What is a Membership Site?
A membership site is a website where visitors pay a membership fee in order to access exclusive content or services. Typically, membership sites offer videos, courses, or other forms of digital content that cannot be accessed anywhere else. They can be a great way to make money online by providing valuable content to your audience.
Why is it So Important to Choose the Right Software for Your Membership Site?
One of the most important decisions you'll make when creating a membership site is choosing the software to run it. This decision will have a big impact on your membership's success.
Choosing the right software is essential because it will affect everything from how easy it is to add new content and manage members to how well your membership site performs. If your membership site is glitchy or hard to use, members will be less likely to renew their subscriptions.
That's why it's important to do your research and choose a software platform that's right for your membership. There are a number of factors you'll want to consider, such as:
– The features the platform offers
– The ease of use
– The price
– The level of customer support available
The recommendations below are based on all of those factors so you can feel confident this membership site software stack will serve you well.
Step 1: Webhosting
If you don't have it already, the first thing you need is a web hosting account. We highly recommend Cloudways hosting. Much faster than their competitors and have excellent customer service.
Step 2: Theme
You're going to want your site to look great and be easy for your customers to navigate. We recommend Astra coupled with BeaverBuilder. If you have an existing site, you can use the included plugin to build the private member's area and leave everything else alone.
Step #3: Learning Management Plugin
This is how you make your content private and only accessible to members. LearnDash is the best we've tried and it does everything you need to deliver an amazing online learning experience via a WordPress plugin. Great customer support.
Step #3: Membership Site Plugin
Once you have your learning management plugin installed, you need to add the community functionality. This is achieved using BuddyBoss for LearnDash.
Step #4: Email Autoresponder
Email marketing is the best way to market your business and stay in touch with customers and clients. ActiveCampaign has excellent deliverability and integrates with LearnDash to enhance the functionality of your membership site.
Step #5: Payment Gateway
You need a way to process payments – your payment gateway handles this. Recommend starting with either PayPal (must be a business account), or Stripe.