How to Launch Your BuddyBoss Project So Success Is Guaranteed

We get a lot of calls from business owners with trouble building their first BuddyBoss site. They purchase BuddyBoss and follow the tutorials. The tutorials are good, but it's their first time. They often try to get help from a good Wordpress developer. That's a good move since BuddyBoss ride on top of Wordpress.

But still, they hit a roadblock.

They've spent a lot of time on it and realize it's going to take even more time to figure this out. They realize building a BuddyBoss site is a lot of work. That's when they out to us for help.

We are happy to help and we can do a good job for them. But this approach can be very painful. They end up paying more than they should and they delay getting their product up and running.

In this article, I'm going to cover two recommendations that will go a long way in improving your chances of success. We want to give you two recommended add-ons that will make a difference. We want you to make the best use of what BuddyBoss has to offer and bypass some mistakes that can keep you from succeeding.

BuddyBoss and the Functions You MUST Provide

BuddyBoss is an add-on to Wordpress. Wordpress is a popular website building platform. BuddyBoss adds the community and social media features on top of Wordpress. Having Wordpress expertise is definitely a positive.

Visit my What the Heck is BuddyBoss and When Is It Best to Use It? article if you want a more in depth review of BuddyBoss and the features it provides.

When you build a BuddyBoss site, you are going to need the following functions. We see a lot of first time BuddyBoss builders struggle because they don't spend time at the start addressing these properly.

1. Every BuddyBoss site needs good login / logout features so members can get easy get to their content. This should include a forgot password function. This would be new to Wordpress developers who have never built a site with membership access. The typical www website doesn't need login / logout features except for site administrators.
2. You MUST give members easy access to the materials they have requested or purchased. You need to make the experience for getting to their content as simple and straightforward as possible.
3. You need a way to easily sell your products. These are the e-commerce features for selling and accepting payments for items you sell.
4. Just as important if you offer free courses or trial access, you'll need a way for people to register to get easy access to these too.
5. You need a way to control who gets access to what when you offer multiple items for sale. These can be the access you give to your BuddyBoss community. It can include the access to course materials or resources like videos and/or downloadable that are part of your program.

Providing Access to Your Site Content

BuddyBoss has excellent community and social media building features. It's what leads a lot of us to select it for adding these features into your site. BuddyBoss shines here. This is where first timers will spend a lot of their time and it should be.

A key component for addressing these is getting a good membership plugin. One of our favorites is MemberPress.

• MemberPress integrates really well with BuddyBoss and can be used to take care of the 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 items I've listed above.
• MemberPress provides features so members can register for a free course or trial access.
• MemberPress provides e-commerce features so you can use to sell memberships giving members access to your content.
• Memberpress can be use to give and control access to the community features made available by BuddyBoss and any other feature made available via your Wordpress site. This can include features like Wordpress blog posts and pages. Resources like worksheets, videos and other forms of media that are a part of your materials.  If you include course materials using a learning management system like LearnDash, MemberPress can control access and course enrollment too.
• MemberPress also keeps people who should have access from getting to your content.

Way to often, we see first time BuddyBoss builders miss out on the features provided plugins like MemberPress. If they knew about it when they started, it would greatly simplify building the site and the effort required for maintaining it.

Upgrading the Way You Sell

An option to also consider for addressing your e-commerce needs is WooCommerce. It's a top e-commerce plugin for Wordpress site and one we highly recommend. It integrates very well with Buddyboss and many other plugins like LearnDash that are used along with BuddyBoss. If you want to sell subscriptions or sell products with recurring payments, WooCommerce Subscriptions upgrades WooCommerce with very good subscription management features.

I'll continue to publish other articles with tips on how best to make use of BuddyBoss and avoiding mistakes that will cost you long term.