Building A Membership Site — Quick & Easy …

I would like to talk about membership sites. Do you have a membership site? It’s nice to have one doesn’t it? Yeah … earning recurring fees from members month after month …

I have created my own membership sites in the past. This includes DIYMiniSite.com and CBTrickVideos.com. But I have to admit that none of those membership sites ask for a recurring payment.

DIYMiniSite.com is a free membership site with an optiona one-time fee to Premium membership level. The username an password mechanism is built around PHP and MySQL. I had fun building it … oh yes, hand-coded everything myself.

CBTrickVideos.com on the other hand is built around Paypal’s Subscription Password Management. This is where username and passwords are created by Paypal itself during the payment process and I just store them in a .htpasswd file. You can do this manually or you can do this automatically by using Paypal’s Instant Payment Notification (IPN).

With an IPN, you create a little script to handle all sales notification that Paypal sends you. This is really cool.

In case you don’t know this, using the .htaccess and the .htpasswd file on your web hosting is where you password protect a certain folder in your website.

With .htaccess, the browser will pop a login dialog box, much like how you would login to your CPanel.

You can try this page to see how it works:
http://cbtrickvideos.com/members/
If you don’t have access, don’t bother trying to login

With CBTrickVideos.com, I make customers pay a one-year subscription fee, non-recurring though. And the account is not deleted even after the subscription expires.

Anyway, I have been trying other subscription scripts lately, mostly those the integrates with Paypal. I like the one using the Subscription Password Management. I don’t have to worry about lost password or anything like that. Customers can just look it up in their Paypal account. Don’t tell me they lost that TOO …

And using .htaccess file, you can put together a membership site with Paypal integration rather quickly. I like it that you are not bound to any specific kind of content management system (CMS).

You see, when you get any of those PHP-MySQL solutions, you would have to use their “built-in” CMS. Yeah, like Butterfly script, like my DIYMiniSite.com, like EasyMembersPro, etc. And sometimes, what I want to build is just a simple membership site. Those PHP-MySQL solutions is over killing …

Here’s an example of a simple membership site:

Instant Cash Generators
http://www.instantcashgroup.com

OK … so using the htaccess limits the things that you can do with the membership site. But that’s OK. If all that you need is a quick, ready to go membership site, then htaccess is great.

All that you have to do is create your protected folder and you can use any CMS that you like in there. If you have XSitePro, that’ll be great too. You know that XSitePro is like a desktop CMS software itself, right?

[+] XSitePro - http://moneyclicking.net/xsp.php

Or you can also try out some “light-weight” CMS like these:

[+] PHPWCMS - http://www.phpwcms.de/ **really nice**
[+] CMS Made Simple - http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
[+] Etomite – http://www.etomite.org/
[+] le.CMS - http://www.worldlevel.com/

Why light weight CMS?

Well, because they are easy to deploy. 1-2-3 … you have a site running. And you still want a CMS because you want to keep your website organized. It’s easier to do that with a CMS. And some CMS comes with a built-in search function … that’ll come in handy for your customers.

OK … let’s get back to the membership site and the payment system. Here’s one script that I found to be really nice.

[+] EZ-IPN – http://toddhost.com/ezipnsm.html – $19.95

EZ-IPN will create you a password protected folder using htaccess and Paypal’s Subscription Password Management. Th script is built to keep everything simple.

It’s easy to install.

All that you need to do is upload the three files and then run the Admin script. The Admin script will ask which folder you want to protect, the location of your htpasswd file, and other related info. The script will create your folder, create your htpasswd file and create your htaccess file. You can even add more users manually from the Admin later.

When you are done with that, the script will ask you if you want to create the IPN processing script. If you do, the script will ask you about your subscription details, what’s your trial fee, how long is your trial, how much is your subscription fee, how long is your subscription, is it recurring and other related stuffs.

When you are done with that, the script will create the IPN file and also generate the code for you Buy Button. You can use the Buy Button straight into your sales letter.

WARNING: They Admin interface does not look like much. But the script does that job.

I think that’s pretty cool …

But I do wish the script does more. Since I am programmer myself, I hacked into the generated IPN code and add a few lines of my coding.

If you forgot about this, the IPN script processes every sale and create the user accounts for you. I added a few lines so that the IPN will also store details of each sale in the database … just for my referrence.

Now that you are done with this, and you have your little CMS running in your protected folder, you are all set. Don’t forget to put in content in your CMS. You can’t sell and empty membership site, can you?

After this it’s all about promotion …