Choosing The Right Membership Software

I own three membership sites. The Small Business Web Site, and a soon to be released one targeting an unrelated niche. (Update: the new sites are MarketingYourDVD.com as well as www.membershipsiteowner.com)

I wanted to mention a few things before I start this overview of Membergate.

I apologize ahead of time for the length of this article. I felt the points brought up here were important enough to elaborate on. If you are considering buying membership site software then you probably don't mind finding out as much as you can ahead of time...

In the interest of full disclosure, I will be the first to admit that I am biased towards my membership site software. I use Membergate to run my sites and have never regretted that decision. It has literally been some of the best money I have ever spent.

Instead of just dumping a blatant endorsement on you, I'll share with you my "journey" of picking Membergate.

It all started back over three years ago...

In The Beginning

Back in early 2002, I had made up my mind that I was going to have a membership site. I knew what the topic was but I was undecided about the best way to actually get it running.

Originally I considered creating simple password protected directory as well as some other basic methods. I quickly ruled that out however. For one thing, it generally isn't the most secure method and not very automated at all.

Not only were there a lot of manual steps just keeping track of memberships, but the actual design and implementation of the site itself was not very automated.

A big problem for me was that I already had Membergate in mind to run my site.

I had used the online demo to get a feel for how easy it was to run and manage a site with it (you can use the demo yourself at www.membergate.com/demo )

I had glimpses of how powerful it was but it was out of my reach financially.

Unfortunately, I tried to make do with less. I paid the price for that in lost time and a lot of aggravation.

Two separate solutions were tried, both of which proved to never work quite right. They also did not provide the wealth of tools and built in features that Membergate was offering me.

The Decision To Buy

When Bill Myers decided to offer a "Startup Edition" for half the normal startup price, I knew a Membergate site was in my near future.

When I then learned that he had a payment plan option in place, that sealed the deal for me.

The payment plan was a little different back then, but the price was the same as it is now. The payment plan splits up the cost of Membergate into 3 payments spaced 30 days apart.

That price includes professional graphic design for the site which is critical to build confidence to your site visitors.

The nice thing about it is that a successful launch helped me to pay off the site software very quickly.

It was only after using the software to run the site did I really understand the powerful advantage it gave me over the other choices. I got to experience first hand many of the biggest benefits of Membergate which weren't fully evident to me before hand. As happy as I was with the information I had prior to buying, it only got better.

Top Things That Sets Membergate Apart

I am going to start with the most critical aspects of Membergate (for me) that make it such an easy choice to make. There is actually a long list of Membergate features on their site but the ones I listed below are the what I consider the critical ones which really set it apart.

These are listed in the order of importance to me:

• Membergate lets search engines in to the members only area to index the content there - The content gets listed for free search engine traffic but when someone clicks on the link, they need to login or subscribe as a member to your site.

  THIS IS AN ABSOLUTELY HUGE ADVANTAGE.

  I do not know of any other software that does this in the same manner and I have asked around. Think about how powerful that is.

Other membership sites are struggling with how to get more of their content listed with the search engines. They are trying all sorts of techniques to try to get more of their content listed without much (if any success). I know this from talking to dozens of site owners using other software. This includes some of the biggest sites online struggling with this.

Membergate does this automatically for you. You simply write your content and Membergate handles the rest.

Every single one of your pages gets listed in Google, whether it is for member's only or for the public. When people try to see a member's only page on google, they are brought to your login/signup page. This is extremely powerful and tremendously increases the amount of free search engine traffic your receive.

I can't emphasize enough how powerful and profitable that feature is. I see the results of this first hand every single day on my sites.

Do you plan on spending more and more of your money paying for traffic to your site? It certainly is nice to know that you are getting every single one of your content pages indexed by Google with Membergate.

• Membergate automatically optimizes your content for search engines - It has been programmed to be extremely search engine friendly. The way tags, alt text, titles and links are optimized by Membergate have a huge impact on getting high search engine ranking.

I can tell you first hand that Google absolutely loves Membergate optimization.

I have hundreds of top search engine listings for articles which appear on my sites. I don't do anything special.

Membergate creates the pages fully optimized for me. It is phenomenal. My personal record so far is having a top ranking in google within 6 hours of posting an article. 6 hours!

• Extreme ease of use - Its common to hear one comment from people once they start to use Membergate:

  "That's easy. Even I can do that!".

  That's precisely the point. Not only is it easy for anyone to manage the site, it can be done from anywhere in the world at anytime. All you need is an internet connection and log in.

There is no need of knowing html or coding etc. You can simply copy and paste text into Membergate and it automatically appears in the places on the site you want it to, accessible to the people you want it to.

Here's a true geek story for you.

On a recent trip to Miami, I typed out an article on my Blackberry PDA phone. I then emailed it to myself and pasted it as a new article into my site.

It even has a built in WYSIWYG editor to easily format your content. Here's a shrunken down screen capture of it:

• Automated Content Management - in addition to being easy to add content, Membergate manages your content automatically for you.

  Articles appear in the different departments on your site based on the date you put them in. The newest articles are at the top of the page automatically. No need to manually adjust anything.

As you enter content, you can decide which departments on your site will get a copy of the article. You can control who sees the article based on which department you clone the article to. There is also a quick way to link related articles as you are adding new content. When people read your article, there is a list of related articles for them to look at when the get to the bottom.

This is all done automatically and is a huge time saver.

I tell you that from direct experience. Prior to Membergate, I was constantly tweaking pages, putting new links here and there and realigning the order that articles appear in etc. Membergate does this all flawlessly.

• Built For Growth - This is a critical issue that many smaller solutions tend not to focus on.

  Membergate is built using ColdFusion. Bill Myers made this decision based on his extensive experience in programming databases.

Without getting TOO technical... Coldfusion handles multiple databases easily and very smart. Databases are where information such as articles, membership access etc is stored. Access to the databases in a membergate site is done only when adding or editing information. The actual information is generated into a "real" (static) web page for members to see.

Many members logged in to your membergate site are not accessing the databases at the same time.

Many other membership site solutions are using .php to access their databases to run the site. PHP does not handle access to the databases as gracefully. Specifically a PHP database will get slower as more people are logging in and trying to access the database at the same time.

Unfortunately this is not an effect you will see until your site is actually starting to do well. Then what do you do? Suddenly you have a pretty successful site that is crawling to a halt.

Membergate does not face this issue. There are Membergate sites with 100,000+ members with no database issues. It is because of the way it is designed.

They are not quick to admit this, but its not uncommon for Membergate to get calls from other membership solution customers which are reaching their capacity.

They are desperate for a fix because their site's database is holding them back. Unfortunately for them, it isn't necessarily in Membergate's best interest to spend the time to convert these sites into a Membergate site.

Get it right from the beginning and you won't have to worry about that.

• Total Package - You are helped through the entire set up of your site. This includes having the design created by graphics professionals for you. You can see some of the hundreds of active membergate sites here for a look at the professional designs.

Here is a small screen capture sample of just a few of the 300+ sites they've done:

As you can see, these are not sites created from generic looking templates. I get a lot of compliments on my Membergate sites and since the talents of the graphics team is included in the price, it is an excellent value.

Many, many built in features which are either "extras" or not available in other software products - Membergate has all of the following built in:

Automated membership management - you don't need to do anything other than look at the new emails telling you you have new members, renewed members on the recurring billing etc.

Full featured and easy to use shopping cart Affiliate program - its all automated from them signing up, to the marketing pages for your affiliates to get your banner and code from, to the reporting system and even integration into paypal if you want to pay your affiliates instantly that way.

Full reporting - the level of reports available is fantastic. Here is a quick run down of just a few of the reports available to you:

• Daily report telling you where your site is at for membership, total revenue for the day, for the month etc but there are also reports on every aspect of the site as well.
• "Google Tracks" - When google was at your site last and what it looked at.
• Referrals - who is sending you traffic?
• Membership tracking - who logged on today, what failed attempts to logon were detected etc.
• Custom reports which you can specify any one of a variety of things to report on

All right, I know I could probably rattle on for hours about Membergate but I hope you are start to get a feel for my appreciation of it.

So What's Stopping You?

Ok, if you are serious about having an excellent membership site solution, what is stopping you from getting Membergate?

I'll tell you what the likely answer may be: it isn't cheap!

No, Membergate isn't cheap. It isn't cheap in price, nor is it cheap in quality or support.

I understand the dilemma of the price.

My problem was that I kept finding myself trying to justify the things I could "do without" by going to a cheaper solution.

I kept trying to get by without certain things or manually figure out ways to do things that should have been automated for me. Unfortunately, cheap solutions don't exactly encourage developers to have strong customer support in a lot of instances...

Now that Membergate offers payment plan options, it is much easier to get going. Your site is installed and running on the first payment so you can get members on board to start the money coming in.

With my latest membership site, I was able to recoup the cost of a membergate site very quickly (within weeks). Obviously your mileage will vary depending on your topic, marketing skills etc.

Tutorials And Demos

Several months ago, I approached Bill Myers and offered to do some Camtasia online videos for Membergate. I had no affiliation with Membergate other than being a site owner and a strong believer in the quality of his product.

I wanted others to see the power and ease of use of Membergate. I thought the online videos would be a great way to demonstrate some of the features of it. That lead to me creating these online tutorials about Membergate.

Additionally there is a functional online demo for membergate available here.

(Log in with username: demo and password: demo)

This can get you an idea of what the control panel is like to use.

To Sum It Up

Ok, I did tell you I was biased about Membergate so you can't blame me for this long overview of it.

Its easy for me to say I would choose Membergate again but its easier to prove it. I now run 3 sites using MemberGate. I wouldn't consider using anything else.

I can best sum up Membergate this way:

It takes the "managing a web site" aspect out of running your site. That is, it automates so many things so well for you, that you are left to concentrate on the important things such as the content of your articles and marketing your site.

Because it is a rock solid program with superior support, you can concentrate on making your site a success and not worry about trying to make it run. The fact that it has search engine optimization and other well thought out programming built in, could help give your site a good edge.

If you have any questions of comments about Membergate, feel free to tell me below.