Membership Sites Are Just “On” or “Off”: Get to Drip Content, Dashboards, and Continuity Later (or Maybe Never)

An online web-based digital membership site... you have a web page (a sales letter) where you offer to solve a simple problem: play guitar, reduce man-boobs, get your ex back. People click a button to buy the solution (a set of videos that play directly in their web browser) and they're taken to a member's area where they watch videos solving their problem.

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A membership site: you need it to handle downloads whether you're running a single payment site ($10 one time, and yes, membership sites DON'T have to be recurring)...

Fixed term site (X number of payments) or forever-continuity (i.e. $37/month)...

And I don't want to tell you about how tough membership sites were during the "dark ages": your choices were either a $4000 piece of crap software that was old (even then) and didn't work right, or $400 per site and it literally took at least a week to connect the membership piece to WordPress, PayPal, and your email autoresponder...

Guess what?

• You need to have a membership site
• It needs to run in WordPress (so you can use your favorite themes and plugins with it, and it's setup in just a few minutes)
• You need to host it yourself (hosted services that "do it for you" always end up lacking in what you want and a huge chunk of our coaching clients deal with people who want to migrate OFF those hosted membership platforms)
• You need to get that membership site setup as FAST as possible and get your FIRST paying member as FAST as possible (even if it's just $10 one time)

The things that have always made money like having a sales letter and building a list STILL make money!

Can I tell you what made a huge difference when it came to setting up membership sites?

It's This: Your Membership Site Is Made Up Of "Levels"

Let me explain... NOT the way "they" explain it... they tell you to "setup levels for Silver, Gold, and Platinum." Or, "setup a level for your beginner golfing course with 24 lessons and then another level for your advanced golfing course"... that doesn't help anybody!

This makes more sense to me: sell access to your $100 (one-time) course on How to Buy and Flip a House. Create a single "page" in WordPress (it's ok if you don't know what that means yet) and pile your videos in there (I recommend four modules of 60-90 minutes each to get people to each milestone when it comes to buying and flipping a house.

Create the content (videos) for that site, put it in a membership site, create a 1-page "sales letter" listing a simple headline and 10 reasons people would want to grab your house compared to the alternatives. Add a PayPal button (a way to take payments online).

You're done at that point...

You can always add or change things later, like increasing the price from $100 to $497 to $1997 or add a second button next to it to give people the option for a payment plan.

THEN the next "course" or "page" or "level" (if you create one) would be called How to Buy and Rent a House. Not Advanced House Flipping, or House Flipping Volume 2. You find another NEED or PROBLEM people have and you solve that.

No one cares about your 400 hours of video...

No one cares about tips, tricks, interviews, tidbits -- get me from Point A to Point D and that's all you have to do.

Just take PayPal payments for now, don't worry about fancy stuff like an affiliate program (Clickbank) or taking credit card payments over the phone (Stripe)... the grass is always greener on the other side and what's more important is that you have SOMETHING rocking and rolling... just get to that one sale...

Don't worry about drip content (as the membership site owner, you're the only one that really cares about that) -- although we include our WP Drip plugin (we've been using it for over 6 years now) inside our Membership Cube course which also includes Wishlist Member.

Don't worry about organizing your content into a fancy "dashboard" just yet -- it's actually much easier to create the content (videos) first, pile them all on a WordPress "page" and then organize them... as opposed to trying to fill in a bunch of empty cubby-holes...

Membership Levels Explained: Don't Make This More Complicated Than It Has to Be

You make this real estate membership site and you have your "House Flipping" level and "House Renting" levels. It's much easier to use Wishlist Member. Most membership plugins that aren't Wishlist, even the WordPress ones, don't use "levels." When you use levels you can set one single page for that level, mutiple pages (and sub-pages) for that level... you could have a "Bonus" page that both levels share. It makes things a lot easier.

Now for one of my biggest breakthroughs with membership sites... levels are "on or off."

Someone buys the House Renting course from you, they pay, they create their membership account with you, now they're on the House Renting level.

Maybe they refund or they join using your payment plan and they eventually "cancel" or stop paying for that payment plan. PayPal sends a signal over to your membership site and "cancels" them from that level.

So you can see that they "used to" be on that House Renting level, but they're now disabled from it, so they can't access the pages or pages (or posts) you've assigned to that level.

On or off. Your membership site doesn't care or notice what price they're paying, or if they're paying every 30 days or 60 days or on a trial payment or whatever. They join, they create their account. If they cancel or refund, PayPal sends that signal over to cancel them from that level.

You can host multiple products (levels) within the same membership site. You can change the price of your button later (just edit the page on PayPal's screen, takes 30 seconds). You can add a fixed-term (payment plan) button to give people the choice between paying the whole $997 or in installments. You can walk the price up as you pile in more members until you encounter price resistance.

Heck, I've even started sites as forever-continuity (people pay $37/month) and then when I become tired of updating it, I just switched the button to a single payment and it was now a "package" of videos and content...

• Use a membership site.
• Use WordPress. (1-click clone included in Membership Cube)
• Use levels. (Wishlist Member, included in Membership Cube)
• Use PayPal to take payments. (easiest to get started, you can always switch out the button later)
• Worry about drip content later. (also handled by WP Drip included in Membership Cube)
• Re-organize your content into a dashboard later. (We use TablePress, shown in Membership Cube, but save this after you get your handful of members)

Your biggest enemy is that expanding scope and making things too complicated so why not get on the shortest path to making money right now?

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Filed in: Archive 1: 2012-2016 • Membership Sites