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In this video, I want to go over the basics of how WP Fusion works and what purpose it’s going to serve in our membership site. It’s actually an incredibly useful plugin. It’s not really positioned as a membership site plugin because it does so many things. But in the context of building the membership site in the way that we’re going to do it here in the series and the way that I do it all the time, WP Fusion is a pretty fundamental component, and I want to, in this video, show you why. So here on the WP Fusion website, you see the main thing that it does is it’s a marketing automation for WordPress. Now, if you were to look at that, you wouldn’t quite get what this thing does. Basically, it says it’s the all-in-one solution to deeply integrate your WordPress website with your CRM or email marketing tool. That’s the basic gist of it. Basically, what we’re going to be doing is merge merging the built-in mechanics of WordPress with your CRM, which in this case, we’re going to be using Fluent CRM because that’s my preferred CRM. Now, again, WP Fusion works with a lot of different CRMs, and so if you’re using a different one, it’s all still going to work basically the exact same way.

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But that’s what it does. Now, if we pop up here to features, and we look at some of the stuff it talks about, connect anything to anything without a developer. Again, we’re going to be connecting WordPress to a variety of different things. So basically what WP Fusion does is it’s going to connect your CRM up with your learning management system, your membership site, your store. It’s going to be able to control access with our tags, which is something we’re definitely going to go over here. You can send form submissions into your CRM. You can add and remove tags. It’s really, really important how this actually works. So So to be clear, WP Fusion is not a membership site plugin, but it happens to be incredibly useful for membership sites, because what it does is it takes our CRM, which is going to be Fluent CRM in this case, and it makes that the hub of the entire membership site, and it connects it up with the other mechanics of your site. In this case, it’ll be Woocommerce, which is where they’re going to purchase the membership. It’s going to be your forms plugin where they can sign up for stuff.

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It’s going to be the content in itself that you can protect it and say, well, they need to have a certain tag on their profile in order to see that content. And then also with the built-in user profiles of WordPress. So if you go to WordPress, people have user profiles profiles there? Well, we’re going to use those as our user profiles for our membership site, and we’re going to then merge it using WP Fusion with the CRM, and that’s how we’re going to control everything and what people are going to log in with. Now, back into our test bed for our membership that we’re building here, you can go into WordPress, go over to the user’s area here, and this is all where your member profiles are going to be. Basically, they are the same as regular WordPress profiles. Now, in this particular install, I’ve only got one on the administrator. Now, as we add more, what you’re going to have is you’re going to have people showing up here as a subscriber. That’s typically the user role that will be used as people join. And then if you go over in the WP Fusion settings, you will see right here that this checkbox will stay on.

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It will create new contacts in Fluent CRM when a user registers in WordPress. So basically, if somebody goes and they buy something in Woocommerce or what have you, and they create a user profile, they’re going to automatically get a profile in Fluent CRM, and the two things will be linked together. Now, back here in the user screen, I’m just going to go in and demonstrate this. We’re going to create a user profile. We’re going to do so manually. Typically, this would be done via people coming in and signing up for the membership site on the public, but we’re just going to do it in the back-end here. Let’s create one. Let’s just call it testuser. That’ll be the username. I’ll just use one of my email addresses here. Let’s go in and call this testuser. We’ll We’ll just keep that password because it honestly doesn’t matter. It’ll go in as a subscriber. Of course, we’re going to keep this checkbox that says Add the user as a contact in Fluent CRM. Let’s go ahead and do this. Now we got ourselves a new user, and if we go over to Fluent CRM to our contact list, you’ll see that that user is here.

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Now, if we open up that profile, you’ll see that Fluent CRM has this little ID number here that links to the actual user profile. If I click on that, it’s going to the exact corresponding user profile. Now, the way WP Fusion works is whatever tags that we add here, and we don’t have any yet because I haven’t yet gotten that far, but they would automatically get synced over here. And so it’s a perfect sync between the user profile and the CRM. It’s the exact same person, and it basically is one profile. It just It bridges the gap between the WordPress user profile and our CRM. Now, the beauty of this is because now we have full marketing automation capability, full integration with everything else across our website. But we can add tags, remove tags, do various things, and it will all affect the user profile. And of course, when that person is logging in, that is what’s going to control what they can see, what they can do based on the permissions that you’ve given them. Now, just to show how permissions work and how the thing starts to come together, I’ve gone into the tag section of fluency-RM, and we’re going to create a tag that says members.

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We’ll just assume this is going to be a tag that we use for paying members to our membership site. That’s our description for this particular tag. We’ll talk more about tag structure coming up in a future video, but this is just going to be for demonstration purposes. Now, we have a new tag here. We’re going to go over to WP Fusion real fast. We’re going to go in and refresh just so WP Fusion can see our new tags. Let’s go ahead and refresh that screen. We see it in the drop-down there. Now what we’re going to do is let’s go back to our contact list. Let’s go to that new profile that I created. We’re going to go in and add this tag to the member in order to make my little test profile here into an actual member. Okay. You can see that my user profile now has the members tag. Now, what I want to do, and I want to show you how to protect a piece of content. What I’ve done is I’ve now gone to the All Pages. I’ve created a quick little test page here just to show this. Let’s edit this page.

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Now, over here in the sidebar, you’ll see the WP Fusion settings. It says, Users must be logged in to view the page. We’re going to make this a members page. We’re going to say, Yes, they need to be logged in, and they need to have the members tag in order to see it. Then we can even make it so that we do a redirect here that says, well, if they’re trying to access this page and they do not have access to it, we can send them off to a Access Denied page or our sales page or something like that. But we’ll do this another time. What I really wanted to do is just show you this. This is how we are going to do content protection. Let’s go and save that. Now this page is protected for members only. If you go back to our list of pages, you’ll see that that page now has a little lock next to it, and you can clearly see that they need to be logged in in order to view that particular page. All right, now, just to connect the dots here and show you how people would get these member tags on there, let’s go in and create a fake little product here just to get started.

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Let’s go ahead and create a product inside of Woocommerce. We’re going to call this, let’s get rid of that stuff. Let’s call this a test product. We don’t even need to worry about the description unless you’re going to use the full Woocommerce catalog, but I usually don’t. Now down here, we’re just going to use this as a simple product right now. I don’t have the subscription add-on installed yet and stuff like that. So this will just be a one-time purchase. It is going to be virtual. We don’t need to track inventory. We could just set our price. Let’s say we’re going to make it cost 20 bucks. All right. Now, the big part is go over to WP Fusion, and it says, Apply tags when purchased. And we’re going to say, If they buy this product, we were going to give them our members tag. Okay? Nice and simple. Now the product is set up. Now there’s more obviously to be done to get our checkout pages looking good and that type of stuff. But the idea would be that if they buy this product from Woocommerce, it’s going to charge them $20 through whatever payment integration we choose to use.

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And it’s going to then, when their $20 has been collected, it will add the members tag to their profile. It’s also going to create their user profile that they don’t already have one. As you could see earlier, that’s going to automatically put them inside a Fluent CRM. They’re going to have the members tag, and that would then grant them access to whatever content that we have chosen to protect with that members tag. Now, one other thing I want to show you that WP Fusion will do is this thing here under the Contact Fields tab where you can then match up fields between the user profile and our corresponding field inside of Fluent CRM. You can see that by default, it’s now matching the first name, last name, and user email with the corresponding fields in the CRM. But you have all kinds of other ones, too. This screen right here really shows nicely what WP Fusion is actually doing. It’s merging everything between our user fields and the Fluent CRM fields. And so going right on down the line, if somebody purchases something and they become a customer in Woocommerce, We can sync those fields over.

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Like right here, if they enter their billing address when they actually fill out the checkout form, let’s go in and sync some of this stuff. Let’s go in and check these things off, and we will sync them up with Fluent CRM so that we actually have that information inside the CRM. The actual order. If you would like to record order information inside of Fluent CRM as fields, you can do that. Now, as you add additional plugins, you’re going to start to see other things available here. If you create custom fields, you’ll see those things available here as well. So the idea would be that you can create a nice, beautiful user profile that has all the data that you need synced between that profile and their Fluent CRM profile so that you can use it in marketing automations. You could put those things inside of emails and things like that. So let’s go and save that because that’s actually pretty handy to have that address information automatically stored when they actually make an order. So hopefully you can see why they call this thing WP Fusion. Basically, it sits there as an umbrella and fuses all this stuff together with your actual CRM.

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And so it basically means that instead of using a set membership site plugin like wishlist member or member press or something like that, we’re going to have far more capability by bringing in other plugins that do the best at what they do, but then using WP Fusion to merge them all together as one cohesive hole and using Fluent CRM or whatever CRM you happen to be using as the basis of our database. And it makes for a much, much more powerful combination Typically, then using something like Member Press or Wishlist or any of those ones. At the end of the day, the tag-based approach to running your membership gives you a lot of power and flexibility. And in the coming video here in this series, I’m going to talk a little bit more about how to define your tag, some tags you might want to go ahead and define for your membership site. Every site is a little bit different, but there’s certain ones that we end up using over and over again. And we’ll talk about that because with the setup that we’re doing here, some Some of this stuff is a little bit more manual in the fact that you’re having to build some of the mechanics of your membership site yourself.

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That being said, it’s so much more flexible this way than having some of the preset stuff that comes with some of the other plugins. So hopefully that made sense why WP Fusion is the basis of all the membership sites that I build. Now, I want to show you one more thing here. If you go back to Woocommerce in our test product that we created and you pop on down, you’ll see WP Fusion. This is where we were doing things before. However, look at one up from there. You go to Fluent CRM, and you’ve got some of the same capabilities. So there actually is a little bit of feature overlap here where Fluent CRM has a built-in integration here with Woocommerce where if they buy this particular product, we can then add a tag of our choice. And we don’t actually need WP Fusion to do it. The other thing that’s interesting here is that if you go When you go over into the automations area, which we’re not going to get into in this video, and you start building some of these automations, there are some things that Fluent CRM can do automatically, and we don’t actually need the full paid version of Fluent CRM.

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For example, if we go over to Woocommerce, you can see that we have the ability to trigger automations based on new orders coming in directly through Woocommerce. So what does that mean? Why do I tell you this? It It just means that in some cases, depending on the capability that your membership site needs, Fluent CRM by itself would be enough. And then what you could do is look at WP Fusion Lite. This is the free version to WP Fusion. Wp Fusion itself is not exactly a cheap plugin. It’s extremely capable, and it’s one of my favorite plugins to pay for because it’s so awesome and it does so many things. However, for some people, For example, the light version, the free version, is actually adequate because what it will do is it will merge with the CRM, it will sync the fields up between user profiles and the CRM, and it also does have the ability to do content protection. Now, what you don’t get with WP Fusion light is the integrations with all the other plugins. For example, our little thing here for integrating WP Fusion with WooCommerce would not exist test with the light version.

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However, for some of this stuff, if the Fluent CRM, Built to Integrations, is enough for you, maybe all you actually need is to use WP Fusion to sync it up with the user profiles and do the content protections. And in some cases, that’s really all that you need. Okay, so that’s the simple version of what you can do with WP Fusion in terms of building our membership site. Of course, WP Fusion does a heck of a lot of other things. It integrates with a ton of plugins, a ton of CRMs. It enables lots of different things. But what I just showed you is basically the core of what WP Fusion does, and why it’s so important as we build our membership site. And again, in some cases, depending on the simplicity level of your site, it could be that the free version WP Fusion Lite will be adequate for you, and then just use some of Fluent CRM’s built-in integrations. And it works. I happen to use the full professional version of WP Fusion because I find that I utilize the rest of those features quite readily, and it’s definitely worth it. It’s definitely probably one of the more valuable plugins that I pay for the license for, and I’m happy to do it every single year.

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All right? So coming up on the next video in this series, I want to talk to you about our approach to tagging, because obviously, with something like WP Fusion, the way that we utilize our tags is a pretty fundamental component of how the membership site is going to work. Okay? And so let’s go and talk about how to determine what tags to put in there, how you can avoid over tagging, because I’ve done it before. I’ve seen a lot of sites where they just got so many tags, and it just becomes a real pain to work with. We’ll get into that in the next video. I’ll see you then.