With all my affiliate site posts queued up for the next 2 months and some time on my hands this weekend, I decided to get to work making the Super Affiliate Handbook available as an online tutorial, through a membership site.
My primary concern was how to set up a membership site easily.
The setup is relatively simple for someone who has worked through installation directions more than a few times, but I did manage to mess things up with some bad file permissions that required another intervention by my favorite geek and host master extraordinaire, Steve Hetrick. The temporary downtime aside, I am quite happy with Amember.
However, I recalled reading that there might be a plugin available that could turn a WordPress blog into a membership site.
What could be more perfect, especially since the main focus of the tutorials is affiliate blogging.
My search brought Wishlist Member to the top of the results.
Per the sales page, the list of features include:
- Unlimited Membership Levels
- Simple Installation With New or Existing WordPress Blog
- Flexible Membership Options
- Sequential Content Delivery
- Control Viewed Content
- Shopping Cart Integration
- Easy Member Management
- Multi-Level Access
- Total Content Protection
- Secure RSS Feeds
- Subscription Length Control
- Login Redirection
- Create Your Membership Site Using WordPress & WL Member
- “Sneak Peak” Content Display
- Custom Error Pages
- Partial Content Display
On confirming that Wishlist Member could be integrated with my shopping cart of choice (Clickbank) and my Aweber autoresponder, I decided that it was worth a try. Note: Wishlist Member also integrates with 1ShoppingCart, PayPal, Cydec, Autoresponseplus and GetResponse and generic systems.
The single licence version of Wishlist Member is $97 and the multiple licence version is $297. With a 30-day refund policy, I opted to buy the multiple licence version – realizing that if the plugin worked as well as promised, I would definitely want to use it on other blogs.
My experience with Wishlist Member
After buying Wishlist Member, I purchased a new domain, set up hosting, did a 1-minute WordPress installation, uploaded the plugin, installed the theme that came with the plugin… and was off to the races.
Within 30 minutes, I'd watched a few of the tutorial videos, set up 8 modules using Pages (you can restrict member access by post, page, categories and comments) , a sequential upgrade that drips content over time and input some articles. By the way, the video tutorials are accessible without having to purchase the product.
The video below shows the results of those 30-minutes, as well as how membership content is protected, even when someone is smart enough to figure out the URL of a higher-level module.
If you'd like to view a larger sized video, it's available on YouTube.
Check it out. Wishlist Member is a GREAT choice for bloggers who want to set up their own membership sites, especially in terms of ease of set up and price.
Wishlist Member gets a 2 big thumbs up from me and my HIGHEST recommendation.