If you are just starting to get your membership site or affiliate program set up, then it can be difficult to know which WordPress affiliate plugins are going to best fit your needs. In general, there are less options available for affiliate plugins than membership plugins, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t just as powerful. In general, there are a handful of characteristics that you need to consider, regardless of which option you end up choosing. Here is a quick look at these characteristics as well as the top several affiliate plugins that are on the market.

1. Compatibility
The most important thing to consider when choosing the right WordPress affiliate plugins is whether or not it will be compatible with your membership plugin. If the two plugins don’t place nice together, then one of them is going to need to change. Obviously, if your membership site is already set up, then you likely won’t be scrapping your membership plugin. This is a really simple thing to check, but a lot of people tend to overlook it until it’s too late.

2. Time Commitment
One of the biggest reasons that people use affiliate plugins, it is to save them time. It creates a central location that you can communicate, manage, track, and pay your affiliates. This means that the overall ease of use and back-end design will determine how much time you will need to commit taking care of your affiliates. The best plugins on the market are designed so that they are very easy to use, plus they give you a very well organized central location that allows you to take care of everything from providing your affiliates with tools (like banner ads or copy) to opening a line of direct communication.

3. Tracking and Payment
The final area that you need to focus on is tracking and payment. If you choose a plugin that doesn’t accurately track your affiliates sales, then you won’t have any affiliates after a month or two. Along the same lines, you need to make sure that you are paying them on time and that the payment amount is correct. Fortunately, with the best plugins, this is never an option. They are very reliable and have proven to be extremely accurate.

Which plugin is right for you?

In general, there are several affiliate plugins that tend to rise to the top. They are Magic Affiliate and WP Affiliate Platform, and WP Affiliate Manager. They are all reliable in terms of tracking and making payments. In terms of overall features, they are all fairly similar, however many people have noted that Magic Affiliate probably has the edge. The big thing to look at is how well they will integrate with your membership site. For example, the only easy way to integrate WP Affiliate Platform is through WP eStore. With compatibility being a key issue, again the Magic Affiliate plugin has the edge. While all three are strong options, the Magic Affiliate plugin probably has the biggest upside and highest likelihood of providing you a long term solution.

Membership sites are currently battling the same problem that many other online profit sources have faced at one time or another. A relatively simple concept has become unnecessarily complex. This is a problem that happened to ebook publishers a few years ago. The sales pages grew to 10 pages long, the ebooks got longer and more complex, and the entire promotion process jumped from a few weeks to 6 months before the launch. Today, the use of audio, video, and more effective launch tactics, ebook publishers have re-simplified. WordPress membership sites have undergone this same problem lately, fortunately there still may a light at the end of the tunnel.

The problem that had arisen with the WordPress membership site first started before there were a wide selection of premium plugins to choose from. Webmasters were forced to piece together a multitude of different plugins simply to secure content and accept payments. In many cases, this could be 4 to 7 plugins solely for dealing with members and accepting recurring payments. Plus, it didn’t include additional functions like setting up an affiliate program, managing affiliates, sending payments, or drip feeding content.

About 5 years later, there were a growing number of premium plugins on the market. Unfortunately, many of them were designed by software companies that had already created independent membership site software and they ended up forcing their software into WordPress rather than working with flexibility that WordPress provided. The result was a bulky plugin that ended up constraining what the webmaster could do. There were also issues that limited the themes that could be used and often caused compatibility problems with other plugins, especially SEO plugins.

Today it seems like everything has finally started to balance out. There is a new crop of plugins designed specifically for a WordPress membership site. They work with the WordPress core rather than against it. For example, the Magic Members plugin provides all of the elements and features that you need to create and manage a WordPress membership site, while at the same time providing the flexibility, scalability, and ease of use that makes WordPress such a popular content management system.

If you are wondering whether or not a WordPress membership site can still offer simplicity, they answer is yes. In fact, managing a membership site using WordPress and the right plugin is actually easier and simpler today than it has ever been.

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Is Your Membership Software Lowering Your Profits?

There are a lot of reasons that your membership site could fail, or at least be less profitable than it should be. In most cases this type of problem will be attributed to things like outsourcing costs, poor online advertising, or just poor planning in general. When a membership site is not doing well, people will look at everything as a possible cause, but for some reason they will rarely look at the membership site software that they are using. The truth is many of these issues can be improved by simply utilizing the right piece of membership site software, such as the Magic Members plugin.

Let’s start off by looking at the most basic way that your membership software can lower your profits – time. Time is money so every minute or hour that you spend dealing with tasks that your software forces you to deal with, the more time you are not spending promoting your site or building relationships with members. One of the biggest time wasters is compatibility issues. The reason that this can take up so much time is because the problems that arise are unplanned, which means that you don’t have a set plan to remedy the issue. This problem most often arise when trying to combine a piece of general membership site software with a specific CMS like WordPress Other potential time wasters can be more mundane things like a poor back end user interface or a steep learning curve for people new to the software.

Another way that your membership software could be lowering your profits is related to your monetization strategy. Your membership site software may be limiting your ability to monetize your members. There are a variety of different ways that this could happen. Your software may not be able to integrate with the right payment processor or maybe it doesn’t accurately re-bill subscriptions. Other potential problems include not integrating your list building strategy or simply not allowing your monetize your members from within the members area via banner ads or Adsense ads. In short, if your membership site software cannot be fully integrated into your monetization strategy, then you should find another option that will.

Your membership site software could also be lowering your profits because it is not integrated with your promotional strategy. There are a growing number of different ways that you can promote your membership site. The best membership site software can be fully integrated with all of these strategies. This can include using coupons, discount codes, free trials, multiple membership tiers, free teaser content, pay per post options and much more. A lot of people are happy just to have their software out of the way when promoting their site. Unfortunately, only by using software that can boost your promotional strategies can you ensure that it isn’t lowering your profits.

There are a number of ways that your membership software could be lowering your profits. If you have already explored all of the regular reasons that you may not be making as much money as you would expect, then take a closer look at your membership site software to see where it is falling short and how much it is affecting your bottom line.

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Understanding the Relationship Between Your Membership Software and Content Control

Everyone knows that the most important function of membership software is to control access to certain pieces of content. This makes understanding the relationship between the software and content control essential. There are several different aspects to consider in terms of controlling your content as well as overall security. Here are several things to keep in mind about your software and its ability to keep your members-only content secure.

It is surprising how many people will start a membership site using a piece of membership software that does not adequately control the security of their content. This could be from compatibility issues between the software and the content management system or it could be from poor software design. Either way you should not take for granted that the membership software will provide you with all of the security that you need just because it should. Keep in mind that content security can be much more than simply creating a secure members area. It can also mean creating multiple member tiers, all with a different access level, including access to downloads.

Another aspect of content control to consider is how easy it is to manage from an administrative point of view. For example, when using WordPress, some membership site software will force you to designate the access level on every page and post. While this is only a minor additional publishing step for new membership sites, it could mean days and even weeks of extra work if you are going to add the software to a membership site that is already established. How tedious would it be to integrate software into a membership site that already has 1000 different pages and several membership tiers if you had to manually set the security level of each one.

The final aspect of content control to consider is public access to content and special access to content. In the most successful membership sites most of the content is for members alone, but there will also be content that is available to public as well. Some membership software will force you to use a separate sub-domain for all of your public content. While this isn’t inherently a problem, it does add an extra layer of administrative work and also carries the potential hazard of creating a disconnect between your membership site and your publicly available content.

As you can see, there are a lot of different things to consider when looking at the relationship between your membership site software and its ability to control content. If the software that you use is not designed to allow the amount or type of content control that you need, then it might be time to find an alternative. There are several very successful membership plugins for WordPress, such as the Magic Members plugin, that offers you complete control over the content with little additional effort. Plus it can be integrated into a currently existing WordPress site or membership site in a matter of minutes.

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When choosing an affiliate plugin, it can be easy to notice the similarities that most of them have in common such as sales tracking. At the same time, it is very easy to overlook additional features and abilities that can boost your profits. Many of these features are subtle and many people will undervalue them. Here is a closer look at several of these features and how they can be used to boost your profits.
Along with tracking, the heart of the best affiliate plugins is communication. There are two separate features that you need in order to communicate effectively. The first is that you need to be able to automatically add new affiliates to your affiliate mailing list. This will ensure that they are alerted whenever changes are made. More importantly, you also need to have a way to communicate with them through the affiliate area. If you have both of these abilities then you can always find a way to boost your profits.

The problem that many people run into is that they can communicate with their affiliates but cannot get them to take action. In order to overcome this, you need to get them excited. The easiest way to do this is by sending them an email about an upcoming promotion, but only tell them half of the story. Let them know that the rest of the information is in their affiliate members area. If you do not have the ability to communicate with them both via email and from within their affiliate members area, then this strategy won’t work. That means that the affiliate plugin can make all of the difference.

Another way that your affiliate plugin can boost your profits is by providing your affiliates with the proper tools and training. The biggest drawback that many affiliate areas have is that it doesn’t provide the affiliates with enough tools. Normally it will have a few banner ads and maybe a review article. That means that the affiliates will have to create their own promotional tools. Not only will this give reasons for your affiliates to move on to another program, but it also prevents you from creating any sort of branding or unity throughout your promotion methods.

The right affiliate plugin will allow you to have complete control over the affiliate members area, which means that you can add as many different resources as you want. It will also allow you to create a training program to help out newer affiliates who don’t yet have the skills but are wanting to learn more. If you provide all of the tools and training that your affiliates need, they are much more likely to stick with you for the long haul. This will boost profits two ways. First it will ensure that your affiliates are happy and always promoting your site. Second it will make your site look even better to affiliates who are already familiar with your niche which means that they will promote your program instead of your competitions.

As you can see, there are a number of different ways that the right affiliate plugin can boost your profits. It doesn’t matter if you are running a membership site or any other type of product, your affiliate plugin is vital.

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As WordPress continues to claim a larger share of the CMS world, there are more plugins created for membership sites than ever before. The problem that many people run into is that they either assume that all of these plugins are created equal, or they simply don’t know how to choose the right one. This means that you need to choose your WordPress membership plugin carefully. Here are three all-to-common scenarios that people face when they choose the wrong membership management plugin for their WordPress site.

1. Plugin Dictates Site

One the biggest problems that you will run into if you do not choose your WordPress membership plugin carefully is that your entire site will be limited by the plugins abilities. For example, if the plugin doesn’t allow you to post teaser content then your membership sites SEO abilities will be limited or you will be forced to create another website separate from your membership site. If your plugin only allows you to choose between a limited number of payment processors then you may be losing potential members because they don’t have a payment method that they feel comfortable using. In short, the wrong plugin can severely limit your sites capabilities as well as limit your target audience.

2. Incompatibility

Another potential problem is that the wrong WordPress membership plugin will likely force you to drop some of your other favorite plugins. There are a lot of WordPress membership plugins that are not well designed and have little support. This tends to mean that the plugin will not play nicely with some other plugins. On the other hand, the top tier membership plugins are not only already tested to work with other plugins, but they also offer fantastic support which means that even if you do run into a problem, it will be resolved quickly.

3. Easy to Use Means Easy to Outsource

If you already have experience running a membership site, then you know that the more time you spend on administrative tasks, the less time you will be spending gathering new members. If you have a high quality WordPress membership plugin, then it will be very easy and intuitive to use. This makes training your outsourced writers, virtual assistants, and customer service reps much easier to trainer. The easier the back-end of the plugin is to use, the easier it is train other people how to use it. On the other hand, if you choose a poor plugin, then your outsourced help is more likely to get confused or make a mistake. The harder you make it for them to do their job, the harder they will make yours.

As you can see, there are some very dire consequences that you may face if you choose a WordPress membership plugin that is not up to par. The best membership plugins, like the Magic Members plugin, are designed to make your life easier not harder. Because they are commercial plugins, they have the ability to provide excellent support and can even help you create a customized solution in the event that you need something that the plugin doesn’t already provide.

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Magic Members Plugin Overcomes Common WordPress Constant Contact Integration Issues

There are a number of barriers that can make WordPress Constant Contact integration more difficult than it needs to be. This is especially true if you are trying to integrate your autoresponder account with your membership site. Fortunately, the Magic Members plugin has been able to overcome these barriers without making it complicated for the end user. Here is a quick look at some of the most common barriers that you can face when trying to integrate WordPress, Constant Contact, and a membership plugin simultaneously.

1. Compatibility

The most common barrier when trying to integrate any outside application is compatibility. With Constant Contact, the most common compatibility issues rise from needing to manage your current members list with your autoresponder list. This is especially true if you are drip feeding content. Fortunately, because the Magic Members plugin is the point of origin for both your membership site and your Constant Contact integration, this isn’t an issue. As will normally be the case, the more that a single plugin can do, the less chance for compatibility issues there will be.

2. List Management

There are a number of free WordPress Constant Contact integration plugins available at WordPress.org. However, they all come with the same fundamental problem for membership site owners. They are not designed to work in conjunction with your membership database. This means that while you could potential create an opt-in form to gather leads, there is not an automatic way to recognize them as a current member once they sign up. Let’s say that you have a 10 email autoresponder course that is designed to turn leads into members. Now, let’s assume that a prospect becomes a members after email number 3. When this happens, you don’t want to be sending them 7 more emails trying to convince them to sign up, because they already have. Instead you want them to be receiving your autoresponder series for members. If you do not use a Constant Contact plugin that has this type of membership-based functionality, then you will not be able to do this automatically. At best, you will have to manually switch every lead into the new members-only autoresponder series and delete them from your prospects list. By using Magic Members, all of this is taken care of for your automatically, which means that you need to spend exactly zero time handling this yourself.

3. Dealing With the Constant Contact API

If you try to use the Constant Contact API’s yourself, within your own customized application, then will be wasting a lot of time unnecessarily Constant Contact has created a number of different API’s, in fact there are more than 10 on the top level alone. Additionally, they will not give you access to their API until you become a member. That means that if you wanted to try and use the Constant Contact API’s to create your own application, then you would need to sign up for an account and then spend additional time creating your application. By using the Magic Members plugin, you can get everything integrated minutes after you sign up for a Constant Contact account.

Although WordPress Constant Contact integration doesn’t have to be difficult, when you add in the specific needs of a membership site, things become a little more complicated. Instead of dealing with all of these issues yourself, it will likely be much easier to simply utilize the Magic Members plugin to save both time and money, while maximizing your efficiency with an easy to use piece of software.

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There are a variety of strategies that can be used to promote your WP Ecommerce site. Many people argue that long term results through SEO, organic traffic, and list building should be a top priority. While all of these long term methods are valuable and will provide long term stability, they don’t do anything to cover the costs that you are dealing with right now. There are a variety of short term promotion strategies that are designed to give you instant results rather than waiting months or years. If you need a surge of sales right now, then here are some tactics that have proven effective.

1. PPC

PPC ads using networks such as Facebook, Google Adsense, and others have become a proven method for generating a large amount of short term income. Essentially, you are paying for a certain number of people to visit your WP ecommerce site. The thing to keep in mind with PPC campaigns is that you will be paying for each person that clicks on your ads and visits your site regardless of whether they purchase anything or not. That means that this type of promotion needs to monitored very closely to make sure that you are actually turning a profit. However, once you find the right combination of ads, price per clicks, and landing pages, you will dramatically boost your conversions and in turn your profits.

2. Niche Targeting

Another way to promote your WP ecommerce site and get instant results is through different types of niche market targeting. For example, you can pay for a banner ad in a newsletter that is within your niche. Then everyone who receives that newsletter will see your ads. While you are paying a flat rate, you need to keep in mind what type of people are reading these newsletters and what they want. For example, if you promoting your online shoe store in a fashion newsletter, you might want to find out what type of content is surrounding the ad and modify your landing page so that it is related to the content. If the content is talking about how “blue shoes” are the latest trend, then you probably want everyone who clicks on your banner to be led to a page that features your “blue shoes”.

3. Cross Promotion

If you can identify someone else within your niche to cross promote with, you can quickly generate massive results. This is even more effective if you have an affiliate program because you can recruit a super affiliate. By promoting them or their new product, they will in turn promote your store. This will be a benefit for both of you, and will generate instant income.

There are a number of different techniques that can be used to promote your WP ecommerce website. If you are looking for fast results, then using strategies like running a PPC campaign, placing banner ads in niche related newsletters, and cross promoting with other sites or super affiliates have historically proven to be very effective at generated fast results.

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An Introduction to the API Behind Successful WordPress iContact Integration

The key to successfully integrating WordPress and iContact is correctly using the iContact API.  In order to do this, it is important to actually know what their API is designed to do and how it can be used to your advantage.  The goal of the iContact API is allow you to integrate nearly all of iContacts features into your WordPress website.  Here is a quick look at the API and what it can do.

Benefits of Using the iContact API

There are a number of benefits to being able to integrate your membership site with your iContact account.  One of most obvious benefits is that you can synchronize your members list with your iContact auto responder list on a regular basis.  Every time you get a new member, it is important to make sure that they are on a separate members-only auto responder list.  This will ensure that you can always contact them whenever you want.  While most membership site owners will have a list of prospective leads, they do not always manage their members very well.  You need to make sure that your members are always aware of what is being added to the membership site so that they visit it more often.  The more often that they visit it, the more likely they are to renew their subscription each month.

How iContacts API Works

If you were to try an integrate WordPress and iContact on your own, then there are some basics that you need to understand.  The most important thing to know is that the API has two main components.  They are resources and actions.  The resources are the subject of each action.  Essentially, the resources are what you want to affect when using the API.  They include things like statistics, lists, permissions, subscribers, etc  As with all API’s the basic actions are Post, Put, Get, and Delete.

Getting the Most Out of the iContact API

In most cases, you will be able to get the most out of the iContact API by simply not creating API calls yourself.  By choosing a plugin that has already dealt with all of the WordPress iContact integration issues, you not only be able to save time, but will also not have to worry about updating the code on your own.  Keep in mind that if you are managing a membership site that you will need to make sure that you not only integrate WordPress and iContact, but also your membership software.

Because of this, the best option is to choose a membership plugin that already support iContact integration.  The Magic Members plugin is an excellent example of this.  Not only is Magic Members a proven membership site plugin, but it also includes WordPress iContact integration as a standard feature.  That means that you get to leverage the power of a great membership plugin with the power of the WordPress platform and iContact auto responder.  The best part is that all you have to do is enter some basic account information to get your iContact account completely integrated with your membership site.

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Simple:Press has become well known as being a feature rich, easy to integrate forum.  The goal of Simple:Press was to easily add a forum to a WordPress site.  This means that WordPress Simple:Press integration should be fairly straightforward.  The problem that many membership site owners have been having is securing their forum and turning their forum into a paid members area.  Fortunately, with the right complimentary membership plugin, this doesn’t have to be a difficult task.  Here is a quick look at some key points to keep in mind when trying to turn Simple:Press into a members-only area on a WordPress site.

1. Security

There are a variety of WordPress plugins that are designed to turn your WordPress site into a membership site.  Unfortunately, a large majority of these plugins have not taken into consideration a forum of any kind, let alone Simple:Press.  That means that you could end up with a membership site that has a public forum, which is not something that any webmaster wants to deal with when creating a members-only area.

2. Integration

Simple:Press was designed to easily integrate with WordPress, but that is wear it ends for most people.  The key to creating an effective members-only forum is to not only have a forum plugin that can integrate with WordPress, but also a membership plugin that can integrate with both the forum plugin and the WordPress core.

3. Integration – Part 2

Along with making the forum private so that only paying members can access it, you also need to make sure that your forum stands alone as a selling point.  That means that you need to make sure that your membership plugin can create a sales page for the forum.  This is especially important if the forum is your only private area on your website.  The Magic Members plugin will actually create a page template that will allow you to turn your Simple:Press forum into a paid subscription forum.

4. Stability

Once you have found a membership plugin or subscription plugin that meets your needs, there is one final problem to consider and that is stability.  If you have used WordPress before then you that a new update (normally a security update) can come out of nowhere.  The same is true for other plugins, including the Simple:Press plugin.  That means that you need to make sure that your membership plugin is constantly updated as well.  By using a plugin that is commercially backed, like Magic Members, you can rest assured that you will always have a membership plugin that is compatible with your WordPress core and Simple:Press plugin

As you can see, the primary concern in terms of WordPress Simple:Press integration lies solely on the part of the membership software that you choose.  By choosing a membership software that is designed solely for WordPress, you can be sure that it will always be easy to integrate.  The Magic Members plugin has already established a strong history of compatibility and stability.  Plus, it is a premium plugin which means that it will have the financial resources to always be up to date and compatible with any recent releases of WordPress and Simple:Press.

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