Turn Your WordPress Blog Into a Membership Site.
WordPress blogs are cool, once you know how to install and configure them they are quick to set up and easy to manage. I really like that I can avoid most of the design work of a static site by simply changing or tweaking a theme that somebody else made.
One thing though has been a problem. How to make a WordPress blog suitable for use as the platform for a membership site. There have been several shots at the task but until recently I had not found anything that worked for me. Some WordPress membership site plugins were badly coded and did not do what they were supposed to. Some WordPress membership software packages had very clunky interfaces that were offputting to site visitors and some did not have the basic kinds of functionality that I needed.
Recently though things seems to have changed for the better. I am now using a new plugin set called Micro Membership on one of my sites here: Marketers College, online business training for the time being the site is not live and I am still working on the layout and content before transfering over the training vids from their current home. The Micro Membership plugin set is ONLY available through the Warrior Forum at this time but I understand that it will be going on general sale, but at a higher price, in the near future.
Lo and behold though! This morning I got an email from Matt over at Mass-Automation. He has just released a new plugin to manage WordPress membership sites as well. I have not yet tried this one but I am happy to point it out as, in my experience, any product under the Mass-Automation brand is always well made and worth serious consideration.
It looks as though both tools cover much of the same ground in basic terms. People sign up and pay money according to the schedule that you set. Micro-Membeship has a very useful future posting facility so that the webmaster can add content to the site for future months meaning that sites can be, to some degree, set and forget contentwise.
Matt's WP Membership Tool lacks the future posting facility but there are ways to handle this function within WordPress anyway and seems to offer a little more from the perspective of managing users. There is quite a difference in cost though. Ralph Pruitts Micro-Membership tool costs, for the time being, just $17.95 for unlimited use on any domain that you own. The Mass-Automation tool is priced at $49.99 for any number of sites but with a maximum number of members of 100 – OR – $99.99 for a maximum number of members of 1000. So, much more costly but in comparison with some of the market leading WordPress membership packages this is still very good value for money given that more than one package charges $100 or more for a single install on a single domain.
For the time being I am going to stick with Micro-Memberships from Ralph Pruitt, if for no other reason than I already have the software. I will probably get hold of the Mass-Automation product as well so that I can play with it.
Bottom line, there are now several ways to make you WordPress blog able to support the ongoing revenue stream that a membership site can provide and, in my opinion, either of these relatively low cost tools will be able to meet the needs of most WordPress webmasters seeking to run subscription/membership sites.
Filed under Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips, Making Money, Reviews by on Oct 14th, 2009. 
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