6 Best WordPress Theme Clubs for WP Consultants

WordPress consulting is one of the hottest fields around these days. There are lots of businesses and individuals that are realizing WordPress’ potential and are jumping ships from blogger and other content management systems to WordPress. It’s nice to have the right development skills as a WP consultant, but sometimes you can save a lot of time by grabbing a premium theme and customizing it for your clients. It certainly beats writing a theme from scratch. I am not suggesting that every client will accept such an option, but there are a lot of people who don’t mind saving a bit of money and let their consultants focus on theme customization rather than theme development.

If you are a WordPress consultant looking to enhance your business toolkit, here are 6 WordPress theme memberships you should try:

WooThemes: WooThemes is my favorite premium theme membership website. It has something for everyone.  It has flexible plans, and you can get your hands on Photoshop files, which is a must.

Templatic: it’s another one of my favorite WordPress theme clubs. There are a lot of retail WordPress themes available through this website. You can get your hands on all their themes for a very low price. You also get the Photoshop files.

Thesis: Thesis is not really a membership club program. It’s one super flexible theme that you can use as the skeleton for your designs. It’s very easy to customize as it takes advantage of hooks, so as long as you know your design technologies, you can build killer websites with Thesis. (more…)

Build a Membership Website around WordPress with aMember

In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of people who are building killer businesses by offering valuable content to their readers on a consistent basis through membership sites. If you have been blogging for a while and know your niche inside and out, there is a good chance that you can make money through your own membership site. You can always apply the “freemium” concept to your content as well (use your blog for free content). aMember is an innovative PHP script that lets you start your very own paid content website fast. The solution is designed to work with WordPress and other top CMS and help you build a more solid community around your blog.

aMember provides support for PayPal, BeanStream, 2Checkout, NoChex, VeriSign PayFlow, Authorize.Net, PaySystems, Probilling, Multicards, E-Gold and Clickbank payment systems. In addition, you can use the system in conjunction with WordPress, Joomla, and vBulletin. It’s also translated to 7 Languages, so you can use the software to create international membership sites.

You can easily find out about how much your membership site has made in the back-end. You can add users, import and export your users, and back up your information easily as well. You also have a chance to manage your affiliate program through the back-end as well. (more…)

WooThemes Membership Review

I don’t know about you, but I am constantly on the look out for the best WordPress themes on the market. There are just too many of them around and choosing the right WordPress theme could take a lot of work depending on what you plan to do with your WordPress website. Getting a premium theme wouldn’t cost you more than a couple of hundred dollars, but if you have more than one website in multiple niches, you are going to need a WordPress membership such as that of WooThemes. Essentially, these sites provide you with unlimited licenses to lots of themes for a monthly fee. So instead of paying $200 to get an unlimited license to a single WordPress theme, you get your hands on 10-20 premium themes for $15-$30 a month. If you own lots of websites, that’s really the best way to go without you going broke, spending all your budget on all kinds of premium themes.

WooThemes is one of the best membership sites on the Internet that I personally recommend to my clients and colleagues. There are a lot of membership sites that provide you with low quality, rehashed themes on a monthly basis. With WooThemes, almost all its offered themes are very high quality and exciting. And the developers behind these themes don’t only focus on one or two category. They provide all kinds of themes for all types of websites to help you expand your website portfolio and build vlogs, portals, blogs, and startup sites.

WooThemes’ business model is very simple. You can either buy a single theme for a couple of hundred dollars or you can join its membership plan and get your hands on all the premium themes. There are two classes of membership available. You can choose the standard plan that will cost you $125 up front plus $15 a month fee for theme updates. If you are hardcore and want to build your own unique themes from WooThemes products, you should sign up for Developer Club Membership. It costs a bit more but at the same time you get all the PSD files, so you can use these themes to build unique, better themes for your website without having to start from scratch. (more…)

Build a Membership WordPress site with MemberWing

Running a membership site is very lucrative these days. Many top online entrepreneurs have started their own membership sites to increase their revenue and keep the cash coming in. But you don’t have to use aMember to create a membership site. Don’t get me wrong. aMember is a super membership product, but what if you want to provide premium content on your WordPress blog (kind of similar to what ESPN and other content sites do)?

MemberWing is a premium WordPress plug-in that is made for folks who want to create their own money making WordPress membership sites. MemberWing allows you to use multiple levels of subscription (silver, gold, …) and charge folks based on their level of access. It also works with payment portals such as PayPal, PayDotCom, and e-junkie.

MemberWing is also SEO-friendly which is a big plus. The plug-in allows you to promote teasers to search engines and your visitors without showing the whole content (similar to how ESPN does it). The First Click Free technology allows you to get ranked high on Google without having to expose your content without payment.

What I really liked about this plug-in was the ability to mix paid and free content. Let’s say you write an article but you want to share bits and pieces of it with the whole world. You can do so easily with this plug-in. And the speed of my blog was not really affected when I used this plug-in. Some plug-ins slow down your site, but not this one, so a big plus here.

Here is the best part. You can get the basic version of this plug-in for FREE. It’s actually not one of those free plug-ins that doesn’t come with a whole lot. The free plug-in is very capable, and it can also show you the potential if you decide to invest in the paid version.

If you spend your days creating content for others, you may as well get paid for your efforts. With MemberWing, you can create a recurring revenue for yourself and focus more on creating better content for your legion of readers (you can download MemberWing here).

Here are some of the differences between the free and paid MemberWing versions:

Run a Membership WordPress Blog with WP-Membership

Joomla has given us WordPress crazy folks a run for our money. Joomla is a portal CMS that makes it easy to create membership communities. I personally prefer WordPress to Joomla and often get tired of seeing folks claiming how great Joomla is in comparison to WordPress. Well, with WP Membership, I really don’t see any advantage to using Joomla.

WP-Membership, which is going for $29.99 per domain, is a premium plug-in that makes it very easy to turn your WordPress website into a fully-fledged membership site (very similar to amember). For instance, you can define what pages folks have access to, and what pages is part of your premium membership program:

The nice thing about this theme is that it allows you to use PayPal effectively to make money. You can also define user levels (gold, silver), and give them different rights. You can create and register pages under these tiers, making sure that folks get what they pay for. Overall, WP-Membership is a nice addition to the WordPress community. WP-Membership may not be as advanced as amember, but it’s effective for small membership sites on WordPress.