A missed “thought of” solution for not having a membership site is to instead take a WordPress blog and password-protect that folder using your web host control panel. I’m here to tell you today that that is a terrible terrible idea. Membership software these days is so cheap and so easy to install that there is absolutely no reason you should be using the password-protected blog solution, and it’s for these reasons – with proper membership software, you can cut off individual users who cancel or refund, you can prevent sharing and you can provide different access levels for different kinds of users.
I have tried the password-protected blog model, and the problem with that is that everybody has the exact same password. So, you might tell everybody, “Okay, go to this site and the username and password are both strawberries. Type the username strawberries, password strawberries.” Great. Right? Until one person leaves the membership site and then I have to say, “Great. Change the password to bananas” and then email the entire membership except for that one person and say, “Okay guys, I’m sorry but the old password was strawberries, now you need to type bananas when you log into the membership site.” So that’s the first headache because that – then you have members emailing you saying, “Wait, I thought that the password was strawberries. You mean it’s been changed?” And then it’s just a big headache.
The next problem is that people can share the password. You have no way of tracking which users logged in if they log in from different IP addresses. So, if the only thing protecting your membership site is a simple password, then there’s nothing to stop people from saying, “Oh hey guys, let’s all go to the site, type in password “bananas,” and now the 20 of us can all get into this site.” But with membership software, where everybody has their own unique username and password, then you can track and figure out if somebody logged in from 3 or 5 or 10 different IP addresses from the same account and then that usually means the person is passing around their membership information and you should cut them off.
Finally, access levels. With membership software, you can provide different users different levels of access. For example, I like to run classes as live webinars first and then turn them into monthly membership sites. So, I’ll create a live level and give people the webinar sign-up links. Give them the direct download to the webinar recordings. But when it comes time to run a monthly site, I don’t want them to have the live webinar links and I don’t want them to be able to download the videos and only watch them streaming on the blog. So, when it comes time to run the site as a monthly membership site, I will create a level called “monthly” and specify only the streaming videos to be allowed to be displayed on the blog. That way, I can give one group of people one kind of content, the other group a different kind, but it’s all the same membership site.
So, that is exactly why you should avoid free membership software, you should avoid the password-protected solution – because with the password-protected solution, you cannot cut them off, you have no control over sharing, and you have no ability to have different access levels.
Stop using that password-protected solution right now and instead, use the best membership software on the planet.