Membership Site Wealth

Tools Needed For A Membership Site

There are certain types of tools that you will need to build and operate your membership website. There may also be tools that you need to make available to your site members as well.

Obviously, you need a domain name and web hosting services. The domain name should state what the topic of the site is, so do not select this until you’ve decided on what topic of membership site you will have.

When it comes to web hosting, however, you have numerous choices. You may not require a great deal of disk space, depending on the content that you have in mind, but you will most likely require a great deal of bandwidth, depending on the number of members you expect to have, and how they will use the site.

On the other hand, you do need a great deal of both bandwidth and disk space if you will have a lot of media, such as audio and video on the site. Consider the content that you will be using carefully before selecting a web hosting package. Also, since your members will be paying for access, the web hosting company should have at least a 99% uptime guarantee, and you do want it to move fast – so consider a dedicated server, as opposed to shared hosting.

You will need software to either create or manage your membership website. This comes in two flavors, basically. First, there is software that simply manages. It creates the doorways to your membership site, and handles billing for you. It may do numerous other things as well, but as for the actual pages that make up your membership site - this management software does not provide that.

Then there is software that includes all of the bells and whistles. It will not only help you to easily create your pages, it will also provide overall management and make maintenance much easier. Features that you may want to look for include;

- The ability to bill customers, automatically
- Automated signups and expirations
- The ability to create various subscription types
- Logging of IP addresses, so that when it becomes obvious that someone is sharing their account information with non-members, that account is disabled.
- The ability for the administrator to email members
- Automated password recovery
- The ability to add content pages, with the use of preset templates.

You will also want an autoresponder. One may be included in your membership software – but make sure that you have one so that you can easily communicate with your members.

Obviously, you need a way to accept payments, and a way to bill members automatically each month. Most membership software and management software have this ability, but will only work with certain services. Find out what they are.

If your membership software does not handle content pages for you, you will need an HTML editor, and an FTP client to upload the pages that you create. You may also need a graphics editor to create or edit graphics.

I will write another blog post about the tools that your members may require. So look for that post as well.

Posted in Membership Sites