Membership Site And Video Conversion Recommendations

Hi Ron, in our opinion, your friend should definitely get his content online with a membership site. If he's already done the video conversion to CD-ROM, then it's possible his video files are ready for the web as-is. Do you have any info in what file format the videos on the CD-ROMS are in? I might be able to make a suggestion if they need to be transferred to another format.

We've been doing a lot of research on the best platform to use for a membership site, and in our opinion, the platform of choice is looking to be WordPress. We have used Amember in the past for a website that we already had, but WordPress' ease of use for content creation, and the vast array of plugins for it make it a no-brainer these days. Also, the search engines seem to love WordPress sites, and rank them highly and quickly.

As far as membership plugins go, we're evaluating several, one of them being WishList Member (WishList Member Home | WishList Member - WordPress Membership Plugin). We've heard many good things about the plugin, and have been very impressed with their documentation and video demos. We also met the guys behind WordPress Member, Tracy Childers and Stu McLaren, at the latest Blogworld and New Media Expo, and they are great guys with a passion for supporting their customers in the use of their software.

As far as bandwidth goes, these days, that seems to be going away as a concern. With a quick search, I found several web hosts that offer unlimited bandwidth, like InMotion Hosting (Web Hosting - Business Class by InMotion Hosting). I've never used them, but their $6.95 a month business hosting plan offers unlimited monthly bandwidth, and WordPress as an installable package.

As far as I can tell, with the tools available for free or very inexpensively, the time to create a membership site with your content is now.

Both of these emails posts look very fishy to me, as if one is meant to direct people to the other?

I can assure you GlobalTrader and I are not the same person. I've tried to remain very objective, simply pointing out products and services that could solve the issue of starting a membership site. We have no affiliation with WishList Member or the hosting provider I pointed out.

We have some experience in running a membership site, as we have been running our site at TraderInterviews.com as a paid membership site for almost a year now. Our aim is to take the knowledge we gained from creating and marketing that site, and make it available to others at MemberCon.com

We were in the same situation with our TraderInterviews.com site, as we had an existing site that just needed a membership wrapper around it. We ended up going with Amember, as it integrated the member management and billing functions. We have it set up to password protect a specific folder/directory, and it has worked quite well for us. It has integration with many payment gateways, including PayPal and Authorize.net.

Customers can use credit cards via PayPal, but they end up going out to the PayPal site and back to us to do so. By applying for a merchant account and using Authorize.net, the entire user interaction is done on our site, which we feel is less confusing for some users.

We also looked into using ClickBank to sell our product, and we were in the same boat, with a higher price-point than most ClickBank products. This is the response we got when we asked about a one-time, greater than $100 payment:

"We are unable to give price limits as high as you need. The highest limit we can offer is $100.00. After 8 weeks of consistent sales and low refund/chargebacks, you may request a higher limit."

We found that we were allowed to do a $99 initial payment, and then payments of $99 a month for X months after that. I think they just need some history of good customer service before they allow large, one-time charge amounts.