This plugin turns your Wordpress blog into a fully fledged membership site. You will be able to easily restrict specific pages or posts to your subscribers and start collecting automatically recurring subscriptions from your members.

The main features of WP Membership Tool are as follows:

• Easy-to-use tags to separate free content from premium one
• SEO optimized
• Support for unlimited user levels
• First click free feature
• No change needed at blog level
• Payments: support for ‘Subscribe’ and ‘Buy Now’ Paypal buttons
• Registration: seamless integration with internal WP user system
• Terms &conditions approval feature.
• Feedback from members feature
• Membership and subscription cancellation automation

For more details about this brand new WordPress plugin click here to visit their website: Mass Automation Tools

Why Start A Membership Site

Membership sites can be free or paid. Some of the main reasons for starting a membership site are:

1) To create a growing database of people focused around a common interest.

2) To generate a recurring income.

3) To give exclusive access to specific content or information to registered members only.

Growing A Database Of People Focused Around A Common Interest

Just off the top of my head, I can think of the following examples of blog membership sites someone with an entrepreneurial mindset may want to build:

• business blog
• christian blog
• fashion blog
• finance blog
• green blog
• mom blog
• music blog
• sports blog
• technology blog
• etc …

All of the above target specific interests and niches that could be turned into a profitable membership site (e.g. by attracting advertisers targeting people interested in your specific blog topic), or just a great place for passionate people to hang out, meet other like-minded people and get more information about the things they’re interested in.

Generating A Recurring Income

If you decide to start a paid membership site and are able to provide regular content of great value, then your blog has the potential to earn you a very nice income from your one-time effort (i.e. creating the content) multiplied by a growing number of members who will pay you to access your content and information.

Giving Exclusive Access To Content To Registered Members Only

Another reason for turning your blog or sections of your blog into a membership site, is that you may not want to make your content available to everyone who visits your site then leaves without giving you the opportunity to contact them again. By having people register for your membership area, you can keep in touch, send them updates and special offers, etc.

These are just some of the reasons for turning your blog into a membership site using the WP Membership Tool plugin.

By the way, if you would like to know more about the benefits of starting a membership site, then go here to get more information, and get some of the latest marketing methods for growing a membership site: 

Membership Millionaire

(clicking on the link above will take you to a special page where you can register for FREE as a lifetime Silver member – this is a special deal for visitors to my blog!)

Mass Automation Tools

I own several software tools created by the folks at Mass Automation (WordPress Cloner and RSS Bookmarker), and I highly recommend their products. Their software is robust and they are highly responsive in terms of customer service. I have no doubt that WP Membership Tool will be one of their best-selling and most popular tools yet.

Go here for more details about the WordPress Membership plugin: Mass Automation Tools

Recently, I was contacted by a client asking me if they could add a business directory to their site, in order to give each of the members of their business network a business listing.

Knowing that WordPress developers have created thousands of plugins for the blogging community, I went online and typed “business directory wordpress plugin” into Google.

Sure enough, I found one. It’s called Business Directory For Wordpress and it’s free to download.

The WordPress Business Directory plugin is described by its developers as being “an easy way to host a free directory page for your readers, affiliates, advertisers, community or club members … Listings include company name, a short description, and contact information including a live URL. The plugin includes an admin tab that allows you to approve of listings before they appear live on the site. You can also edit and delete listings.”

According to the plugin developers, they will soon have a premium version of the plugin that allows you to promote a listing upgrade to your directory members, where, for a fee (paid via PayPal), they will be able to upload a logo and appear in the top ‘premium’ section of your directory.

So, I downloaded the plugin, installed it into the client’s site, activated it, and, following the easy installation instructions, I created two pages: one where the directory appears (e.g. “Members Directory”) and one page where the business listing gets created (e.g. “Submit Directory Listing”).

By default most pages get published as “public”. This allows anyone visiting the blog to access the page. Since I knew that my client didn’t want non-members to create a business directory listing on the site, I simply selected the “private” display option for the directory listing form page before publishing it. This way, only the blog administrator can add a listing to the business directory, and they must be logged in to view the form (if you’re not logged in as the administrator and try to go to the directory submission form address, you will get a ‘page not found’ error.)

Here’s what the directory submission form currently looks like (I’ve set it up on a private page – this is why you see the word “Private” in the screenshot below):

To see what the Business Directory listings actually look like, just click on the Business Blog Directory link in the “Pages” section of this blog.

The whole process of adding a business directory to my client’s business blog using the Business Directory For Wordpress plugin took me less than 10 minutes. Adding a new business directory to my own blog took me only about 2 minutes, since I didn’t need to read through the installation notes the second time around.

If you haven’t discovered yet the power of using a blog to grow your business online, then maybe it’s time to do so. I’ve written several posts on this blog describing the benefits and advantages of using a business blog, so feel free to browse through some of my earlier posts.  And if you would like to set up your own professional business blog and start growing your business fast, check out our ’step-by-step’ business blog video tutorials.

I’ve recently come across a great free WordPress plugin that automatically notifies Twitter of your new blog posts, then links your new entry (called a tweet) in Twitter back to your blog post. Anyone following you in Twitter can then see the new entry and come visit your site to read the rest of your blog post.

The plugin is called Tweet My Blog and was developed by a couple of well-known internet marketers, John Merrick (no, not the Elephant Man, but a computer programmer from the UK!) and Soren Jordansen (co-creator of the best-selling hands-free plug’n'play affiliate marketing system called “CB Pirate“).

According to its creators, Tweet My Blog is “a Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter – driving massive amounts of traffic to your blog. And the best part… It’s 100% free!”

Learn more about Tweet My Blog …

I have downloaded this plugin and have installed it on this site and some of my other blogs. The plugin and sidebar widget allow you to display your latest tweets on your blog’s sidebar (see blog sidebar), it’s easy to install, easy to set up and works great, so in my opinion, it’s definitely a worthwhile plugin to install on your blog.

You will, of course, need to have an account set up with Twitter.com to use this plugin (setting up an account with Twitter is free.)

I do have a few separate Twitter accounts that I use for different purposes, and I found there was no problem using the same Tweet My Blog download to install and use the plugin on different blogs. Everything works just great and each of my separate blogs posts to my different Twitter accounts.

If you haven’t started using Twitter yet to help promote and grow your business, perhaps it’s time you should. The Tweet My Blog plugin developers were kind enough to include a very informative report on how to use Twitter to market your business when you download the plugin.

To learn more about Tweet My Blog and download your copy for free, visit TweetMyBlog.com.

If you haven’t started a blog for your business yet, then I recommend you check out my step-by-step “how to set up a business blog” video tutorials. Video tutorials on how to upload, install and activate plugins in your WordPress blog are included in the training program and all videos are done in “non-techie” style – you just watch over my shoulder as I take you through each step of installing, setting up and configuring a professional Wordpress blog that will help grow your business online faster.