Well, for the next video in our membership site building series, we’re gonna talk about the member registration process, and I’m gonna show you how to set that up, both the paid side and the free side. So let’s get moving. Okay. So let’s talk about building the member sign up process. So the first thing is that there are paid registrations and there are the free registrations.

Okay? Now paid registrations are when people are gonna be buying their way into your membership. Okay? Now it could be buying 1 off products or it could be recurring. It really doesn’t matter.

The idea is that they’re just buying something, and that’s how they create the account. Secondly, would be free registrations where you decide to have, a free member level for some reason. Alright? Now paid registrations happen automatically via WooCommerce when they actually buy. So the being that we are using WooCommerce in this particular setup that I’ve been training you in, WooCommerce is what’s gonna create the product.

So when they create the, they’re entering their information into the checkout screen. Okay? And when they process the order, their account is gonna get created in the background, and the whole process is automatic. Now free registrations is a little bit different. Free registrations are gonna take place, via a form on the website that we’re gonna actually build.

Now keep in mind that free registrations are optional. Okay? It might not fit your strategy. And in fact, I’ve done this in the past where I’ve offered a free member level. And then I found that over time, it was a little bit of a a pain in the butt because what would happen is it was cluttering up the database with people who were coming in maybe to download a lead magnet or something like that, and they weren’t really gonna do anything.

And so what happens is if you end up having a bunch of user profiles that just don’t really have much of a purpose, to be honest with you you end up having to purge them out. So for a free member level may or may not make sense for your strategy, but in this video, I’m gonna show you how to create the sign up process for a free member level if that’s something that you’re looking to do. Now, WordPress and WooCommerce both have, setups in place to create an account. Okay. And they’re just there.

And they’re on by default, by the way. The thing is, I don’t actually recommend that you use those default methods. I would recommend that we build your own and that’s what I’m gonna show you how to do. The WordPress sign up methods, they don’t offer very much control. And we want to be able to control not only perhaps what email list they go on, we might wanna control what tags get added to their profile, we might wanna send them into particular places on the site when they register.

The other thing is that spam bots can actually become a problem. And so I’ve seen I’ve seen it on client sites when they had the registration process turned on, And, what would happen is that they had all these bot registrations, that were they were just cluttering things up big time, but we had to go in there and and clean them up. And so I turn off the WordPress sign up methods, and we build our own. That’s the big thing is I I disable the default sign up, and I use fluid forms to build a custom registration process. Okay?

This makes the entire thing a lot simpler. It also allows you to customize things in a lot more of a nice clean way. You can even ask for additional information. It doesn’t just have to be name and email and maybe a password. You can ask for other information.

And that’s actually not a bad idea from a marketing perspective because then you can segment them and do follow-up marketing with them after the fact. I mean, if you’re giving them a free account, they can give them free stuff. They can, you know, enter some additional information to to to further enhance their profile. Right? Alright.

Now, you can also easily control what happens after the sign up process when we use fluent forms. We can put them into the CRM in any way that we want, and you’ve got a lot of control. The other cool thing about fluent forms is that it has some security things that we can build into it, where you could keep the bots away from your sign up process. We wanna make sure that if you’re going to do a free member level, that just the people who are legit Get the user account and that way we’re not cluttering the database with a bunch of stuff. Alright?

So with that, let’s get onto the screen and I’ll show you how to do it. Okay. So first off, let’s talk about paid registration when people are actually creating paid accounts. Now, I’m not gonna show you too much on this because we kind of covered some of it before when we were talking about WooCommerce setup. If you go to WooCommerce, go to settings, go over to accounts and privacy, there we go.

This is the option that we’re gonna have. Now, for account creation, we’re what we want is to have this checkbox enabled, so that when they are actually going through the checkout process, it’s going to automatically create an account for them. Okay? Which makes perfect sense, because if they’re buying a membership, they are basically registering at the same time. It just happens to be a paid account.

Okay? Now, this 1 here, I always keep it unchecked. This is what that where it will actually put a, the ability if they if they try to visit the account screen of WooCommerce without being logged in, it will actually have a form on there for them to create an account. But, again, I keep that disabled because I don’t want people to be able to create an account in that way. I wanna be able to control it a lot more, and I want to use fluent forms to do it, which is what we’re gonna do here in just a minute.

So I uncheck that, but I do have it checked so that they will create 1 as they’re actually buying something, which makes perfect sense. Also, keep in mind that I keep this, the, guest checkout, unchecked. I keep that disabled because in the sites that I build, I want them to create an account as they’re purchasing because it’s that account which is going to enable them to access whatever they’re buying. Okay? Now, if you were if you were setting up WooCommerce in order to run a an ecommerce store where they’re just buying some item that’s gonna get sent to them and they don’t need a user account, then you probably would wanna keep this thing turned on.

But, otherwise, for a membership site, I typically keep that disabled. Now the 1 other thing I also definitely want to make sure you’re aware of, is to go to settings, go over to general, and this thing here, for membership, we wanna make sure that we uncheck this box. By default, it will be turned on. The thing is, that opens up the default registration process for WordPress. Okay?

And again, we don’t wanna use that. We’re gonna build our own. So we wanna disable this option right here and make sure that you save the setting. Now I wanna make 1 other point here, and that is that even if you build your own registration process, or even if you’re using a big fancy system like BuddyBoss or something like that, and you’ve got a registration process, if you have this turned on, the bots can find it. Okay?

And I’ve seen that happen on some people’s membership sites, where they have a registration process of their own that they’ve built. However, this was still turned on by default, and that allowed certain, things in the API to just sit there and be accessible. And the bots could sit there and hammer it and and create user profiles, and they just spammed up the database. So once again, we wanna make sure that we turn this off so that we do not leave that door open. Alright.

So now we’re gonna create our own registration process. Now I’m gonna go ahead and install fluent forms to this site. Now in the case of fluent forms, you do need the professional, add on. You need the pro version, in order to open up the ability to have it create user profile. So I’m gonna go ahead and install all that, and then it will go back to screen, and we’ll build it together.

Now I wanna make 1 other point is that pretty much all of the good quality forms plugins for WordPress can kinda do the same thing. Alright? So if you’re using Gravity Forms or, you know, what are the other ones? There’s so many of them now. You could still build, registration form with that.

Okay? But I’m gonna use Fluent Forms. I’m a big fan of the Fluent family of products. Obviously, it works like the bee’s knees with, FluentCRM, so that works out really well for me too. And that’s what we’re gonna use.

So let me install that, and I’ll see you back on my screen, and we’ll build the rest of it. Okay. So on our list of plugins, you can see that I’ve got fluent forms, and we have the pro add on pack installed. And you do need the Pro Add on Pack in order to do everything that we’re looking to do here. So now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go over to our list of integrations for Fluent Forms.

We wanna make sure we turn on this user registration and update module. Okay? That this is gonna give us the ability to create forms that can affect user profiles. Alright? Let’s I always turn off this landing pages 1.

That’s totally up to you. It’s got nothing to do with what we’re doing, but it’s what I do. Okay, so now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go to our list of forms Okay, we’re gonna create a new form I just use a blank form Okay. Let’s go ahead and call this, free whoops. Member registration.

Okay now with all the different fields that we have available here, you can put anything that you want on this form Okay, and I’ll show you this a minute, but you can match it up to fields inside of fluent CRM You can do all kinds of cool things with this form. We’re gonna keep this 1 pretty basic just for our purposes We’re gonna ask them their name. We’re gonna ask them their email. Alright The question I get from a lot of people is should you ask for the password? It really depends on up to you?

If you wanted to you just go under advanced fields, and I think yeah, there it is right here. We just put the password on there like that. Okay. Now, here’s the thing about the password if you don’t ask for the password, the system is gonna automatically generate them, 1. And then what’ll happen is WordPress, you will have WordPress send them an email.

They will then get a link to click that link and set their password. So it’s a little bit more work, but it’s also a little bit more secure because they’re not actually plugging a password into the screen. It’s gonna basically be auto generated for them. That being said, if you wanna make it really, really slick and easy, you can go ahead and ask for the password here. Okay?

Now again, you can enter any other information that you want. You could ask them you could ask them some survey information on the Ray Inn that you can then apply particular tags to and your CRM and and do follow-up marketing You could do whatever you want to do, but for this purpose I’m gonna go in and create this form real simple like this. I’ll say create Account let’s make that nice and large. We’ll center it Okay, let’s go ahead and save that form Now what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go over to settings and integration Okay, so for confirmation settings We just say what’s gonna have what are they what are they gonna see when they submit this form Now, typically, what we wanna do is send them to some type of a welcome page. Okay?

And I don’t actually have that yet. So let’s go over here to all pages. What we’re gonna do is I’m gonna create something real basic Welcome Okay, this is the page people will see after they create an account Real, real simple. Obviously, in the real world, you would do something a little better with this page. Okay.

Good. So that’s now been created. Let’s go back to our form, Go back to our settings And for this we are now going to go ahead and send them to the welcome page After they have submitted. Okay, so let’s save that Okay. Now the next thing we need to do is we’re going to configure integrations Okay.

Well, let me make a quick mention of this under email notifications It comes down to whether you want your form plug in to send off email notifications to either you or the person who’s registering. Typically, I do not use this to send an email, like a welcome email or anything like that. I use FluentCRM for that. And we would just set up the automation. If you, as of the administrator of the website, wanted to get an email notification anytime somebody registers, well, you could turn this on.

You can control that, and you would get an admin notification. In most of the most cases, that’s gonna be really annoying. So I just keep all that stuff turned off. So let’s go over to integrations. Alright.

Now under here, the integration that we’re gonna want is user registration or update integration. This is basically you using fluent forms built in capability to do user forms. If you were playing around with fluent forms on your site and you do not see this as an integration option, it’s because you did not turn it on and enable it under your list of integrations, so you need to go do that. So we’re gonna go ahead and set this up. Doesn’t matter what you call it.

Now what we’re gonna do is start matching up our field. So for our registration for email, we’re going to say we’re obviously gonna match up the email. For username, now, if we were asking them for a username on our form, you could select the form here. But as it says here, if you keep this empty, we’ll just use the email address. Okay?

And that’s usually what I do. Okay? I just let the email address be their username and I keep that field blank. Alright for first name, what we’re gonna now do is we’re going to enter first name. Alright for last name, we are gonna enter the last name and then for our password We’re going to do the password now just like it works with the username If you do not enter anything for this password, it will auto generate and it will go through that automatic process Okay If we go down a little bit further, we can choose our user role that they will go into.

I always keep them as subscriber because these are public people. If you do want to start matching up custom fields, you could do that here. If you have advanced custom fields installed, this gets even a little cooler, but we don’t have it installed at this moment. Under here, do you want this person to automatically log in to their profile as soon as they submit this form? Then you could check this box, which is kind of a cool thing in some cases.

What you can actually do is have them create the account, and then they are automatically logged into it. Okay? But if you want them to jump to a hoop first or confirm something first, you would leave that unchecked. With this, do you want to send the default welcome email? Now if I were generating their password automatically, I would usually check this box so that they do get the default welcome email, and it will then send them a link so that they can set their own password.

Alright? Under form validation, let’s uncheck that, by the way. Under form validation, do not submit the form if the user already exists in the database. I always leave that alone Okay, and then lastly we enable the feed Now that form is going to work it will create user profiles Now the 1 other thing that we probably want to do is add them to fluent CRM. So with this case, we do the fluent CRM integration.

You could use WP Fusion’s integration if you’d like. They kinda do the same thing, but I’m just gonna go direct in this case. And with this, we can then, if we wanna add them to a particular email list, if they’re for free members, you can do that. Obviously, for email, we’ll match up that field again. Let’s go ahead and and match up our names to the CRM.

So they show up in fluent CRM that way for this 1. I use just choose the name. It’ll kind of put everything together. This is really handy because you’re gonna want to tag them in a particular way. So in this case, I’m gonna go ahead and say I’m gonna tag everybody who fills this thing out with the member tag.

Okay? Now, if you wanna get cooler with it, you can enable dynamic tag selection, and this is where you can set different tags on their profile on the way in based on things they’ve entered into the form. Being that we’re keeping things pretty simple in this case, we’re gonna keep that off. We can skip it if they’re already in them in the, database. That usually makes sense.

Alright. Actually, I’m gonna uncheck that because we wanna make sure that they’re still gonna get tagged even if they already exist. Do you want to enable double opt in? Usually, you would probably say yes. Okay?

But it kinda depends on your overall email marketing strategy whether you wanna use double opt in or not. And then lastly, this option would be, do you wanna force subscribe them? So the what this 1 does is that if they happen to already be on your email list but let’s say they unsubscribed. Maybe they were there already. But then they come in and they decide to register for a free account.

Well, you can then just force them to they’ll be subscribed once again to your email list automatically. Okay? With all that being said, you can also do conditional logics. You can only apply this integration in certain circumstances. You can remove tags, but we do wanna enable it.

Bingo. So what we now have is a registration form that will create the user profile with the settings that we want. It will also put them into FluentCRM. And WP Fusion is also gonna make sure that they’re all linked up and it’s ready to rock and roll. Very, very cool.

Lastly, what you’re gonna wanna do is probably create a page in order to stick this form on there So what we’re gonna do is we’re just gonna create a quick page we will call this register and We could put anything we want on here copy what have you But what we’re gonna just do is put fluent forms and we’re gonna select our free member registration There it is and we’re gonna publish Okay, all set And there’s what it would look like. Now, obviously, in this particular, instance, I’m already logged in. Typically, what we would do is we would put a registration link up in the top menu. Okay. Somewhere where it’s accessible, where we want it to be.

And then using the same methods that I showed you in the previous video in this series where we’re taking control of our nav menu, we would just make sure that the registration button only shows up if they’re not logged in. It wouldn’t make sense to show it to them otherwise. Okay. So that’s kind of how we control that. Now, 1 last thing I wanna mention here, and that’s just the idea of security on this form.

Obviously, like we did previously, we have turned off the default registration options for WordPress, under general settings and also for WooCommerce. So now what we have is just this form. The thing is, bots can still hit it. Okay? Now typically, what I have found is that by using fluent forms for this, and you’ll see it on other ones too like like gravity forms, simply by using that type of setup, a lot of bots don’t really look for it.

What they’re looking for typically is a low hanging fruit. And so what they’re gonna find is they’re gonna look for the default word pressure registrations. And on your side, they’re gonna find out that it’s not even there, and so they’re not gonna do anything. That being said, if they do find this fluent form, and they’re smart enough to know how to read that code, they can still hammer it. Or what could happen is you end up having, spam registrations like, you know, Russian email addresses and that type of stuff.

And so long story short, we wanna put a little bit of security on this form. So there’s a couple things that I usually do. 1 is I turn on what’s called the honeypot. Okay? Now, fluent forms has a built in honeypot.

The honeypot basically has a little hidden field in there that’s dynamic, and it’s looking for that. And if it doesn’t see, that honeypot being, handled properly, it they it knows it’s a bot, and it won’t allow the form to submit. So that’s the built in Honeypot. And then there’s a plug in out there called WPArmor. I’ll show you this in just a second that I usually put onto the site, which is an even better Honeypot.

And I install that. They have a pro version, but the free version is usually what I use, and all you gotta do is install it and that’s it. And that right there really helps make sure that your forms, all of them by the way, your contact forms and everything, will make sure that they can’t be abused by bots. And then lastly, if it’s necessary, I will put on something like recaptcha or what’s called Cloudflare turnstile. Basically, these are the the the little security features that you probably see on sites where you have to click on fire hydrants or something like that.

But I hate that 1 personally. I think it’s really annoying. Cloudflare turnstile is a little bit simpler where you just have to check a box to basically verify your human. If Cloudflare can tell that you’re normal, it won’t even show it to you. So it’s a lot more of a user friendly experience.

I’m not gonna show you in here how to set up Cloudflare turnstile, but I will show you where the settings are, and that we could talk about the specifics maybe in another video. Alright. Let’s go back to screen real fast. Okay, so back in WordPress admin go over to fluent forms go over to global settings and Right under here. I think it’s on this screen We’ve got this option right here enable honeypot security Okay, And we want to go ahead and check that and save our settings.

Okay? So that’s the basic built in honeypot. The other option is WP armor, so let’s go to install a plugin, search for WP armor and it’s got a little u in there so you can find that there it is WP armor honeypot anti spam. Let’s install that And we will activate it This honeypot is very very effective. It works really really nicely.

The other thing too is you really don’t have to do much in the way of settings. It will show up there. You can also if you find that you’re even despite the honeypot that you start to get a little bit of bot registrations, you can actually just hit this little button on the honeypot, settings, and it will refresh the field name, and therefore, it throws the bots off all over again. Okay? Now, also, you will find that, let’s see if it’s there.

Go back to our registration page. See how it’s got this little hidden thing that it says is that this form is protected by WP armor. Now nobody else will be able to see this. I’m only seeing it because I’m logged into the site as an administrator. Now if you don’t happen to like seeing that if you just find it to be visually annoying you can just flip this to yes, and it will hide that from you But it will still do its job.

Okay. So that’s WP armor now if we go back to fluent forms settings I think it’s I think it’s under settings actually. Let’s go to settings. Yeah, under security, you will see the options that fluent form supports. It can support Google recaptcha version 23 hCaptcha, which honestly I’ve never used before and then turn style, which is using Cloudflare.

Now I’m gonna let you figure this thing out. Perhaps I will do another video at some point in the future on how to actually set this up. But there there you set it up over inside of your Cloudflare account. It’s gonna give you the site key and the secret key, and then you plop them in there, and boom. It it will be all set.

And then the cool thing is is once this is set up, you can then go to your actual user registration form or any other form of your site, and you just drag the little CloudFlare, turnstile field into the form. You don’t really have to configure anything. But, but at that point, the form is then protected with turnstile. And that is pretty much a complete and total block. You really don’t see bots get through that 1 very much at all.

And so if necessary, you can always use 1 of these security measures. Alright. Well, there you have it. We’ve now created a pretty simple registration process. Obviously, from here, you can make it more complicated if you want.

Basically, you could add additional fields to your form and ask for more information on the way in, enrich their CRM profile, allow you to do more follow-up marketing after the fact. You can obviously create the pages and the things that your free member should do. 1 thing I will say is I’ve seen people who just say, oh, free member levels are great, but then they really don’t hardly have anything in there for free members to do. And so, you know, make sure just strategically that if you’re gonna bother with offering a free member registration process and a free member level, just know why you’re doing it. Make sure there’s something in there for them to do and some way to get people to come back.

I would not use a free member level just to deliver lead magnets because it’s just not enough of a reason to clutter up your database with user accounts. Most people are then going to just go get the thing that they wanted, take off, never show up ever again. Now, you do have them on your list. You can send out follow-up emails, but, again, why clutter up the database in that perspective with user profiles? So, again, make sure you’ve got a strategic reason to do a free member level if you’re thinking of doing 1.

And, again, make sure that you set it up the way that we’ve defined here, have the proper security on there so you don’t get a bunch of spam registrations, and things will work out nicely. Now if you have any other, things that you want my help on on your registration process, definitely get in touch. I can help you build it out if you want. You’re probably gonna also wanna set up, some automations with FluentCRM so so that you can send them a welcome email and that type of stuff. We didn’t really get into that here.

And so there there’s a little bit more to it, but it’s not that complicated. It’s not complicated at all. So with that, I will see you on the next video in our series where we’ll continue to build out our membership site here. Now, there again, this is a mock membership site. I’m not actually building a real 1.

I’m just trying to show you a lot of the mechanics here that go into doing this so that you could translate it into your own. And, hopefully, it’s helpful so far. I’ll see you on the next video. Real quick, by the way, are you subscribed to the WP Edge? That’s my Monday morning newsletter.

It’s sent out to a whole bunch of people, honestly, and we’re well over 500 issues in. I’ve been doing this a really long time, but it’s a weekly newsletter that’s packed with value. It’s also showing you some of the WordPress news of the week, some of the plugin updates, things like that, but I also get into some strategy, but also some technical how to on using WordPress to fuel your business. That’s the entire idea. If you’re a membership site owner, a creator, a consultant, but it doesn’t matter who.

But if you’re using WordPress as the foundation of your business site, the WP Edge is probably gonna be worth your time. So make sure that you’re subscribed. Go over to the wp edge.com. Get subscribed there. The archives are also available at blogmarketingacademy.com, and I will see you bright and early Monday morning.