7 Mistakes to Avoid When Building WordPress Membership Sites

I recorded this while traveling after reading Nathalie Lussier’s (founder and CEO of AmbitonAlly) article on things you don’t wanna do when you’re building your membership site on WordPress. She had fifteen of them but I’m gonna share seven of them with you and I’ll add my little twist to it.

1. Don’t Pick the Wrong Hosting Company – If you pick the wrong hosting company, and I’m not gonna name the ones you want to avoid, but you really want to make sure you’re building on a solid foundation. We’re a big fan of WPEngine. That’s where I do all of my hosting and that’s where we recommend all of our clients do their hosting. It makes a huge difference because not only is their performance really good but their security is out of this world. They feel so confident about their security that if you have any trouble, they will un-hack your site at no charge. That’s included in the price of it. So, just make sure you get some good hosting.
2. Don’t Pick an Inflexible Theme – There’s a ton of themes that are really good for building membership sites. The key is to make sure that you have the ability to put a really nice menu across the top. It’s very easy to add menu widgets on the sidebars and you have the ability to reformat it. There are a lot of options: if you want to write me I’d be more than happy to share some specific ones with you, but make sure you don’t cut yourself short here.
3. Don’t Build Your Site in a Folder – Make sure to build your site on a subdomain. That’s really important. I got a lot of reasons why that’s a good thing: like it’s easier to move your site when it’s on a subdomain. You also need the flexibility. Don’t make the mistake of building your site in a folder.
4. It’s Really Important That You Get an SSL Certificate – It’s gonna make the lock on your address bar turn on. Google is now penalizing folks who don’t have an SSL Certificate. Don’t cheap out and make sure you spend whatever it is your hosting company will charge you for. It can run you around seventy five dollars for the year. WPEngine actually includes an SSL Certificate with all their hosting accounts. That’s just another benefit of using them.
5. Selecting the Wrong Tools – If you’re a fan of Nathalie Lussier AccessAlly, that a great membership site building tool. We’re a real fan of Memberium. Both of them work really well with Infusionsoft. Just make sure you understand the tools you’re using. Make sure you don’t have any regrets about the tool shortcomings that are impacting your site.
6. Not Upselling or Cross-selling – Whenever we build a site, we always wanna have a first course that’s less expensive. That’s a logical next step to your core offering. We build lead magnets into membership sites, and it’s basically a sales funnel. It enables you to always be moving people along so they get more and more of your content. They get a lot of value and you get more money. It’s really important that whenever you subscribe, let’s say to Redbox, you have available upsells. They’re always trying to email you and trying to get you to do more things. We build all of our sites with ghosted images. You don’t have access to so people click and get to a sales page. The problem with not doing that is you’re leaving money on the table. You really want to have those teasers so that people would want to buy something else from you.
7. Avoid the Cheap, Do-It-Yourself” Route – When you’re building a membership site and you’re doing it by yourself and you’ve never done it before, you can only do the best that you know how to do. Working with a team, you might as well work with a team like our, means that you’re getting three to four membership site builds a month worth of experience. We understand the best practices. We understand what works and what doesn’t work. We try to keep you away from those pitfalls.

So anyway, those are the seven mistakes you want to avoid when building your membership site on WordPress with Infusionsoft.

Take care.