Remember…
- These best practices are generic rules and philosophies.
- Best practices aren’t always convenient.
- Best practices aren’t always cheap / free.
- Needs are different than wants.
- If your needs don’t match the best practice then it may not be a best practice for you. We offer them up with hopes to help, not hinder.
- Dave has a lot of opinions, and is self-aware of this.
Web Site Hosting
- Make sure your webhost supports PHP 7.0, it’s the fastest version.
- Speed matters.
WordPress Setup
- There is no best theme.
- Memberium controls what your site does, not how it looks. How it looks is controlled by your theme. This is a powerful separation of duties.
- All themes that follow WordPress standards work with Memberium. There are thousands of free and premium themes, so we cannot personally exhaustively test all of them.
- We do test the following themes: Thrive, Divi, Visual Composer, Avada, OptimizePress, and BeaverBuilder.
- It’s preferable to host your public sales and marketing site separately from your membership site(s).
- Avoid the WOffice theme. It works fine with us, but it has *severe* scalability issues. Use BuddyBoss Social Learner instead for a similar look and feel.
- The beauty of our sites is less important to our members. They come to us for content, empowerment and service, not for pretty widgets.
- The beauty of our sites is more important to us as site owners, our sites are our pride, but we’re not our customers.
- Put your customers first.
- There are few plugins outside of our community that directly integrate with Memberium. Don’t require Memberium integration, look for plugins that are designed to play weell with other plugins.
Outsourcing
- If you don’t go with someone certified, then get references. Not everyone who claims Memberium proficiency there has it. Not everyone who has experience is good at it.
- Ignore the above at your own peril.
- Your best bet is a Memberium certified partner.
- Your next best bet is an Infusionsoft certified partner (ICP).
- Your next best bet is an Infusionsoft certified consultant (ICC).
- Your next best bet is an a VA who’s active in our community with Infusionsoft and WordPress experience.
- Your implementor is welcome to contact support, but we ask that they keep the site owner CC:’d.
- It’s not the job of Memberium’s support team to do your implementor’s work for them, or teach them Infusionsoft.
Memberium Setup
- Start simple. Be lean. Implement your minimum viable product and get to market. Version One is better than Version None.
- Never test your site with an admin login. Always use a regular user.
- You will spend more time assembling, formatting and loading your content than you will on the site setup. Collect your content first.
- Find a Memberium certified partner to help you if you don’t want to do it on your own.
- Let the Memberium team install your plugin at no cost to you, so we can identify and fix any web hosting issues
- Use the Memberium install wizard to walk you through the plugin setup and make sure you have the latest versions of everything.
- Use a custom field to store your membership password, instead of using the built-in “Password” field on the Additional Info tab.
- Pay attention to the error messages and warnings that Memberium displays. Work with support to fix the issues. Click the dismiss once they’re fixed.
- Test. Test. Test.
- Membership sites aren’t just for your customers; membership sites are for your prospects and leads as well.
- Marketing doesn’t end with the sale. It has a valuable responsibility after the sale to reassure your customer, and to ethically maximize their total lifetime value.
- Use a service like Amazon S3 to share files instead of services like Dropbox.
Video Hosting
- Host your video files and other large media on a separate server from your WordPress install.
- Use a video streaming service designed for serving video such as Vimeo or Wistia, instead of a DIY solution like Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud files
Infusionsoft Configuration
- Use Actionsets for things that you need to happen immediately.
- Use Campaign Builder for things that you want to happen over the next 15 minutes or later.
- Actionsets are not a legacy feature. Many Infusionsoft functions are ONLY possible with Actionsets with no Campaign Builder replacement in sight.
- Just because a feature says “Legacy” doesn’t mean it’s obsolete. Sometimes Infusionsoft calls things legacy as wishful thinking.
- Campaign Builder is actually a workflow tool, not just an email campaign tool.
Working with Support
- Use support. We have over ten people working on the support team at various levels and we’re staffed 7 days a week; it’s a major investment for us. We’re here to guide and coach as well as fix errors.
- Private messaging Dave on Facebook is not the best way to get support; he doesn’t use Facebook messenger but he does live in the support ticket queue.
- Make sure your Memberium plugin and WordPress core are updated before you open a support ticket.
- State the problem clearly: What did you do, what did you expect to happen, what happened instead.
- Include the URL to your site.
- Include an admin login for us to use.
- Include the exact URL’s affected by the problem instead of describing the page by name.
- Include the login of an example/test user that we can reproduce the problem with.
- Verify all the logins you supply work before you submit the ticket.
- Take advantage of our twice weekly office hours call to work personally with Micah and David.
- If you have a feature request, our litmus test is that it has to serve our customers as a group, otherwise we’ll likely refer it to a partner to custom implement.
Resources
- Clipart and Stock Photos: Pixabay, Unsplash
- CSS Button Generators: Best CSS Button Generator, CSS Button Generator, CSS3 Button Generator, Button Optimizer
- Don’t see your favorite free resource? Share it in our Facebook Group or with our support team.
