow you to create “buckets” with AS3 and upload files automatically.
For daily updates of the website, I am using Google’s Feedburner for RSS and email. Although deliverability is high for email, I am finding that too high of a percentage of subscribers are not confirming their email addresses. Consequently, I’ll eventually move it to my own email list management service. The only reason I didn’t do this to start with was because I wanted to automate sending out the posts rather than to have to manually do it.
From a time side, creating a system like this this definitely involved a lot of research and work. The good news is that now it is done so the focus can be put on content and supporting members.
Want Your Own Membership Site?
If you’re interested in a set-up like this, I’m working on rolling out a service within the next month or so. Basically, my team would help you sort out what decisions you need to make for setting up a membership site and then handle setting up the back-end for you. All of this would be done on our servers. We haven’t yet decided on a pricing schedule – it will be a flat set-up fee plus an ongoing fee for hosting and support. If you’re willing to deal with possible bumps as we systematize the process in exchange for a reduction in fees, get in touch with my team.
Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links that pay compensation to my company if you purchase products through the links.
Photograph by jhritz
