How can a members forum help my membership?

Membership sites are all about creating a following. Having a community of like minded individuals all discussing and consuming content around a specific topic is a great way to create a successful following. Yet, not all membership sites implement a forum successfully.

Benefits of a members forum:

1. One of the things you want to accomplish ASAP after your membership site launches is member interaction. Having a members’ forum is a great way to help facilitate that interaction – not only with you and your staff, but with other members too.
2. Having a forum gives you a way to identify highly active and helpful members who you may decide to turn into forum moderators so they can contribute even more, get recognition and do some of the work you or your staff would have to do anyway.
3. If implemented correctly, a segmented forum allows you to create areas of the forum that only members who blong to a particular membership level can access. This allows you to create even more added value to your premium levels of membership – whether its for a specific course or even a coaching group.

When to launch your forum?

Starting your forum from day 1 of your membership site is probably a bad idea. Until you have reached a particular threshold with your membership, you will probably do more damage than good by launching a members’ forum.

When to launch your forum is a critical decision that is best determined when you create your membership site launch plan and strategies. Your forum is just one aspect of successfully launching (or relaunching) your membership site and if done correctly, can quickly generate hundreds of paying members.

How to get help with your forum?

WishList Member Coder is able to provide expert membership site consulting on an as needed or project basis. If you want to make sure your membership site reaches critical mass and maximum velocity, talk to us about how we can help you get there fast!

Multiple Shopping Cart Integrations?

One question some of our clients have is: can multiple shopping cart solutions be integrated at the same time?

Well, the answer is Yes.

We’ll explain why you would want to do this and how to do this in the rest of this article.

WLM is compatible with multiple shopping carts which gives you a bigger choice when integrating an e-commerce solution with your membership site. However, the question is, can you can give your potential members more choices?

It’s a given fact that some people (in fact, a large majority) prefer to make online payments with PayPal because they trust their payment details are secure as well as their identity. Yet, you can’t run an affiliate program through PayPal.

Multiple Payment Options

However, if you could also accept payment via Click Bank (one of the internets largest resources for affiliates and affiliate products) your customers would then have a choice. When a new member goes to join your membership site, you could present them with multiple payment options: PayPal or Click Bank.

For that matter, you could even have a 3rd choice with something like your own, personal branded checkout process using 1ShoppingCart.

Is One Choice Too Many?

Whatever payment solutions you decide on, be warned, split-test your options! Some internet marketers and sales psychologists preach that for every additional choice you give your potential customers, 50% of them will not make any choice at all!

Out of 100 potential customers, this equates to:

• 1 choice = 50 people will make the choice, 50 will just leave
• 2 choices = 25 people will make both choices, 75 will give up
• 3 choices = 12 people will make all 3 choices, 88 will give up along the way

This is why you need to split test offering multiple payment options.

Common sense says that if a potential customer only sees 1 payment choice AND they don’t trust that option, then you’re not making any sales anyway!

Multiple payment options is about 2 things: Trust and Convenience

Your potential customers MUST trust at least one of the payment options you provide them.

Secondly, if they trust multiple payment options, they will usually go with the one that is more convenient for them. Note, this could mean the choose something like PayPal because its convenient for them to protect their identity too.

How to Setup Multiple Shopping Carts

Setting this up is easy. In the WLM plugin dashboard, click on the Integration tab. Next, make sure the Shopping Cart sub-tab is selected (default), and select your first Shopping Cart system you want to integrate from the dropdown list.

After you have followed the instructions and entered any appropriate details (press any “save” buttons you see), just simply select another Shopping Cart to integrate with from the dropdown list and repeat.

Its as simple as that!

Enlightened Millionaire Code

This multi-level, full-featured membership site makes use of the Publisher Membership Model. Using the WP-Vype theme from SoloStream.com, this site has been implemented with significant custom modifications. These include custom pages outside of the of the WordPress structure that pull-in WordPress content and features.