How to Set up a Basic Membership Website with Paid Memberships Pro

hey everyone it is travis limia from paid memberships pro thank you very much for joining me on today's webinar episode now just real quick i want to let you know that this is a recording so i recently recorded this episode mainly because i am the only one on the episode for today so i wanted to make sure that i have your full attention if any comments come through during the live premiere of this episode so don't worry i am around but i'm not going to be live answering questions like we've done previously but if you are around and you send through a comment or a question i'll be answering through the text side of the live chat so please go ahead and say hello if you are around so in today's episode i am going to be covering the basics of setting up a membership site with paid memberships pro now we have a couple of videos on our channel and on our on our website that cover the initial setup of paid memberships pro but i thought it would be nice to do a webinar episode on this specific topic because in the last few months we have gained a lot of new um members and our plug-in installs have recently reached a hundred thousand or over a hundred thousand active installs so if you are a subscriber to our channel you might have noticed that we have done a fun little video to celebrate that if not go ahead and check out our channel for more information on that video it was a lot of fun filming it and you will get a little bit of a glimpse into our paid memberships pro team and uh yeah it was a lot of fun so i hope you enjoy that so in today's video what i'm basically gonna do is starting from scratch i have my screen set up here in front of me and i'm gonna set up a website a wordpress website very basic one and i'm gonna install paid memberships pro and i'm gonna go through the basic setup process so for you for those of you watching at the moment i am not going to be working on a live production site um i am going to rather set up a a development website that we can you know tinker around with if you don't know what this is then i suggest you head over to i'm just going to open up chrome real quick um and if you go to local by flywheel over here let's go over here to local so it's local wp.com you can essentially download for free a wordpress local environment or development tool that you can build websites on so this is a great way if you want to tinker around with wordpress and paid memberships pro to you know get a membership site working before you actually transfer it to a live production site this is what we use if we are doing a lot of troubleshooting and even tutorial videos i never really work on a live production site instead i go ahead and create a website as you can see over here i've got a bunch that are already installed and then i will record our videos using this tool it's great and it is free so if you want to go ahead and check this out it's also really easy to use so if you are even just getting started with wordpress i'd highly recommend downloading this tinkering around and you never have to worry about you know breaking your live production site so i'm actually going to keep my browser open i'll just minimize that because i'm probably going to be using that from time to time so like i said i'm going to start way from the beginning so just bear with me and so over here i have my local by flywheel already set up and i'm going to go ahead and name my website name to pm pro i'm just going to call it setup okay great so pm pro setup is ready to go and as you can see i can view the admin side of the website or the sort of front end of the site let us go to the front end just so you can see what we are working with you can also see that we have a little bit of a strange url up here let me go ahead and maybe make that full screen for you so you can see we've got a bit of a strange url that's you don't have to worry about that but as you can see we've got a pretty standard wordpress website set up here with a default wordpress theme so what i'm going to go and do is i'm going to just log into the back end of this site and my test password was admin admin again please don't use admin admin for your website credentials it's very dangerous even uh chrome is giving me a hard time saying like hey you should really change your password because hackers are gonna infiltrate your site okay so first things first we have our website as we i'm just going to open that in a new tab so we have our website it's basically ready to go and what i am going to do first is i'm going to install paid memberships pro now the quickest way that i find to do this is just head over to plugins and then select add new and we're basically going to search for up here in the search plugins field we're just going to search for paid memberships that should take a minute before we see paid memberships pro and as you can see over here we have our core plugin and i'm just gonna go and say and click on the install now and all of these green square thumbnails are our paid memberships pro add-ons that are available for free to use on the wordpress repository so while this installs i can just show you we have our woocommerce add-on that's popped up register helper buddypress um this is not ours paid memberships for infusionsoft so there's a few that you will see they all look the same with a square a green square thumbnail great so paid memberships pro is installed and i'm going to go ahead and activate it fantastic so as soon as you activate paid memberships pro you'll notice that you get redirected to the paid memberships pro membership dashboard now an option will appear in your admin toolbar over here or your menu and you will see the word memberships appear and so this is paid memberships pro so once everything's installed you'll see memberships over here and memberships over here in the top bar and you can access all of these options right from your wordpress dashboard let me just talk about the wordpress dashboard for a minute this is kind of like your control center your home base and from here you can access all of the settings that you need to set up configure and even manage paid memberships pro so just head over to memberships dashboard if you are ever in a pinch and you can probably find where you need to go from here so the membership dashboard aside from its settings it has a bunch of reports and features that can give you a very good overview of how your site is doing so at the moment i don't have any sales or membership stats but as time goes on these will be filled out and you'll be able to get a much better idea of how your site is doing whether it be from a revenue perspective or a membership sign-up perspective so that's great keep an eye out for that um we also have a paid memberships pro news and updates widget over here and these are some of our blog posts that have recently been published and if you want you can just stay up to date with how paid memberships pro is doing this was our most recent tooltip so if you go ahead and click on that it will basically redirect you to our website and here you can read up more on the blog post that was recently published so i'm just going to go ahead and hit back and that should take me back to my pm pro dashboard so let's dive right in i'm i don't have a support license on this so this is going to be as if a free member was using paid memberships pro and i hope i can illustrate to you the power of the core paid memberships pro plugin a lot of people think that you actually need a support license to get started with paid memberships pro and that is simply not the case pm pro in the sort of i'm using the term free and premium version just to make it so you know to make it a little bit easier to understand but essentially paid measures pro is completely free you can use it from start to finish and start getting paid with your membership site without the need for a support license so hopefully i can demonstrate this here but if you do need to upgrade and you want to go about doing that you can just go ahead and click on the upgrade button and then you know the rest will be sorted out for you so i'm going to get started by creating a membership level over here and i'm going to call this my pro level you know i'm just gonna call it pro and for my description i'm gonna say um this is my premium membership level confirmation message is what you can add this will appear in on the confirmation page as well as if you want to send a confirmation email this just lets our members know that everything went through correctly and they actually have an official level with you so i'm just going to say thank you for signing up okay so billing details let us charge for this level since it is a pro level so i'm gonna create a 50 per month fee so what i want to do is select 50 initial payment and this is the initial amount that is collected at registration so because i clicked on the recurring subscription check box it opened up a few other options for for me which allows me to sort of like design a subscription that suits me so in this case i want my billing amount to be 50 and it's going to go off once per month so it's going to charge the client once every month now the initial payment this is at registration this is what the user will pay so if you have a fee that you want to charge up front and then it falls back to a lower or higher sort of subscription fee you can do that here by simply just adjusting this say for example i want to charge an initial fee of 150 right up front and then fall back to a 50 per month sort of a subscription you can do that so you can charge a different amount up front versus sort of an ongoing basis i'm not going to do that for this so i just want to keep mine at 50 um sort of per month so that's how i will set this up i'm not going to worry about a billing cycle or a custom trial and because i am offering a recurring subscription then i don't really need the sort of the membership to expire so but if you want you can go ahead and click that to create an expiration but even the warning that comes up over here is just basically saying you know if you have a recurring billing you don't really need to set a membership expiration paid memberships pro actually allows you to offer members the ability to cancel their membership at any time so once that is done i'm just going to go ahead and save my level and as you can see over here we have a very first membership level set up it's got an id of one it's called pro and our billing is 50 per month there's no expiration and yes it does allow signups so if you want you can actually head over back to your dashboard i just wanted to show you this so the initial setup started off with set up a membership level it now says view membership levels so you can actually go ahead and view the page that i was just on and actually add or edit certain levels but now if you want we can just go ahead and click on the next step which is gener generate membership pages so now we are on the settings tab and the paging sub option and now this is prompting us to set up our paid memberships pro membership pages so i'm going to go ahead and say generate pages for me you can manually create these but it's we like to recommend at least generating the pages up front and then you can always edit them as you need so as a quick glance over here paid memberships pro has already set up a variety of pages for us and it has assigned it to the specific page so what i mean by that is on the account page as you can see over here paid memberships pro has gone and created a membership account page and assigned it over here so if you want to go and create a page of your own you can and then you can just you know add the or assign the sample page to the account page so that means that if anyone tries to access your account page they will go to this sample page just wanted to make that clear a bit i'm going to change it back to our membership account page if you just want to get started with with paid memberships pro then this is almost all you need to do as as a starting point so i'm just going to go ahead and save my changes and once that is oh it did save i didn't even see that sorry and so once that is done the next step is to set up our payment gateway so let me go to our payment gateway and ssl now for the for this demonstration i'm going to leave my payment gateway on testing only because i don't have an actual payment gateway to test this out with but if you want what you can do is you can click on this field and you can go ahead and choose a payment gateway that will work for you um we generally recommend using stripe and paypal express and if you want you can use an add-on of ours called add paypal express to checkout and this will allow you to offer these two payment gateways to your members on the same checkout page at the same time so whether someone wants to use a credit card and purchase a membership using stripe or if they have a paypal account and they would prefer to process a payment through paypal they can do that and so you can have those two options so if you want go ahead and check out add paypal express to checkout on our pm pro add-on page and then that's how you can do that so if you just for to illustrate this if you go ahead and select stripe or paypal you'll notice that a bunch of different options go and open up so these options are relative to the kind of payment gateway that you choose so in this case stripe you are required to set up a publishable key a secret key and then you will be prompted to create a webhook now if you have any questions on how to do these just refer back to paid membershipspro.com we have a gateways let me open it up over here so let me just go paid memberships pro we have a lot of documentation on this so if you want you can go to our gateways tab and then if you go to say stripe it will open up our documentation and this is exactly where you can see all the information that you need to get to basically set up the gateway so you can just go to gateway setup and here it is over here we've even got a video demo that you can view how to set up your web hook it's a relatively new feature that we've added into pm pro so check that out if you need to and let me go back to my site so as i said uh you know depending on what you choose is what will appear and then you can go ahead and just enter these details if you are unsure with where to get in this instance like a paypal api username and the password chances are you just need to go to your paypal account and then actually get this information and then bring it back to the site once you are fully ready to go and even if this was a production site i'd highly recommend that you try your gateway environment in sandbox or testing and then do a test checkout but if you are happy and everything is working perfectly you just want to go ahead and flip this over to live or production and now that will mean that you can actually start accepting payments so again for this i'm just going to set mine to testing only i'm going to leave it on sandbox testing if you want you can go ahead and change your currency i'm going to leave mine as us dollars for now but we have a bunch of currencies that you can select and these are the credit card types all of that if you are in the states you can set a sales tax this is optional we always have a disclaimer to just check in with a sort of tax practitioner or accountant or whoever is doing your taxes just to make sure that you comply with your specific states etc so just go ahead and check in with a tax practitioner if you need ssl this is where you can enter your ssl seal code we recommend to keep it on yes over here but i don't need to fill this in if you need some help with ssl settings specifically get in touch with us you can receive a free ssl certificate basically from your web host or let's encrypt.com uh i think it's let's encrypt.com if you go to letsencrypt.org excuse me you can go ahead and actually apply to get a free tax excuse me not a tax certificate a free ssl certificate and then you can go ahead and add this to your site highly recommended that you should do it there's a couple of links that you can go and click on as you as you see here it says your ssl certificate must be installed by your web host so just get them to do that and then you are good to go so i'm just going to go ahead and save my settings over here and that in a nutshell is more or less what you need to get started but if you want to take things a little bit further you can go to your email tab and this is where you can go ahead and actually enter your from email address the from name so as you can see mine is just pulling the data from my website and this is what's going to show up if a email goes out to a member so i'm just going to set mine to travis lima and i'm going to leave my email address the same there because this is just a test and you have a couple of options if you only want to filter pm pro emails you know you can do that a lot of this is options that you can do at a later stage so i am going to not worry too much about editing all of this i want to get to the meat and potatoes of actually setting up a couple of posts and maybe restricting them so you can see how that works so i'm just going to go ahead and save my changes over here and then lastly on the advanced settings section this is where you can do a couple of things with your membership site uh certain things like you can block all users with a subscriber role from accessing the dashboard you can do the same with the wordpress toolbar you can edit the message that is going to be shown for logged in non-members or logged out users so this can just prompt those users to hey this is a restricted blog post you need to either log in or sign up to access it or whatever the case may be one thing that i feel is relatively important to know about is the content settings so sometimes when you restrict a blog post in paid memberships pro it disappears for anyone who doesn't have a membership level can that can view that blog post so this setting is where you want to go and just make sure this is turned on depending how you want to do it if you want to hide content from any and all non-members then you want to go filter searches and archives and then you will see here it says yes only members will see restricted posts and pages so if you don't want this to be on then you have to say no non-members will see restricted posts and pages in searches and that basically means that they will be able to see it but they won't be able to access it without an account so it's just important to remember that i'm going to leave mine on yes so this is the default settings and then i'm going to go ahead and create a post now we're going to restrict it and then you'll see what i mean in a bit the same is true for show excerpts to non-members we're going to leave that no let's hide excerpts for now and i'll come back to this in a moment and then we can go from there the advanced settings again are advanced settings so you might not need to sort of uh visit this page just yet but just keep in mind that it is there if you need it and um just reach out to us if you need any help with getting set up over here the last things that i can show you on the dashboard is our add-ons tab over here this allows you to basically install or download various add-ons some are free to use and some are part of our plus license those will be you'll be able to access from from this dashboard if you have a plus license alternatively you can get them on github.com i did make mention that paid memberships pro is completely free which means that all of our code is open source and you it's available for download on github.com a plus license will give you access to our premium support our premium content on our website and give you the ability to install and do automatic updates of our plus add-ons right from your wordpress dashboard so those are the takeaways over there and if you do have a license you can go ahead and click on this license tab and you can just go and enter it here and validate it you can also buy a plus license if you want straight from here so that's what you can do great so let me just have a quick look at the front end so as you can see i can manage my pages view so everything is more or less set up let's go ahead and create a post and restrict it so let me maybe go to my paid memberships pro blog and i just want to copy a little bit of information from a blog post and create a dummy post for us so let's go over to this re-engaging past members to win them back blog post and let's just go and copy some information over here i'm going to close this for the moment thank you okay so let's go ahead and copy this title and i'm just going to paste that in and i am going to copy the introduction and i'm just going to paste that in over there and let's go ahead and create a separator why not and i will copy this image i'll paste it over there i love how gutenberg works with the copy and paste uh functionality and then the last thing i guess i can just take this bit of information over here and let's make a paragraph paste that in and there we go so let's go ahead and publish this and now i am going to view this post and there we have it so now we have a demo post and let's say that we actually want to restrict this so how do we do that great so all we need to do is go back to edit post and over on the right hand side over here in these document settings you'll notice that require membership has has appeared so this required membership is a paid memberships pro feature and if we want we can go ahead and just click on pro and now if you remember i created the pro membership level and so this is why it is appearing over here um if you have multiple levels these will appear over here and then you can just go ahead and check them as you need so by checking this this will mean that a user needs the pro membership level in order to view this post so if you go and you have multiple members memberships excuse me say you have a free and a pro membership level and you tick both that means that either a free or a pro member will be able to view this post if we uncheck it then that means this is free to view for any and everybody is sort of like if you have a membership level or not you can view this so for this example i'm going to click require membership pro i'm going to update it let's go ahead and view the post all right so as you can see over here the post has been restricted and i can see the title of the post but i am unable to view the actual content and now this message has popped up this content is for pro members only so paid memberships pros working it's doing its job and even myself as the admin i don't have a membership level i haven't got signed up for one and that's why i can't even view the post so if you as an admin want to change this you can just go ahead and edit your profile and if you scroll down on your profile page you can see here it says membership level settings it says non-paying because i haven't purchased anything but i can go ahead and assign a current membership level to me if i want to access those posts and not have to actually sign up for a level okay i'm gonna go back to my site now and let's see if i can as you can see the recent posts it doesn't actually show up as the re-engaging post that we just added and that could be that setting in the advanced settings section that you might want to add let me see what would happen if i do go and add that real quick so if i go to my advanced settings section and i say filter searches and archives i set this to no non-members will see restricted posts and pages and let's turn excerpts on let's just see what that will look like over here so i'm going to save my settings i'm going to head over back to my homepage and i'm just going to say refresh and there we can see that we actually can view this now somewhat and you can see the excerpt is showing but that's all that is showing let's see what happens when i click on it so as you can see now i can find this post a lot more easier as a non-member i can view an excerpt and i can go ahead and join to view this post so i think i'm going to go ahead and do that for this example let's say that i am a user i viewed this page i think it's great this is such an informative website i want to become a member let me go ahead and join now and then i am redirected to the membership levels page excuse one one second over here you can see under recent posts i don't know if you remember but we could only see hello world now this uh search or this um archive is showing us that under the recent posts we have a re-engaging blog post that wasn't there before and since i turned that setting on um in the advanced settings it's now appearing anyway i digress so i want to sign up for the pro level i'm going to go ahead and select it and i am now i wanted to say transported but i was redirected to the membership checkout page over here we get a little bit of information as you can see it says here you have selected the pro membership level this is my premium membership level that was the description if if you recall that i wrote and um the price for membership is now 50 per month it's also making mention that i am logged in as admin just in case i need to know about that and a little sign is coming up that i need to set up a payment gateway before payments will actually be processed again i'm on the testing one so if you are using stripe or paypal or paypal express you shouldn't see this okay i'm gonna go ahead and enter in my first name and last name just as if i was a member looking to check out i don't know if you knew this but i live at 123 test avenue the city is example this my state i'm not going to fill that in sure my postal code is one two three four i really um have a strange contact details don't i um email address stays the same and now this because it is a test payment i can almost enter anything that i want in here so this doesn't really matter so let's go ahead submit and check out and now we are transported or redirected back to our membership confirmation page now all of these pages that you have been seeing the membership level the membership checkout the membership confirmation all of those have been generated for us by paid memberships pro in the second step that i showed you on on actually setting up your pm pro membership pages so this is actually what they are the these are the pages that have been created so as you can see in a relatively short amount of time you can already build a working membership site and start getting paid you know in relatively no time at all i would say that the biggest step would be creating the membership level and setting up your payment gateway and then you're sort of ready to go that's like a bit of a blanket statement of course because there are a lot of things you can do but what's nice with this is that you can start a membership site and then grow as you needed to great so this is our confirmation page as you can see it says yeah thank you for your membership to pm pro setup that's our website name your pro membership is now active so that's just pulling the um the membership level name over there and i said here thank you for signing up this is where your confirmation message will appear if you want you can even add in images and really make it fancy it's all up to you but you know that's what i've had so there we go um and then below are some details over here about the membership and so we've got our invoice we can print that and all is looking well so let's go and view our membership account and here members can go ahead and cancel their account if they need to they can view which level they're on they can view all membership options so this is going to open up over here and so this is if i have multiple levels they can go ahead and upgrade downgrade or change their membership level here is my account i can edit my profile change my password everything from here view uh past invoices and print them so it's all working now the question is if we go back to our home page will i be able to view my blog post that i was actually trying to get or reviews or read sorry so let's go ahead and click on this and as you can see that message has disappeared the one that's stating that we need to log in or register and i can actually view this blog post and now this method will work for posts pages we have a bunch of other methods including gutenberg blocks and short codes that you can use to restrict content if you need it's very versatile and so i highly recommend you just go ahead and check out our paid memberships pro documentation everything is here that you need to do but that's in a nutshell and let me just go ahead and close stop screen sharing and that in a nutshell is how you can go and set up a basic paid memberships pro membership sites in a couple of minutes even maybe an hour that i've been on here um so i hope that helped and i hope that demonstrated exactly how to go about doing that um it is highly possible that i have missed something through this webinar episode so i'd like to encourage you to please get in touch with us either now in the comment section i'm gonna let the video play out for a little while so that we can actually get some of the last comments and questions in and i can answer them if need be but if there is anything i missed and i apologize if i did please reach out to us on the contact page on our paid membershipspro.com website and we will be more than willing to get back to you and answer any questions you have thank you for bearing with me thank you for watching and i hope that this was helpful and if you haven't already please go ahead like this video subscribe to our channel we are constantly looking for more videos to offer you and record and stream so it's it's we've got some exciting ones lined up and i hope to see you in the next one goodbye [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Stranger Studios

Views: 28,998

Keywords: paid memberships pro, membership, wordpress, local by flywheel, pmpro, wordpress membership site, build a membership site with wordpress, build a membership website, build a membership site, build a membership website with wordpress

Id: AMSF_LdpSes

Length: 40min 2sec (2402 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020