You didn’t have the kind of bandwidth that you have today with the internet where you could actually download and stream videos, let alone social media. People can just distribute so easily these days with the technology that we’re so lucky to have right now. That’s where my career started off.

For me, it was actually working around the actual mining industry in Perth and primarily in the IT realm. My work’s a lot to do with integration, to projects where sort of grabbing various bits of technology, you’ve got might be server hardware, it might be networks and various software stuff.

My job, generally over the last 10 – 15 years has been working to bring this all together into a usable solution to bring about an outcome for those mining industries. Specific projects might have been automated trucks and driverless trucks out there on the mine site. They’re managed by GPS, they drive around the mine site. My job and my focus was pretty much bringing in the software and the hardware and the solutions

As time goes on it’s like, I have to say that I’m sometimes, I needed a little bit of a break from IT. On the side, I actually teach piano. It’s really good. It’s a left side, right side brain kind of situation where I have a few piano students and I was looking for a way to augment the kind of support I was giving them.

I see them once a week so I’m thinking some video content could help them when I’m not in contact with them every week. This way they’ve got something they can go online and actually do some extra study to help them on their way with their studies with me

That’s where I branched into the internet world and I mean, I’ve always been in the internet world, but this is more of a kind of psychic to start off with. It’s like, I had my day job at the time and then I thought, “Well, my side business would be just to help people study and learn piano.”

I started looking around for a way to deliver this online. Then I came up with all these different platforms and solutions that were available and I thought I’m going to start by creating a whole collections of video lessons and start storing them online for my students.

That was where I started delving into this whole online membership type platform environment

What I found about the hosted solutions is that they have so many different customers and so many different people they’re trying to satisfy with their product.

Generally, you can’t find one that fits everyone. You have to go for the main, core options. What it does is that everyone inevitably comes up against something, the solution doesn’t quite fit me. It gets me 90% of the way there at best but then there’s just 10%, which you know, for what I need it for, it doesn’t actually tick all the boxes.

I try to fuel these platforms and I sign up for the 14 day trial. I’m working on this in my side time after, late at night after the kids have gone to bed and stuff like that. I’m thinking I’m going to work in this, but soon enough, the 14 days is up you know, I haven’t even really scratched the top of this thing, so you know what? I’ve invested a little bit so far, I’ll just keep going. A month later, two months later, three months later.

Okay, I’m now starting to invest a little bit of time. I’ve started to build a bit of content, I’ve started to get used to the platform and then I get to maybe three or four months in and it’d be like, “You know what? There’s something about this that just, it almost gets me there but it doesn’t quite end it up.”

It’s like, I’ll get onto the support and I’ll say, “Look, can you help me with this?” Or “Have you got a solution?” They respond, “You know what Nino? We don’t actually do this, but how about you put in a request and we’ll add it to the list of enhancements that we’re adding. If we get enough people that are asking for it, then we’ll get on implementing it.”

Of course, if you’re motivated to go with your business end trying to get off the ground, these delays can really, really slow you down. Because they’re these proprietary systems that you’re working with, you’re sort of tying up your own business viability to this other company that you don’t have any control of. When that happens, you live and die by those platforms as well

In my situation, I’ve got to this point around about 4 – 5 months in and I thought, “I’m going to have to start on a different platform.” I hadn’t actually gotten to WordPress yet.

I mean, I’m aware of WordPress but I hadn’t actually gotten there yet because at the end of the day, I did IT all day at work. I could sit down, I could start developing and doing these things myself, but I really was just looking for a quick solution, just so I could actually create these lessons and stuff and provide those to my students. I wasn’t really trying to get into this full-time development gig just to deliver something. I was more interested in the outcome

Anyway, I got about four or five months in. I thought, it doesn’t tick all the boxes but there were a couple other, still hosted platforms that I was interested in, so I decided “Okay, I’m going to start up with one of these other ones.” I started up this one I thought, “Okay, now I’ve got to export all my data out of this original platform,” and it’s like now, that’s where I found, you know what? I can’t actually get it out

Not only does this platform not suit me down to the ground, I actually can’t now get all that hard work I put in over the four or five months, I can’t actually get it out again to bring it into this new platform. There’s two platforms they’re, they’re not designed to work together. It’s not in this company’s best interest to make it easy for you to move to another system. While they’re not trying to trap you in the system, it’s kind of the way it works out.

WordPress has really grown and it’s become a real good viable platform to start landing on these different modules or plugins as WordPress calls them, to actually expand the functionality of your websites including membership websites.

What you’ll find is that you start off, a membership website really doesn’t require that many plugins but it does require good ones, to get the functionality you’re after. With a WordPress Membership website, you don’t start off with a membership plugin. This plugin gets installed to get you going.

At its very essence, a membership plugin basically separates your content on your website into the content that’s publicly accessible and the content that’s not publicly accessible.

Pretty much any website that you see where you can see a log in, that’s a membership website in some kind of flavor. You’ve got Facebook, for example. Basically, you’ve got what you can see when you’re on there and what you get after

The beauty about WordPress is that because it’s so modular, you can add this functionality as you go. You can actually choose a platform membership plugin and installer and then you can actually progress and you can install other plugins as well.

Then you’d have your learning management system. Then you would have your theme and then you would probably have a page builder and they’re probably your first four that you, first four pillars of your membership site.

Now, the difference between a membership plug in and say a learning management plug in is a membership plugin will actually control the access to the content.

Difference between that and a learning management system is whilst you could theoretically create a WordPress page and draw, put elements on that and try and present that as a course, what a learning management system is going to do, it’s going to encapsulate that course information into things like courses, lessons and modules.

Then it will package it in a way that’s nice and easy for your students and or your customers to consume. It will package it in a way that they can actually see a logical path of learning. That’s what these learning management systems do.

It can be time consuming to actually create a course page by page, but there’s quite a few learning management systems. Some are better than others, but the primary goal of a learning management system is to enable you to very, very quickly create courses.

Then you’ve got the other ones like the theme. Now, the themes, there are ones that are more conducive to membership sites than others, but generally, any premium theme is going to work quite well.

The one thing you’ve got to look out for in themes is that they’ve got good vendor support for them. If you’re going to go for a free theme and you run into problems, you’re really left with no avenue to go. I think you’re going with a premium theme, something like thrive themes.

These are all what people would like to call mega themes, that have got lots of functionality. They’re maintained, there’s a massive user base. There’s always resources that you can use to keep on top of it and they’re very configurable, so they’re great for people who choose the WordPress platform because they love that configurability and they can use these themes to their own advantage, to get exactly what they want. They’re very customizable.

That goes hand in hand with that fourth pillar, the actual page builder. What a page builder does is let you, you quickly manage the entire look and feel of your website.

The page builder will let you quickly draw out the actual pages that you’re going to have in your membership website, whether they’re publicly available or whether they’re behind a paywall or they’re gauging content that your membership plugin is controlling access to. They’re the probably the four main pillars of a membership website.

There’s actually not a lot to it. The magic behind a membership website on WordPress is in the integration. That’s with going back to the technical challenge of building a membership website. You say it’s technology, if there’s only four main plugins you need, why is it so hard?

The problem is in the integration. If you ever come across a situation where this plug in doesn’t work and this other plug in doesn’t work and so you contact the developers and they both point at the other plug-ins and say, “Look, you’ll have to take it up with the support for the other plug-in,” you can sometimes be caught in the middle of two developers who have plug-ins that don’t want to work.

When that happens, you’re just sort of like, “Okay, well which one do I go with?” You have to make an educated guess or even it’s just a plain out guess about which one could be right. Or you have to just throw the two away.

When I was building my membership website, after going through and cutting my teeth on all these managed hosting platforms and figuring it out that they just weren’t going to cut it, I moved to WordPress. I had probably a 12 month or an 18 month grind of trying different plugins.

That whole grind was really working out which plugins are going to play nicely together? I get my teeth stuck into these things and I’ve got my tech background and I like IT. As much as I didn’t want to end up doing this, I kind of ended up doing it anyway. It’s more because I don’t really want this to beat me and I know I can figure this out, this is what I do, right?

This is for my living. I’m used to integrating, this is what I do. I’ve done it for 10 – 15 years. It’s what I’m good at doing. I did have something in the background that said I’m going to integrate all these programs without having to write code.

If I have to write code or start doing some custom kind of stuff, I’m really not doing anything else other than making a proprietary system, using other things, other programs. As soon as you get a plug in update or something out there, and you’ve got a custom code there, that update could break it

The least amount of code or custom code you can do, the much better it is and that’s going to be a more robust system.

That left me with one thing, I had to find plugins that work well together. That’s probably the biggest challenge. It’s like, if you ever had a problem with the plumbing and you notice that you call the plumber out and he knocks on the wall three times and he goes, “That’ll be $300, and there’s your problem.” You think, “Hang on, that’s all he did. It’s not very hard,” but you couldn’t figure it out because all it was, you don’t know what you don’t know

That’s the challenge I think most people starting out with WordPress have is whilst the plugins you do need to get you started and to get your membership up and going is actually quite easy, and all you need to do is know which ones they are, know how they integrate, and how you can actually work these all together to produce the result that you want with your membership website.

A Thrive theme, they offer about ten different themes and they cover just about the whole gamete of what you may need. When you’re just starting out, they’re perfectly fine and sometimes less is more. The less you configure, the less can go wrong.

That’s great for clients who are, they want their membership site built for them, they want ease of use, that’s why they’re coming to you in the first place and they want that nice, easy way I’ve done it. The beauty about it, as you’ve said, Thrive Architect is an amazing piece of software.

It’s perfect for the person who doesn’t want to get their hands dirty with code. You can pretty much just grab all the elements you want to form, just drag it on there. If you want a picture, you can just drag it on there and you resize it on your mouse, on the screen, as you go. What you see is what you get.

It’s a real what you see is what you get. There’s a lot of page builders where you tweak this box here and then you open up another webpage, and then you hit refresh and you see what it looks like. Then you go back and you tweak it a little bit more and then you go back and they say it’s what you see is what you get, but there’s still this disconnect in between. When you’re sitting there for a few hours designing a page, that gets old pretty quickly. Yeah, I’m probably, on the stack I’m probably with you on the theme, I probably choose a Thrive theme. I’d definitely choose Thrive Architect.

For the page builder, for the learning management system, I’ve actually tried Learndash as well. I’ve tried one called Lifter LMS, I’ve actually flipped back and forth between those two. I actually found learning management system plugins actually some of the best plugins that were out there. They all worked quite well.

The issue was getting with various other membership platforms at the time that it was testing, that weren’t playing nice with the learning management systems. That was where I had to actually choose one or the other and then go the other one and then test one and it didn’t work.

For the actual membership platform that I’ve settled on, and it was after about testing two or three different ones, including free, it was a paid membership program, which is like a free, not a free one but it’s like a … It’s a relatively cheap one but there were some integration issues with this. I’ve now settled on one called Digital Access Pass.

Now, Digital Access Pass has been around for about eight or nine years that I know of, possible longer. This is just a really, really good robust plug-in. I’d have to say that the developers, I don’t think they sleep at all. They just sit there and they just develop on this thing.

What this does is this integrates tightly with the membership platform and allows you to package your membership levels, or products, as they call them and be able to hook it into a payment gateway like Stripe or PayPal or AuthNet, Authorize.net. They also brought in, crypto payments as well. You can actually sell your product using any crypto coin you want to use.

You’ve got the Thrive themes, the page builder, the Thrive architect. You’ve got the membership plugin which is Digital Access Pass and Shopping Cart. Then for the learning management system, I use a product called WPEP, W-PEP if that’s the way you pronounce it. This was probably the third one I actually tried.

I did go back and forth between Learndash and LMS. I found that what really made me gravitate towards W-PEP was the speed at which I could actually build courses. They advertise on their site, build courses at mouse click speed. They’ve got a cool little sales gimmick. I’ve installed this thing it’s like, “you know what?” I’m just going click, click, click, click, creating module after module, course after course.

Literally, and because I’ve already had my course framework all ready built out, I probably created it and recreated it about 15 different times, since I tested all their different plugins over those two years that I was trying to build my pianos lessons website.

I pretty much just built out the content in about 10 minutes. I just grabbed the content then dropped it into there. Then you just put a short code on one single page and then suddenly it’s just built out your index.

It’s built out, that whole hierarchy of that lesson structure that you’re looking for, completely mapped out for you. What’s more, it also has an integration with the membership plugin. This was a really key thing for me. This is moving more into the marketing sort of thing, which I definitely have to bow my head in your direction on the marketing side of things.

There’s one thing I’ve learned and that’s, if you can present some courses that are available under a certain membership level and then you have some other courses which are not available, but they are available in a higher level.

It’s like an upsell. Particularly integration actually grayed out certain courses that weren’t available under the existing membership. It created a bit of an interest. Something that you don’t have yet, and a way to sort of bring people up, the model.

They’ve also brought in recently a new, almost Facebook style page. Basically it creates this page on a per member basis and allows you to conduct more of a one on one coaching environment for that person. If they log in, they get all the access to all of their courses. Then they click on their own member’s home and then they’ve almost got this to and fro chat between you and them.

That just a whole different way of delivering something like that. That’s literally just came out in the last couple of weeks.

You can actually create complete funnels with this Smart Pay Cart. There’s probably not enough time, you’d need like an hour just to talk about the functions you get in that plugin as well, if you really want to get into the plugin.

Say you go to WordPress page, you would put in a little bit of code from Wistia that Wistia gives you and when you implant that code there, it places that code there so when the student comes they’ll see and study your video.

Now, what stops that student or somebody putting that code in another website is that Wistia actually knows which website you’ve put that code on. They program it on their end so that their video simply won’t appear and it won’t even play on any website, other than on your particular website. Your business dot com, that’s the only domain, it’s the only one that it can work on.

As a second level of protection, something like Digital Access Pass, actually goes the next step and even stops someone from looking at the page. Unless they’re a paid member or a free member who has access to that page, they won’t get to the page in the beginning, and then once they get to the page, they can see the video there, but they can’t be seen anywhere else.

I think Vimeo is actually doing it as well. They’ve got the domain level security, that’s what they call it when they lock it down to that website. In Wistia, you can not just lock it down, you can actually choose which domains you want it to work on.

When you’re just starting out, you’ve got every other cost that you’ve got to associate to do it … I think now for the person starting out, Vimeo is really, really, really cost effective. I would certainly recommend Vimeo. I actually use Vimeo now for all of mine.

If you’re testing the water and you’re getting your feet wet, Vimeo is definitely the way to go. Then, as your needs progress and as you’ve got that … Your online business starting to pull in the money and you can start to afford the Wistia probably definitely be the next level after that.

Actually these services like Wistia, like Vimeo, on the technical now, they probably are hosted on the Amazon AWS website anyway because Amazon hosts so many massive big services. What Wistia and what Vimeo have done, they’ve repackaged these underlying services into an easy to consume, added all the functionality and they’ve made it really easy.

If you’re technical enough, sometimes you can just bypass these guys and just go straight to the source and use it. Amazon S3 it is a solution. I would probably say it’s a little bit more technical.

You can go ahead to MembershipWebsiteHelp.com. The link’s there at the top of the page there you can just follow it. You can look at the build option. I’m offering two different ways to do it. One where, I’ll actually give you some training. I’ve basically built this website exactly the way as the one I built for my client.

The offer I’ve got there is I’ll help you build your website and I’ll provide the training and pretty much as we’ve talked about it today, we’ll take you through how to actually install those plugins, how to do the integrations, and how to do that. This is great for the person that’s, you know what? I’m not scared of tech

I’m happy to go and do all this stuff and I really want to learn about it and I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. Seeing what’s under the hood and really finding out more about this membership platform and how I can leverage it to suit my online venture, my online business.

Then there’s the other solution, which is a done for you solution which is where you come to me and you say … We sit down, we have a chat, we work out exactly what your needs are and then we’ll say, “Look you know, we’ll build this platform for you, here’s the plugins that you’ll need. Here’s the integrations that you’ll need with your marketing solution or your email solution,” and we connect it all together.

My expertise comes in with integrating it for you so that you don’t have to do the running around and find which plugin works with the other plug in. That solution I’ve built basically builds that engine. I teach people how to create that engine that people can then leverage to do what they want. It doesn’t actually so much build all the pretty colors and the icons and stuff. It creates that engine that you can go and dress up the way you see fit.

It’s great for people who, they want to market, they want to build the pages themselves and that’s very easy to do with the page builder. It’s pretty much set, a little tan case solution. Here is your website, now go run. You’re ready to sell as soon as you’ve got your sales page up and you’ve built that out.