Building a two tier Membership site - YourMembers/yourmembers GitHub Wiki

Two Tier membership sites work on a similar basis to the Freemium model, providing free access to most material over a long period with the option to purchase immediate access to the content and or advanced content. This model is highly effective if used in a narrow niche and the series of content leads to the production of something, as people will often pay for access to something they will eventually get free, just to get ahead.

For example let’s say we are running a course on “making membership sites”. It’s a 12 part course: the first 8 parts are free but you can only access them in order every few days. The final 4 are advanced and must be purchased. In this scenario we have two packages:

Free Package, access to the first 8 content pieces. Each piece is set to drip feed 5 days after the previous piece meaning it will take over a month to complete the first 8 pieces on free.

Advanced Membership: a single one off payment which gives instant access to the first 8 pieces and 4 additional pieces.

These style courses rely on human impatience and the fact they offer a free hook, by being subject specific and building up to a finished product. A guest will often have a vested interest in continuing the course at the time they first consider payment. However these courses need to offer a strong reason to upgrade and rely on the first few parts of the course to be high quality and informational to bring to the members mind that they are going to pay for even more high quality information. To begin the first stage in setting up your two package types within the Your Members Admin area you will need to navigate to:

Membership -> Packages

If this is a default install of Your Members then you will already have a couple of packages for this tutorial. Go ahead and delete them. Once deleted select “Add new Pack”, and “Basic” Choose: Price “0” Account Type (Package Type) “Free” Duration “5 years”

Click “Submit” and a new package will be created.

Next let’s create the “Advanced” package again. Click “Add new Pack” but this time select “Advanced” Choose: Price “20” Account Type (package type) “Create new type” -> Name this type “Advanced” Duration “5 years” Subscription Recurrence “1” Hide from standard Subscription page “ticked”

Leave the other settings as they are and Click Submit and this new package will be created.

So we now have two packages both for the length of 5 years, the first is free, the second costs $20 and does not repeat or show on the registration page by default.

Next step is to create a dedicated registration page, but first let’s create some fields to collect information. Navigate to:

Members -> User Custom Registration Fields

We will add a custom field to collect first name, so when we email users we can personalise this email.

At the bottom of the page is Add new Field Place the following values: name: fname Label: First Name then click “Create Custom Field”

The new custom field will appear in your custom field list, but by default will be inactive, tick the box and click “update” to save.

You can also change the order by dragging and dropping fields, drag the custom field to the top of the page and hit update.

Finally Subscription introduction and options can be unticked as they are not needed and only a single subscription will be available by default.

Next let’s create a new WordPress Page called “register”. On this page place the shortcode [ym_register] That’s it we now have a registration page, which has a single custom field for the First name, so the user simply selects a username, email and first name. Once they hit register they are automatically put on the Free Package.

note: For this example we are going to use PayPal Web Standard Payments

Before we can create a method to charge users we first need to sort out a method of payment. Navigate to:

Memberships->Payment Gateways

The lower half of the page has options to change currency and place sales tax if needed by your organisation, and by default USD are selected. In the top half are all the available Payment Gateways. If the PayPal gateway is not active, click the activate button. Once activated click edit. Within the gateway the only two options you need to change are: PayPal Email Address - should be set to your PayPal account log in Sandbox/Live Mode - should be switched to “live”

Make sure you click update options, and your payment gateway is now live and you can collect payments.

The upsell page is the method to push your user “free” members to the advanced package. This should probably contain some compelling sales pitch (can’t help there) but to create the page, select a new WordPress page and call it upgrade, and then on the right hand side, in the Your Members panel select “free” account type. This means only Free users will access the upgrade page. On the page below the sales pitch place [ym_upgrade id=xx]

Where xx is the ID of the advanced subscription, this can be found:

Membership->Packages

In the first column of the main table, this will create a nice upgrade button which will when the user click direct them to Payment gateway and then back and apply the “Advanced” package.

Your Members offers 3 different content protection mechanisms, and as we are not going to be offering teasers on page for non logged in users the protection to use is Full To enable full protection navigate to: Advanced -> Security

In Post Protection set “full” For Guest Forbidden Access URL set your registration page including http so for example

http://www.yoursite.com/register/

For Member Forbidden Access URL set your upgrade page again including the http, for example

http://www.yoursite.com/upgrade/

You can leave the alternate settings and simply save the settings.

Now when generating content that is to be protected on the write edit page, simply tick the package account type which should have access. If the member does not have that package type then they will be redirected if logged in to the upgrade page or if they are logged out the register page.

Drip feeding, sometimes called Post Delay, allows you to specify a period (in days) into the future from when the member joined or changed account types to access content. In our two tier membership site we are going to use this feature to spread our course over several weeks. Let’s take our first 4 pieces of content:

Number of Days since Member Joined Piece one 0 Piece two 5 Piece three 10 Piece four 15

To set this up, on the write/edit page for each piece, on the right hand Your Members panel, select show Post Delay and for the Package Type Free and select the number of days you wish to specify to delay the package by.

Note that if set to 0 it will show automatically but only if they would normally have access. You can therefore leave “advanced” and “guest” at 0 as “advanced” would automatically see all the content, and “guest” would never see the content.

In this tutorial we have covered: Setting up a two tier membership site with a Free and Advanced package, creating a registration page and using a custom field to grab the user's’ first name. We’ve also looked at generating an upsell to the Advanced package and protecting the content for both parts of the course. Finally we looked at Drip Feeding for the free package. So where to go next?

Email AutoResponder either using Mail Manager and your native mail server or Mail Manager and a service like MailChimp. An AutoResponder allows you to send emails timed to be sent after a certain period in a similar way to drip feeding, in effect it allows you to set up emails to be sent once new content is available for that specific member encouraging them to return.