What is a Membership Site ?

WHAT IS A MEMBERSHIP SITE ?

A membership site is a site where some content is available only to members who have logged in. To gain access to this content, visitors usually have to pay to join as a member. Membership sites often include user-submitted content. The site where I got this photo is a membership site: you sign up and pay for a subscription that lets you download photos. Newspapers that put up paywalls are also membership sites. Some sites combine membership with other tools, such as learning management or social networking.

There are a lot of different models for a membership site, so it can be difficult to know how you should set it up. For example, membership site can mean many things, including:

Industry publications (white papers, surveys, reports), and newsletters
Courses, webinars, and guides
Private member directory (especially for associations and business groups)
Exclusive invites to events and conferences
Discounts on products/equipment/services for a specific industry or geography

How do you build a membership site?

There are almost as many different ways as there are sites, from plugins to third-party services to custom code. We'll talk about some general considerations when planning and building such a site and some popular membership and content restriction plugins--which are easy to use, which are easy to customize, and so forth.

There are a number of options for building your membership site, in most cases, you’ll be looking at one of two choices:

Cloud Platforms: This option enables you to get up and running quickly without wrestling with tech. However, it’s important to remember that with such services, you’re simply renting someone else’s platform. You sacrifice a lot of control over your membership in exchange for convenience, and this comes with costs that are not monetary.
WordPress with a Membership Plugin: This option you complete control over your site and greater flexibility in terms of how your website looks and functions. However, this does mean that unless you’re hiring a web developer to help, you’ll need to build and maintain the site yourself.

Up to date, we have a wide selection of WordPress plugins specifically built for membership sites to handle payment, user registration, and content protection.

There are a lot of good reasons for building a membership site. Perhaps you want to create a private area for your clients, demonstrate your knowledge of a certain topic, develop a new course or share your passion and interests. Or maybe you’re simply looking for a new way to work online.

Benefits:

Extra Money

A membership site especially takes a lot of time to set up and get running. However, what a membership site does give you is a regular, recurring income that can give you the extra money you need to make your life more comfortable. And that’s without having to worry about driving more traffic to your site.

Imagine having just a few, let 's say 50 members paying you $19.99 a month, You can end up with almost $ 1,000 a month. A steady stream of income every month is what most Internet marketers strive for.

Use your Knowledge and become a Specialist

If you’ve trained for a career or spent years learning on the job, then you have a lot of knowledge you can pass onto your audience.

There's a lot to be said about sharing from the wealth of your knowledge. And, After all, it's one of the main motivation ways to showcase your expertise and let people know that you’re the master.

For instance, within a membership site, you can create courses with content that builds on itself. It allows you to go much deeper than you could in, say, a blog article or a podcast.

You might create some introductory courses, then build on that basic info to lead for free and to more advanced course material paid.

If you already are a speaker, author or another kind of expert, a membership site can provide you with a commercial element that confirms your expertise and gives you something tangible to sell.

Build Loyalty and Respect

When you ask someone to pay a membership fee to access your content, you're also giving them a reason to focus their time and attention on what you're trying to give them.

A customer becomes a member, you are providing a service and providing new information to that member on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Doing this builds loyalty and respect. That is a solid foundation for a successful business!

Building a free subscriber base and then getting them converted to ‘paid members’ is only half of the job.

If your members are going to keep paying you every month you better make sure to provide them with valuable, up to date, and fresh information.

Ready To Build Your Membership Site?

Whether you’re building a site for yourself or a client, being clear about the type of membership site you’re building, how billing will happen, what members should get, and how you communicate with members will help you determine the best tools and setup for your site.

Best of success building your membership website!

by Deolma Araiz

Selecting a Wordpress Theme

As a web designer and developer, knowing where to search online resources for tips, guidelines, tutorials, and other useful tools is pretty important. Building a website on WordPress can be one of the most rewarding things you do for your online presence or small business. Most beginners feel overwhelmed when it comes to select a theme for their WordPress site. There are thousands of free and paid options. Each theme looks better than the other.

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE THE BEST THEME FOR WORDPRESS?

It’s essential to take some time to look at on the right choice for your WordPress theme and make a checklist to ensure the one you choose has all the necessary components. In this article, we will guide you with some highlights that you should consider, so you can choose the best WordPress theme for your site. Now go grab a cup of coffee and enjoy reading.

DEFINE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES FOR YOUR WEBSITE

Before you jump into graphical and visual ideas, it is important to start with defining what success looks like for you and your future website. What are your goals and objectives? What do you need your website to produce?

Why is it important for you to have a website?
Who is your target market?
What do you want those users to gain by visiting your website?
How will you measure success?
Do you expect to make money on your website?

Thinking conceptually about your website’s objective is crucial to making sure you choose the right look, feel, and functionality for your visitors. WordPress has many themes that are specifically catered to each of the functions so you want to make sure that you’re looking in the right direction. The first criteria you should consider is the type or category of your business. For instance, If you have a tech company, go to wordpress.org Them Directory and look for tech themes. If you have a fashion business, look for fashion themes. This helps you to narrow down your search and you end up picking the theme which matches your overall purpose.

KEEP SIMPLE AND CLEAN

Have you ever walked into a department store and felt completely lost? That is what website visitors feel like when they visit a website with poor navigation, with moving components, unoptimized images galleries can sometimes overwhelm and confuse the user. Besides the visual elements, a theme can affect the performance of your website. Choosing a theme with a lot of extra features or useless widgets can slow down your site’s load times and cost you traffic. Some tips:

Simple and super easy to use
Responsive which is an essential feature nowadays
Tested with cross browsers all the popular ones
Elegant styling
Simple WordPress theme has lots of white space
Fully documented for ease of use in times of confusion
Compatible with the latest WordPress version and tested
Coded as per latest theme review standards and security standards
Consider the Search Engines - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to your website performing well in search results. The quality and consistency of your content, as well as the optimization of your metadata, affect your page ranking.

START WITH A FREE THEME

Startup owners are flocking in their thousands to platforms like WordPress. Why? Simply because WordPress is an open-source platform upon which great things can be built. There’s no shortage of examples of how startups have used WordPress to create websites. Many themes can be download completely for free. Do a simple search on Theme Directory to find free themes that match your website’s criteria and then check out their demos to get a sense of how the theme would look with your content.

PREMIUM THEMES

When you are finding a WordPress theme for your website, along with the look and design, you should focus on many other aspects like the support, upgrade and many more. One of the advantages of paid themes is that they often include extensive documentation and support options. This can be important if you run into an issue that you can’t resolve on your own.

SHOULD YOU GO FOR A PREMIUM OR FOR A FREE THEME?

select wordpress theme

Since there’s no such thing as a free meal, there are quite a few holdups to consider when it comes to using a free WordPress theme. Let’s say you’ve done your research, and you’ve found a theme that is 90% perfect. For instance, you like the layout of the pages, how the menus function, and the overall design of a theme, color but the fonts aren’t quite what you had in mind.

A free theme has limited features and no extra functionality, which many larger and more professional websites require.
The quality is generally high since theme authors must check bugs to prevent theme returns and unsatisfied customers.
Some free themes have over 1 million downloads! Free themes are not unique when compared with premium themes
A portion of the themes on the WordPress repository site isn't updated, which might render them incompatible with frequent version updates of the Wordpress.

BEST SOURCES FOR PREMIUM THEMES

Not sure where to start your search for the perfect premium WordPress theme? Fortunately, you have many companies to choose for your WordPress theme search. We've compiled a few of trusted theme marketplaces.

A free or premium WordPress theme has its advantages and disadvantages, but choosing which one to install ultimately depends on your website’s needs and the website owner’s budget and aesthetic preferences. Know that it’s completely OK to start with a free WordPress theme and upgrade down the road as the need arises. Why? Because only you will know which one will serve as the best reflection of the business you’re building the site for your objectives. Hopefully, this guide can get you started in deciding which WordPress theme will work best for your needs in terms of quality, convenience, cost, support etc. What questions do you still have about WordPress right choice?

by Deolma Araiz