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.

In social media, the number of people that follow you on your accounts like Twitter, Facebook, squarefour, and Linked In is in similar relation to the number of links pointing to a page in traditional SEO. We all know that Google ranks your website based on the number and also on the quality of backlinks coming into your site. Google recently hinted that they will rank social media sites similarly in the fact that if you have reputable followers and a lot of them, your tweets could get ranked higher than someone else’s based on that scenario.

In search engine optimization, high quality pages link to another website or another webpage and pass “link juice” to the page they are linking to. With social media is looking like it’s going to be the same type of scenario based on a popularity contest or voting system.

Google is really trying to get into the real-time search market. People are starting to use twitter search or Google blog search to get more relevant real-time information has recently been created on the Internet. Nobody likes searching for something on Google and finding non-relevant content from four years ago. So, it is good for consumers and it is good for marketers because those marketers that continue to market and continue to update their websites and social media accounts should reap the rewards.

Another question that people are asking about the ranking of their tweets is how hash tags are ranked. It is predicted that Google will rank has tax is a lower quality tweaked as they serve as a red flag for spam like content. Google, as we know, is all about being natural. We will see where this takes us over the upcoming months.

Finding the right keywords that your prospects and customers are searching for on Google, Yahoo, and Bing is a foundational part of internet marketing.   You may have heard of or used tools like Google’s keyword tool, Keyword Elite, or Wordtracker, but there are 7 other ways to find relevant keywords quick.

1. Misspellings – I can’t count the number of times that I mistype the same word over and over again.   I remember when I used to use Hotmail, and always typed “Hotmal” instead.  Oops!  Someone was capitalizing on that because I got sent to a porn site.  That was way back in day.  There are some great tools out there to find common misspellings for your niche that you can capitalize on.  Here are a couple places to search

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Mutation-Detection/Default.aspx

and

http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi

2. Technoriati

Technorati is a search engine and gathering site for blogs of many niches.  They track the most recent tags and mostly commonly used keywords.  You can find some great keywords that people are using and searching for at http://technorati.com/tag/

3.  Twitter

I actually found myself seaching on Twitter this past year for up to the second information instead of using Google.   I think this is the new trend and Google seems to realize it too.  You can see what is being searched for on Twitter and what is popular with the following services

http://www.tweetvolume.com/ and http://trendistic.com/seo

4. Facebook Lexicon

Facebook Lexicon is a great place to see some recent keyword activity.  They have graphs and more so you can see search trends at

http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/index.php

5. SeoBook

I have used SEObook quite a bit over the years to find out some of the volume of keywords being search in the search engines.  They have a great keyword tool at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

6. Google Wonderwheel

Google’s Wonderwheel is part of the Google search page.  After you search at http://gooogle.com you can click on “show options” and then scroll down to “wonder wheel” about half way down on the left.  This is a way to “drill down” and follow a vein of keywords to find what people are looking for.

7.  Your own site

I have looked on my own stats on my site and noticed that I am being picked up on the search engines for tons of long tail keywords that I didn’t even plan on.  If you see this happening, make sure you capitalize on it and also make sure that the page those visitors are going to is a converting page for maybe an optin or a product.

There are tons of places to find good keywords to go for.  Just make sure you go after some long-tail keywords and don’t be afraid to go after the “big daddy” keywords of your niche too.  (The ones that get tons of  searches).  Somebody has to.

Google’s Gdrive online storage has really begun to launch.  Ok, they are still saying that the the Gdrive does not exist and refused to confirm the name of Gdrive.

It is announced that over the next few weeks, Google docs will start rolling out the ability to store some of your media in your Google Docs account.  Before this point, it was just for documents like text and presentations.  Now you will be able to upload images and video to your account.    This isn’t really the launch of anything according to Google, but could be their slow and methodical roll out of the “Gdrive” service which is expected to allow you to store all of your files on the Google servers and not have to store them on your own personal harddrive.

To start out, you can upload up to a max 250mb size files to the server and up to 1gb of storage is free.  If you want or need more space, you can purchase more at $.25 / gb per year.  Sounds pretty cheap to me.

We will see how it goes.  I do like the idea of using any computer and having access to all my files at anytime, but don’t really like the idea of Google having all my files.  Maybe its just the conspiracy theorist in me.

When I got into internet marketing and designing my own websites, I didn’t have a clue about web hostings and what to look for in a host.  In fact, my first web host was Godaddy.  Like many people out there, I made a big mistake by going with the company that I had heard of instead of finding a hosting company that actually worked well.

I learned my lesson when Godaddy wouldn’t work with a lot of WordPress application and plugins.  It was a nightmare.  I would upload a script or something and it would mess up my whole website.  I learned my lesson I guess.

Here are the top things to consider before you jump in with a website hosting company.

1. Advertising: If they offer free hosting, you are going to get ads on your site for sure and probably less than par speeds.  Pony up and pay for some shared hosting to get started.  Pretty inexpensive.

2. Amount of web space: What type of space do you need when it comes to size.  Most people starting out are fine on a starter package that they can upgrade to later.   A starter package will probably cost you about $5 to $10 per month.  Keep in mind that you can upgrade when you need to.

3. FTP access: FTP access usual done through a cpanel.  This is the easiest way to work with your files and databases.  Some servers don’t even allow you to have access.  This is usually when you host a web template through a company like Web.com.

4. File type and limitations on size:  You really have to watch out for these limitation.  Some will really limit you to the amount of upload amount you can have.  Especially the free ones.  If you are paying for shared hosting or dedicated hosting, you shouldn’t have too much of a problem with this.

5.  Reliability and Speed:  This kinda speaks for itself.  It can be really frustrating for your web traffic if they have to wait for your website server to deliver the information.  The best way to know which servers are best is to ask a friend or get a recommendation from someone who has already used that company.  (GoDaddy was pretty slow.)

6.  PERL and PHP and IONCUBE: This essential if you want to run specific scripts or plugins.  If you don’t have these through your server, you will be very sorry down the road.  Especiall if you runa cms like WordPress or Joomla.

I recently worked with a client that insisted that we host his site on his friends server.  After about 1 and a half extra weeks of frustration trying to get things to work right, he finally ponied up and bought a shared hosting package for $8 per month.  Glad he did.  Made things much easier.

This website is hosted on Host Gator and I have also used Blue Host in the past.  Love them both.

I just found out about a new product that is really turning some heads when it comes to easily adding video to your website.  It is called the Easy Video Player.

If you are an online business owner or an affiliate marketer, you are really going to want to check this out.  I think you  are really going to like it.  What is does is allow you to upload your web videos to Amazon s3 servers and grab embed code for that video with just a couple clicks.  It makes it so easy.  Amazon S3 is a bit clunky when it comes to uploading and embedding.  This makes it much easier.

What I like about it to is the fact that you can redirect your video viewers to any page you want after they watch the video, automatically.  I have done this before, but it takes a lot of coding and hassle to accomplish it.  Easy Video Player will let you do it with checking one box.  Also, you can drop in a webform at the end of the video to have them get added to your autoresponder like aweber, getresponse, or infusionsoft.  What ever you are using.  Again, this is able to be done without the player, but it is a pain if you want to make it work.

Plus, you can allow others to share your video or embed the video on their site.  The backend features are pretty robust including full tracking of the video performance and conversions.

Overall, I think it will make your video marketing easier and you will probably do a lot more of it because it is just easier to embed, track, and share.   Check it out and let me know if you like the features.