Thinking about setting up a membership site?

aMember PRO is a flexible membership and subscription management PHP script that we use to manage payments and our affiliate program on PrivateLabelCentral.com.

aMember has support for numerous payment systems including:

• 1ShoppingCart
• 2Checkout
• Authorize.Net
• BeanStream
• CCBill
• Clickbank
• E-Gold
• ePassPorte
• Google Checkout
• Multicards
• NoChex
• PayPal
• PaySystems
• Plimus
• Probilling
• VeriSign PayFlow
• and many more…

Amember PRO also allows you to manage your users manually – without any 3rd party payment system.

aMember Pro also supports integration with more than 50 third-party content management services and autoresponder services such as:

• vBulletin
• Joomla
• WordPress
• Aweber

aMember is a good membership software solution if you plan to sell digital subscriptions and downloadable products such as ebooks.

If you’ve purchased digital products, you’ve no doubt seen the aMember software in use by other marketers. The interface looks like that shown in the screenshot below (trade out the lilac for a light grey) on the signup page for our Hobbies: Scrapbooking Article Pack.

I am NOT a geek, yet I found the installation easy. Product setup was a wee bit trickier, but still entirely manageable with a little bit of help from their technical support which offered timely responses.

The good news is that installation of the software is now free with the PRO version.

Go on, check out the demo and download the free trial of Amember PRO.

Cheers,

P.S. They also offer a 30-day no-hassle moneyback guarantee, so you have nothing to lose if you buy it and find it doesn’t perfectly suit your needs.

Two days ago I challenged NPT readers to guess which membership model I would use for my new multi-media blogger training course.

Watch the video below to see which membership model I chose.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to implement it. After spending most of the morning wracking my brains — and surfing the Internet — and coming up with no good answers, I will definitely be taking Stu’s Wishlist membership model training course.

… and the Membership Winners are …

• Stu
• Rafael
• Brat
• Gord
• Steve

Congratulations! You will each be receiving an email from me as we get closer to the launch date, with your membership details.

With all my affiliate site posts queued up for the next 2 months and some time on my hands this weekend, I decided to get to work making the Super Affiliate Handbook available as an online tutorial, through a membership site.

My primary concern was how to set up a membership site easily.

Gail and I use Amember on PrivateLabelCentral.com. The setup is relatively simple for someone who has worked through installation directions more than a few times, but I did manage to mess things up with some bad file permissions that required another intervention by my favorite geek and host master extraordinaire, Steve Hetrick. The temporary downtime aside, I am quite happy with Amember.

However, I recalled reading that there might be a plugin available that could turn a WordPress blog into a membership site.

What could be more perfect, especially since the main focus of the tutorials is affiliate blogging.

My search brought Wishlist Member to the top of the results.

Per the sales page, the list of features include:

• Unlimited Membership Levels
• Simple Installation With New or Existing WordPress Blog
• Flexible Membership Options
• Sequential Content Delivery
• Control Viewed Content
• Shopping Cart Integration
• Easy Member Management
• Multi-Level Access
• Total Content Protection
• Secure RSS Feeds
• Subscription Length Control
• Login Redirection
• Create Your Membership Site Using WordPress & WL Member
• “Sneak Peak” Content Display
• Custom Error Pages
• Partial Content Display

On confirming that Wishlist Member could be integrated with my shopping cart of choice (Clickbank) and my Aweber autoresponder, I decided that it was worth a try. Note: Wishlist Member also integrates with 1ShoppingCart, PayPal, Cydec, Autoresponseplus and GetResponse and generic systems.

The single licence version of Wishlist Member is $97 and the multiple licence version is $297. With a 30-day refund policy, I opted to buy the multiple licence version – realizing that if the plugin worked as well as promised, I would definitely want to use it on other blogs.

My experience with Wishlist Member

After buying Wishlist Member, I purchased a new domain, set up hosting, did a 1-minute WordPress installation, uploaded the plugin, installed the theme that came with the plugin… and was off to the races.

Within 30 minutes, I’d watched a few of the tutorial videos, set up 8 modules using Pages (you can restrict member access by post, page, categories and comments) , a sequential upgrade that drips content over time and input some articles. By the way, the video tutorials are accessible without having to purchase the product.

The video below shows the results of those 30-minutes, as well as how membership content is protected, even when someone is smart enough to figure out the URL of a higher-level module.

If you’d like to view a larger sized video, it’s available on YouTube.

The only thing that would make Wishlist Member absolutely perfect, is if it could be integrated with the more popular forum software, such as phpBB or vBulletin. I haven’t heard that this is planned, but with all the other features that were integrated after user suggestions were submitted, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that option turn up at some point — or at least, I’m fervently hoping it will — Are ya listening, Stu?

Other than that,  Wishlist Member is a GREAT choice for bloggers who want to set up their own membership sites, especially in terms of ease of set up and price.

Wishlist Member gets a 2 big thumbs up from me and my HIGHEST recommendation.