How to Create A WordPress Membership Site (either paid, or non paid)

If you heard about a way to grow your community while increasing your income at the same time, would you be interested in learning more about it?

If so, it may be time for you to add a membership program to your site.

What’s a Membership Program?

A membership program is a members-only section of your site. Usually, to gain access to this section, people must pay to join the community, which is how you earn more money while building your community.

There’s several different types of membership programs, but before we jump into the specifics, lets look at two examples:

Example 1: Blogging Advice Membership Site

Leo Babauta, of Zen Habits fame, and Mary Jaksch run a project called A-List Blogging Bootcamps where they teach people how to become successful bloggers. They trade expertise for membership fees. (Their site design is powered by Thesis, too, by the way :-D).

Example 2: Makeup Advice Membership Site

University of Makeup offers their members a ton of videos to help them learn how to apply makeup flawlessly. Non-members are able to get a sneak peak at their video collection, while members have full access to the all of the videos they have to offer. Again, expertise for cash.

Notice a trend here?

In each example, someone trades their expertise for ongoing, monthly revenue. It’s a good business model.

Now it’s your turn. What do you specialize in? How can you trade your expertise for cash? If you’re having problems coming up with ideas, here are more examples:

1. A woodworker can provide members exclusive access to woodworking plans as well as insight to the tools of the trade.
2. A do-it-yourself pro can offer members tutorials for anything from fixing leaky faucets to installing a garbage disposal.
3. A cooking aficionado can give members access to videos on how to prepare simple meals for families on-the-go.
4. A graphic designer can grant members access to a variety of graphics for use in print, on the web, and in multimedia mediums.
5. A professional landscaper can help people who don’t want to pay for a pricey lawn service by providing tips and tricks to keep their lawns in tip-top shape all year long.

The possibilities are endless.

So now I’m sure you’re thinking, “That’s great, Nina, but how the heck do I add a membership program to my WordPress site?”

Do not fear, my friend. I will walk you through the painless process in just three steps. Let’s get started!

How to Create a Membership Site with WordPress

WishList Member is my membership program software of choice.

It’s extremely easy to use, integrates with WordPress flawlessly, and offers great customer support.

Not to mention, it is flexible enough to meet the needs of everyone. Need to offer different membership options? Want it to play nicely with your shopping cart software? Wish to offer multi-level access to your members? If so, WishList Member has you covered.

It’s as easy to install as a plugin because it is a plugin, which means you can have your membership program up and running in seconds!

Step 1 – Upload WishList Member to Your WordPress Site

When you first sign up for WishList Member, you will receive an email with a link to download the plugin. Click on the link and save the file to your computer. You will then need to use an FTP program, such as Filezilla, to upload the “wishlist-member” folder to your plugins directory.

Warning – Be sure your FTP program is set to binary before uploading the plugin files.

Step 2 – Activate the WishList Member Plugin

Once the “wishlist-member” folder has been successfully uploaded to your server, go to your WordPress Dashboard, and then navigate to the Plugins area to activate the WishList Member plugin.

Step 3 – Enter Your Products Key for WishList Member

Once it is activated, look in the left sidebar to find WL Plugins, and then click on WL Member. Enter the products key along with the email address you used when you signed up for WishList Member.

Boom! Done.

You now have a brand new, shiny membership program on your site. That couldn’t have been easier, right?

A Quick Look at WishList Member

At the top of your screen, you will see the following WishList Member pages you can now explore:

Dashboard – This is just like your WordPress Dashboard, but it gives information about your members as well as WishList Member news.

Settings – On this page, you can configure the settings of the plugin to suit your needs.

Members – This is where you can manage your members or add them manually.

Membership Levels – You can add membership levels and content here.

Sequential Upgrade – If you wish to give your members access to your content over time, rather than all at once, you can use this page to set up sequential upgrades.

Integration – You can integrate your shopping cart software with WishList Member on this page.

The Bottom Line

As I mentioned earlier, WishList Member has an extremely supportive community.

Be sure to take advantage of the variety of video tutorials, articles, and support forums WishList Member has to offer. Within no time, you will be on your way to building a flourishing membership program for your community.

Do you run a membership program on your site? If so, how’s it going for you? If not, do you plan to start one soon? Let me know in the comments below.

Amazing skill and Talent - People are awesome in the World 2015 part 8

PEOPLE ARE AWESOME 2015

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4 Easy Ways to Get Advertisers on Your Site

If you're just getting started on the internet--or simply looking for ways to add new revenue streams to your business--you might be considering accepting ads for other companies' products on your website.

Who wouldn't like to make a few extra bucks without any effort? You just put up a few ads on your site and wait for the cash to roll in, right?

Not necessarily.

To make your site attractive to companies looking for ad space, you'll need to have a great niche market, tons of traffic and the promise of good ad placement on your site. However, if you don't have all these elements in place yet, there are still ways for you to make money from ads on your site. The easiest--and often the most successful--include:

1. Promote an affiliate product on your site.
Joining another company's affiliate program is one of the simplest ways to get started with internet advertising. While affiliate links aren't technically ads, they allow you to make money by promoting someone else's product. As an affiliate, you earn a commission each time someone you've referred makes a purchase. To encourage sales, you might post a banner on your site that links to the affiliate site or publish a newsletter article about their product.

Different affiliate programs offer different payout options. Some might offer 10 percent commission for each sale, while others pay up to 50 percent of each sale. You'll want to shop around for the best deal for you and the best fit for your site. To find good affiliate programs, check out the following directories:

• Associate Programs
• Affiliates Directory
• Refer-It

Some internet advertising pros are actually making all their income from signing on with multiple affiliate programs. They don't even have a product of their own! This isn't a strategy for beginners, however, so take some time to check out different programs before committing to this option.

2. Use targeted advertising with Google AdSense.
Google's AdSense program allows you to make money advertising on your site by placing targeted text ads generated by Google on your pages. The ads appear in rectangular boxes running down the side or across the bottom of a web page with the words "Ads by Google" over the top. These ads are paid for by businesses that use Google's pay-per-click program, AdWords. These ads reflect the content on your site, so if your site sells a book on how to recognize authentic baseball cards, for example, the ads that appear on your site might be for baseball card retailers.

As a Google AdSense publisher, you earn money every time a visitor to your site clicks on one of the AdWords ads on your site. If you're getting a lot of targeted traffic--and if these visitors are interested in the products being advertised--that could mean a healthy new source of extra income for you.

Best of all, Google AdSense is free to join. It's easy, too. Google does all the work of finding relevant ads for your site--you just collect the payments.

A word of warning: Google ads don't work for all sites, so if you add them, be sure to test them. You don't want to lose credibility with your target market.

3. Approach companies directly to ask if you can advertise for them.
If your site is already getting lots of traffic, try looking for sites that offer complementary products and target the same niche market as you do. For instance, if you own a bridal shop, you could approach a local florist to see if they'd like to advertise their wedding bouquets on your site. An ad on your site would also be seen as an implicit recommendation of their product, and it could send a ton of brides to their site. And the more successful your ads are, the more you can charge for them.

Be sure to contact potential internet advertising partners in a professional manner. Call them on the phone instead of just e-mailing them so your communication is more personal and professional. Be ready to supply them with information about your business and your site traffic. The more information you can give them, the more likely they'll be to consider your offer. And above all, make sure they have a solid reputation. If you partner with a questionable company, their activities could reflect poorly on your business.

4. Sign up for a blog-specific ad program.
If you have a blog, consider signing up to feature blog-specific ads on your site. The key is to consider the kinds of ads your target audience will find valuable. Here are some great ways to attract advertisers to your blog:

• Sign up with a context-based ad program like Google's AdSensethat will automatically generate ads for your site that you can put up within minutes of being accepted to their program. Crisp Adsoffers a similar program, but only for blogs.
• Place Amazon Associates ads on your site, and feature ads for products you personally use or are happy to endorse. That way, your customers are responding to your recommendations.
• Get advertisers interested in your blog with a link they can use to contact you for rates and requirements. This link can be a simple message saying "Click here to find out how to advertise on this blog!" That way, anyone visiting your site is free to discuss advertising opportunities with you.
• Sign up with an advertiser-publisher connection program likeBlogAds or AdBrite, and get listed in their publishers' directory. One important note: With these types of ads, the advertisers look through listings of thousands of blogs to choose the right people to promote their products. Unless you're getting thousands of visitors a day, they might not be all that interested in doing business with you.

Making money from your site isn't a matter of putting up a few ads and grabbing a paycheck--it takes a lot of research and testing on an already established site to make even the best internet advertising strategies truly pay off.

Even then, you may find that your audience resists the presence of ads. If you're putting people off by placing ads on your pages, you could end up losing more customers and revenue than you actually gain. To make sure this doesn't happen, test every aspect of each new ad campaign you run.

Once you do discover the internet advertising strategies that work best for your site, you can try promoting another product, and then another. Soon, all those added revenue streams will combine to swell your profits.

HOW TO MAKE A WEBSITE

STEP ONE

Choose the Best Hosting and Website Building Platform

Before you start worrying about color schemes and domain names, you’ve got to decide what platform you’re going to build your website with

we reqment 

Web Hosting Services by Discoverofsolutions ( DS ) Hosting. Top rated Business Hosting Providers for small and large Companies.

.What do I mean by “platform”?

Well, back in 2004 when I got started, most sites were built using HTML (code), CSS and even Flash. These took a lot of time to learn and were tricky to master.

That’s why most people still think creating a website from scratch is difficult or requires a lot of coding and design skills – but that’s no longer true!

In 2015, content management systems (CMS) like WordPress have made creating a website accessible to everyone.

A content management system is a user-friendly platform for building websites and managing your own online content, instead of using a bunch of loose HTML pages

Three most popular website building platforms in 2015:

As you can see, nearly half of the websites on the internet are running on the WordPress website platform. Just look at those statistic made by W3 Techs and Builtwith. This

Why WordPress is better than the rest?

Because it’s AWESOME! But more importantly…

• It’s totally FREE, with loads of layouts to choose from

WordPress doesn’t cost a dime to download or install, and there’s a huge community who have designed beautiful themes and templates, making it easy to get going fast.

• It’s extremely beginner-friendly

If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you already know how add your own content. WordPress can be expanded with plugins to handle just about any site you can imagine – from gorgeous business pages to social networking sites.

• Small or Big site? Doesn’t matter…

From basic blogs to beautiful business sites and online stores, WordPress can handle just about any kind of website – and there are plenty of plugins to expand its capabilities. WordPress is used by Facebook, eBay, McAfee, Mozilla,Reuters, CNN, Google Ventures and even NASA.

• It’s mobile-friendly

The website you build will be responsive, looking great on every mobile device, smartphone and tablet.

• There’s a huge support community

With so many people on the platform, it’s easy to find help when you need it, and lots of free resources you can dig into.

In fact, the site you’re reading right now is built with WordPress! It’s popular for a reason. If you want to know more about how popular WordPress is, take a quick peek at this article: 14 facts about WordPress.

Of course, there are other CMS / website building platforms, too.

Drupal is a very powerful platform that is popular with web developers and experienced coders, but it comes with a very steep learning curve that makes it a bad choice for beginners.

Joomla is similar to WordPress and works great for online stores, but you’ll need at least a little bit of technical coding to make it work the way you want.

If you want more details, I’ve put together a pretty comprehensive comparison between WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

If for some reason you don’t want to build your site with WordPress, check out my Drupal, Joomla and HTML5 guides as well. They are all FREE to use.

But for beginners, I strongly suggest sticking to WordPress.

It’s the easiest platform I’ve ever worked with, but it’s flexible enough to suit everyone from small business owners, and freelancers to creative artists and bloggers.

Click here

At this point, you don’t have to install or set up anything.

In Step 2, I’ll walk you through the process of choosing a domain name and finding a great hosting plan for your website.

In Step 3, I’ll show you everything you need to know to install and customize a WordPress website.

Don’t worry – I’ll walk you through the process, with lots of images as a reference.

Remember; I’m here to help!

I’m currently offering free help via email. I can’t set up your site for you, but I CAN give you specific advice – so if you get stuck during set up process, just use my contact form.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting services provide hosting for websites on virtual servers which pull their computing resource from extensive underlying networks of physical web servers. It follows the utility model of computing in that it is available as a service rather than a product and is therefore comparable with traditional utilities such as electricity and gas. Broadly speaking the client can tap into their service as much as they need, depending on the demands of their website, and they will only pay for what they use. It exists as an alternative to hosting websites on single servers (either dedicated or shared servers) and can be considered as an extension of the concept of clustered hosting where websites are hosted on multiple servers. With cloud hosting however, the network of servers that are used is vast and often pulled from different data centres in different locations. Practical examples of cloud hosting can fall under both the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) classifications. Under IaaS offerings the client is simply provided with the virtualised hardware resource on which they can install their own choice of software environment before building their web application. On a PaaS service however, the client is also provided with this software environment, for example, as a solution stack (operating system, database support, web server software, and programming support), on which they can go straight to installing and developing their web application. Businesses with complex IT infrastructures and experienced IT professionals may wish to opt for the more customisable IaaS model but others may prefer the ease of a PaaS option. A development of the concept of cloud hosting for enterprise customers is the Virtual Data Centre (VDC). This employs a virtualised network of servers in the cloud which can be used to host all of a business’s IT operations including its websites. The more obvious examples of cloud hosting involve the use of public cloud models - that is hosting websites on virtual servers which pull resource from the same pool as other publicly available virtual servers and use the same public networks to transmit the data; data which is physically stored on the underlying shared servers which form the cloud resource. These public clouds will include some security measures to ensure that data is kept private and would suffice for most website installations. However, where security and privacy is more of a concern, businesses can turn towards cloud hosting in private clouds as an alternative - that is clouds which use ring-fenced resources (servers, networks etc), whether located on site or with the cloud provider. A typical cloud hosting offering can deliver the following features and benefits: Reliability; rather than being hosted on one single instance of a physical server the website is hosted on a virtual partition which draws its resources, such as disk space, from an extensive network of underlying physical servers. If one server goes offline, it dilutes the level of resource available to the cloud a little but will have no effect on the availability of the website whose virtual server will continue to pull resource from the remaining network of servers. Some cloud platforms could even survive an entire data centre going offline as the pooled cloud resource is drawn from multiple data centres in different locations to spread the risk. Physical Security; the underlying physical servers are still housed within data centers and so benefit from the security measures that those facilities implement to prevent people accessing or disrupting them on-site Scalability and Flexibility; resource is available in real time on demand and not limited to the physical constraints/capacity of one server. If a client’s site demands extra resource from its hosting platform due to a spike in visitor traffic or the implementation of new functionality, the resource is accessed seamlessly. Even when using a private cloud model the service can often be allowed to ‘burst’ to access resources from the public cloud for non-sensitive processing if there are surges in activity on the site. Utility style costing; the client only pays for what they actually use. The resource is available for spikes in demand but there is no wasted capacity remaining unused when demand is lower. Responsive load balancing; load balancing is software based and therefore can be instantly scalable to respond to changing demands

Microsoft integrates Skype voice & video in Office,

AMSTERDAM: Microsoft has announced that it is planning Skype integration directly into Office Online and Outlook.com which will allow the users to communicate by voice and video with their contacts while working on a document.

According to The Next Web, this will make it easier to communicate when actively making modifications to a file. But, if the users do choose to use messages, then Skype will connect their message history to the document, so the users can pick up from where they left off last time they opened a document.

In addition, Microsoft is making it easier to access its Web Office Suite with the help of a new Chrome extension for Office which now allows the users to open a variety of Office documents right within Chrome, whether they are stored in OneDrive or their computer.

The improved Skype integration has been released on Office Online and Outlook.com in the US and other regions are coming soon.
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