Wishlist Member Review: How to Turn Your WordPress Blog into a Membership Site
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.
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Posted / Revised on July 12, 2009 under Blogging, Product Reviews, Site Tools  |
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Rosalind Gardner is a Super Affiliate blogger, author, speaker, and Internet marketing consultant. For more info, subscribe to her No-Hype, No-BS, No Spam NPT newsletter and join Affiliate Blogger PRO to get answers to all your affiliate marketing questions. Thanks for visiting!
Hi Rosalind!
I have a friend who just bought WishList Member and I’m helping him with installation and setup. It’s giving me an insight into what it actually can do.
It is a prhazetty slick plugin for WordPress and it’s pretty easy to configure once I went over the videos.
I may be missing something but when it’s setup using PayPal, IF someone cancels they have to cancel themselves thru PayPal BUT it doesn’t notify your WL Member backoffice that someone has cancelled. Most membership scripts I’ve been looking at recently automate that.
Also would be nice to be able to use PayPal’s sandbox account for testing the process. Maybe next update.
Surprisingly, another thing missing is some sort of built-in affiliate system. You have to have to use & integrate another affiliate software to use with it.
I do like the overall flexibility WL Member allows you by using WordPress platform. Some nice features too. But I’m still on the fence about using it because of the things I mentioned above.
Thanks! ALWAYS love to get your take on these sort of things.
Rick Wilson
Hi Rick,
I didn’t check the Paypal integration functionality, so thanks for adding your comment about working with that aspect.
I decided to stick with Clickbank, primarily for their affiliate program and the fact that I wasn’t prepared to have to make affiliate payments via PayPal.
Cheers,
Ros
**”I didn’t check the Paypal integration functionality, so thanks for adding your comment about working with that aspect.”**
Yes, I realize that you mainly use ClickBank for most, if not all, of your products/services. I just thought I’d bring that up since many membership site owners use PayPal as their payment processor.
How has ClickBank’s recurring feature been working for you?
**”I decided to stick with Clickbank, primarily for their affiliate program and the fact that I wasn’t prepared to have to make affiliate payments via PayPal.”**
I can certainly understand that! I have a love/hate relationship with PP as it is. LOL
I’m mainly an affiliate marketer so I don’t have much in the way of my own products/services yet. I probably should go back and look over CB’s site again and see what’s new for the merchant (vendor) side.
Thanx again!
Rick Wilson
Hi Rick,
I’ll let you know how the recurring works once I get the product launched… but in the meantime, I see so many of my IM colleagues using it, that I must assume that it works absolutely fine.
Cheers,
Ros
Hi Rick,
From what I was told by Stu, one of the developers of wishlist, they are either working on it, or have completed the integration with paypal to include the ability to control access if a cancellation occurs and this will work automatically.
If by chance it is not done yet, I know they have it planned.
Take care,
Mark
Thanks for your helpful information. I’d really like it. I’ll try it for my site. Thanks again.
Hi Ros,
This is an amazing plug-in. It has my mind spinning with ideas because it’s so easy to use.
Can you tell a little bit about your experience with integrating it with Aweber? When people sign up, are the names entered in your Aweber account? And I know that WishList Member has email capability–when you use it with Aweber, do the emails go through Wishlist or Aweber?
Thank you. Your reviews are always so helpful. Your experience in with a product counts highly in my opinion of it.
Thank you again,
Julia
Hi Julia,
Wishlist Member IS an amazing plugin to be sure.
The list (or lists) gets built in your Aweber account, so if you want to send to all, you’d use Aweber. Which of course is brilliant, because then you can just set up the blog broadcaster in Aweber and never have to write an email. I’m ALL for automation.
Cheers,
Ros
Thanks, Ros. This sounds great.
I have a promotion that I’m running where I would love to integrate my teleconference invitations with aweber. Doesn’t work that way.
Whenever I can do it, I love automation!!
Thank you for the information.
Julia
Hi Ros,
Wonderful post! My husband and I have recently used Wishlist member on our new site. We use this to provide an on going membership to our Irritable Bowel Syndrome help site.
It was really easy to install and the integration to Clickbank and Aweber is so simple. We love it.
Actually we love it so much he is going to use it on his site. Amember looks great too but we wanted something that was integrated into wordpress and easy to use for us (not that techie!)
Great post Ros, thanks.
Kim
P.S Anyone wondering how to learn about affiliate marketing…GET Ros’ Super Affiliate Handbook…we read it last year with NO experience and now earn good money and should be replacing our job income VERY soon. (Ros did NOT ask me to say that!!)
Hey Kim,
Well gee… you coulda shared that find with me sooner! LOL
But glad to hear that you’re loving Wishlist member as much as I am (see my remarks to Stu McLaren). It truly it an amazing tool for bloggers.
And thanks SO much for your comment about the SAH which will soon be an even better product thanks to Stu’s software.
Cheers,
Ros
Rosalind,
Thanks for your kind words about WishList Member
We currently do not have an add-on for any forums but many of our other customers have shared that the BBPress.org plugin works well with WL Member as well as SimplePress (http://simplepressforum.com/) since they both the same user database as WL Member.
That basically means as long as your members are logged into your site, they will be automatically logged into your forum because it uses the same username and password.
So with that said, as long as you had a link to the forum on your blog, non-members wouldn’t be able to see it or access it without logging in first (if you used the hide/show feature built into WLM).
We are currently working on an add-on that will provide deeper integration/protection with these forums but the release date is unclear at this time.
—
As for Rick’s question about automatic cancellation with PayPal, it does happen when you are using the Full PayPal Integration as outlined in the Integration tab.
If you follow those steps, a person will automatically be blocked from accessing your membership if they stop paying with their PayPal account.
Should anyone have any specific question please feel free to ask us at our support desk.
You can reach us here:
http://wishlistproducts.com/support
Hopefully that helps.
Thanks Rosalind!
Take care.
Stu
Hey Stu,
Thanks for stopping by and for the forum integration tips.
BTW, did I tell you how much I LOVE WishList Member?
I’ve literally been putting this project off for years because I’ve become so blog-oriented that I didn’t want to have to learn yet another piece of complex software.
But, I’ve been working on my project for most of the day and I can’t believe how easy your software has made the process. Because WishList Member removed the pain (learning curve), I’m actually having alot of FUN… not to mention that this will definitely help add to my bottom line!
Thanks,
Ros
Thanks Ros!
Glad you like it.
You’ll be REALLY pleased when you find out all the things that are coming (tease tease)
I (like you) just love WordPress so much that I didn’t want to use something else to build a membership site. The problem was, we were having so much trouble with other solutions and we were never getting around to actually launching our sites.
Initially, that’s the reason we created WLM – just to have a good solution that “played nice” with WordPress.
BTW – a couple plugins you should also look at using which will give your site an added “punch”…
TS Custom Widgets – will allow you to display different widgets in your sidebar for each page, post, category etc. You can REALLY tailor your sidebar to the content they are viewing (very cool).
Download Monitor – helps you protect files within your membership from being shared to “non-members”.
Audit Trail – helps you see who logs into your site and what content they view (which can be very interesting).
Hopefully that helps.
All the best.
Stu
@Rosalind,
Thanks for the post and video. It helped a lot. There is one thing
that remains for me:
@Stu,
Does the Wishlist plugin allow for displaying -parts of- user profile
page to certain member levels only?
Thanks for the hints on the plugins BTW.
Cheers,
Friso,
Friso,
With WLM you would not be able to show “parts” of a user profile.
However, you do have the option to allow/not allow your members to view their full profile.
Hopefully that helps.
Take care.
Stu
Hi Ros,
You mentioned wishlist integration with some forum software.
You might want to look at a wordpress based forum software-plugin called Simple Press Forum. The site is http://simplepressforum.com/.
I have only installed it in one location but I like the layout of it and it appears to be stable, supported well with a good forum of it’s own, and some good people behind it. To access one needs to login through the normal wordpress login window so it should be protected by wishlist. There is also another plugin (can’t remember the name offhand) that allows customization of the traditional wordpress login box as which would fit well with this plugin forum.
At any rate, it might be worth checking out to see if it fits your needs.
All the best,
Mark
Hi Mark,
Thank you SO much for that tip… I’ll give SimplePressForum a shot.
Cheers,
Ros
You’re welcome Ros…
For the custom login box I mentioned before but couldn’t recall…it was the BM Custom Login plugin. It works really well and looks great anytime someone needs to login to a forum, membersite by going through the wordpress login box.
I’ve had Wishlist for quite awhile now but if I recall Stu gives purchasers a whole list of really good plugins that integrate with WL and that may have been where I first heard of the custom login plugin.
Take care,
Mark
rOS,
Hope I am in the right place. I have ordered two of your books and set up blue host. I am so newbie!!! Now I am second guessing myself wondering if I should have just starting blogging on my social network site (NING) and adding everything as best I can. I really want to be an affiliate marketer> I have a product that is ready to go so other affiliates can market for me right way. What do you think? I am terribly confused. Should I bluehost or blog for now?
Thanks for your helpful information.
Great info….thanks
Ros,
Blue Host is way above my head, so I cancelled the subscription with them. I researched thirdsphere again today. Now I am back on the site to order from then so you can get paid. I was almost completing with ordering on their site directly and I came back to order from you since your site was there for me when I began to brainstorm. Thanks for all you’ve done thus far.
Excellent site, keep up the good work
Cool site, love the info. I do a lot of research online on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks,
A definite great read..
I’m having trouble with integrating my *shared* Bluehost account with Wishlist Member and Aweber. My Aweber subscriber page (after ordering and registering) shows my bluehost email address rather than the subscriber’s email address, so the subscriber NEVER gets the email to confirm list membership.
Has anyone found a way around this? Bluehost says there is no way, Wishlist Member support is VERY slow to respond (no reply yet to another question I had over 24 hours ago).
@Bill – The reason you may not have recieved a reply within 24 is if your ticket was submitted outside of support hours.
As stated on our site, we provide support M-F, 9am-5pm EST and all tickets submitted after 1pm EST on Friday will be handled the following Monday.
So it’s likely your ticket was submitted after these hours.
In regards to your Aweber challenges, I would double and triple check you have followed the instructions exactly as it describes in “Quick Start Guide #4″. The most common mistake with the Aweber integration is accidentally adding a “space” either in front of or at the end of the autoresponder “list name”.
Either way, if you’ve submitted a support ticket, our team will get back to you the next business day so they’ll be able to take a closer look at whatever challenges you maybe having.
All the best.
Stu
Hi,
Great post. I’m using Wishlist and I’m pretty happy with it so far.
One question — how did you do the “My Modules” widget in the sidebar?
Cheers,
Adam
Hey Ros,
Thanks for sharing wistlist, looks and sounds
VERY interesting…I plan on purchasing very soon!
I feel you’ve chosen the combo model…hope Im right!
Thanks again,
Ron
I looked at Wishlist Member as well. I have tried a few different WP plugins for membership sites over the last few years, but I think that Magic Members is still my favorite. They have all of the features that I need, but the reason that I have enjoyed them so much is their support staff. Anytime I had an integration problem (such a certain forum plugins) they got everything working for me.