How To Turn Wordpress Into A Membership Site
January 19, 2010 by Ben Janke
Filed under Wordpress Plugins
How do I turn WordPress into a membership site?
There is no doubt that WordPress is a very functional and flexible way to bring your business online or market other other people’s products online.
About two years ago, I decided that I wanted to turn one of my websites into a membership site. There’s quite a few different ways to do it and I researched a ton of different scripts that allowed the interaction of WordPress and their particular membership script. There was amember, membergate, memberwing, and a couple other ones that I looked into. After a lot of research I decided to go with amember.
So, I installed the script, bought the extra plug-ins to integrate with WordPress, and got it all put together. Now it’s time to test it. After hours and hours of testing in trying to manage the scripts and getting very frustrated, I gave up. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to have a membership website.
About one year later, I got an e-mail about WishList Member. I was pumped because WishList member integrates directly into WordPress via a WordPress plug-in. Now I didn’t have to worry about separate scripts and trying to integrate with WordPress because this membership plug-in made it so simple. I had all set up and figured out within about two hours instead of two weeks. There was also some great video tutorials on how to get set up.
Now it was time to put to the test. I set up a member only site that only allowed people to view the site if they were signed up as a free member, and they had the opportunity to upgrade to a premium membership. I did some YouTube videos to drive traffic to my membership site. No matter which page they landed on, they were redirected to my sign-up page. All with one click of a button.
To my surprise, I was able to drive 4000 people to my site one day, and one out of four signed up as a member. So, in one day I had 1000 members using the WishList member plug-in. Not that success in quick fashion.
I also set up to integrate automatically with aWeber to deliver my emails. If you are looking for a way to make wordpress a membership site, make sure to check out the Wishlist Member plugin.
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Stu McLaren on Tue, 19th Jan 2010 1:55 pm
Congrats Ben!
Great to hear about your success with WishList Member. Keep us posted – perhaps we could do an interview with you and go into detail regarding how you are using it.
All the best.
Stu
Mark Eastman on Tue, 19th Jan 2010 2:20 pm
Hi Ben,
What is the URL of the wishlist site you built?
Thanks!
Mark
Ravi Jayagopal on Tue, 19th Jan 2010 10:28 pm
Ben,
If you are ever open to looking at other membership script options, do check out DigitalAccessPass.com
Just thought I would throw it into the mix
Appreciate the opportunity to comment.
Thanks,
- Ravi Jayagopal
Ben Janke on Wed, 20th Jan 2010 5:19 pm
@Stu Thanks for the invite. I would love to do an interview sometime. Thanks
Ben Janke on Wed, 20th Jan 2010 5:21 pm
@Mark I am in the midst of working on the site a bit more right now, so it is a bit ugly. I will let you know when it is back up. It is an MMA based site though featured around UFC and MMA.
Ben Janke on Wed, 20th Jan 2010 5:22 pm
@Ravi Thanks for the post. I will take a look, but I am pretty happy with Wishlist Member. Doesn’t hurt to look though.