Using WordPress as a membership site. Recommendations?

Have you looked into wordpress multi-user, aka - Wordpress MU? Wordpress.com is using this version. Instead of paid memberships you could set up a blogging community and then run ads on your members blogs.

Wordpress.com has a paid membership that disables the ads on your blog. If you want a free blog, you get ads. If you pay, no ads.

This might entice your members to sign up for a paid version of your community.

For my first WP membership site I just setup a WordPress blog with a password protected folder on top of it (using cPanel), and shared the password with my list. Keep it simple.

After I got the hang of it, I bit the bullet and paid the $200 for aMember and WordPress plugin. Best investment I ever made. Beats trying to be cheap and using someone's WordPress membership plugin that might break down the line and then they won't be around to support it.

I also got the ListMail plugin to integrate with my mailing list, and I used the Clickbank add-on just because I wanted to easily have an affiliate program, split up the checks with my business partner and possibly sell it off someday. But that's just me.

So my recommendation is WP + password protection first, then for membership site #2, WP + aMember. I would stay away from stuff like WP MU like the poster above said... it doesn't scale well... they create a new set of database tables for EACH user... not good!

Membership Sites on Crack!

Oh yeah, with aMember + WordPress you can set different levels of membership. Not only that, you can do crazy stuff like allow the silver people to only view silver posts but NOT leave comments. Then gold people can view gold or silver posts, and leave comments on either one.

Hope that helps...