Current Lesson
Course Content
Course Content

Setting up a Membership Site

Okay. So in this video, I'm gonna share how to create a membership site and then a high level overview of how to configure it. So to start when you log in, go ahead and click on content and then membership site, and that'll take you to this page. To create a new membership site, you just click create new membership site. And this is gonna give you some of the main features to configure when you're setting it up.
But then when you click create site and you go into the configure tab, you'll be able to see the rest of the features. Okay? So that's not all the features that you can configure. I'm gonna go into 1 of our already created sites. So it's very similar to when you created a website.
I do have I'm gonna link we're gonna link the video that we created about setting up a website so that I'm not gonna go into those details here. So for all the things that are similar to a website, you can watch that video. Again, very similar with, like, you know, you create the site and you're gonna have to remember to launch it. The pages are very much the same. You're creating pages almost the exact same way that you create them in a website.
Same thing. You can publish them. You can drip them, etcetera. Or, sorry, you can schedule them. In a membership site, 1 thing that is different from a website in terms of pages is you can drip the pages, which means that you can drip them out via an automation or a trigger.
And so you can have private pages that can only be dripped out if they purchased a certain product, and then you set up a trigger that drips out the page or a step in an automation that drips out that page. And they'll get access to the page when they, you know, go through that automation or when that trigger fire is when they do that action. So that's 1 of the main differences here. Courses, if you're creating a course, you would do that here. Courses we is the best practice is to put your courses on a membership site and not a website.
Because the membership site is where you can more easily control access to the courses based on what they need to buy to get access to them, or if they need to sign up to a certain list, etcetera. We recommend adding adding the courses to a membership site, which will make it easier to control that access. And this is where they'll show up. We're also going to there's also another video on courses that you can watch. So I'm not gonna go into detail about creating your course or how to connect it to your product or anything like that.
But but this is where you would create the course on the membership site itself. Can I talk today? Now in terms of groups and forums and blogs, the blog is very similar. It's almost the exact same thing as on your Wayne website, so that's where you would do that. The forum, same thing.
We have a main forum that is that comes with every site, and the forum is site wide. So anyone who has access to the site can have access to this forum. Now, if you have access on your if you have a certain simpler plan, you can do groups as well. Groups are private forums. Okay?
So these are forums that you can make exclusive to certain members based on what product they bought or what list they signed up to, etcetera. Right? So that's where you would do that here. If you make your comments needing to be moderated, then those comments would show up here and you can approve them Now the configure tab, this is the moneymaker. This is the money.
This is where you've got all the different settings that you wanna go through just to give you a high level overview. So again, the site title is here. Similar to the website, you're choosing what the homepage is. You can give it an internal name, a label, which is to organize it from the back end, so customers don't see labels. Those are just for you.
You can say what language the site should be in. And then if you do that, we will make all the built in default text automatically translate to this language. You can choose the domain. So if you wanna use us some plural domain, you'd have to use 1 of these here. And then you can choose what the sub domain is here so you can choose what this word is gonna be or what the string of letters and numbers would be here.
Now if you wanna make this site publicly available to anyone without login, like without a login, you don't want it to be private, you would select this option here. 1 1 use case for doing that is if, let's say, you wanna have 2 public websites. Simpler only comes with 1 main marketing website here. But if you create a membership site and make that public, it's basically it's basically going to be the exact same thing as your public main website. Okay?
So that would be a reason to make this publicly available. Otherwise, don't check this box and it will be password protected. Okay? You can hide the site from non admins until you're ready to launch and choose what page to show instead. So you could create a landing page and show that landing page, we automatically show a splash screen which you can edit or choose something else.
If you want to do a custom domain for this membership site, you can add that here. And that's just gonna so you don't you put the DNS, put the domain here, ignore DNS, save changes, and that'll add that list to your settings gear icon, change your URL page, and then you can go into your DNS and configure it and point it to the site. You can get your site a card image, which is gonna show up on their account overview. When they log in to their profile, they'll see this image, and they click on it, and that'll take them to your membership site. All of your members.
We have some recommended dimensions for that. And then if you don't upload anything here, we're gonna put your logo there instead. For community features, there's a lot of stuff here. So feel free to just go through them. You know, you can disable the member directory, etcetera.
Disable reactions like like in love, allow comments without a login, never collapse the comments even if there are a lot of them because right now we we automatically collapse them if there are a lot. But if you just wanna show all of them no matter what, you can do that by not toggling this button. You can display the engagement badges on the comments for blogs and courses and forum posts. So this is all based on the community. Notification settings are interesting.
With notifications, each member has access to their own notifications page and only the member is able to up date their specific page. Okay? So you're not able to update a member's notification settings. However, you can choose what the default notification settings on that page will be for new members when that when their membership is first created. Right?
So you could say, no matter what, when they become a member, they have access to they're they're notified for all posts and comments. And then they have to go into that notification page themselves and make that change. Right? That's where you can do that here. Don't include the body of the post or comment in notifications, so you can say what you want to be included in those notifications.
You can disallow out commenting by replying to email notifications. So you can say, you know, right now, if they reply to an email notification, it will comment. It will add a comment to the post. Like, if it's a forum post or a blog post, but you can choose not to allow that. If you if you're posts and your comments require moderator approval, you know, on the form of the blog, you can have a moderation notification email here so you can get notified that you have to approve them.
If you want to add a sign up form to all of your pages, without having to manually go add it to each and every page itself. You can just add the sign up form here and it will show up on all the pages. Now just keep in mind, don't put this here if you just want it to show up on 1 or 2 pages because it's gonna show up on every single 1. There's a different process that you would use to add a sign up form to a specific page. Social profiles, these are all channel, but, you know, if you add these in, it's good to just have them on your site.
So you've got, you know, you can add Facebook, LinkedIn, etcetera. If you have a Facebook page, we do recommend adding that page ID right here. So, yeah, we've got a lot of different options to add your profiles. The metadata is here. So you've got the site title, the default image, and this is all what would show up for search engines.
Right? So Google, etcetera. And then same with Facebook, you can allow the crawler to access the metadata on private pages if you want to. If the pages are private and you don't want to, then don't toggle this on. You can add a trigger to the site.
The trigger would be, you know, when the new member joins or signs in or how it logged in, etcetera, all of these options, you can have something happen, send them an email, a tag, all this stuff. Right? So that would be for the triggers. And then these are advanced settings. You know, if you if you don't need them, you're not sure you need them, then you probably don't.
That's we have a little disclaimer here on that. But you could come through and see some of these settings as well just in case there's something in here that you're looking for. But I won't really go into detail on these ones. Another thing to keep in mind is that we do already have a video on this as well, but, you know, membership site pages are very similar to website pages and and similar to landing pages, like, they all use the same builder. There's just a few discrepancies that are different Right?
So I've talked about some of them, like, with the drip pages that are only available on a closed membership site versus a website. A landing page is a stand alone page. Right? So it's not connected to a website. And then a membership site page has all the same features that a website page does.
But the membership site pages also have a few sections that aren't available for websites. I'll show you some examples. So if you add the section you'll see here on a membership site. So all of this stuff is available on a website for the most part. The things that are not are if we look under let me see here.
The course catalog, I'm trying find where that is. But the course catalog, not sure why we don't have it here. I'll have to find that, but we do have a course catalog that is an option that would show up on the membership site. Right? And so that 1 is 1 thing that does not show up on a website.
It looks similar to the product catalog. It's not the product catalog, but it's similar where we've got the image of the course, and then we've got the different, you know, search now. I think it's because there's oh, no. We do have courses on the site. So, yeah, it will look like this.
Although it wouldn't say products, it would say course catalog. And then you could just add the course catalog here. I'm gonna go ahead and go back and that will display all of the courses. So that's 1 difference with the membership site versus the website. So those are the biggest differences.
Yeah. That would be that would be it for creating a membership site. This is a very high level overview. So again, go through some of the other videos to get into the nitty gritty on courses and pages. Etcetera.
And good luck.

In this video, we will explain how to start setting up your membership site.

As the page builder is the same as the Marketing website, you can check out how to build pages in the following videos on that module to learn more about the page builder:

There is also a whole Membership Site module on our help guides that will show you how to build your site step by step.

If you want to see an example of how a membership site looks from a customer’s perspective, you can join our Simplero demo site here.

0 comments

There are no comments yet. Be the first one to leave a comment!