I realize that you have a choice in what membership software to use. I am extremely happy with my selection of membership software, but you might have your heart set on some other solution. If that’s the case, I want you to be aware of some specific things to look for when choosing a membership script, and those things are drip content, protected downloads, membership levels, and autoresponder and payment integration.
The biggest thing you need to look for is protected downloads. After someone pays you, do they have a way of creating their own membership account, where they log in with their own unique username and password, that no one else in the membership site has? If the answer is no, then you do not have a membership site. Definitely look for some download protection. And in fact, most modern membership software also has sharing protection. If somebody is passing around their username and password, the system will notice that they are all logging in from the same IP address and will shut off their account for sharing.
The next thing to look for are membership levels. Can you create a silver and a gold level, where the gold level gets twice as much content as the silver level or vice versa? Can you make one level a free level and one level a paid level? This is definitely very important when having membership site software.
Next, does your software drip the content? Can you schedule a bunch of information ahead of time and when somebody joins your site, they get a little bit at a time until they had completed the entire course? That’s very important, but it’s even more important that if somebody quits your site and joins up later, they do not have access to all the information they missed out on. If somebody joins your site, they start at the beginning of the training and the longer they are in your site, the more they get, but if they quit and come back, they begin right back at the very beginning.
The final piece of the puzzle that you should look for in a membership software is integration with third party services. If you are going to have a paid membership site, you need a way to accept payments. It’s just that simple. The most popular source of payments on the internet in internet marketing is PayPal. Make sure that your membership site at least supports PayPal payments. If somebody can click a button on your site, pay you instantly either with their PayPal account or with their credit card, you get the money and they get their instant access. This should not be a requirement for you to manually add users. This should be built in and integrated with the membership software, so that when somebody joins, it is completely on autopilot and 100% hands-off on your part.
And finally, make sure that the membership software supports third party autoresponders as well. An autoresponder is a mailing list software, a mailing list service. The most popular one is called AWeber, and the membership software you have should have the capability that when they join your membership site, it automatically subscribes them to your email autoresponder mailing list as well so that you can send notifications via email to your entire subscriber base.
When looking for a membership software, check for protected downloads, membership levels, drip content, PayPal integration, and AWeber integration.