But you may be wondering why you would want to create a membership site using DAP and WordPress.

Here are the top reasons why…

1. Using WordPress takes away the challenge of making your site look pretty. You can use any theme you want (free, paid, or custom), and change your mind as often as you wish – but your membership site will function the same. When you want to change the text, add pictures, or drop in a YouTube video, it’s as easy as updating a blog (because, technically, it is a blog).
2. Using WordPress gives you the added functionality of plugins. This is great to help your site grow through SEO plugins, social bookmarking, etc., with no special programming or expensive webmasters!
3. Digital Access Pass integrates with WordPress posts, pages, and even membership levels. This means you can protect part or all the content of your pages and posts based on what level your members have signed up for or purchased. Protecting your blog content is as easy as clicking a button. And you can even use DAP with forums on your site through WordPress.
4. DAP also protects your files and pages on your site OUTSIDE of WordPress. This means you can show special offer pages to particular membership levels, protect images, PDFs, audio files, video files, etc. You can even sell your products on completely different websites, or have payment links inside your emails!
5. DAP protects content based on sequence, specific dates, or even number of views. Want to show members content only when they’ve been a member for 6 months, and not before? You can do that. Want to show members a special page only during Valentine’s week? You can do that. Want to let people to “pay per view” of a video or “pay per listen” to an audio? You can do that.
6. DAP creates an instant affiliate account for all your members. The growth of your membership site will come not from your efforts alone, but through the word-of-mouth referrals of your members and affiliates. With DAP, you can send members their affiliate link right inside their welcome email, and even post it on any blog post or page on the site. Pre-code your pages with “re-tweet this” links or buttons, and watch your traffic increase much faster than your efforts alone.
7. DAP lets you sell as many different types of memberships or products as you want. Want to sell an ebook for a 1-time payment. You can do that. Want to sell a 5-part teleseminar series that requires 5 payments of $17 each, you can do that. Want to offer members a choice between getting content all at once (fast track), or seeing content come to them periodically, you can do that too.
8. DAP is a living, growing, evolving software. The creators of the software are both programmers and excellent marketers. Ravi Jayagopal and his wife Veena Prashanth are 100% committed to this software and its growing community. DAP was first released in early 2008, and has seen additional features and functionality added every 3-5 weeks. Best of all – these new features are typically put in based on community feedback!
9. You want a system that frees up your time, and provides you with ongoing revenue. With one-time purchases, and monthly memberships, you’ll finally get to grow and stabilize your online business income.
10. You want total control of your online business. You’re in charge with confidence when you combine DAP with WordPress. Plus, your site is easy to modify yourself, or just about any virtual assistant or team member could help you with. No longer will you have to pay exhorbitant webmaster fees for membership site customizations.

I could go on, but those are the top reasons you should use DAP and WordPress for your site. Best of all, if you already have a blog, you can add DAP right on top of it and get going even faster.

Your next steps:

1. Get a free trial to Digital Access Pass, and test it out for a month. Actually, test it out for 2 months because you get a 30 day guarantee even past your trial!
2. Sign up for the Discover Digital Access Pass Gold training course I’m teaching. I’ll shortcut your learning curve, and show you how to set up a blog, create products, and grow your site with the built-in affiliate program.

And remember: take action, revise later!

Bob

p.s. Have another reason why people should combine DAP with WordPress, post it below!

p.p.s. Want to compare DAP to Wishlist? Check out this head-to-head comparison between the 2 platforms (plus Amember and more). Digital Access Pass vs. Wishlist

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Some people are in love with Wishlist Member for WordPress – a competitive membership script that I have not tested myself yet (but hope to soon).

The reason I chose DAP in the first place are documented in my first comparitive review.

Let me now share a few additional thoughts now that I’ve been using DAP for a few weeks on a live site.

Simple Or Complex – DAP Works As Advertised

First, the IM Success Library is much more complex than most people will need for a membership site. I have 16 courses available, each with 2-16 modules. Plus, I’m including my various coaching programs and options.

DAP is handling it all quite easily.

Smooth Integration With Paypal

Since it integrates smoothly with Paypal, all I have to do is set up a payment button in Paypal, and set up a matching product in DAP, and I’m good to go.

One of the things that I’m loving about this particular feature (Paypal integration) is how I can actually put a buy button on any website I want, or even a link in an email, and when someone buys that product, 1 of 2 things happens:

1) if they already have an account with me, they get their upgrade automatically

2) if they do not have an account with me yet, it’s automatically created from the purchase – no separate registration is needed.

Affiliates Choose Their Preferred Landing Page

Affiliate tracking is also integrated within DAP (unlike Wishlist which relies on you using Clickbank or another 3rd party system). My affiliates are loving the way they can use their affiliate link to promote to any page on my site – including a specific module, blog post, or page.

Protect Content Outside Or Inside WordPress

But perhaps the most under-stated but most helpful feature of DAP to me right now is the ability to protect and deliver my content OUTSIDE of WordPress, too.

This means that you can have PDFs, videos, audios, and even HTML pages you may be using for iframes protected with DAP: members can only access those files and pages if they have the right membership level.

Updating the script was a breeze, too. Ravi just released version 3.3, and it was a “drag and drop” process to update my script. I logged in again to my site, clicked a big button to complete the upgrade, and it was done.

The newest feature that was added that I love is the ability to see all pages and posts of your WordPress site in the dashboard of a product – making it a lot easier to protect content.

Recommended Improvements

There are a few areas that I’d like to see improved, but these are minor. But the cool thing about DAP is the creator of the script is accessible and continues to take member suggestions and include them in frequent updates.

1. As a site owner, I would like to be able to change the default landing page for the affiliate links
2. The links to available content that a member can access are URLs by default, and hard to read. This can be edited by the admin, but I’d like to see the default be the title of the post or page if it’s in WordPress.
3. These same links are also not in any particular order; except I think it may be in order of content availability. For me though, I do not have time-released content. So these links seem a bit random.
4. Deleting or editing the content available in a product is done on a 1-at-a-time basis. Since I have over 150 pages available to some members, this is a bit time consuming. It would be cool to be able to change the availability windows, “free” or “paid” status, etc., to multiple pieces of content at the same time.
5. Tighter integration with Aweber. The built in autoresponder is good, but I’d like to have the signup process result in an Aweber subscription as well.
6. Integration of the affiliate link code by itself so I can include that link anywhere on the site I want for members; this would also allow for the kind of dynamic affiliate tools page that affiliates are after. This is my biggest request, and Ravi tells me that it’s coming in an upcoming release.

So overall, I’m quite impressed with the infrastructure DAP is giving me for my IM Success Library. And I know it would be great for a much simpler site as well.

If you’re thinking of creating a membership site, and you want the design flexibilities of WordPress (themes, blog integration, etc.), then give Digitial Access Pass a go.

Bob Jenkins

p.s. If you’re not sure what you’d create a membership site about, I highly recommend you take this course from Paul Evans. I arranged for a $20 discount for you from that special page.

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You may know that I’m a big fan of Butterfly Marketing, and I’ve been using it for over 3 years. I continue to make mini-sites with the software. But there are a few limitations that are leading me on a journey to creating a membership site with WordPress.

Without customization, Butterfly is great for free front end offers that lead to an obvious upgrade through either follow up messages or a One Time Offer. The ability to create new pages inside the site is good.

The most powerful feature though is the affiliate program. Turning any member into an affiliate instantly is important in viral marketing.

However as the platform for the IM Success Library, it’s showing some limitations. Mainly, there is no customer interaction in a Butterfly Site unless you do custom programming. Since I’m trying to build a community of people who want to learn how to profit from internet marketing, it’s important that I have a community feel.

The other thing is since all the internal pages are hidden, there’s limited search engine optimization available. My IM Success Library contains over 100 pages that can not be indexed by the search engines.

So I’ll continue to use BFM for my single-purpose minisites.

But for my next site, I want to go with WordPress and a membership script add-on that not only allows me to have different free and paid membership levels, but also has an affiliate program and methods for maximizing member experience and search engine optimization.

WordPress itself is free, and I’ll either find a good free theme or pay for a premium theme like Thesis. But that can wait. For now, I need to focus on the membership functionality and the delivery of content.

Over the last 3 weeks, I’ve been evaluating the merits of 2 leading candidates that claim to work well with WordPress: Wishlist and Digital Access Pass. Both are similar enough in price that the price is irrelevant.

For now, I’ve decided to go with Digital Access Pass, and I’d like to tell you why. Before I do, let me say that I have not seen inside either of these programs yet, so I’ll be updating with more impressions later. For now, these are simply the reasons why I bought Digital Access Pass ten minutes ago, and not Wishlist.

First, I asked many of my friends about their impressions of Wishlist, and pretty much all of them are happy with it. The sales page for Wishlist is really well done, and the features list is pretty impressive. For a lot of people, I think they’ll be content with Wishlist.

It seems to work inside the WordPress dashboard, which will be a big plus for techno-phobes.

On the other hand, Digital Access Pass has one of the lamest looking sales pages I’ve seen. The dashboard seems to be external to WordPress, which will likely add another step to my content management.

“Wait a minute… I thought you said you bought Digitial Access Pass?”

I want to point out the “don’t judge a book by its cover” reality here, because it’s the functionality of the script that matters, not the gloss and shine of the sales page.

Here are 7 things that have me excited about Digital Access Pass vs. Wishlist:

1. Looking at the blog for each product, I can see that DAP creator Ravi Jayogopal is consistently adding new features based on members requests. Wishlist’s blog has not been updated since April 2009 (it’s October when I’m writing this). I do like that they are working with Gary Vaynerchuk for a promo, but I am impressed more with Ravi’s consistent communication with members.
2. My friend Lon Naylor, who’s a former Microsoft dude and Camtasia video master, gave me his impressions of DAP compared to Wishlist through a couple of months of work with our mutual friend Ray LaFoy.
3. Digital Access Pass integrates with but is external to WordPress, which means the content protection and delivery can happen outside of WordPress as well as inside.
4. DAP has a built in affiliate program and integrates with Clickbank, 1Shoppingcart and others. Wishlist integrates with those others, but does not have its own affiliate tracking built in. I may be wrong, but this could mean that buyers of later products in Wishlist may not be tracked accurately if they clear their cookies. DAP also has a “hunt them down” affiliate tracking feature that will help affiliates keep more commissions.
5. DAP allows you to drip emails, content, and files. You can actually treat your entire blog like an autoresponder. Wishlist has some content delivery timing in place, but it appears to require membership level changes to achieve the effect. That could be problematic down the road.
6. DAP gives you the option to let people keep the content they’ve paid for. Most membership scripts, including BFM and I believe Wishlist, too, will remove access to products completely if people stop paying. This way, I can give people the content they had paid for and just keep them from getting new content that comes later.
7. Ravi seems very accessible. I called his number on the sales page, he called me back. We exchanged tweets back and forth. And he’s posting to his blog asking for member feedback, and keeping them in the loop of what’s coming up.
8. Maybe the best thing for most people, Ravi gives you a full month to use the script for $0.01. That way, you can build your site, try to get members even before you pay for the script. That’s great “proof in the pudding” marketing.

So Wishlist may look like a superior product from the cover, and for many it’s probably got just the right pieces for a WordPress membership site without extra bells and whistles.

But for me, I need those extra bells and whistles. It may be a little more complicated to work with, but I’m betting that it will be totally worth it. And if I get stuck, I’m confident Ravi will help me out (and his documentation and step-by-step videos show you how to work with the script – you can even watch them before you get it).

After I have some more insight into DAP, I’ll post again with an update. It could turn out that I’m completely wrong about DAP, and I should have gone with Wishlist. But for now, this is the path I’m taking and now you know why :)

Bob Jenkins

p.s. Do you have experience with DAP or Wishlist, or even something else? Let me know your thoughts below.

p.p.s. Both Wishlist and DAP work along side your WordPress blog, but you have to have it on your own server (not Wordpress.org). If you don’t have a website yet, get an account at Hostgator, and install the free WordPress software on your site before you get started with the membership script.

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