How To Launch A Successful Membership Website On WordPress In 2024
Ready to turn your passion into profit? Dive into our instructional video on launching a successful membership website packed with actionable tips and insider tricks. Discover how to build brand loyalty, optimize user experience, and scale your business effectively through subscription-based models. Elevate your digital presence today by watching this essential guide – don’t miss out on transforming your ideas into reality.
With Special Guest Melissa Love, Founder of The Design Space Agency.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript And Links
[00:00:01.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to another membership machine show. I got a special guest and will go into the podcast part of the show immediately. And we got Melissa with us. Melissa Love, founder of the design space agency. Should be a great show. So I’m going to do my countdown. Go straight into it. So free. Two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the membership machine show. This is episode 67. In this episode, we will discuss how to launch a successful membership website and a load of other topics. We got a great special guest for this show. We got Melissa’s love with us. She’s the founder of the design space agency and much more. She’s got a lot of knowledge to share about design utilizing WordPress for your membership website, and she’s also done a number of courses herself, so she can give some insights on the other side of the process. So I thought she would be a fabulous guest to have a chat with. So before I’m going to let Melissa introduce herself. So Melissa, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?
[00:01:22.810] – Melissa Love
Thanks, Jonathan. Yeah, so my name is Melissa. I have been in the WordPress space for about 15 years. I can’t believe it’s that long. And in that time I built membership sites for myself and others. I’ve released courses. I’ve pretty much given every platform out there a go. But our main business is designing themes for the various page builders and blog builders out there as well as we have a membership and a membership site. So all of which I’m looking forward to chatting about today. And I’m in the UK as well.
[00:01:51.030] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s what mortgage you ask for. So there we are. Before we go into the meat potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a couple of significant messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Should be a great show. But before we go into it, I just want to point out we’ve got some great special offers from the major sponsors, plus a created list of WordPress plugins and services that can help you build a great membership community website on WordPress. And I think that is a great idea. You can get all these goodies by going over to wptonic comdeals, wponic comdeals and you find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot, but that’s all you’ll get from that page. But it’s fab. You should also sign up for our weekly newsletter on that page. I do an outstanding newsletter. Let’s start off with why people should consider utilizing WordPress instead of some of the leading SaaS alternatives. Why do you think, Melissa, in 2024, some of the key benefits for people to look at utilizing WordPress, as I say, rather than a SaaS platform?
[00:03:28.370] – Melissa Love
Gosh, it’s a great question. I’ve actually got loads of reasons. So one of the reasons is that I think people who are just starting out with a membership site and it doesn’t work out for everyone can end up paying a very heavy monthly price for something where they’re not necessarily utilizing a lot of the features they’re paying for. So sometimes, when you’re just starting out, you’re carrying quite a significant monthly recurring cost, but you haven’t proven your concept, or maybe you’re just doing a soft launch, and you want to see how it goes. And so just on sheer affordability alone, I don’t think it’s going to suit everyone. Then, in time, I’ll put this with my I’m by trade a graphic designer and a self-taught web designer. So I’m all about making things look pretty and being able to position things exactly where they want and create beautiful custom dashboards. And if you don’t have those skills, or even the platform is very restrictive, you probably can’t do that if you want to move your student menu to the right-hand side. With some of the platforms, even simple things can get frustrating until they become the store that breaks the camel’s back.
[00:04:38.390] – Melissa Love
And then again, indeed just the UX for you as a business owner, like the user experience, you start to think, well, I really want this feature, but if I go up a level, it’s this much more money or I have to get someone, a developer, to invent this thing I want. So sometimes the things you wish to don’t even exist. But with WordPress, I’ve found that if you can dream something up, you can generally put it together with a plugin or a combination of a little bit of custom coding and a plugin. So, for me, it’s about ultimate freedom in terms of design and usability, but at an affordable price point. And as your membership grows, sure you spend more on software to achieve things. Once, I remember when I took the leap up to WP Fusion, and then I added, know each time you might add it, but you don’t have to do it till your membership is ready for it and your revenue is there to justify the cost.
[00:05:30.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Also, what are your views on what I call digital sovereignty, having as much control over your central business platform as possible? How do you view that? Melissa?
[00:05:45.790] – Melissa Love
Well, it’s another excellent question. I’ve been with clients who’ve moved from an online provider to WordPress, moved back again, and then they always end up back in WordPress because you’re at the whim of a major update that you don’t like. Might change the functionality. If you can use WordPress and you’re comfortable maintaining it, I think it’s always the best option.
[00:06:12.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. How do you respond when people say, well, Melissa, I love WordPress, but I want everything in one place, I want a unified interface, and I want everything just to work and be in one place? And that’s what I seem to get from Kajabi as an example. How do you respond to that? And have you heard that?
[00:06:39.230] – Melissa Love
A few times I have heard it. And those people probably should use an all in one solution, just like some people should use know. I guess they’re not my market. I love using WordPress. I’m comfortable with it. I find squarespace really difficult. So it just depends what you’re comfortable with. But if you have any, I never psych to convert people to WordPress because I think the best tool you’ve got is the one that you’re comfortable using. So if people want that, I should 100% go and do that.
[00:07:10.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I also think it really depends on your experience level, doesn’t it? Because I think if you’ve got no experience of utilizing a web based platform, a website and the back end of it, I think you’re going to be intimidated with Kajabi almost as much as WordPress, really to some extent, and there’s going to be a considerable learning curve. The interface is going to be slightly more integrated, but in some ways I think that’s overplayed. But I don’t know if that’s totally down to my personal bias, but I think it’s slightly overplayed. On the other hand, if you’re more experienced and you got a more established business model for your website, for your membership website, I think you should be up to the stage where you’ve got some help helping you. You’re not doing everything on your own. So I see some of the is an open source plugin based modular platform, but you should be able to hire some help. So some of the updating of the plugins and it really depends on what plugins you’re utilizing and where you’re getting them from, isn’t it? So I do think myself, but like I say, I don’t know if that’s based on my own bias.
[00:08:37.990] – Jonathan Denwood
We all are, is that I do think that the integration, having everything in one place is overstressed for understandable reasons by some of the leading SaaS providers. What is your response to that? Or do you think I’m off target there a little bit?
[00:08:57.400] – Melissa Love
No, I don’t think you’re off target. I mean, I’m someone who teaches complete beginners how to use WordPress and once they’re comfortable in the WordPress environment and they understand that adding an LMS plugin to their stack is really just a different type of post type, once people kind of wrap their head around. Actually everything in WordPress is a post type. From woocommerce products to lessons and courses, the penny drops and they feel much more comfortable when they understand we’re really just sorting data and choosing who we display it to when we’re working with WordPress. And I also kind of to people you don’t have to. Also, I think there can be a lot of trepidation around setting up a membership site. If I get someone to do it, it’s going to be ten k and it’s just not affordable. Whereas I know people like yourself, Jonathan, have turnkey solutions where they have preselected the tech stack. They make it work for you and then they hand it over and it doesn’t. Yes, of course we can all build expensive membership websites, but there are people around offering a similar set of functionalities to something like Carter or ever.
[00:09:58.660] – Melissa Love
But using a WordPress tech stack, so you don’t always have to get in for big bucks or as you say, know how everything works together. You just need to find the right person to talk to who can tell you. Because from long experience using a tech stack that really works and works together.
[00:10:14.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and I think WordPress, its great strength also can be its greatest weakness, is you’ve got enormous choice. You got multiple choices in the WordPress platform when it comes to the, I call them Lego bricks, which are the plugins. Like I say, I see it as a modular system. You have the core which is WordPress, and you have these additional modules which are plugins which you can bolt on to the core. But the thing is, there’s enormous choice, which is great. It means you’re not entrapped with something that you decide no longer fulfills what you need because you can move on to another solution. But on the other hand, all this choice can lead to confusion and also you spending a lot of time on the tech stack with WordPress and also ending up with a bit of a Frankenstein, a WordPress Frankenstein. So it’s tricky. It’s finding a middle road. Would you agree with that, Melissa?
[00:11:26.110] – Melissa Love
Yeah, it is. And then, of course, when your knowledge increases, you start to get a sense of actually what is the role that each piece of the puzzle or Lego brick plays. So, for example, I know just because I build teams for both that it would be quite a small job for me to swap learndash for lifter LMS. They’re both short copace. They have a similar structure. So when you understand that, I then think, well, actually I can swap this affiliate plugin for another one. I know how the Lego bricks work. So once you kind of understand the role each thing in your stack plays, switching to another one or upgrading stops being quite such a barrier. And so if you feel your tech stack, as you say, is a bit of a Frankenstein, once you understand the role that everything plays, changing it, streamlining, it isn’t such a big deal. Whereas I know when I first built my membership website, I was like, I’m never changing anything. It all feels like it’s precariously knit together. And of course it’s not. I’ve now, since four years ago when I first launched my membership, I now have moved on the software in various areas and changed to different things and switched them out.
[00:12:28.380] – Melissa Love
And it’s a bit of work, but I’m not daunted like I was in the beginning where I was like, will this all work? Everything speaks to each other. I don’t want to do that. I feel a lot more confident with my building blocks, my Lego blocks. Now.
[00:12:41.730] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’re making a really fantastic point. There is that. I think I’ve noticed that with all the hundreds of discussions I’ve had on Zoom, is that people get, they want to throw everything into the kitchen sink, they want everything set up and they spend months and months and they look, and this is a journey, isn’t it? More than you need the right solution at the right moment in your membership journey. Obviously, you got to get traction first and then get your first group of students through your first course, and then you got to get feedback. It’s a journey. And the technology stack changes with that journey. I think you’re pointing that out, aren’t you?
[00:13:34.850] – Melissa Love
Yeah. That’s just part and parcel of running your business. A tool serves you till it doesn’t, and then you have to find a solution. Not even in our website. We’ve just swapped calendly for fluent booking for example. And that’s been a journey to get. We have onboarding calls in around robin scenario and it’s been a slight pain in the ass actually. But we’re there now and you’ll always have these challenges in your business. There’ll always be a little tech thing that you’re thinking, I could do better than that, or there’s a tool here that’s going to save me time, it’s going to save me money. It’s just part and of doing business.
[00:14:12.270] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. And I think obviously WordPress at WP Tonic we communicate that we are hosting plus because it was a bit tricky for us to find the right communication about what we are because we are hosting and quality hosting, but a lot more than that. But on the other hand, we don’t want to become a WordPress SaaS either, because I think some people have been very successful in offering WordPress as a service. But I also think there’s some problems with the concept because you can end up with the slightly technical extra setup required with WordPress and the slight increase in maintenance required, but you also get all the great benefits that we’ve discussed in this discussion. But then you also end up with the worst elements of SAS, which is lack of flexibility and true ownership and control. Can you see where I’m coming from this? So at WP Tonic we decided to name it hosting and give more choice, but also give guidance and add extra features which we feel that help our clients, our customers get the end goal of getting their membership website set up and running with as least pain on WordPress as possible.
[00:15:58.820] – Jonathan Denwood
But we didn’t want to go down the full WordPress as a service solution.
[00:16:05.750] – Melissa Love
Yeah, I think there’s two parts to that. If you are the owner of a WordPress as a service business, especially for membership sites, and you choose the tech, I then think you’re then beholden in the nicest possible way to your clients to not swap out parts of the tech stack which is going to cause them any kind of anxiety. So you’ve got to be very sure if you are the owner of that service that your tech stack is not going to radically change and create kind of pain for your subscribers. But also yeah, on the flip side, I think just as with any kind of all in one solution, if you are using the tech stack that you’ve been given, but you start to kind of think, well actually I’ve heard about this thing and I think it’s going to be better suited to my needs. It’s quite hard to do that sometimes there will be people who are offering, as you said, like membership site as a subscription, where they’re not prepared to change or they don’t own the plugin that you want to use and minuses.
[00:17:05.520] – Jonathan Denwood
So let’s focus a bit further on getting a membership community website set up on WordPress. So hosting is required. The requirements, especially if you’re combining a learning management system with a community, which in 2024 is probably going to be buddy boss. Depending on the size and the additional plugins you’re going to add to the mixture, you’re going to need pretty good quality hosting not to have there’s WP tonic, there’s WP engine, there’s Kinster, there’s about half a dozen providers out there that can offer quality hosting in my opinion. There’s a whole subset of sub hosting providers which I wouldn’t recommend. So it’s hosting first and then you need what plugin, what system are you going to utilize to actually build the website? Because WordPress, it has a theme, some free themes, but the reality is that you’re going to need additional platform. But I say that, but it is a little bit confusing. So there seems to be three choices if you go with native Gutenberg with a theme designed for a membership site and full site editing. Because I think in some ways it’s always been confusing, but for understandable reasons to some extent I think in 2024 we got even more confusing scenario, unfortunately, and I think this is one of the things that’s slightly holding back WordPress, but it’s understandable.
[00:18:58.110] – Jonathan Denwood
So I don’t want to be too critical. So you got native Gutenberg with full site editing where you can choose a theme designed. Then you’ve got Gutenberg that utilizes a third party block library, a framework like Cadence WP and then you got the page builders like Elementor Divi. There’s half a dozen of these plugins that are not in the Gutenberg world. Which one I think you kind of stuck your flag with Cadence WP, which is similar to WP Tonic. We offer Elementor because it was the best solution. We still offer it because its integration with Buddyboss is the most easiest and effective. But when it comes to pure membership using a learning management system, we recommend cadence. And I think you stuck your flag there to some extent. Do you think I’ve done a good summary because I tried to keep it as simple but keep the essence there, but I’m still frustrated because I think sometimes I confuse people with, and have you got a better metaphor where you try and explain to the average person where we are with that key choice.
[00:20:37.630] – Melissa Love
Yeah, so my own membership site is built on Divi. I sell Divi products, still love it. I also sell elemental themes and I also sell cadence themes and have a cadence block library. So I’m kind of page builder agnostic. And yes, there’s lots of discussion at moment. It’s almost like we’re entering into the great wars of page builders versus block themes. But that’s a topic, slightly separate topic, but in terms of how those things work with a membership site. So as a designer, I’m always looking to not be constricted by the automatically generated pages of anything which has a user account, like WordPress, sorry, woocommerce or lifter lms or whatever, or learndash. I’m always looking for the solution where to a certain extent it’s short code driven. That means I can work in Divi and drop in a short code and make the environment look how I can build other elements around the short code. It means I can do the same in Elementor and it means I can do the same in cadence. Now, cadence, perhaps more than the other two, is slightly more compatible with things like that. You can roughly edit the auto generated layouts in the customizer that gives you some control.
[00:21:50.630] – Melissa Love
But when you get up to Cadence Pro. So Elementor has got the. They call it the theme designer, I think. No, they don’t call it that. They call it the can’t remember what they call it. Divi. Calls it the divi theme builder. Elementor’s got a similar thing where you basically can create custom layouts and assign them with dynamically generated content to say the single lesson or the single course layout. Now you can do that with cadence elements. So for me, I’m looking for a combination of short codes like the cart or the my account shortcode, so I can build a beautiful dashboard around it and being able to create a templated layout for the single post, the course, the whatever, the shop, the woocommerce product. So as long as I don’t really care whether it’s block based, I don’t really care whether it’s page builder based, as long as it’s got those two features. I know I can make a beautiful membership website.
[00:22:43.670] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. So to quantify this, I think I kind of put words in your mouth. I think you were pointing that you’re still more agnostic in your position. So I think there’s certain parts of your business where you’re leaning the cadence, but you still use Divi Elementor. I apologize for that. The only thing, I disagree with you slightly, but it’s not a total disagreement, is that I think there’s a place for short codes. I’m not one of these. There’s a certain element in WordPress that are very anti short codes. But on the other hand, I have come across themes, and it’s one of my main criticisms of divi. Very nice people, though, don’t get me wrong. I wish them well, but I’ve never really worn to Divi because it’s got what I call Diva itis and not Divy. It’s got short code itis. It utilizes short codes, in my opinion. It’s just my opinion, Melissa. It uses short codes too much, basically.
[00:23:49.070] – Melissa Love
Well, let’s just be really clear. So the underlying code of divi uses short codes. And there’s a really cool plugin built by my mate Sean called bye bye Divi that just strips them all out. So if you’re ever down that rabbit hole, just know that there’s a tool for it. But you can’t see those short codes. Whereas what I’m interested in is when you, for example, install woocommerce or lifter LMS, when you open up the account page, all there is on that page is a short code that’s very different from the underlying short codes generated by something like Divi, which is going away in the next update. But woocommerce operates on short codes. The five key pages that are installed, my account cart checkout, et cetera, are just a short code, which means you can put a beautiful custom header above your checkout. You can put your checkout short code and have a column on the right where you build your, put your little testimonials so you can create that fast checkout experience. So when I say short codes, I mean the ones you can see on the page, which come when you install and you do an installation wizard and you can see them on the page.
[00:24:50.680] – Melissa Love
Those are the key to giving you total design freedom. The ones you can’t see as part of something like Divi, I never have to see them. And I know that if I change a site from Divi, I just run that plugin in there stripped out. So I’m not overly.
[00:25:02.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think this is very difficult in these type of discussions, is that we’re encroaching into the kind of WordPress professional now, and it’s very understandable. This particular podcast, we do get quite a few professionals listening to it, which is surprising. But we also get what I call a lot of normal mortals listening to this and where I think what the normal membership founder is looking for is they like the freedom of WordPress and they’ve used it before and they love the SEO and all the other benefits which we have outlined, but they want something which is much more drag and drop flexible. And I think you do get that with Gutenberg and you do get that with cadence because cadence hasn’t framed the baby out with the bathwater metaphor. Because I think full site editing can be confusing if you’ve got previous working knowledge of WordPress. My co host Mala podcast has pointed out to me, because he does a lot of onboarding for WP Tonic and for lifter, is that people that are totally new to WordPress actually like full site editing. They seem to grasp it really quickly. I think it’s a path, it’s pushing it at the present moment.
[00:26:34.960] – Jonathan Denwood
And I also like what cadence is doing and it also offers which you have taken up and so has WP tonic in providing focus solutions in the design area that uses the basic of cadence. But we can offer more focused solutions at different niches. So you’ve taken that opportunity and so has WP tonic for particular niches, but it is a bit confusing. So just to wrap up before we go for our mid break, if you had a mall to a non WordPress professional and they were looking at the right website builder page builder of all these solutions out there, is there one, or is it depending on what type of person you are, what would you recommend the page builder tool that they use?
[00:27:40.050] – Melissa Love
That’s such a great question, I think right now because I’m in a state of waiting to see what’s happened with the Gutenberg native page builder in the last two years has been astonishing and the pace of progress has been phenomenal. If you’d asked me two years ago, I would have no, no, too far to go. Stick with a page builder, stick with Divi or elementor, you’re good to go. But there’s been so much positive development that what I cadence, all that does is simply enhance the native builder and give you some extra features in the header and in other areas and in the customizer. I call it native block, like Gutenberg blocks with superpowers. So for me, I haven’t really seen either Elementor or Divi or any of the big, other big builders kind of come out and say, here is definitively how we are going to seek to integrate with blocks. And until they do, until they bring out their next big versions, I’m all in for kind of block builders at the moment. But also if you are familiar with Divi and Elementor and you’re comfortable, there’s tons of resources for you. One of my sites is built with Divi.
[00:28:44.850] – Melissa Love
My membership site is built with Divi. One of my other businesses is built with cadence. I use them all happily. So, as I said before, the tool you’re most comfortable with, if you’re already comfortable with one, you don’t need to go and learn another one.
[00:28:54.920] – Jonathan Denwood
If it’s going to add, I totally agree with you there, but I think if you’re coming, if you haven’t got any real advanced or above beginner or lower intermediate, and we have people hosting with us and we support that are still using Divi, God bless them. But I’ve gone into cadence because unless you want to customize buddy boss and Elementor is still the more easier solution. But if it isn’t that particular scenario, I think cadence really offers the ability because most of these people want because you got the enormous plus of having starter themes available, but then you got access to the patterns, the blocks to build, landing pages to different sections for your pricing. It offers such enormous versatility and basic power in the cadence system, doesn’t it?
[00:30:16.890] – Melissa Love
For sure. And then of course, you’re using the same building environment for posts, for products, for courses, for lessons, for pages. It’s all the same builder. Like with Elementor or Divi, you’re powering up kind of an editing layer that floats over the top. So when you do a page, it feels different to when you do a blog post or you do a lesson. So if you’re new and you’re thinking about building your membership site cadence theme and blocks, both free versions work excellently.
[00:30:45.070] – Jonathan Denwood
And at WP Tony, you have access to the pro version as part of our hosting package. Folks, we’re going to go found midbreak. Hopefully you haven’t lost too many of you. We’ve gone a little bit techy, but I think we’ve brought it back. But I knew it was going to go there. And we will be back and we will be discussing some of the other choices that you need to make to get an effective membership community website built on WordPress in 2024 with the expert Melissa, who’s got a lot more knowledge than me. So we will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast, a feast of knowledge being shared by Melissa. Before we go into this second half of the show, I want to point out if you are looking to build your membership community website and WordPress in 2024, or you’re looking to do update, or you’re moving away from one of these SaaS encroached platforms, why don’t you look at hosting and at WP Tonic we are hosting plus. What we mean by that is that we offer a lot more than just great hosting.
[00:32:08.630] – Jonathan Denwood
We offer suite of plugins, fully licensed, plus we set up all the email functionality for you plus much, much more. If that sounds interesting and I feel it should go over to wptonic.com and you can also book a free chat with me and we can see if we can really help you build this fabulous membership business for you and your family in 2024. So page build, we touched that. Had a good conversation about that. The next big module, Lego brick, is are you going to use a membership plugin or are you going to utilize a learning management system? They overlap one another. I think if this is going to be a real membership business at different levels where you’re going to probably have multiple courses aimed at different niches, in your niche, you’re probably best to look at a learning management system if it’s only ever going to be one course. But things change. So I just feel that you’re better off your kind of covering yourself by just going with a learning management system. In my opinion, there’s three main players in this. You got learndash, which has got the biggest market share. You got lifter LMS and you got tutor LMS.
[00:33:50.930] – Jonathan Denwood
To me, they’re the three main choices in 2024 at WP Tonic, we love lifter LMS and we love learn dash. We don’t support tutor LMS. We don’t mind if you want to use that, but we don’t provide it as part of our plugin packages that we offer. Would you agree with what I’ve just outlined, Melissa? And how do you know? Is there any other learning management system that you would add to those three? And what’s your opinion of those free anyway?
[00:34:29.790] – Melissa Love
Well, I always think it’s about future. I’ll declare my allegiance here. I use Lyfter LMS and I’m a massive fan. One of the reasons I chose that is because it’s got membership levels built in. So when I first launched my course, in the back of my mind I thought, well, if I ever want to, and from the beginning even I was selling one course, I use different membership levels to give people access to greater chunks of the course. And of course, when you’ve set your membership levels, you can just use that to gate certain pages or certain content once people are logged in. So I had already kind of twigged before I built an actual real big membership site that actually something like lift lms can do both. And even when we build membership sites for people and they literally just want to gate content, I say 100%, at some point in the future you’re going to come to me and say, can I add courses? I said, so even if you only use it for this for now, you might want to add courses. And of course they’ll say, well, actually I’ve got all this content.
[00:35:37.320] – Melissa Love
I’d like to have it in sequential order, actually. Basically a course. And they’re like, actually, yes. So most people who have a membership site end up having a combination of courses. And within my own membership site, it doesn’t restrict you. I also have some custom post types for different kinds of content, and a custom post type, I’m not going to get too technical, is just say you wanted, I’ve got one called monthly masterminds. So I’ve created just, it sits there on your left hand bar, just like blog posts and lessons and courses does. So I’ve created a custom post type called monthly masterminds, and I just display that on a certain membership page within the site that members can access, but only some of them can access that page and see those posts, which I just literally display with a post grid. So that’s where I’ve gone with it. So I think the big question, just to circle back before I get too carried away on the merits of that, is that is just think about what you might conceivably want in the future. So for me, it’s like, can the thing you want do actually two things at once, rather than having to add another plugin into the mix later on?
[00:36:42.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the strength of. So I don’t know if you remember when you were looking to go which LMS you’re going to choose, the situation has changed. It’s ongoing. The thing we’ve learned was it’s a great platform, but until recently, you had to buy a third party membership plugin to really. It did have the ability to have paid subscriptions without a membership plugin, but it was very, I wouldn’t say clunky. It was very. I’m struggling for the right word here, not that clear how you did it. It was not intuitive. It was much easier to get a third party membership plugin, which does add more complication to the setup, really. Learndash have now brought out their own plugin, which they’re charging extra for, and a one site license with Learndash, which if you host with us, you get that. But if you buy it yourself, it’s $199. Where you look at lifter LMS, a lot of the core functionality is free, and they have a subscription model already built in core. All you need to do is add a stripe add on, which is $125, and you can be selling your courses really quite rapidly. Plus it’s got a lot of add on plugins, which it bundles with different paid subscriptions.
[00:38:35.960] – Jonathan Denwood
At WP tonic, you get the Infinity bundle as part of your hosting. It’s amazing value because that’s normally $1,200. You get that part of our hosting bundle, and it just offers the enormous scope of add on functionality, like their social add on, their groups add on, which are quite well thought out, aren’t they? Melissa, would you say that?
[00:39:01.850] – Melissa Love
I’ve got to admit, I haven’t explored them very much because I’ve kept my community on Facebook in a private Facebook group. So I can’t say I’ve really explored all of those additional features, but I have implemented them for clients. I think what I like about lifter is LMS is it doesn’t have any kind of, what I call bells and whistles. You don’t need, like, the code’s pretty clean. The code is clean, it’s light, it’s fairly simple, and it’s easy to kind of make it do what you want. It’s easy to add onto it. So I like the way, kind of Chris’s approach. He’s the owner, he looks. What’s the simplest way we can implement this?
[00:39:40.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, he’s the joint owner, isn’t he?
[00:39:41.830] – Melissa Love
Yeah. So that more people can use it. And actually, I also chose lifter because he runs a great community and he’s very responsive, and I look for that. That’s why I kind of went with cadence in the block builder world, because I really like the team.
[00:39:57.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Ben. Ben’s fantastic, isn’t he? A very generous, fantastic developer, isn’t he? But he’s also got the business foresight, hasn’t he?
[00:40:08.840] – Melissa Love
Yeah. So with both of those things, I look for a relationship where I can see the owner is leading, is present in the community.
[00:40:18.110] – Jonathan Denwood
I was very happy to hear that Chris was going into partnership with the Comans, James and Kim, because they’re very talented couple, and obviously they’ve got deep knowledge of membership and that. So I thought it was a great merger or so I think what we’re saying is that tutor is also great. You got three great choices. We lean for lifter LMS. We are in agreement, which is great in some ways. And so we would suggest if you’re looking to build your first membership, I think we’ve got some agreement that probably cadence is a good idea. And then we would suggest lifter LMS and combining those two together onto the next, I feel, important module. Lego brick. It’s marketing optimization, which is it tends to be mixed with email marketing landing pages and then you got the marketing optimization. And this can cause a tremendous amount of confusion as well because we provide, with our partner Sendgrid, we provide the email sending. We’ve got very generous email sending limits with our plans, Melissa. But a lot of hosting doesn’t provide most of the quality WordPress hosting. They do not send out email. You’re going to have to set up your membership with something like Sendgrid and then utilize, set up your Sendgrid account, set up another plugin that will relay those emails out.
[00:42:34.650] – Jonathan Denwood
We do all that for our clients, but what we don’t provide is inbox functionality and most quality hosting providers in the WordPress space don’t. But trying to explain that to somebody can be a little bit confusing. But we don’t provide multiple inbox functionality. We’ve got certain services that we can recommend. So you got that part and then the landing page site, well that’s kind of covered with cadence because cadence deals with that because it’s got a great library of landing pages. Which other platform? That’s another reason why I like it, Melissa. And we’ve provided a library of landing additional landing pages as part of the starter themes that we provide. And the last thing you got, optimization. And I think for a number of years this was the greatest weakness of WordPress and it was one of the reasons why people looked at the SaaS platforms. There weren’t any real good solutions when it came to marketing optimization. And what I mean by that is something like what Activecampaign provides. But this is a two edged sword. I think the situation with our preferred partner, and we offer it as part of our hosting package is we are a big partner with Fluent CRM and we offer a lot of the fluent forms and it integrates.
[00:44:08.630] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s another one called Groundhog and I wish them well, but we focus on fluent because they provide some other key plugins. Yeah, but the problem with this is great. I like your thoughts on fluent forms and fluent CRM. And you mentioned the fluent booking, which is also part and we offer fluent support. We offer all that as part of our hosting and we like it because it’s integrated and we love the company and the founder. Yeah, but optimization, we found a lot of people get sucked in and they haven’t even got their first membership student yet. They want to build the most elaborate landing page and marketing optimization setups. And I just say to them, you need to back up a bit. It’s the right tools at the right moment. What do you think? First of all, how would you respond to how I’ve kind of laid out the landscape? And secondly, the second point, people tend to get sucked into optimization too early.
[00:45:22.190] – Melissa Love
Well, there’s a couple of things. I’m always about future proofing your business. So if you ever have the opportunity to host a landing page, for example, like if you were using, I don’t know, people, what’s that? Clickfunnels. Or even activecampaign offers, which is an email CRM that offers you landing pages. Never do that. You want these in your website, you want people driving traffic. And I’ll tell you exactly why in a second. I’ll tell you what we do and then I’ll tell you how I feel about fluent, which is very positive by the way. But we use Activecampaign because we have brands across several domains and it’s actually kind of more effective for us to not be tied to have our CRM in one domain like you tend to do with fluent. So for us, as a multi product, multi website business, we’d rather just have one CRM which covers all of. So whereas fluent tends to be based in your website. But what we have got is, I’m sure you’re going to mention this, but we have a tool called WP Fusion which ties it all together.
[00:46:27.570] – Jonathan Denwood
We offer that as part of our hosting. I really don’t do this often, it’s coming across, it’s just one big advert for WP, but hardly mentioned.
[00:46:38.490] – Melissa Love
We use same text app, I very much know that. And again, it’s another fantastic plugin with a great founder who is very active in the community. Another thing I look for, but what this is, it’s like the magic fairy dust that ties your CRM, whether it’s fluent or something else with your WordPress, which gives you that cartra alike effect. So by that I mean, for example, I’ll give an example when somebody completes marks a lesson complete in our membership site. At a certain point it triggers an email from our active campaign with an offer that’s specific to the piece of learning they’ve just done. So the fusion is total. So I can go into someone’s profile in my CRM and see every single last thing they ticked off. I can see what level they’ve achieved with their gamification. I can see how far they’ve gone through the course. I can see their lifetime value to me. So it basically pulls everything together, the woocommerce or whatever you use for your lift lms. So I have that completely integrated approach which you would get on an all in one platform. It’s the magic ingredient that makes it all come alive.
[00:47:47.390] – Melissa Love
I love the fluent products. I use fluent booking, I use fluent SMTP for my email sending, and I use fluent forms. But because of our multi brand, multi site nature of our business, we’ve stuck with activecampaign and WP Fusion. But fluent CRM, a great solution. If you’re just starting. If you’ve got your one website and you want to really have everything knitted together, it’s a great option.
[00:48:11.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally understand the only remark I would say, and we are going to get a little bit techy here, folks. I will dial it back, but I totally understand what you’re saying, Melissa. But I think you could have fluent on its own domain and maybe look at utilizing something like Amazon web services because you’ve got a team. So you probably could set it up not using Sendgrid because it just depends on the volume of email you’re sending out. I would imagine you’re sending out a lot of emails. So it’d be worth the initial technical cost of time and money to set up with Amazon Web services on its own domain and then you can utilize fluent CRM. I would still utilize fluent CRM with WP Fusion because WPFusion has a more sophisticated tagging system and because you’re a sophisticated user, you would be utilizing tagging rather than lists as the main and the cost savings because Activecampaign is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but they have put their prices up considerably over the last six months. And I think Jack from WP Fusion was using Activecampaign and he’s written a really nice article, a nice technical white paper about the process of moving from active campaign to fluent CRM.
[00:49:47.890] – Jonathan Denwood
And it’s a great white paper actually, and I suggest that I don’t know if you’ve read it yourself. All right, yeah, I’m preaching. Anyway. So if I was in your shoes, but you’ve been busy with other things, so there’s only so much bandwidth that we all can do.
[00:50:08.700] – Melissa Love
I mean, if I’m starting, as you say, if I was starting now, I’d 100% go for it. If I was super ecom niche, I would perhaps do Klavio. But if you are someone like us, we have what we call a big engine, which no matter which brand people come in at, it assesses their relationship with us, where they’ve been tagged, and then once they’ve completed a certain set of actions, it then drops them into another funnel. So we’ve got a legacy system which is so big, and all the tagging system in action campaign drives everything in all of our websites. So we use the tag to hide.
[00:50:42.380] – Jonathan Denwood
And show what you’re saying. It would be a bit of a big job.
[00:50:45.990] – Melissa Love
We use it in a much more elaborate way than most businesses do. But if I was starting now, I’d just get all the fluent things, I’d get the whole fluent package, their whole ecosystem is excellent, they’re a great company and I use three out of five of the things they offer, or four out.
[00:51:04.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Um, you’ve mentioned the fluent booking and you’ve moved from canary to fluent and you said it was a little bit of you’ve done it, but it was a little bit. What are some of the struggles you had with that actual move?
[00:51:22.530] – Melissa Love
Well, you’ll be really proud of me because I totally outsourced it to our amazing va, our technical va, Kate, who did all of the heavy lifting. But we did know some things were hard to find and we had to do some fiddling around for it to pull in and generate unique Google Meet ids for each meeting. And there were some things which I didn’t even try to understand because I fully for once not knew someone else could do a better job than me and just let someone go on it. But from what I’ve seen with the question she’s been asking, it was not quite as intuitive as it could be.
[00:51:58.610] – Jonathan Denwood
But it’s a newer product, isn’t it? I think they’ve done a good job and they’re building it out, but it was really missing in the WordPress. And I was so delighted that because there was a couple other solutions, one that we offer, which is more suitable if you’re doing a physical event. Amelia is the product. It’s a great product, but is very powerful and a bit of a beast. But if you’re doing virtual or physical or hybrid of the both and you need ticketing, it’s well worth it. But for coaches or for the average membership that’s doing one to one or group coaching in buddy boss or in lifter lms. What fluent is offering, because the main problem with some of the other solutions, and I think it’s still with most of them, is it was slightly outside. They didn’t have this easy integration with Google Calendar. You had to go through a nightmare ish of setting up a Google app, and for the average person, that was a nightmare. We used to help them, but Fluent managed to get their plugin accepted by Google. So you have that easy connection, and it’s a little bit unfair to the other plugins, but here’s the reality.
[00:53:31.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Most end users expect that easy connection, don’t they?
[00:53:38.110] – Melissa Love
I just want to clarify though, when I said some things weren’t intuitive, if you’re just getting people to book appointments with you, it was super easy, flawless. I was actually setting up a really difficult thing involving seven different people in a round robin thing where someone’s booking an onboarding call and it assigns the right person from a group of seven people. I mean, that’s outside the scope of. Of course that’s not easy, even at the best of times. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression that fluent booking is hard to use if you’re just running your own calendar or setting someone else up with a straightforward booking calendar. Piece of cake.
[00:54:13.050] – Jonathan Denwood
Yep. So let’s wrap up in discussing some of the services and products that you offer. Melissa, because your experience entrepreneur and a very successful one, what are some of the fundamentals? You got the design agency, and like I say, but you’ve got a lot more than that. Maybe you can outline to the Nissas and viewers what some of the key elements of what you offer.
[00:54:39.790] – Melissa Love
Certainly. So we have two brands which deal with WordPress themes. So we’ve got the design space, which is for page builders like Divi and Elementor. And we also have a brand called style Cloud, which is purely for cadence. And we have a big cloud library of beautiful blocks which includes landing pages, sales pages, lesson pages, course sales pages. I think there’s about 200 layouts and 300 blocks which you can choose from, and a load of themes. And across those two brands, we share a design team, so we do build sites for people. It’s the same unified kind of team of people running two brands. And then as a kind of side gig, I have the marketing fix, which is my own membership site, and we’ve got about 250 members. We offer live coaching, about four or 5 hours of live coaching every week. A monthly mastermind. We have a visiting guest, I’d say probably about half the people in there are kind of service based. A lot of photographers, web designers, copywriters, creators. We have one accountant, one opera singer. We’ve got some anomalies, quite a few artists. And we have a real mix of people, lots of people building their own memberships.
[00:55:46.780] – Melissa Love
I coach membership owners; that’s what we do. And that’s the Marketingfix Co. So, there are three brands that kind of work together. But certainly on the WordPress side, the design space and style cloud are two sides of the same coin. One is for block themes, and one is for page builders.
[00:56:04.810] – Jonathan Denwood
There are fantastic themes for cadence. We’ve got a couple of lines, I would say. We offer ours what we offer; we provide about half a dozen themes plus the others. But Melissa’s got a more extensive selection, and they’re really fantastically well designed, and we would highly recommend them. And we do recommend them. So if people want to learn more about you specifically, have you got your website? What’s the best way to find out more about you? Or is it all combined with your businesses?
[00:56:39.690] – Melissa Love
Alyssa, well, there’s this crazy thing I’ve been doing every Monday. I’ve been writing a weird storytelling email about business, marketing, and life, and that’s the best.
[00:56:48.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s better to be weird if you’re involved in WordPress, right?
[00:56:52.440] – Melissa Love
It’s often funny stories about my life like getting scammed for Taylor Swift tickets, which is a whole other story. But if you go to the Designspace Co., Which is a forward slash newsletter, I’ve been writing it every Monday for five years now, and it goes out to many people. But it’s a mix of business, marketing, fun, and crazy stories. And it’s the best way to get to know me. You can join our Facebook group or see what we do from there.
[00:57:17.730] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I enjoyed the discussion. I didn’t know where this was going to go. I just felt that because of your experience and your deep knowledge of WordPress, plus you’re one of those individuals who has deep technical knowledge. Still, you also have deep knowledge about the marketing and the business side as well. But I thought it was best to deal with the technical side a little bit. I don’t know if that was the right decision because I think we covered the central free what you’re going to build the website, what’s the critical module, the learning management system? And then, what are some of the choices with landing pages and marketing optimization? I think in this hour, we’ve covered the prominent three fins, haven’t we? Would you agree with that, Melissa?
[00:58:10.360] – Melissa Love
Yeah. And I know I always say to people, stop getting hung up on how good your website looks or what tools you’re using, but you must make those decisions first. You can clear your mind to then focus on strategies and growth and retention, which one day, yes, we should definitely do another edition of this where we talk conscious and growth strategy, but you can’t relatively quiet your mind and focus much if you have chosen your tech stack. So it’s an excellent place to start.
[00:58:36.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, definitely. We will be back next week with another great discussion to help you build your membership website and choose the right technology to help you achieve that for yourself and your family. It’s a great way of making a great income and freedom, and you should get off the fence and do it in 2024. They always say that the first step in every 1000-mile journey is the most significant step. So you need to get on with it. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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