Using MemberPress for WordPress Membership Sites

In the first post of this mini-series we looked at the basic lingo you have to understand to get going with MemberPress. Here are a couple more tweaks you shouldn’t neglect when setting up your membership site.

Don’t leave visitors stranded

When first setting up your membership site, you’ll likely put a lot of care and attention into your registration pages, realizing that they will do the heavy lifting of converting visitors. But don’t forget to think about how people are actually going to end up on them. You’ll probably have links in your navigation and other obvious places, but you also need to think about what happens when someone stumbles across a blog post on your site with some protected content on it – what do you do with them and how do you get them into the sign-up process?

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Show Custom Text on a Password Protected WordPress Page/Post

how to show custom text on a password protected page

It’s easy to password protect an entire page or post in WordPress. But what if you would like to show part of the content on the page?

I did look for a plugin solution for this at first. I thought it would be easy to find a plugin that gave you a shortcode to wrap around content you wanted to keep protected. I was wrong (unless you want to utilize user roles, but I didn’t want people to have to log in). I came across Content Protector, but found it really unreliable.

But there’s a pretty easy solution if you’re OK with a little code. For this solution you will need:

  • A child theme (because we’re going to be editing template files)
  • An understanding of the WordPress template hierarchy
  • The confidence to edit some PHP code

If this all sounds a bit much for you, you may want to check out my post on Going Beyond WordPress Basics, to build your confidence.

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Getting Started With MemberPress

Getting Started with MemberPress - a membership plugin for WordPress

There are many ways to password-protect content in WordPress. Basic password-protection is built-in and there are other free plugins to expand upon that. But if you want to generate revenue from protected content, you’ll need a fully-featured membership plugin. There are many to choose from and I can’t say I’ve tried them all, but of the ones I have tried, I really like MemberPress. It has a lot of features and capabilities, but it’s also pretty easy to get up and running with. That said, learning a new system will always present some hurdles. Here are a few basic concepts I needed to get my head around to get going with MemberPress. Hopefully this will be helpful for you, too.

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Troubleshooting WordPress Issues

Troubleshooting WordPress Problems

When something goes wrong on your WordPress site, how do you react? Do you freak out, or have a mini panic attack? Don’t worry, that’s a fairly typical reaction from the normal WordPress user ;) With this post I’d like to change the way you look at and react to WordPress problems :)

With WordPress, as with many things in life, we learn a lot when things aren’t going smoothly; learning to deal with technical problems pushes us out of our comfort zone and forces us to develop new skills and a deeper understanding.

Much of what I’ve learned in WordPress over the years has happened through things going wrong and me having to figure out how to fix it. Every time you face a problem and learn how to deal with it, your confidence is boosted and your problem-solving toolkit, and resilience, expands. The next time an issue crops up you are better equipped to handle it and you feel less panic.

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The Complete Guide to Using The Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Complete Guide to Using Yoast SEO for WordPress

This guide is current as of  March 2017.

Get The PDF: Download the PDF version of this guide for easy reading!
Get the PDF

While some general aspects of SEO will be touched on in this guide in the course of explaining the plugin, beginners may find that they need a more fundamental understanding of how SEO works in general, in order to get the best use out of this plugin. I have written an ebook that addresses that need:
The Beginners’ Guide to SEO for Business

Yoast SEO is on most lists of ‘must-have’ WordPress plugins. But the extensive set of options it provides can seem intimidating, especially to newer users.

Yoast has a fair amount of commentary and explanatory text throughout the plugin screens so I won’t duplicate anything he’s saying there, but I’ll try and clarify the less obvious parts.

If you’ve used an older version of Yoast on a site, there are several menu tabs you’re used to seeing, that are hidden by default on first activation of more recent versions.

To access all of the settings referred to in this guide, you will need to activate the Advanced settings.

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