Given that your web building experience is primarily with Wordpress...


You're lacking a large part of the skillset necessary to do what you want without using a plugin. That skillset isn't learned in a week or two and I doubt you would be sufficiently prepared to tackle this yourself without a year (or more) of dedicated learning.

I've mentioned in the past - it's against youtube TOS to be using their embeds for a paid membership site where users must pay to access the content.

You can however set up paid lessons directly on youtube.

So you are planning to host the full videos elsewhere, correct?

There are already paid videos available on youtube too. For example, I know of a channel that does free content, but mid month there is a "special more indepth" video that costs something like $2.50 to see - payment made via youtube and the video becomes accessible.

I see that $10 a month thing - looks promising.

Make the videos and optimize for web. Then take those 5 minute cut versions, and load those to youtube. Those are teasers and will be an additional traffic source for you.

If these are not behind the paid area, then stick them up on a page on your main site. And feel free to use the youtube embed for them.

Would need to know more about the content itself.

Are all these videos on one complete subject that should just be it's own product? Or will there be multiple products in the end?

If it's multiple products, then you need a plugin capable of allowing you to add products, which each member gains access upon paying for them.

There are different plugins for setting up membership sites.

As for where/how to host the videos, you can investigate paid services or host them via amazon S3. It can be mere pennies a month with amazon - depending on how much you have and how often it's streamed.

Again, that is only one solution.

I also have access to easy video player (which is now easy video suite). Gives me an upload area on my server to store into amazon, and then take those videos and embed them anywhere on my server (ie: inside private member area).

But you don't need evp necessarily either. Depends on what you are most comfortable using and what your overall budget is.

Anyway, it doesn't have to be wishlist - but could be. You will want to start looking at blog posts on the web for different wordpress membership plugins and find all the specifics of what you want to do and how they all work.

Take some further time to investigate and see if you can find some how to videos on youtube as well.

Consider everything you want. For example, if you want your membership to be available for affiliates to promote via someplace like JVZoo and maybe you have an Aweber autoresponder then you'll want something that has the appropriate add-ons to integrate all these things. These will affect your final decision on what will work best for you.

Spend some time on some other wordpress run membership sites and peek under their hoods to see which software they are using.

Also, when in other membership sites take notice of how all the content is arranged so you can determine if the same navigation is what you are going to want.