46:12 Conjuring membership magic

WordPress tools to try before you die. Sorry about that. Time for the next tool.

Welcome to another episode of WordPress Tools to try before you die. My name is Lee Matthew Jackson and I am your ghostly host. In this Halloween season where we share with you a problem, we discuss the solution that we would use in our agency in the guise of a WordPress tool or service. And finally, we share with you some real life use cases. Right at the very end, you have the opportunity to share with us what your solution to the problem would be.

So be sure to stay tuned for how to get involved in the conversation. Today’s problem is creating a membership website that is fast, efficient and easy to configure for our clients. In the past, we’ve used plugins where the interface is quite complicated and unfortunately, information that should have been protected was actually available via the search engines. In order to avoid this scenario, we put a lot of time and effort into testing tonnes of WordPress plugins that offer membership services and content protection. Some of the key services we needed included some form of paywall within a post so we could expose some of the content, and then you’d have to pay to get access to the rest.

And another form of protection would just be a blanket protection on specific post types or categories. And finally, one of the most overlooked features would be ensuring that uploaded files are protected, such as PDFs. You can imagine our horror when a client reported that Google was seeing their PDFs and presenting all of that information in the search engines. The solution we’ve chosen is Wishlist member. This is something we’ve used with clients now for several years.

It’s very powerful and it includes everything that you would expect from a membership plugin and so much more. Let’s touch first on the integrations. You can integrate with a plethora of payment providers for us PayPal and Stripe, but it also integrates with SamCart, with WooCommerce, Authorise. Net, if anyone still uses that, and a whole plethora of others. On top of that, they integrate with a slew, what a great word of email providers.

And they also integrate with some of the leading WordPress LMS plugins too. And finally, yes, they integrate with Zapier and they have Webhooks, so the world’s your oyster! There is already so much you can do with this, especially when you’re looking at connecting with other services, be that when taking payment or be that when doing something within the platform. So we were already really impressed out of the gate. Level management is ridiculously easy.

You can set up multiple levels and you can control every aspect of each level from the registration to the output of all your email notifications. One of my favourite tools is the email broadcast, which allow me to email either everybody or just specific levels. So when we used this in our event, we were able to ensure that people on day three had the information they needed to join us for day three. Content protection is pretty mind blowing. You can do it on a per post basis.

They have the ability as well to show a little bit of information and have people pay for the rest if you just wanted to do that sort of paywall. But my favourite aspect is controlling what people can see at a post type and a category level. This is all done in the content protection section and the fact that you can also control access to files that you upload that are pertinent to whatever programme you are offering, I think that is awesome. There are so many features to go into, but let me just give a shout out to two final features. Firstly, you can control the look and feel of the product via CSS and also style your registration forms in your logins.

And then finally, the part we use all the time is the ability to import members from a CSV. We use this all the time and we can either set our own password or we can have the platform set the password for us. We can also control what is sent to the end user after import, whether they receive an email with their details or if we decide to do that separately. For us, our main use case is for online events. We will use this platform to protect both the live stream and also all of the recorded assets that are loaded post events so people can go ahead and log in and rewatch the show as it were.

As this is an online event, we can give people specific membership levels such as speaker, organiser or attendee and we can then ensure they only see the relevant networking rooms to their membership level. They can only see the relevant live streams to their membership level. And of course finally post event they can only access the content that their membership level provides them. So now it’s your turn. Let us know in the comments of this episode what membership platform you would use.

How would you solve the problems that we presented at the very beginning of this episode? Check the show notes for the link to get involved in the conversation. Did you know? You can also come and chat with me Live? Yes.

Agency Transformation Live is happening again this year on November the 10th and the 11th of 2022 here in the UK. You can join us on Day One for a full on conference with amazing speakers followed by Day Two, an intimate in-person Mastermind where we help you with the combined brain power of the room. Define what your next small achievable actions to your agency’s success will be. So head on over to agencytransformation.live, if you want to come and have a real conversation in person folks, if we don’t see you in the comments, if we don’t see you at the event. Why don’t we see you in the next and final episode of this Ghastly season.