Building a Membership Site

As I wrote about in my “Calling All Lightworkers” post, I am working on a membership site which will teach Lightworkers a step-by-step process of building an online presence and business and to leverage the technologies available on the Internet to help the world.

The first step to turn this idea into reality has been for me to learn everything I can about setting up online membership sites.  Luckily, research, testing and reading through volumes of information to decipher what’s relevant and what’s unnecessary is one of my strengths so that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last five days.

Much like when I first started learning about Blogging and WordPress, there’s definitely a lot of learning to do.

I have identified the main components to the Membership site as follows:

1. Content Management System (CMS) – If at all possible, I’m going to try to stick to WordPress for this.  The other options are Drupal, Joomla, and also Expression Engine.  However, I really would rather get more in-depth with WordPress than to try to learn another platform.  So far my research shows that I will be able to use WordPress for what I need.  I’m not 100% there yet, but I’m probably about 98% sure I’ll be using WordPress to manage my content for the site.
2. Membership Management System (MMS) – To run a membership site, you’re going to need a way to track your membership base.  There are a number of approaches available in the market to handle this.  CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, Expression Engine and Drupal have some basic membership tracking built into them.  However, to be able to track subscriptions based on time and to manage who has access to what in the membership site, you’ll need something a bit more powerful like aMember.  aMember is a membership and subscription management PHP script that tracks your members, connects with your CMS software (like WordPress) as well as your payment processing system to collect payments.  So far, it looks like I’ll be using aMember to track this for me.
3. Payment Processing System (PPS) – A payment processing system basically takes care of collecting payments for you.  Some examples are 1shoppingcart, CCBill and of course PayPal.  These systems basically handle the process of collecting money from your member base by charging their credit cards, or PayPal accounts or whatever other methods of payment you accept.  The cool thing about aMember is that it integrates with almost all the payment processing systems out there.  I haven’t decided who I’m going to use for this yet, but PayPal will definitely be one of them.
4. Affiliate Management System (AMS) – The next thing you’ll also need to run a successful membership site is some form of Affiliate Management System.  An affiliate management system will track and manage your affiliates.  It will track who your affiliates are, who they refer to you, what kind of stats they have (views, clicks, sales etc.) and calculate their commissions as well.  A well organized Affiliate Management System can be very helpful in making the affiliate marketing process as easy and painless as possible for your affiliates.  aMember has basic affiliate management built in, but I’m not sure if I’ll be using that yet.  There are a few others I want to research and look into like Post Affiliate Pro for example.
5. Forum – Having a support forum available to your members is a big plus.  It allows you to build a community of members who are helping each other out and it allows you to converse back and forth with your members so that the membership site is not just a static linear experience.  If people get stuck on a lesson they can ask questions and get help.  In all the different memebrship sites I’ve ever subscribed to, I always found the forums to be invaluable.  I’ll most likely be using vBulletin for this.  Although I haven’t tested it yet, I read that it integrates with aMember as well.
6. Autoresponder – An email autoresponder software will help you to manage the email communications with your members and potential members.  For this I’ll most likely be using AWeber which is the service I use right now to track my existing email list.

There are definitely going to be a few more pieces to the puzzle as I dive into this further, but I think these are the main pieces so far.

What’s really cool is that once I master this whole “Membership Site” concept, I can teach it as a more advanced topic inside my membership site itself as I definitely think that the “Membership Site” model might be the right business model for some Lightworkers to teach what they want to teach.

All of these, of course, are just the technical aspects of getting a Membership Site built.  There is a lot more to it then that such as creating the curriculum and content (text, audio, video’s etc.) as well as pre-launch and launch marketing / sales, administration, support, etc.

There are two points that I would like to get some feedback from you guys about.  I’ve been considering two things as I work on this program:

(1) Active / Evolutionary Curriculum Structure – I’ve seen this done on a few membership sites I’ve participated on.  Essentialy what happens is that there is an initial “Founding Members” class which joins the membership site.  The difference between this first intial group and everyone else after them is that the “Founding Members” get the benefit of participating in the creation of the curriculum to some degree.

How this works is that the content that is created is only created a few weeks ahead of the first student, and it’s delivered with an incremental content delivery method.  Meaning, when you first become a member you get access to Lesson 1.  A week later you get access to Lesson 2.  A week later you get access to Lesson 3, etc.  So each week you learn a new lesson, and you are given assignments and things to work on.

As the founding members start going through the initial lessons, it allows me to see how well people are progressing with the content being presented to them.  If the lessons are well understood and seem “easy”, I can increase the amount of content I deliver in future lessons and adjust the pace a bit.  If the lessons being delivered are overwhelming people and people want a slower and more in-depth explanation of each concept being taught, the future lessons can reflect that style.

Also as the Founding Members go through the course there might be certain “stuck points” that emerge which would allow me to create additional lessons to solve those issues.

In a nutshell, the membership site then takes a more “living” approach to delivering the content much like if you were working with me one-on-one.

I’d like to get some feedback as to what you guys think about this model.

(2) Early Affiliate System - I’ve been contemplating implementing an early Affiliate system which would allow people who are interested in promoting this membership site to start promoting it even before it’s launched.  This would give you guys, my Blog readers, an early start on any other promotions I might do closer to launch date.

Nothing is set in stone as far as pricing or Affiliate commission percentages, but imagine if you could refer and sign up a few people to the program before it’s even launched and your affiliate comissions were able to cover your membership fees for the program plus more (once it’s launched of course).

So, the second thing I’d like to get your feedback on is if anyone would be interested in affiliate promoting the program before it’s even launched.  Because if so, I can make that a bigger priority to implement an affiliate program into the software.  If you guys would rather wait until the whole thing is finished, then I can wait with this until later, but I was just thinking that it might be a good way for you guys to get early access to the affiliate program as readers of my Blog.

Let me know what you guys think!

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