I’ve built hundreds of sales and membership websites for small businesses. I’ve found that using Digital Access Pass with WordPress is the best way to tailor your site for SEO, scalability, growth and profit. If you need help with DAP, I’m happy to consult with you.
Purchase DAP Support:
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Market Samurai is running a great 50% off promo right now for anyone who doesn’t have it. I hesitate to even write about it here because I know all of you probably already have it (and if you don’t? I’m guessing you’re not a serious internet marketer and aren’t interested.)
I’m still swamped with work here, but I thought I’d pop in to tell you about it- just in case you don’t already own it.
To your success,
Crystal
Full disclosure: I am a Market Samurai affiliate.
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This week a reader wrote in with a great question:
Quick question…what have you found is best place to put Member Profile & User Links area?
I don’t want it taking up prime real estate- once a member knows where to login in…they are set, don’t want to ‘cloud up’ menu bars for non-members.
Thanks!
Steve
The way I set this up for 99% of my DAP sites and client sites is to create a Dashboard page in WordPress (as a page) that the user is redirected to on login. (You can control what page the user is redirected to under Setup – Config – Post Login URL (for all users and membership levels) or membership-level specific under Products/Levels – General Settings – Post Login URL.
In addition to the Dashboard page, I create:
Then I add H3 tags to the top of each page and type:
Dashboard | Profile | Affiliate Info | Protected Content | Logout
This image doesn’t show the Logout link, because members are encouraged to log out in the sidebar:
(Click to expand image)
Then I link each word to it’s corresponding page in WordPress:
(Click to expand image)
To keep things looking nice, I don’t put link tags around the current page. (I.e. no link around “Affiliate Info” on the Affiliate page.)
The link to logout is always http://yoursite.com/dap/logout.php (Replace yoursite.com with the domain of your site.)
This allows your members to navigate around (the “dashboard”) while not cluttering up the nav bar of your site.
That’s my solution- how do you set up DAP in your membership site? Share below!
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What WordPress theme should you use with DAP? The short, sweet, beautiful answer is this: any theme will work with DAP. DAP plugs in and protects existing content, and can take any theme you have and turn it into a membership site. I love that about DAP! If you’re seeing a formatting issue with DAP, it might be the way you’re plugging in the DAP shortcode or the more tag. I’ll talk about that in a later post.
Many of my clients use OptimizePress with great results- OP helps you create a powerful, landing-page driven site.
Buut… quite frankly? OP is a bit too controlling for my tastes. I like to have complete control of a site and how it looks, so I use and recommend Thesis with Premise landing pages plugin. You can see that in effect on this site.
What do you use with DAP?
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I’ve had the opportunity to troubleshoot two great 1ShoppingCart.com integrations with Digital Access Pass sites recently, and I want to share what I’ve learned. This is also a great checklist to go through if you’re having problems.
7 Steps to a Successful 1ShoppingCart + DAP Integration:
1. Product name must always match exactly in 1sc and DAP. (DAP’s documentation is very clear about this, but it’s easy to forget!)
2. Cron and Email Cron must be set up and working. For most DAP sites, the regular cron is setup and email cron is ignored. Make sure email cron is running every 10 minutes. (Pro Tip: if you’re not sure what your Path to PHP is, put this code in a blank php file, upload it to your server, and run the file. That will tell you what your path is- and then delete the file!)
Code: <?php phpinfo(); ?>
3. Make sure your email orders are being read by DAP in the email order processing instructions. You must have an email account that you can set up in this way.
More advanced tips after the jump:
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Note: As a special 48-hour bonus to DAPGuru members, I offered to answer any and all DAP questions free of charge.
Here’s Fern’s question:
Hey Crystal.
I’m setting up an affiliate program from my new membership site/product launch and was interested the best way to do it in DAP. I understand how to new members are automatically assigned an affiliate link but how do you make non-members affiliates?
Thanks so much.
There is a simple way to do this in DAP so anyone can be an affiliate without becoming a member. This is great for high-priced products, products that aren’t actually memberships, or even just giving access to great promoters who don’t necessarily want to be behind the scenes.
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Note: As a special 48-hour bonus to DAPGuru members, I offered to answer any and all DAP questions free of charge.
Here’s Deborah Savadra’s question:
I’m putting together an e-course to sell to my newsletter readers called The WordPerfect Lover’s Guide to Word. I put together the first to-be-protected post, published it, and (since I couldn’t do this step pre-publication) protected it and assigned it to the course I’d set up, expecting (based on the representation made in the DAP documentation online under “RSS feed protection”) that the post would “disappear” from my RSS feed.
Instead, I got this:
So now I’m considering publishing all of my protected paid course material (as opposed to my protected posts for my free newsletter readers) as pages rather than posts to keep this sort of thing from happening.What’s your recommendation/observation? I see there are other plugins available to do “stealth publishing” of posts – is that a good workaround?
Thanks for asking for questions – I look forward to reading your answer!
You can view Deborah’s DAP site (and get Microsoft Office help!) at Legal Office Guru.
This is a typical complaint of many DAP users. “It’s not you, it’s DAP!” There’s an easy way to fix this that I recommend for all users, because the answer to this question ALSO fixes another common questions clients have: how to protect scheduled posts.
I created a video behind-the-scenes in one of my DAP sites to answer Deborah. See the step-by-step instructions below the video.
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Note: As a special 48-hour bonus to DAPGuru members, I offered to answer any and all DAP questions free of charge.
Here’s Rick Smith’s question:
I set up my first product which is a paid membership. Next I created another product with a free membership with access to the same posts on the same blog. So, one paid and one free access (two different products) to the same content.
The paid members I have set up can access all of the content, but the free members can get into their home page but cannot see any content. I have gone into the Content Responder tab under the free product, selected “edit” beside the post
and clicked “YES” to Is Free? Still, no content will show up for the free members.The two products have different home pages.
What am I doing wrong?
Thank you very much!!
You can see Rick’s DAP site live (and learn how to create an amazing video-based business!) at SpecialInterestVideo.org
The answer to Rick’s question is one I haven’t seen covered in DAP’s documentation. Ravi and Veena are constantly creating newer, better versions of DAP for us to use and love, so I can’t complain!
This workaround is definitely what you need if you have a FREE Trial Membership Level in DAP. Without the workaround, you’ll run into the same problems Rick did.
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I opened my AppSumo email this morning to find what appeared to be a really great deal- PostPlanner for Facebook lets you schedule FB posts, brand them, and set recurring updates. 50% off a year of PostPlanner… not a bad deal, right?
I’m all about a deal- so I spent some time researching it to see if this was BETTER than SocialOomph- which I started using a few weeks ago.
The short answer? No. SocialOomph is better!
The breakdown:
As great as PostPlanner is for Facebook, Social Oomph works on FB, Twitter, and your blog (if you want it to). You can simultaneously target your Twitter followers and your FB wall. You can set recurring updates forever. SocialOomph helps you organize ALL your social accounts- no matter how many Twitter or FB accounts you might have. I have recurring updates for accounts that I forget to log in to for months without it.
| Post Planner | SocialOomph |
| Manage unlimited accounts | |
| Direct RSS feed | |
| So much more! | |
| $14.95/mo | $16.17 bi-weekly |
For the niche website builder, SocialOomph has my vote.
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Anyone who’s been in the member’s area and downloaded my blogging system knows how important social media is to my niche sites (though you wouldn’t know it looking at THIS site!) I found an amazing new tool that I’ve been using for a couple of weeks now that I just have to share. This IS an affiliate link- but let me tell you, I wouldn’t have gone through the process of signing up to be an affiliate and writing this post if I didn’t LOVE it.
SocialOomph is a social media powerhouse. This is the first system I’ve found that lets me schedule Facebook wall updates (PLUS choose the photo that will accompany the update), Twitter updates, blog updates, and set them all to be recurring! Its report systems are fanatical. It’s so powerful that it’s not even pretty- they’ve spent all their time adding amazing features and left the shiny buttons to the other guys.
Try it out- get a free account and see how easy it is to manage your social media accounts- finally!
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