Everywhere you turn, people are telling others “I’ve built an online business selling subscriptions and courses!” And if you pay THEM $1,000 or $100, you can learn how too! Here’s the fast (and free) version of that model. For what it’s worth building a fast and robust membership website with online courses will take some work, but you can build it out in weeks, not months or years.
I build in both WordPress and SquareSpace, and I’ll address WordPress primarily in this post. Wix can do it too, but there are additional challenges with Wix (you can see my post here about those). Squarespace, like Wix, Kajabi, Shopify, et al, are SaaS – software as a service, so are limited to what they develop and what (significantly smaller) number of plugins or extensions are available for those platforms. WordPress, on the other hand can be custom developed with plugins and custom interfaces that make it more robust. It requires the site be maintained – plugins and core updated, and occasionally things need to be turned off or on to eliminate a conflict. But you get bleeding-edge features that you might wait months or years for in other platforms. Most plugins are reasonably priced for the features they offer. Many really useful ones are free! Most of our clients pay for 3-4 plugins and run 10-15 free ones.
You’ll need a membership and course plugin. I like all-in-one MemberPress. It allows GRANULAR control over content blocks on a page (or a page, a category, etc.) using robust rules. So if you want to show a course, a video, a blog, a piece of content, you can assign it to a category or put a block on a page and protect who sees that based on their membership. Their courses add on offers a course interface on par with Learn Dash, another courseware platform available for WordPress.
With this one plugin (MemberPress), you get everything you need to build out a course and membership site for your business.
Build your course framework first
It’s essential to build your framework first – how you organize your courses, content and offers should be done before you start adding in content. I generally recommend thinking of the user’s journey – list out what that user needs to know at every stage from prospect to member to course taker. That will help you organize and categorize your content, tagging it as you go. Then, it’s as simple as building a page with the content that user needs to see (courses are built just like pages and posts!)
I like to outline my course, content and offers in a spreadsheet, identifying the user profile or membership category that the user will be in, and then list everything they’ll have access to at whatever levels you want to sell subscriptions to.
Once you have your course framework, build one stack – this will include an initial offer with some drip content (via email). You’ll likely be sending your users from Instagram to your offer (to download), and from there, you’ll nurture them in the website (using member management tools or a 3rd party email system integrated, such as MailChimp, if you prefer.)
The next stack level is your basic membership – this might be access to blogs and videos. Categorize posts and media by your basic membership and protect it with a rule so only the membership you’ve chosen can see those items when they’ve logged in. The stack above this is your next membership up (silver, or whatever you want to call this). You’ll grant access here to a course or two using the courses add-on and protect that by categorizing it to the (silver) membership. Your top tier is your (gold) highest membership tier, and you can include rules like “all content matching… a category, tag, etc.) or just “all content”.
The page layouts you choose to use are dependent on the blocks you choose – SquareSpace, Wix, WordPress and virtually every other platform builds in blocks now – you can drag in video blocks, you can create custom block mixes (called patterns) that contain, say, a video, some content, document links and images and reuse these across your site. Simply tell MemberPress “show this block to this membership category” and if the user isn’t authorized, you can customize what the user sees “you’ll need to upgrade to Gold membership to read this, upgrade now”. Any design you choose will work for this, blocks flex and scale with mobile devices automatically and the underlying membership system controls who sees what.
Once your first stack is complete, evaluate it and test it. You will be looking to test:
- Does the content (course, video, blog, image, content) show up for the membership level you’ve assigned (and no others?)
- A handy plugin here is called User Switching, letting you switch between users on your site. I usually set up one user account for each membership so I can test out each instance
- Does the protected content offer to upgrade the user? Customize any wording here – either globally or individually
- Test out any financial transactions as you get ready to launch. No good substitute for actually processing a whole transaction and ensuring everything works
Repeat your stacks for each membership level, duplicating pages if you like, to create your full built-out membership and course driven site.
Building courses in your WordPress membership site
Courses are a part of MemberPress – think of a course as pages with its own special navigation and features like quizzes. You build your courses based on your outline (there’s even an AI to do this from an outline!) and each page – or lesson – can contain video, downloadable items, images, content (words).
A course can have just one lesson or it can have many. You can embed SCORM content (we like Camtasia for developing SCORM-compliant content) or build it using video, text, images and downloadables.
Once you have your courses in place, you can turn to developing your home page.
Build your buyer’s journey or experience into your home page. Think of what the user needs to see at each stage, answering their most important questions and inviting them to download, trial or experience your course in multiple spots.
Once you have your basics in, it’s time to do some user testing. Invite close friends or clients to your site to test out the site. Ask them to use the site as one of the buyer personas you’ve built your site for. Answer “does the site invite users to take the next step? Is it easy to figure out what step to take next? What did you learn?” – among other questions (your web developer will help you prepare user testing.)
That’s it! You can build out a membership site in weeks, not months, and if you have just one stack (an offer, a basic membership, a course) you can do this even faster! Start simple; you can always build out more later, but it’s important to build one well-functioning stack right off the bat.
A few client examples:
Puberty:The Wonder Years is a membership-based course website using the following:
- MemberPress membership sold by the course pack
- Woo Commerce organizes the course pack, triggers the membership upon purchase
- Corporate (multi-user) memberships are controlled or administrated by a user admin on the client side, giving them control of their own user access within the defined boundaries of the membership
- SSO to connect large school districts’ own user administration system with the website
- Multiple offers – a free 5th grade lesson (although the course is for 4th- 6th grade, 5th is the year most teachers are required to start teaching puberty, and the courses often must be approved by districts before use), a free 30 day preview for the district’s or school’s health committee.
- Automatic renewals, renewal reminders to teachers and their school administrators, school admins can add and drop teachers on their own from within the website
- CRM onboard the website (Groundhogg) to manage prospects
- 3rd party email marketing integration (MailChimp)
- So robust a business based entirely on this website, that the original curriculum developer sold this to another business owner who, having no knowledge of the subject matter, was able to pick up and run with this business!
Michigan AfterSchool Association has multiple membership levels, offering access to content on the website, premium access to a 3rd party learning management system with CEUs and premium access to conferences, learning sessions.
- MemberPress member management
- The EventsCalendar event management and online ticketing system with virtual checkin options
- 3rd party LMS linking available to logged-in members
- 3rd party email marketing integration (Constant Contact)
- Over 15 years (and the third iteration of this website) managed by the same client/same developer (us!) combo