The Innovator

The usual order for entrepreneurs is to first create a course and then, once you’ve developed a loyal following, offer an ongoing membership. You may have a natural desire to create one or the other. They’re similar with key distinctions. 

Both help bring in recurring revenue once created. A course is more “set it and forget it” than a membership, which usually involves at least monthly additional new items for members and some live interaction. 

For long-term community building, you’ll likely want to create a membership site. Memberships require getting clever with ways to keep people sticking around, which can be fun as well as challenging. 

When you’ve got your fans’ attention, you can talk to them, learn from them, sell them your latest offerings, grow together. Membership sites can also repurpose content you’ve previously created. It’s new to your audience so you get double duty from it. 

To set up your course or membership site using WordPress and AccessAlly, you integrate with a CRM (customer relationship management), software that communicates between your membership site and customers to keep client information accurately stored and up to date. 

Your CRM captures contact and payment information and “tags” clients with access permissions and purchase information. It also revokes access when needed.

AccessAlly works with several “tag-based” CRMs. You’ll need to pick one. Ontraport is my preferred CRM. (I’m an affiliate. Ask me about signing up.) Together, AccessAlly and Ontraport give you big business power. 

A course or membership site can either live in its own domain or in a subdomain. You don’t want to put it in the same installation as your main site because it’s too resource-intensive and will create a tangled mess.

The reasons to use a separate domain or subdomain are based on branding primarily since they’re both entirely separate sites. You don’t have to purchase a subdomain whereas you have to buy a separate domain (around $20/yr).

A course / membership site is normally connected to a business with a well-developed identity. As a seasoned brand designer, I’ll create a sub-brand for your membership site or create complementary brand elements for your well-designed existing brand. Naming, colors, typography and brand art are all coordinated.

AccessAlly integrates with Stripe and PayPal Payments Pro. AccessAlly order forms are simple and elegant. 

If for some reason, you’ve got a more complex setup, you can also use Ontraport’s e-commerce order forms. Or you can use a third party shopping cart such as ThriveCart or SamCart but I prefer to use AccessAlly’s built-in solution and find it usually works better too. 

  Some Free, Some Paid Model

Another option is to have one layer of free content to pique people’s interest and another layer that requires payment. I love this approach. It lets you market and sell using the same site.

Offering prizes is also fun and draws people in. You can give away memberships to fans who may have hung around a long time.

BTW, you can also use AccessAlly order forms to sell additional products you may have to offer.

Your content can be released either as soon as someone pays / gets access or you can drip-release it based on either a date or completion of previous content. There are great reasons to do both and I can help you decide what will work best for your situation.

AccessAlly allows you to upload all commonly-used forms of content, including video, audio and PDFs. Importantly, you can protect linked content so it can’t be accessed without being a member of your site and won’t be searchable online for free downloads. Note that you can also allow pages on your AccessAlly site to be accessed without logging in if you want to. For instance, if you want a free level and a paid level, you can do that. 

Gamification with courses is the ability to score people and check off tasks while completing a course. It’s been proven to increase participants’ focus, enjoyment and ability to finish modules. This means fewer people dropping off along the way.

AccessAllyPro includes ProgressAlly, which allows for the creation of these features:

• PROGRESS TRACKING — beautiful checklists and graphs
• VIDEO BOOKMARKS — with tagging automation on completion
• QUIZZES — three flexible quiz types with tagging
• CERTIFICATES — drag-and-drop certificates of completion
• PRIVATE NOTES — plus ability for students to upload homework
• REWARDS — built-in social sharing and rewards e.g. for achievements

These tools help your members becomes more involved than they would otherwise, which translates into more revenue for you.