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Your EverWeb made website will probably combine one or more of the following functions: To inform, communicate, engage with and offer space for community, promote brand identity, and facilitate transactions. If the latter, transactions, if important, you might want to combine with the communication and engagement functions to maximize your site’s earning potential. EverWeb includes widgets such as the PayPal Modern and Stripe widgets, with many other ways to integrate other payment providers. B ut you might want to take the sale of your goods and services a step further by offereing a Membership Site.

Why a Membership Site?

Starting your own membership site can have a number of advantages for your business:

1. Can provide you with recurring income
2. Allows you to offer exclusive content to your members
3. Facilitates better audience engagement
4. Can give you better insights in to your audience
5. You have control over who has access to your content

Whilst the advantages sound good, you should also consider these other factors before starting with your own Membership Site:

1. Keeping Content Ongoing. Members will expect new content on a regular basis
2. Membership Account Management needs to ba factored in, especially as your membership grows
3. Keeping Your Members can also be a challenge due to their expectations and what can be delivered
4. Higher Expectations especially from paying members who expect more exclusive content,

Adding EverWeb Membership Sites

After evaluating whether a Membership Site is right for your business, the next step is to get started. Using EverWeb’s Membership Sites add-on is the easy way to integrate a Membership Site in to your EverWeb site. The links are already in place in EverWeb itself.

You can purchase your EverWeb Membership Sites license from this link. Select Membership Sites from the menu options on the left of the page. Here you will find three different levels of Membership Site that you can choose from:

• Membership Starter – Free Entry Level
• Membership Plus – $10 USD / Month
• Membership Deluxe – $50 USD / Month

If you find that the plan that you have selected is not the right one, you can change this at any time in the future. To do this, login to your EverWeb Client Area. Go to the Services menu option, then choose My Services. Click on the down arrow next to the Spanner icon to the right of your Membership Site product addon. Choose Manage Product. You can then change your Membership Sites plan as required. If you have any problems, EverWeb Support will be able to help.

Getting Your Membership Site Up and Running

After purchasing the plan that meets your needs, you will receive an email with a EverWeb Membership Sites Widgets collection that you will need to use when building your membership site. Instructions are provided on how to install the widgets.

Getting your Membership Site up and running will take some time and effort. There will be work to do at the front end in EverWeb. This will be where you will be building your membership site’s user interface using the widgets pack that you were emailed when you signed up.

For the front end of your membership site, the widgets will allow you to create a Membership Sign Up page, a Member Login page, an Email verification page, a Change Password page, a Membership Profile page, a Membership Payment page, and a button for quickly logging out of the Membership Site.

Using the widgets is just the start as you will also need to make pages for your content. The number of pages you will need for this depends on how much content per membership level you have. You will probably also want to create pages for circumstances where a member has cancelled their account, or where you have had to suspend their account. For more information on building the front end of your EverWeb Membership Site, check out post, Creating Your EverWeb Membership Site Front End.

There’s also the back end of your membership site to create. This is where you manage all of the administration tasks that are associated with your membership. As well as administering your member details and payment methods, you will also use the backend of Membership Sites to set up your membership levels, emailing options, set up and administer discounts and so on. For more information on how to create and manage your Membership Site’s Backend check out our post, Creating Your EverWeb Membership Site’s Backend.

Planning Your EverWeb Membership Site

The most important part of your Membership Site is planning as much of it as you can in advance. We have a complete section on EverWeb Membership Sites in our website to help get you started. We recommend that you follow the steps outlined so you can see what work is involved for your own site, what you may not have thought of (e.g. time and administration considerations), as well as making sure that you have content that adds value for each membership level, both now and in the future. Planning activities that tie in to your Membership Site, such as promotions, discounts, periodic sales (e.g. Black Friday), marketing activities etc., will all help you be as best prepared as possible before you begin.

Planning is also in advance is also helpful so that you can roll out your Membership Site in stages if necessary, and will be less overwhelming as you will not have to do everything all at once.