Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites

The
initial Teaching Sells training teaches you how to build robust
“flagship” membership sites. Some of the business models we reveal in
the core training require the ability to quickly churn out multiple
membership sites in multiple niches, and these topics show you how to
make that happen.

Introduction to This Course

This
course is designed to supplement the Blueprint for Building Membership
Sites course, where we looked at building large-scale, enterprise-like
membership sites. We’re going to talk about using some different
programs to get a smaller, niche site up quickly and easily. This
introductory video outlines what we’ll be covering and defines what we
mean by quick, easy, inexpensive, and niche site.

Choosing a Niche

The
choice of a niche for your membership site falls into two broad
categories — the niche you’re already in, or picking a new niche as
the basis for a site. In this topic, we’re going to focus on the basics
of choosing a niche.

Basic Niche Research

Now
that you’ve done some recon and determined that your niche is viable
enough to move forward with, its time for some more in-depth research.

Your Content Strategy

You’ve chosen a niche, and you’ve done your research. It’s time to starting thinking about your content strategy.

A Paid Version of Your Existing Site

So
far in this course we’ve been exploring how to choose and research a
niche for your site. But what if you already have a niche?

WordPress Membership Site – First Steps

So
with your niche established, either from your existing site, or a new
one you’ve researched and chosen, you’re ready to get started building
your membership site.

WordPress and aMember

With WordPress installed, we’re now ready to move on to the membership setup. For this we’re going to be using aMember.

Copyblogger Case Study: WordPress Membership Site Example

As an example, we’re setting up the basic configuration for a WordPress based membership area for the Copyblogger site.

Your Blueprint for Building Membership Sites with Open Source and Low-Cost Software

While
the content and marketing of your site is of vital importance, you
absolutely must have an air-tight membership site in order to function
as an online business.

Thankfully, with low-cost and open source
components at your disposal, it can be done without paying outrageous
fees to proprietary membership site vendors. This course will explore
each step necessary to build a secure and user-friendly membership site.

It All Starts With Your Parts List

The
first thing you’re supposed to do when you open one of those
do-it-yourself kits is look at the parts list and make sure you have
everything. How many of you do that? There are those who do it
religiously, and those who jump right in to the project, and hope for
the best. This is one of those cases when you need to make sure you
have all the parts.

Finding a Home for Your Site

Finding
the right host is critical to a successful membership site. More than
just a place to stick your files, and serve pages from, your host is
your partner.

Reaching Your Prospects

It’s important to choose the most effective tool for managing prospects.

Partners in Promotion – Tracking Affiliates

An
affiliate program is a cost efficient marketing tool that also serves
to generate interest in your membership site and what you’re offering.
The right software can make it easier to set up and manage an affiliate
program.

Managing Your Membership

This
topic walks through the basics of installing and configuring aMember to
manage a membership site. aMember is a program that handles membership
management. It enables you to provide protection and access control for
your member area, take and process payments, and do administrative
tasks related to membership – renewal emails, notifications, manual
payments, etc.

A Place for Your Content

You need a program to design, store, organize, and manage your training content. In this topic we cover Moodle, the open source content management system (CMS) that we use. Moodle is a CMS designed to manage online courses and related training materials.

Choosing a Payment Processor

With
a paid membership site, you’ll need a way to take and process payments.
A payment processor provides you with the capability to accept credit
cards and process payments from your members.

Design Options for Creating a Consistent Look

Putting together a large scale ILE
with a mix of different scripts and systems not only involves tying
them all together in the backend, but also requires creating a
consistent look across your site. The programs we’ve discussed in this
course have themeing or templating systems, allowing you (or your
designer) to make that a smoother process.

Integration – Putting the Pieces Together

Now
that you’ve pulled together some different programs to make up your
membership site, you have to make sure that they all work together.
This topic outlines ways to integrate some of the pieces we’ve covered
in this course.

Working with a Technical Partner Reference Guide

When
working with a technical partner, it’s helpful to have a set of common
specifications to refer to. After completing this course, you may
choose to work with someone to develop your site rather than putting it
together yourself.

This brief document provides a list of the
programs we have used in this course, along with links to key
information and specifications for installation, configuration, and
integration.

Explosive Content: Delivering Your Message Payload With Multimedia Storytelling

These
advanced content topics teach you cutting-edge techniques to creating
explosive audio/visual content that knocks people’s socks off and
delivers the message payload that fits your business model or desired
action. Even better, it’s all done with the tools you learn about in
the core training.

Introduction to This Course

Humans
have always used stories to communicate ideas. Tales of heroics and
adventures were used to express important concepts as well as entertain.

Story Basics – Delivering Your Message

A
multimedia story is more than a narrative that uses a variety of media.
In the world of teaching or marketing, a story is a delivery vehicle.
The real desire is to get your core message across.

A Screencasting Narrative

In
the last topic, we discussed that in the context of persuasive
educational content, your story is a delivery vehicle for your payload.
Now we’re going to look at our first example, a simple screencast.

Scenarios: Stories with an Objective

In instructional design
your objectives, the point you’re trying to get across, is your
payload. One way of doing that in an online training module is by using
branched scenarios. These stories help to illustrate and deliver your
payload, by getting the learner involved.

A Payload Excursion: Finding Examples of Stories and Their Payloads from Around the Web

Now
that we’ve taken a look at a couple of examples, you can begin to see
how a simple story is an effective way to use persuasive educational
and under the radar marketing techniques to deliver a core message.
Once to know that, you start to notice it everywhere. So in this topic,
I’m going to guide you on a brief excursion around the web, and point
out some places to look for examples, ideas, and inspiration.

Tools for Screencasting and Presentations on a Mac

A demonstration of some tools for screencasting and developing multimedia presentations on a Mac.

Tools for Screencasting on Linux

A demonstration of some tools for recording and editing screencasts on Linux.

PowerPoint as a Useful Teaching Tool, Not a Boring Presentation Tool

As
a reintroduction to the familiar snooze-inducing PowerPoint, this
series will take a new look at the tool, and demonstrate some ways to
turn this often misused program into a useful tool for teaching.

An Overview of the KoolMoves Animation Tool

KoolMoves
provides the ability to produce Flash animation without the cost or
complexity of the Adobe Flash development tool. This overview touches
on some of the features and shows how it can be used by both novices,
and those experienced with animation.

Additional Tools Used in this Course

In this and the Building Membership Sites
course, we used some additional free tools seen in the videos for
editing, organizing, and cleaning up files. This is a list of some of
those additional tools.

Basic Niche Research

Now
that you’ve done some recon and determined that your niche is viable
enough to move forward with, its time for some more in-depth research.

WordPress Membership Site – First Steps

So
with your niche established, either from your existing site, or a new
one you’ve researched and chosen, you’re ready to get started building
your membership site.

Copyblogger Case Study: WordPress Membership Site Example

As an example, we’re setting up the basic configuration for a WordPress based membership area for the Copyblogger site.

Creating Compelling Learning Interactions With Articulate Engage

In
this series of videos, we’re going to cover Articulate Engage – a quick
and easy tool that lets you create interactive elements to include in
your courses, presentations, and training programs.

Integration – Putting the Pieces Together

Now
that you’ve pulled together some different programs to make up your
membership site, you have to make sure that they all work together.
This topic outlines ways to integrate some of the pieces we’ve covered
in this course.

PowerPoint as a Useful Teaching Tool, Not a Boring Presentation Tool

As
a reintroduction to the familiar snooze-inducing PowerPoint, this
series will take a new look at the tool, and demonstrate some ways to
turn this often misused program into a useful tool for teaching.