People have been getting upset by the recent Google Money Tree Scam, where they pay a few bucks and end up getting billed for much more. I’m opposed to scams as much as anyone, but often times the customer also needs to be educated on how things work.

What seems to be missed by the reporters is that a monthly fee is a common offering known as a continuity program or membership site. There are many offers for an initial product which states that you will be billed on a monthly basis for access to a training or coaching program for example. Most of these sites explicitly state this on the sales page and usually on the purchase page. Make sure you make this explicit on your sales pages.

There is also confusion about the use of the name ‘Google’ in the product title. This may be confusing to some, but there are other products such as Google Cash Detective. You have to understand that many systems that can make you money rely on having you use the Google Adwords system. This is where you pay to have ads show up beside the Google search results in order to get traffic to your site. Nothing wrong with that.

It’s one thing to not get what was promised, but quite another when the consumer does not notice that they will be billed each month in addition to the initial purchase. So make sure you are making this perfectly clear when you are setting up a system like this for your customers.

The annoying thing about this report is that it tarnishes perfect good products out there, and increases the reluctance of people to buy online in some cases.

As you know I eventually found the best way to build a membership site by using Wordpress and the Wishlist member plugin. I use Hostgator servers because they have great support and I don’t have to pay for each of my websites (as I had to do with Godaddy). You can see my membership site on mastering the guitar fretboard.

Here’s another informative post by Chris Garrett which explains how he built his membership site, which is a little more complicated with the use of Amember and a forum. I believe people will move towards the Wishlist member plugin more and more over time.

When I was a member of Teaching Sells, I started to obtain all the individual software packages that were initially recommended such as Moodle, Amember, vBulletin and Affiliate Pro. But after struggling with this (even as a programmer myself), noticing they weren’t truly integrated (each with their own user profiles and login/logout issues) and wanting to focus more on the content and marketing I went with Extreme Member. This was great for a while because it was fully hosted and integrated, with email marketing and affiliate marketing built in. The downside was the monthly cost at $99/month and having the site go down for many hours a couple times.

Using Wordpress (free) and adding plugins such as Wishlist Member and most others that are free, is so easy with a bit of learning. You can even add a forum such as the Simple Forum plugin (free), which will do the job.

I thought I would explain what I did to move from Extreme Member to using Wordpress with the Wishlist Member plugin on a different web host (Hostgator)

First I needed a host to serve up the membership site. I went with HostGator because you can have unlimited websites with them (I have lots of other sites on Godaddy.com that I am moving as well, so much cheaper in the end). Not only that since I am a new signup, Hostgator offered to move the entire site for free! That includes the wordpress files, videos and database.

I had some concerns about doing this as there are proprietary parts of Extreme Member (database tables/modifications, custom plugins, etc). We disabled all the plugins and added a few back one at a time. Things worked fine.

The other problem was with the theme. EM had modified some of the themes to work with their system. So I redownloaded the original theme I was using (Mandigo) and it re-uploaded it along with my original header graphic. It worked fine.

Then came the install of the Wishlist Member plugin. As you know that’s easy. FTP it to the server under the plugins folder and activate it within Wordpress. Enter some licence key info and you’re good to go.

Then before pointing the actual domain name (http://onlineguitarcoaching.com) at the new hostgator servers (I use a godaddy domain), you can actually modify your ‘hosts’ file (for windows) to point to the hostgator servers. So you can test it out on your local machine before actually making the change at the domain host (godaddy). Again thanks to Hostgator for teaching me this!

Don’t forget email – since I used an email such myname@onlineguitarcoaching.com on the original EM site, I needed to recreate this on the hostgator account (the original email was handled by godaddy servers). I also forward this to my hotmail account so I don’t have to login to a whole ton of different email accounts.

There is also the issue of the subscription payments, for transferring existing members. The easiest option is to just find those members in the new system and put them into a similar membership level (eg. Gold). Now since the payments in paypal are setup to talk to EM (not Wishlist), each month that update to the membership will fail but you can just manually remove the members after they cancel in Paypal. If you have a lot of members, that option may not work for you. So what Wishlist suggested is you put them in a temporary membership that expires after 30 days and then they have to pay via paypal to stay a member.

I’m not going to explain the actual wishlist member setup here, as they have tons of documentation and I might do some of my own later.

Then I tested the signup of a new account via paypal, and eventually refunded the money back to myself. When everything seemed good, I pointed the domain name at the hostgator servers and remove the entries from my local hosts file.