How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 3: Technology
Read previous articles in this series:
- How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
- How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 2: Communication Channels
The pieces of the puzzle to produce a successful membership site are coming together. Preeminence (credibility, reputation, key contacts) and marketing (an ability to communicate with your prospective members) are in place, or at least you know you need them to be in place, and now you can work on putting together the nuts and bolts technology to deliver your membership service.
To build your membership site you need to consider the following requirements:
- How will you protect member resources from public access?
- How will you take payments and process registrations/deliver resources?
- What content features will your membership site contain (audio, video, forums, chatrooms, webinars)?
- What email list service will you use to communicate with and how will it integrate with the rest of your membership site?
- How will you handle affiliates – track referrals, offer promo tools, pay out commissions and ingrate everything with your email list service?
As is typical with web technology, you have quite a few options to choose from to satisfy all the above requirements. The challenge is coming up with the right combination of tools that meet your needs and work well together.
My process to decide what technology to use started a long time before I launched Blog Mastermind, in fact years before I even decided to produce a membership site at all.
Before deciding to produce a mentoring program for professional bloggers I was planning to release an information product, an e-book along with some videos. This was about a year into my blogging career and at the same time I made my very first technology choice, which (eventually) impacted the structure of Blog Mastermind. I made the decision to use AWeber as my email list provider (AWeber review is here).
Thankfully AWeber integrates with pretty much every mainstream membership site software program, so although I made my email autoresponder decision early, it had little impact on what software I used to meet the rest of my membership site needs.
Membership Site Software
Audio: Interview With Dave Jackson From SchoolOfPodcasting.com
Download the MP3 [ 33 Minutes - 7.5 MB]
Dave Jackson has a great voice for podcasting and he should since he’s the dean of the 
School of Podcasting, a membership service to help budding podcasters get their shows up and running. Dave and I had a fun chat about running an online membership service including discussion of various software packages, we delved into his history and looked at the future for his online project. If you like podcasting, plan to launch your own membership service online or just enjoy a fun interview then download this podcast.
Show Notes
- We started with a brief intro to Dave, his School of Podcasting and how he got into podcasting.
- Dave offered some advice on running an online membership service business (including discussion of AMember).
- Next up we looked at how to attract an audience for a podcast.
- I asked Dave about his previous online ventures, including firsttimevisitor.com.
- And we wrapped things up with a look at the pricing of his membership service and the scripts and software he uses to manage School of Podcasting.
