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orion_joel
11-16-2008, 11:03 PM
I have been considering setting up a site that offers a membership for a fee, to access a range of content that i have been working on. It would include a range of videos, audio and written articles. I have two questions really.

1. Has anyone here had experience in creating or working on these type of sites?

2. Can anyone suggest any scripts that are available which may be able to give me a better start then trying to develop something/hack together a solution. As i have the stuff i could put something together with a CMS like Joomla, or such, using flash based media players and such, however while i think this is basically what a pre-existing script may do, i would like the membership payment stuff to be better integrated without having to play around with things to much.

Anyway any info or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

vangogh
11-17-2008, 02:01 AM
I haven't created one myself, but I am thinking of it and have taken an online course about building membership sites.

I don't think there's a ready made script for the whole thing, though given the recent popularity it's possible someone has or will develop something. It depends a little on what you want to do as to what software to use, but the basic set up I learned about was to use Amember (http://www.amember.com/) to manage the payment, registration, login and use Moodle (http://docs.moodle.org/) to manage the content.

Moodle is free. Amember isn't. Moodle is a CMS developed specifically for teaching courses online, which makes it a great CMS to use for membership sites as your course will generally be set up around a teaching environment. Amember will handle all the financial parts of the membership site and allow and prevent access to your content.

The two programs integrate well, though you will need to integrate them.

You could also use WordPress to manage your content. It can also integrate well with Amember with the addition of a plugin (which may cost more on top of Amember). Seeing how the set up works with Amember and Moodle I'd recommend using both.

Ultimately what you're looking for is some CMS to manage your content, and something to collect money and control access to your content.

Watchdog
11-17-2008, 05:09 AM
I attempted this with my site for the sheet metal industry. My original Shop Pass idea and site years ago was a members only site that offered reading material, printable tutorials and work sheets - a forum that would dedicated to advanced learning of several trades.

I offered this for 99.00 annual fee for business owners. This "pass" was for them to offer their employees a place to learn in a "sort of structured" way. It would have included online test that would prepare for license and certification should it ever have got that far.

Only a hand full of takers -

My mistake was that we had already offered a forum for the industry. So after the word got out that this service was availabe, we did gain more traffic but insted of becoming paying subscribers, they just flocked the free forums - turned out ok in the long run as we now have the only dedicted forum for that particular industry.

billbenson
11-17-2008, 08:09 AM
If the subject matter doesn't bother you, look at some of the adult webmaster forums. One of the business models of adult sites is membership sites. Most adult webmasters have mainstream sites as well and many are very professional and knowledgeable.

orion_joel
11-18-2008, 12:27 AM
Some good ideas, i will have to take a look at Moodle and Amember, thanks for those names Vangogh.

Watchdog, i can understand what you mean, while the fee doesn't sound to bad, it just depends on people's perception of the value they expect to receive. What i am thinking about is a little lower monthly fee, between $5 and $10 a month, with a lot of short tip video's, written content, and maybe audios. While the content will mostly be stuff that can be found else where, if you look long and hard enough i aim to bring it all together and have such a volume the price seems insignificant compared to the time saved searching for it all. Do you happen to have any names of products that you used or was it all custom built.

I may have a look around Bill, I do get where you are coming from so i will maybe check this avenue out as well.

vangogh
11-18-2008, 02:05 AM
Be careful about setting such a low monthly fee. That could create the perception there's only so much value inside. Higher cost often leads to a perception of greater value.

I think the success of a membership site comes down to many of the same things success in other business models requires. You want to have valuable content behind the login that helps people in some way and you want to promote your site to the people most likely to be interested.

The course I took is closed at the moment, but I'll post a link when it reopens. It was on the expensive side ($100/month) and it might be more expensive when it reopens, but it was a great course and I learned a lot about business models and marketing in general.

SteveC
11-18-2008, 02:15 AM
It's pretty easy to set this up... suggest you use Pay Pal Subscription as gateway provider... couple this with their IPN system to ensure montly payments are maintained... and then all you need do is use a standard login type system that sets a session variable so people cannot bookmark pages and avoid login systems, etc... as every page has a check to ensure everyone is logged in.

I cannot point you to a out of the CMS as I don't use any... all of ours are custom designed to suit.... Dreamweaver however comes with a suitable login extension... and I'm sure you could download a trail copy to play around with.

vangogh
11-18-2008, 02:24 AM
Steve I'm guessing you would sooner develop a custom CMS in house, but if you were ever looking for an open source CMS for a learning site, Moodle is pretty good. It's built with the idea of that the content on it will be part of a course of study. It's structured in a way that mimics how many courses are presented.

The course I took does ultimately use PayPal to collect the money in much the way you describe. I think there were reasons for why it was integrated through Amember, but I'm not remembering at the moment. Next time I log into the site I'll poke around and see if I can find it.

SteveC
11-18-2008, 01:56 PM
Steve I must check out all of these Open Source Solutions as I am sure I could use many of them... many of them might actually save us time and could be better.... however finding the time to do all of this is a challenge.

I don't know what is happening in the States, but work is amazingly good at the moment... we're picking up clients left, right and center and we're even getting the odd one from over that way.... although I could I imagine get hundreds more, if I went for one of these virtual offices and did a little advertising...

vangogh
11-19-2008, 12:05 AM
Some open source solutions solutions are really good and do save a lot of time. I try to take on projects where I'll have to use one or another just to be able to work with it and form an opinion. Some like WordPress I've liked a lot and others like osCommerce I'd be fine never working with again.

I can't speak for everyone in the States, but business for me has been fine. I've been picking up new clients myself lately. I won't use the phrase amazingly good, but my business has been growing these last few months.

orion_joel
11-19-2008, 07:30 PM
I think that you will find many of the Opensource CMS would save you considerable time once you have established even a little knowledge of the workings of it SteveC. Because really if you are able to develop your own solutions as it stands anyway, once you have a knowledge of the coding style of a pre existing CMS, you should have no problem adding to it to meet your ultimate needs.

Even for me, and i am a non-programmer, i get by with adding in other 3rd party extensions and usually can make it do everything i want this way. But i think that you would quickly find easier or better ways to do things.

I have found that moodle is available to install through Fantastico, but have also found that some recommend not doing so, and installing it properly, the manual way. For me Fantastico would be so much easier, as i tend to find, FTP takes forever for me and moodle is something like 30-40mb. However it is something that i am going to look at so, may try the Fantastico install and then reinstall properly later on if i decide to use it.

Additionally i can understand the thought on charging a higher rate for this sort of thing, and creating an impression of better quality. However i also don't want to price myself out of members range that only have limited resources, and cannot afford a monthly membership of $20 or $30. Although i guess it is numbers, is it easier to sign up 100 people to $30 a month subscription or 600 people to $5 a month subscription. I guess hard call, you may be able to better justify the cost of $5 to 600 people then $30 to 100 people. Something i will have to consider with the content i have or if i need to work on more content before moving forward.

vangogh
11-19-2008, 10:44 PM
Joel the thing is you aren't necessarily pricing yourself out of the market by going from $5 to $30. It's quite possible more people will sign up at $30 than will at $5. The ideal thing to do is test varying prices to see which results in the most signups.

Don't automatically think that lower price leads to more subscribers. Often lower price leads to less subscribers.

billbenson
11-20-2008, 05:45 AM
You also want to test auto rebills and chargebacks.

Watchdog
11-29-2008, 05:38 AM
Yes there are many folks like to do things on the cheap, but there are many that don't mind the fees and even become more invloved because they do pay a fee. I joined a networking group and pay about 24.00 a month...

The jurys still out on whether or not the money is well spent..but at the end of the day, I typically learn from these resource sites, I have had great success on a couple of my web sites and it's all part of the biz.