Membership Management Software – There Are Two Kinds

So, you want to start a membership site and are looking for membership software to run it. Well, there’s one thing you need to know before you start – there’s two types of membership software, a fact I stumbled on after spending $1,000 on the wrong kind.

The first kind protects directories (folders) on your web site. An example is aMember. ($179 per domain) You select the directory or directories that you want members-only access to. You can put downloads, web pages, audio, video, even a whole web site in there and aMember protects it.

But, the second type of membership management software protects a database. That means that all of your protected content has to be entered through the membership software interface. And, from what I’ve found, it doesn’t protect any directories.

The advantage is you don’t need web design software, you create content through the web interface.

One version of this membership software is MemberSpeed. It’s expensive at $997 ($57/month for the hosted version) but it has tons of stuff with it – site designer, ad manager, shopping cart, affiliate manager, autoresponder and more.

There were two problems with it for my purposes, though. I already had 150 pages created that I didn’t want to copy and paste into their interface (including copying and pasting all the meta data) and there was NO SEARCH! The shopping cart portion has search capabilities, all other database driven programs like WordPress and Joomla have search, but not MemberSpeed. I still might use it on a new site, though.

Another one I bought but haven’t used yet is Wishlist Member. It’s actually a WordPress plugin ($97 for a one domain license and $297 for unlimited domains). It’s got a couple of handy features like drip content (each payment gets new content rather than access to the whole site) and the ability to have free content on the blog with members having access to “the rest of the story” to tempt visitors to sign up.

So, if you already have web design software like XSite Pro or Dreamweaver and are comfortable creating your own sites you may be inclined toward aMember. If not you may be better off with database driven membership management software.