Setup Your Own Wordpress Membership Site And Profit

Membership sites are great when setup properly. They allow you to build a loyal community and a chance to make sustainable, recurring profits through a subscription model. At a certain point, your site will become self sustaining and able to be run by your members themselves. If your membership site becomes big enough, you can also flip it for some nice money.

Setting up a membership site seems like it would be difficult to do, but it is actually quite easy if you use the right tools. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a simple membership using Wordpress along with some free plugins. When you are done with this guide, you will have a private blog that will require your users to register to view and any registered members will able to contribute content to your site. I will assume that you already have your own hosting and have the ability to install Wordpress and the Wordpress plugins yourself.

There are three main plugins we will be using. Download each of them and install them in your Wordpress installation.

Members Only (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members-only) - This plugin will allow you to restrict access to your blog so it is only accessible by registered members.

Register Plus (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/register-plus) - We will use this plugin to customize the user's registration experience. This includes things like custom logo, invitation codes, captcha validation, registration emails and much more.

WP Lite (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wplite) - We want our users to have limited capabilities to post content to our site. WP Lite allows you to pick and choose which areas of the WP dashboard you want your users to have access to.

Here are the options I use for the Members Only plugin. Feel free to modify things as necessary.

• Check Members only. This will make your members login before they can view anything. This is the essential setting to turn your blog into a membership site.
  

• Redirect to Login Page. Any users not logged in will be automatically redirected to your blog's login page

• Check Return user. After a user logs in, they will be redirected back to the page they originally tried to get to.
  

The Register Plus plugin has a ton of options to further enhance the user registration experience. Here are some of the settings I use.

• Create custom logo. You should definitely create your own logo to build your brand and it just looks better than the default wordpress logo.

• Prevent fake email address registrations > Grace period 7 days. This is the time between account creation and account verification. Use this option to prevent the accumulation of "unverified" accounts

• Enable invitations codes. A nice way to promote the exclusivity of your site.
  

The WP-Lite plugin looks quite daunting to configure. To just give your users the ability to write their own posts, you can set things to look like my screenshot.

With these plugins configured and in place, you now have a simple membership site up and running. So where do you go from here?

To learn more about running a membership site, I would suggest you check out Yaro Starak's new ebook, Membership Site Masterplan. Yaro is the creator of the Blog Mastermind membership course that makes him over 6 figures a year and his report covers everything about launching a successful membership site. Everything from creating content, setting pricing, and attracting members...it's all covered in this book. It's a 72 pages long and I got through it in about an hour. It is very well written and informative and you will definitely learn a lot. It's completely free, so there's no reason not to check it out.

Become A Membership Site Mastermind By Downloading The Free Report

I am currently a part of a few membership sites myself and I can see why they are so popular (for the owner, members, and affiliates)  Dominate IM is a great one for learning internet marketing, and it gives you access to some awesome tools and training videos.  They are always updating their site with live case studies so you keep coming back for more.  PPC Coach is another excellent membership site that aims to teach you about pay per click marketing.  It thrives because of its ever growing community and you will learn a lot just by asking questions. These are just two examples of some membership sites you may want to emulate.  So read the free report and get to work!