Membership Sites
WordPress 3.0, WordPress 3.1, and WordPress 4.0 Explained
But Here's the Big Question:
Should You Upgrade?
- YES, if you are running a free (open) blog such as RobertPlank.com, to get used to the new features and take advantage of themes that use the new functionality.
- NO, if you are running a mission-critical WordPress membership site, especially if it's hosted with Wishlist Member.
Three First impressions About WordPress 3.0
- Better looking Dashboard with a "notification" area (like Facebook)
- Batch updating of plugins (now if only the updater wouldn't stall on my server)
- New theme-dependent things like menus, featured image, and standardized way of changing your header graphic
Three Things You Might Not Have Noticed
- WordPress MU (MultiUser): so you can create a blog network if you change your config file
- author specific templates: if you know how to rename your theme files, you can give different users a different admin interface
- custom post types: you could create an e-commerce store or article directory in WordPress easily without "fudging it" using pages.
3 Things to Look Forward to in WordPress 3.1
(coming August 2010)
- newer HTML editor: local autosave, paste with formatting, and faster performance such as showing text while resizing
- prevent comment impersonation: if someone tries to leave a comment on your blog, and that email address belongs to a registered user, require them to login
- email authentication: users can login using their email address and no longer have to remember usernames, only passwords.
4 Things I Want to See Before WordPress 4.0
- better plugin updater: mine still times out, I at least want a progress indicator, and maybe even the ability to update a plugin WITHOUT going into maintenance mode or halting the entire thing
- official plugins: please build the All in One SEO Pack, Robots Meta, Google Sitemap, Subscribe to Comments, Twitter Tools, Get Recent Comments, List Category Posts, MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer, WPTouch, and Psychic Search plugins right into WP so I don't have to install them by hand on every single blog I setup
- automatic update: I really don't see this coming until WordPress 4.0, but I would like a Windows-like function to automatically check, and update, the blog, theme and plugins overnight
- big picture stats: when I login to the dashboard, I want to see the word count of my entire blog, the average word count of my posts, my top commenters, the average comment length, how many posts per month, how many comments per day, how many hits per day, and how many searches per day my blog is getting
What do you think about the new WordPress? Have you upgraded yet or are you waiting until a more stable and tested version?
12 Can’t Miss Rules of Highly Effective Membership Sites
I don't care what niche your membership site is in, what software is running the membership site or even how big the membership is, you should be following all of these 12 rules of membership sites.
Rule #1: Autoresponder Reminders
Whether your membership site is filled with audio clips, videos, articles, or even PDFs or software, you simply cannot expect your members to always remember to log into your site everyday or every week. Set up some kind of autoresponder reminder system so that if someone has been in your membership site for 7 days, then on the 7th day of your autoresponder, it reminds them and tells them to come back to the membership site.
Rule #2: Drip Content
Don't give everything in your membership site away at once. You should be giving your members something new every week if they are charged on a recurring basis, but even if they are charged one single time, it can't hurt to record a couple of extra bonus videos that are dripped out throughout the refund period.
This will reduce your refunds and complaints and also keep people from cancelling and rejoining your membership site at a later date.
Rule #3: Offer Extended or Bonus Trickle Training
One of the best ways to get your customer to love you is with surprised bonuses. That means if you are offering extra training, either in a recurring or one-time membership site, don't announce every single thing you're offering them. Make at least a couple of the extra items be a pleasant surprise.
Rule #4: Stick to One Niche
I can't tell you how many membership sites I have joined that either ran out of ideas, go off-topic or just don't have anything interesting to say in their membership. Have a clear point to your membership site. Is your membership site about weight loss, real estate, copywriting? Whatever it is, make it totally clear what your members are buying into.
Rule #5: Cut Off Access For Non-Payment
If you joined a gym membership and didn't pay, you would no longer be allowed to access that gym's facilities, right? If you stopped paying your cable bill, you would no longer be able to watch TV. The same is true with your membership site. People are paying for access to your training and your content and if they are no longer paying, they should no longer have access.
Rule #6: Deliver Your Training Step By Step
You really do need to not only keep your training simple but offer a clear outcome. The easiest way to do this while also appearing as the best authority on your subject is to set up your training in a step-by-step fashion.
For example, if you are teaching a course about blogging, the first set of training should be about how to set up that blog and then should gradually go into how to create the content. That way, if someone is already somewhat experienced with blogging, they will get caught up, but the new members will not be left in the cold.
Rule #7: Remove The Word "Or" From Your Training
When your members are learning something new from you, no matter what the subject is, it's tough enough to figure it out just by following your step-by-step progress. Don't make it any more complicated than it has to be by sticking the word "or" in there. If you're teaching blogging, teach WordPress blogging, not WordPress or movable-type or pMachine. Whatever the subject is, remove as many choices as possible and teach people to do things the way you do them.
Rule #8: Create Multiple Levels of Your Membership Site
The great thing about membership site software is that you don't have to have a lot of different memberships set up. If you want to offer multiple products in the same site, you offer different membership levels.
People buy the beginner's blogger WordPress level and then later on, buy the advanced blogger WordPress level and be in the same membership site but get access to a new set of content. If you come out with advanced bloggers version 2.0, you can add those posts in layer and use the same membership site to host it all.
In addition, if you want to run a special promotion or give a certain group of people a bonus that only they can get, all you have to do is make a new membership level. You don't have to make a brand new membership site.
Rule #9: Set It Up Quickly
Way too many people spend 6 months or longer working on their content to try to make their membership the best it can possibly be, but the problem with this is that you are not spending your time on things that might make you money and your membership itself might not even be something people want. You need to set up your membership site as quickly as possible and then course-correct once people join.
That leads me to...
Rule #10: Only Be Ahead Of Your Last Subscriber
Like I said, you might be creating a bunch of content for nothing. It's also more important to have a lot of paying members in your site than to have a lot of content. You might have 6 months of content that nobody wants, but if you have one month of content that a lot of people want, you can justify the extra time you're spending and create more of that same content.
Rule #11: Avoid Lifetime Buyouts
You created your membership site, especially if it's a recurring one to get yourself a lot of easy automatic monthly income, right? Then why would you throw it all away by offering a lifetime buyout option?
This is where members can, instead of paying a monthly fee, pay you one single fee and get the entire membership content at once, even if it's 6 months, a year or longer.
Not only does this kill your monthly income, it trains your subscribers not to pay you on a monthly basis, plus it is going to overwhelm them getting all the information at once.
And the final rule of setting up highly effective membership sites is..
Rule #12: Set An End Date
Unless you have tons of content, you won't necessarily be excited about your membership site in 6 months or a year from now. For that reason, why would you want to keep your membership site going forever and ever? Unless you are 100% sure you are still going to be excited about maintaining this membership site in 1, 2, or even 3 years, set at end-date for your membership sites.
I prefer 6 months (sometimes 8) because that gives me long enough time to say everything I want to say even at the advanced level but it doesn't give me too much to handle.
And I know that if I have even more to say, I can see how this first six-month membership site works out and then create a second membership site.
And those were the 12 can't miss rules of highly effective membership sites.
Which one did you like the best and how soon are you going to apply it to your existing or current membership site? Leave a comment below explaining yourself.
6 Ways to Drip Content Automatically
The biggest benefit you can give to yourself as a business owner is to remove yourself from the equation. That means automate as much of yourself as possible ahead of time so your daily tasks do not become chores.
You might be surprised at all the ways you can pre-schedule your content and your marketing ahead of time and I'm going to explain six ways to do that right now.
1. Blog Drip
When someone says the phrase "drip content" to me, the first thing that comes to mind and the first thing that should come to mind to you is dripping out content on your WordPress blog.
WordPress is the #1 blogging platform and my favorite feature about it has always been that you can schedule content ahead of time with no additional plugins needed. When you're writing a blog post, you can choose to submit it right now or you can change the date on it so it appears as if it was written a long time ago, but you can also change the date to a date in the future – for example, date it to be next week or next month.
That post will remain in a scheduled state until the next week or next month and it will automatically be published for you on a timer. You can set not just the date but the time of day so you know exactly when that next post is coming out.
I highly recommend that instead of sitting and writing out your blog's next week's worth of content, write 4 or 5 short posts and schedule them one month apart. That way, you have the next several months of blog posts already scheduled. And guess what else, if you're using WordPress to run your membership site, you're dripping out content inside your paid membership site as well.
2. Autoresponder Drip
The next easy way to drip content is with your email autoresponder.
You might not have notice it yet but your autoresponder gives you the ability to pre-schedule posts in the same way as your blog. You can write an email that will be sent to your list and set it to tomorrow's date or next week's date, which means that you can write your next month or your next week's worth of autoresponder emails and not have to do anything for that amount of time. You could go on vacation for the next week, schedule your next week's worth of emails and now your business will run even though you are not present.
When you are launching a product, one email simply won't cut it. You need to give people multiple reasons to go check out your offer. You need to give people multiple email reminders getting them to look at your webpage. When you're running a webinar, you should send several emails leading up to the webinar to make sure everyone is on the call.
When you make a blog post, you should send traffic to that blog post and even send reminder emails, which means you can schedule your blog post and schedule your autoresponder emails for that blog post.
3. Sales Letter Drip
If you know a programmer for about $5, you can get content on your sales letter dripped out. There's a little thing called "if else" statements.
That means if you want to slowly increase the price of your product – say increase it by $10 once a week for 5 weeks, you can at a special bit of PHP code that will replace your order button with a new one at a higher price every few days. You can run seasonal specials. For example, every month you could rotate in a different bonus for your offer to give different people a reason to get in.
4. Squeeze Page Drip
You can apply the same "if else" technology that you use on your sales letter to your squeeze page as well and you can use it to do the same things – rotate a monthly or weekly offer, and this can be a different headline, a different bonus or even an entire page swapped out for another.
You can switch out one of your opt-in forms after 2 months for a different one and have the first opt-in form send people to a page where they are supposed to re-tweet one of your free audios, but after 2 months, now direct them to a page where it sends them to your blog, which is now filled up with content.
More often than not, if I have a hard deadline for something, if I know I'm going to increase the price, change the headline, change a redirect, I will set it on this timer instead of doing it manually because otherwise I know I might forget.
5. Social Media
Now that you've dripped out your blog post, install a WordPress plugin such as Twitter Tools to leave a Twitter post or a tweet everytime you make a new blog post.
Also, if I know I'm going to be tweeting about something for the next week or two, I will use a scheduling service such as SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) to write tweets but set a publication date on them, which means I can write 10 or 20 tweets a time which will be posted once a day or once a week.
If you don't know what kind of scheduled tweets you should put out there, just use 30-day reminders. If you're posting about a blog post today, schedule another tweet in 30 days, reminding people about that old blog post.
6. Traffic Drip
Even third-party services allow you to drip out your content, even if your content appears on other people's sites.
The Traffic Geyser service allows you to upload up to 90 videos at once and determine when they will be scheduled. (I wish Tube Mogul did too.) When I was using this service for videos, I would record 90 videos at once, upload 90 videos and set the publication date for each and everyone - meaning that I could leave it alone for 3 months and it would send out a new video to the video sites once per day.
EzineArticles even has a premium option which means you can schedule all your articles and determine what date they will be published. Meaning, you can use the same strategy, write or outsource 90 articles, upload and schedule them all and the next 3 months' worth of traffic building are now automatic.
I hope that one of those 6 ways to drip content automatically opened your eyes and made you realized that doing things on a consistent basis doesn't always involve you and doesn't always have to be a chore.
So, which one do you like the best? The blog drip, autoresponder, sales letter, squeeze page, social media, or traffic drip? Post below, letting me know. Thank you.
