Okay, it’s time to start talking about membership site tools. And I’m going to give you in this video the tools that I have chosen, the ones that I use pretty much all the time, to build membership sites. Now, I want to be clear. It doesn’t mean that if you’re using something other than the tools I’m about to mention that you’re screwing up. It doesn’t mean that you’ve made necessarily a bad choice.

What I’m going to simply do, though, is explain my logic for the tools that I use. These are the tools that we’ll use in this series moving forward, by the way. And then if you have reasons to use other tools, that’s totally fine. All right, a lot of the same logic is going to apply either way. All right, so let’s go ahead and get started.

Okay, so once again, let’s talk about the core tools for building a membership site. And again, you do not necessarily have to use these tools, but I’m going to explain my logic on each one because I have built memberships sites in a multitude of different ways. And the tools I’m about to show you are the ones that I have found make my life incredibly easy. And it makes websites and membership sites just so much easier to use. It alleviates a lot of problems.

And I’ll explain as we go. The first one here is, of course, woocommerce. Now, woocommerce is pretty much the leading ecommerce platform for WordPress. It’s actually created by the same people that made WordPress itself, and so it works out really well. And then for subscription billing, the add on that I use is called woocommerce subscriptions.

This is what I use. This is what I recommend. Now, is it perfect? No. But that being said, this is the platform that I find offers the most flexibility.

Pretty much anything that you want to do, you would be able to do with woocommerce. And so that means that you can build something on woocommerce. Two things, almost everything will integrate with it. You’re hardly ever going to have a problem with that because woocommerce is so prevalent everywhere. And then secondly, anything that you want this thing to be able to do into the future, you would be able to do without having to switch platforms.

And for that reason, I recommend that you use Woocommerce for your billing, for your membership site, and it makes life simply easier. Now, a few words about some of the other options out there. First of all, there are other membership site plugins out there like Wishlist memberpress, there’s a number of them out there and they offer their own way of taking payments. And in some cases there are a few little things that I would say they probably do a little nicer. For example, memberpress, they have a pretty good way of being able to move from one subscription to another in order to basically upgrade subscriptions.

And it’s, and it works nice and seamlessly. Membermouse does a pretty good job of that. But the thing is, they don’t have nearly the flexibility of woocommerce, not nearly the amount of things they can integrate with it. And so for that reason, I still recommend that you use Woocommerce. Now when it comes to external systems, we’ve got things like thrive cart, we’ve got other shopping cart systems.

The problem with these is that they’re not integrated into WordPress. And so for example, with thrive cart, because I’ve seen a lot of my people who come and they want to use thrive cart because they feel like it will make things simpler, but in a lot of cases it doesn’t. And that’s because that functionality is inherently over there, it’s someplace else. And so when your members want to control their own subscriptions, they’ve got to log into a customer hub way over there. It looks nothing like the rest of your website and it’s just not user friendly.

It’s not user friendly at all. What we want is for simplicity. We want people to be able to go to your site, enter a login and a password. There’s everything, there’s their entire subscription, there’s all their content. They can control their account right then and there.

It’s easy. That’s what you can get with Woocommerce. And it’s why that I recommend that you use woocommerce for your membership site. Alright? Now there’s one thing that you may find handy.

It’s completely and totally optional. I wouldn’t consider this core, and that is cartflows. Now there’s other ones out there, but let me explain to this, what you, what this one does. Cartflows is a add on that works with woocommerce that will allow you to do upsells, downsells, order bumps, basically create beautiful sales funnels and do it on top of the woocommerce platform. It allows you to do a lot of the cool things that people, people might go to thrive cart for, or something else you can do with cartflows.

You got full control over what the checkout experience looks like. You know, a lot of the missing features that are not part of woocommerce by itself. Cartflows makes it pretty easy to do. And so I find that for a lot of sites that I use and that I build, I put cartflows. Even the free version of cartflows does a pretty good job of being able to take control over your checkout forms and just makes things more user friendly.

But if you want the professional level upgrades like upsells and downsells and cross sells and all that type of stuff, and like funnel flow, you would need the pro version. And it works really nicely. And this is what I use. All right, let’s move on. Let’s look at Fluent CRM.

This is absolutely the best system that I have found for running membership sites. But here’s the thing, it’s really for your email list. This is what, this is where you will put your CRM and your email list and everything in house inside of WordPress. And it works really well. This would be in lieu of something like active campaign or convertkit or any of these things that you may go to.

You could do it all inside. Remember at the very beginning how I talked about how digital sovereignty is really important, being able to own all of your own business assets? Fluent CRM allows you to do that. It also integrates beautifully with everything else I’m talking about in this tech stack. And so I’ll show you this as we move forward in this series.

But the ease at which you can manage member profiles and have all of the data for your members in one spot by using a tool like Fluencyrm, just makes life easier. There’s no way around it. Whereas if you put stuff out on Activecampaign or Drip or ConvertKit or any of that, it’s again a remote piece of software. It means that you’re dealing with APIs and all that kind of stuff. It means that you’re going to have data over there, you’re going to have some data over here, you’re not going to be able to access everything on the same screen.

It inherently makes things more difficult to manage. And then basically are you just using the CRM as a, as an email list and a way to send out emails? Whereas if you have everything in house combined with the next tool that I’m about to show you, it makes this such an inherently powerful tool to be able to build all of your marketing automations inside of WordPress, to be able to control all of your member protections from fluent CRM. Everything would be right there and you can have everything on one screen and it’s just a really, really beautiful setup. Now, in order to make this really core for a membership site, I highly recommend WPFusion.

This is the plugin that I use on almost, not even, almost, I think every single membership site that I use, even a few that I’ve built where they really had some reason why they wanted to use a membership plugin such as memberpressed or wishlist members. I still find that we put WP Fusion in there anyway in order to solve a few problems. So here’s what it does. WP Fusion, it’s called this because it will basically fuse WordPress with your CRM. It basically makes your WordPress site as an extension of whatever you can do inside of your CRM.

It also happens to do really, really good at content protection. So this is basically the membership site plugin. It does so much more than that, but it’s basically the membership site plugin now. It’s, it doesn’t have anything to do with billing. We use woocommerce for that.

But what this does is it integrates your CRM, which is going to be fluent CRM with basically every piece of your website, and it also allows you to lock down content. So this is what you’re going to use to control access to your online courses, to your workshops, to any products that people purchase to be able to control different member levels and what they’re going to see, it’s all going to be done through WP Fusion. WP Fusion does so many things that it’s like the swiss army knife for anybody building any type of membership site with WordPress, it just does damn near everything. And the guy Jack, who’s behind it is just really, really pervasive. Like you could post a question in the Facebook group, the dude is going to answer you lickety split super fast.

So it really is pretty much my favorite WordPress plugin and I highly, highly recommend it. And this is what we’re going to definitely be using as we build out. All right, now you’re going to need a theme. All right. And the one that I use is cadence.

Okay. And, but I want to make clear here, I have my reasons for using cadence. I’ve clicked with Cadence. It works based on the block builder and works based on the native theme setup that works with WordPress. And so it’s just, it’s very performance friendly.

The pro version of it has some things that make building membership sites really easy for me. I think it’s a really good tool. But I want to be clear here that this is not a core tool of a membership site that ultimately you can use any theme that you want, but what you want is a theme that’s going to make life a little bit simpler for you as you build out your membership site. You don’t want to have themes that are difficult to modify or are going to be performance beasts. I will make mention here of Buddy boss because Buddy Boss is really popular with a lot of people and it is a really good membership site theme.

I will say, but if you’re not using all the community functionality of the Buddy boss platform, I would suggest steering clear of the buddy boss theme. It doesn’t offer enough use for you in that case. And not only that, it’s a real pain to modify and then you end up putting elementor page builder on there and then that creates just a really beefy site with something like cadence and some other tools are similar like Spectra and stuff like that. You can create any type of site you want, you can make it look however you would like, but it’s also pretty lean and mean. It doesn’t put out a lot of bloated code.

The sites are very performance friendly and it has some things in there that just make life simpler for people who are building membership sites that, you know, like some stuff up in the header that just makes it easy. And anyway, we’ll get into that stuff a little bit later, but it’s a really good theme and it’s what I suggest for you. All right, let’s talk about fluent forms. You’re going to probably need a forms plugin for your membership site. It could be just for whoops.

It could just be for people to fill in surveys or to modify their account profile to register in the first place, to fill out quizzes, whatever it is that you might want them to do, fluent forms can pretty much do it. And it works. The reason I suggest it is because first of all, when you get fluent forms, you have all the add ons as part of it. Okay? It isn’t like you’re going to be made to buy much more expensive license options like gravity forms does.

All right, gravity forms is a great plugin. However, I do feel that as if it’s a little bit expensive if you want to get the add ons, whereas when you buy fluent forms, it just does all that stuff and so, and it’s a really, really powerful plugin. I also love how it integrates so beautifully with fluent CRM and a number of other things, by the way. But you, if you ever want to be able to pull up your member profile in your CRM and see all the forms they filled out too. It works beautifully with fluent forms.

It’s a perfect combo and that’s why I recommend that one so much. Now lastly, let’s talk about online courses. This one, I’m not going to give you a core suggestion. I will say that most of the time when they want to have full online courses, I end up using Learndash for that. But it’s not because I’m just some massive fan of Learndash, it’s because, you know, Learndash is just what I’m more familiar with.

There’s other ones out there like lifter lms and tutor lms and these guys, and I’ll let you go out and pick the one that you like the most. But I will say not every system needs full online course platforms. And in fact, if you’re just going to be doing a single lesson courses, single like classes or workshops where you just have a recording and then some content, maybe some downloadables, in a lot of cases you do not need an online course platform. And in fact we can just build something for you using custom post types, using something like advanced custom fields and we can build it and just use the WordPress functionality inherently with custom post types, that we could build this stuff without all the overhead and annoyance, using something that’s big and beefy like Learndash. Learndash does a pretty decent job.

The problem is when you install Learndash, if you’re pretty much probably only interested in organizing your online courses. But the thing is, Learndash also comes with progress tracking and quizzing and assignments, and it comes with its own member protection system and it has the ability to sell the courses. We don’t want any of that stuff, it’s just extra payload. Okay? And so again, depending on what type of classes that you are looking to put together, what type of member content you’re looking to provide, you just might not need an online course platform.

And so that’s what the part that I wanted to mention here at the end of this video, that if you’re going to go with an online course platform that I’m most familiar with, it would probably be learndash. But it isn’t because I’ve got some love for Learndash. I actually think that in a lot of cases there’s just no need for something like that. And we could just build one that will be a lot leaner and meaner and simpler and easier to maintain and much more flexible and you could do that using custom post types with some custom fields and just sort of build your own, and it often comes out a heck of a lot better. Alright, so those are the tools that I use.

Those are the core tools that I use to build membership sites. Of course, there’s others, depending on the needs of your site, the other functions you might want. You might have some other plugins that come into the bit into the fold here, and that’s totally fine. But those are the core ones that I use most often, and some of these are going to come into play as I help you build some of these functions coming up in this series. Those other plugins that may come into use down the road, I’ll of course mention them to you when the time comes.

All right, I’ll see you on the next video.