Blog Tipz

Okay, so you want to start a membership site with WordPress. It’s quite easy and simple to do, if you have the time to read through this article. Membership sites are great for people who want to focus on and branch out from a main topic, ideally news and community sites. What you ultimately do is allow other people to publish content to your site – they have their own admin area and can manage comments through here.

I will be focusing on a clean installation of WordPress, and we won’t install a single plugin. We’re keeping this as simple as possible. After all, the preferred plugins change and the developers may halt development, and this results in the inability to use this tutorial in the future.

Getting Started

It is ideal that you start from scratch, or in the very beginning stages of your blog’s life. If you are dealing with thousands of articles, and no clear intention of inviting authors to your site, you’ll find it more difficult to manage them once you do create a clear initiative.

Once you have installed the latest version of WordPress, make sure everything within the back-end of the site has been filled in.

When you have your main authors, you are ready to open the site up to other authors, although there are a few decisions that you must make:

• How to separate the users from the main authors (including yourself). There are three main methods – give each a complete author profile/page, give each member a folder or sub-domain on your blog, or create a community channel-type area within your site.
• What privileges do you want your writers to have? Some writers want full control, although others want to only have the ability to write and submit new content. You could also have customization options fro your members, although this only comes with WordPress MU and more complex installations.
• How much time you want to dedicate to your project. Having yourself as one author can take quite a bit of time out of each day, but having multiple authors and a full community writing for your site can add a tremendous amount of time. Beginning with support questions, you’ll also have people who are contacting you about writing on your site themselves.

Now that you’ve thought about the main points, I’ll walk you through how to begin setting up author templates and using the more complete functionality provided right within WordPress.

Adding New Members

Depending on how large you want to make your site, and depending a lot on how you market your community site, you may want to close membership from time to time, especially if “fake” profiles are being created. WordPress makes it easy to change whether this is open, directly through the General Settings area.

Through this, you’ll be able to configure their default role, although we’ll get into this later – right now we’ll focus on how to market your blog to new publishers and contributors.

1. Place a banner or link near the top of your site encouraging people to either contact you or directly create their own profile.
2. Invite people from other blogs (not in a spammy) way to also contribute to your blog, as long as it is also in a related niche.
3. Send out a newsletter to your subscribers or only invite your RSS readers., through a link within the footer, to join in a further conversation. Your goal is to build a true community, not just of people who will create a profile and leave.

The standard back-end “Add New User” from is displayed above, ideal for people who want more control over who is able to join their blog.

Exploring Roles and Capabilities

A great feature included within WordPress is the ability to control and assign users roles and capabilities. For example, you don’t want members controlling which plugins are installed and not installed on your main blog, so you restrict access to this ability. Other common abilities are: writing and editing posts, creating pages, defining links, creating categories, moderating comments, managing plugins, managing themes, and managing other users.

• Administrator – This person has access to all the administration features.
• Editor – This person can publish posts, manage posts, as well as those of other people who have written on your blog.
• Author – Someone who can publish and manage their own posts.
• Contributor – Someone who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts.
• Subscriber – Someone who can read comments, comment, and receive newsletters.

In the case of this article, you either want to choose the “Author” or “Contributor” roles for your authors. These provide the ability to publish and manage posts or the ability to write within WordPress and have an Administrator or Editor publish them.

Using Author Page Templates

Having a clearly defined area within each post for a short biography and link to the writer’s main page is essential. It is important to place a focus on your writers, as they are trying to create an impact online, and may go onto bigger things if they have learned enough about blogging.

The standard link back to the author is as follows, which is created within The Loop, and directs users to the author’s main page.

Written by:
< ?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

After you have placed a link (although more information can certainly be added to the footer of each post) using similar shortcodes, you need to create the page that displays author information. This is generally referred to as the author.php file, and if you don’t have this, you will need to create it. This works much like any other page template, so you will need to know how to implement and edit basic PHP coding.

Using the Current Author variable, WordPress will display information about the author, at least everything that has been implemented within their main profile.

There are a number of steps involved in creating a proper page template for your authors, although a fairly well-laid out documentation file has been included within the WordPress Codex.

These pages will include everything your writers will need in order to properly showcase a little information about them and will also include a link back to their website.

Managing Posted Content

Once you have everything set up for your members to publish content to your site and everything is working properly, you’ll find there is a “lull” between the time you activate this feature and when things really start working out. The main reason for this is that some people will struggle with posting (having never written on a blog before), while others will start right away, but not know what type of content should be published.

Initially, it might be a good idea to contact some of your members and let them know what type of content they should be writing. Because you are most likely doing this for free, it is a good idea that you give them a wide array of topics, and not impose any severe restrictions on length and as much focus on quality. *Quality is good, but you can’t have perfect writers as members.

As the administrator, you’ll be able to moderate posts, delete those that were written about spammy topics, and clean up those with images that were not resized properly or with content that hasn’t been formed properly. Of course, you’ll have to relax a bit when you receive a few hundred submissions each day – it’ll be consume too much of your time to ensure everything is perfect, when in reality, nothing is.

Your main goal is to ensure that a good balance of content is published, and you meet your traffic and comment goals, if you have set them.

Long-Term Management

Over time, you may want to focus on increasing your server capacity or optimizing your database, as members will be uploading lots of images and content to your site. This will surely slow down your site for everyone, and you’ll notice more errors occur.

From time to time, it may also be a good idea to purge some posts that have snuck through, and do more campaigns for more writers through Twitter and other methods. The more writers, the more quickly your site will likely grow.

Main Benefits of These Sites

Membership and community sites have a large number of benefits, as well as some drawbacks, but for right now, I’ll only be focusing on the positives of creating a site like this.

1. It’s fairly easy to get setup and started. There are long-term benefits from switching from a single-author to a multiple-author website.
2. More content will be published to the web, ensuring you cover a wider array of topics, and your members (previous readers) will know what may interest others.
3. Your site will grow more quickly. Along with the increased number of articles, you’ll find that this benefits your site, increasing traffic and consequently ad revenue.
4. You’re creating a community for others to enjoy and learn from. You’ll gain more “respect” for creating this, compared to keeping everything to yourself.
5. You’ll be helping establish other bloggers online as your blog/website grows and they start their own blogs.

Conclusion

While there are several key variations to the blog network and membership site I have referred to in this post, they can all benefit you and your blog in some way. Premium membership sites charge your members for access to more content, while you can do the same for free with “average” writers who simply want to create another profile online to promote their work.

No matter what you use a membership sites for, WordPress has made it easy to create it and manage it without any plugins required. Now, there are some great ones that will give you expanded options and flexibility, but I’ve saved those for another post.