Learn Internet Marketing Strategies For Your Business

I’m in the market for a new membership site script.

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.

Next related article