Written by Matt Smith for Online Income Teacher
I have been setting up a membership site over at Bizzebee (called The Hive) with Premise and wanted to let you know how. I’ve had a few people asking me how they can create a membership site themselves, so I thought it would be good to put this guide together to show you.
Why Create A Membership Site?
Well, apart from being a great way to monetize your site, membership sites are a great way to build a community around your website. Every site needs regular visitors, so people who have subscribed (whether for free or by paying a membership fee) are a lot more likely to keep coming back to your site on a regular basis.
Membership sites are a way of taking your site to the next level by offering premium content to your subscribers. You may run a blog as your main site, but create a membership site within that and you could offer premium videos, eBooks, podcasts, audio, webinars, downloads, coupons, and much more!
Say you only charged $10 a month (or more likely $9.99) as a subscription fee, if you get only 20 subscribers, you earn $200 a month ($2400 a year). Get 50 subscribers and you earn $500 a month ($6000 a year). You begin to see how you can scale it up the more subscribers you get… and that is discounting other monetizing methods that you can use on top of that (i.e. advertising, sell your own products, sponsorship, etc.)!
There are plenty of membership sites online that have thousands of subscribers, some of which charge a lot more than $10 a month! The biggest of these sites will be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars every month (if not more), so hopefully you can see the potential of membership sites.
Now, before we get carried away with how much you can earn, you need to think about what content you will offer to your members. People will only subscribe and pay a premium IF there is something worth subscribing too. The big sites that are making so much money via memberships are doing so because they have great features and quality content to offer to their subscribers.
Why Create A Membership Site With Premise?
Premise is a fantastic WordPress plugin that enables you to create membership sites, as well as great looking landing pages, all of which you can do from your WordPress Dashboard.
Premise has a ton of great features, including;
Works with any WordPress site, WordPress theme or Design Framework,
Create membership areas,
Sell digital products (eBooks, software, music, downloads, etc.)
Accept one-time and/or recurring payments,
Drip content to your members over time,
Setup payment gateways with PayPal and/or Authorize.net, as well as; Clickbank, Stripe, 2Checkout, Braintree and more.
Setup private forums with vBulletin
Setup password protected content libraries,
Create custom landing pages,
Copywriting assistant to help you create better pages,
Landing page templates,
Audio seminar and PDF manuals to help you,
Split test your pages,
Graphics library,
…and much more!
Premise is more than just a simple plugin, it’s an incredible tool to use for your website. Not only that, but you get access to tons of tutorials and helpful information within the Premise website when you purchase a copy.
As I say, this post is about how to create a membership site, so we will look at the relevant features of Premise that let you do that. Other features, such as setting up a landing page, will be in a future post.
Use Premise To Create A Membership Site
Setup Premise
Premise is a WordPress plugin, so you install it in exactly the same way you would any other. Simply download the plugin (after purchasing it), then upload it via WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Add New > Upload
Once uploaded, you will see both the ‘Premise’ and ‘Landing Pages’ options in your sidebar.
Before you can use the membership options, you will need to input your API Key into the plugin, which you will find in your Premise account. Simply copy and paste your API key into the box provided (Premise > Main Settings > API Key).
Enable the ‘Membership’ module below and you will gain the ‘Member Access’ option.
Setup Membership Pages
Now that we have the ‘Membership Access’ option, we can begin to setup the site.
Quick Note: I setup the Bizzebee membership site on a subdomain (hive.bizzebee.com) in order to keep the main blog separate from the member site, but you can just create a membership site within your main site if you want.
Go to Member Access > Settings > Main Settings and select a page for your ‘Checkout Page’, ‘Login Page’ and ‘Member Page’. You will want to create pages for each of these as these are vital for the membership site.
To create a basic ‘Checkout Page’, create a new page (Pages > Add New) and add [checkout-form] to the HTML text section.
This will add a basic checkout form to your page. (You’ll need to setup payment options in order for them to be visible – more on that below).
You can add other attributes by using other shortcodes that can be found on the Premise website.
To create a basic ‘Login Page’, create a new page and add [login-form] to the HTML text section.
This will add a basic login form to your page, which again you can add to with other shortcodes found on Premise.
Finally, to create a basic ‘Member Page’, create a new page and add;
Welcome Back [member-first-name]{member-last-name]!
<h2>Your Purchases</h2>
[member_products]
<h2>Your Account Profile</h2>
[member_profile heading_text='To change your account information, please fill out the form.' show_email_address='true' show_username='true' label_separator='-']
[logout-link text=’Logout’]
…to the HTML text section. This will add a basic member form to the page, which will allow members to see what purchases they have made, enable them to edit their details and to logout. Again you can add to it with other shortcodes found on Premise.
Create A Product – Subscriptions
In the case of a membership site, your product will be a subscription. This could be a basic flat subscription fee for everyone or you could setup different subscription levels for different areas of your site with different fees. For example;
Bronze – forum access,
Silver – forum + audio/video access,
Gold – forum + audio/video + eBooks, Seminars, Live Hangouts, etc.
Alternately, maybe you want to setup different types of membership. For example;
Free membership – basic access
Monthly membership – Small fee every month to gain access to everything.
Lifetime membership – One off payment to gain access to everything for life.
You could even offer one time product purchases to visitors, perhaps those who don’t want to become a member, but just want to learn about a certain subject (e.g. eBook download). Whichever way you want to setup your products, you do it in the same way within Premise.
Go to Member Access > Products > Create New Product
Enter in all the basic information (title, description, price, etc.), choose a ‘Thank You Page’ where people will be redirected to after purchasing and setup the ‘Send an Email Receipt’ section.
Then, you just need to setup your ‘Access Levels’. This is pretty straight forward as you would just add Bronze, Silver and Gold if you were offering Bronze, Silver and Gold membership. These could be totally separate access levels or based on a level system. For example;
Bronze Membership – Bronze access
Silver Membership – Bronze + Silver access
Gold Membership – Bronze + Silver + Gold access
Create Your Product Pages
You may have setup your products (in our case subscription levels), but you will need to add a page in order for people to click though. This could be a single page with the different options listed, or perhaps separate landing pages that encourage people to purchase.
Simply add the product link (URL/checkout/?product_id=XX) that we have just created to your page, which will redirect people to the checkout page that we setup earlier. It’s important that you add the right link, with the right ID number.
Sort Out Your Access Levels
We talked about Access Levels when creating your product (i.e. Bronze, Silver, Gold), but you still need to setup your access levels for each page on your site.
Premise will have added a small box to each of your ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’ that will allow you to select which group of people can access the content. Depending on how you set it up, this could be accessed by everyone, some or an individual group of subscribers.
There is an added feature within Premise that allows you to set access levels WITHIN a post/page. Let’s say you had a blog post that was accessible to everyone. You could add a tutorial video, download link, additional text, etc. within that post that could only be seen by certain subscribers (i.e. Gold Members).
This can let you create really great membership sites that offer different levels of content to different subscribers.
Setup Premise Payment Gateways
Now is a good time to setup what payment methods you will accept on your site. By default, Premise allows you to setup gateways with PayPal and Authorize.net, of which you can use both to give more options to buyers. You can also add gateways for Clickbank, 2Checkout, Stripe and Braintree with some additional plugins (info on the Premise website), and I’m sure other methods will be added in future updates.
If we look at the ‘PayPal for Express Checkout’ section as an example, you will need to fill in your Username, Password and Signature in order for it to work. For more details on this, visit the PayPal website.
You can then ‘Test Gateway’ to check that it is setup correctly before going live.
This Is Just The Start To Using Premise
The above steps will allow you to setup a membership site and start taking payments, but there is SO much more to this amazing plugin that I haven’t even covered. Setup coupons for your subscribers and offer discounts to them, setup a members only forum with vBulletin, create protected download links that only your subscribers can access and much more!
Now I know this was a bit of a mammoth post, but there is simply so much to talk about with this great plugin. If you want to create a membership site then Premise is the one to build it with.
Have you built a membership site with Premise? What is your favourite feature that you’ve used? Please get in touch by leaving a comment below!
The post How To Create A Membership Site With Premise appeared first on Online Income Teacher.
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