Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin; I’m excited to be here with you just like I am every single week, because today, I have an interesting topic that we’re going to talk about. We’re going to talk about two different ways that we can actually protect our content, so not anybody can access it. And they’re not going to use WordPress plugins, which I think is an interesting thing to think through, mainly because there’s so many plugins that we could use to password protect, or create a membership site, or an e-learning environment or whatever. But, we’re gonna talk about two ways to do it without plugins, so stay tuned for that in just a few minutes. This episode is sponsored by the all new DreamPress 2; it’s WordPress managed hosting provider that’s much more powerful than the typical shared hosting account, and I’ll share a little bit more detail about that towards the end of the show.

I do have some announcements to go through real quick. The first one is, in just a couple of days, I will be flying to Dallas, TX, Dallas/Ft. Worth area for the Podcast Movement. So, if you are planning on attending – if you’re going to be there, please let me know and find me while there. We are going to be having a WordPress.com booth. There’s me and a few other happiness engineers and a developer will be there to answer any questions that you may have about your WordPress site. WordPress.com or Self Hosted will be there for the entire weekend to be able to help out. And I will be speaking on Saturday, and with that talk, I’ll actually be doing that on a webinar the next Friday, and that is called, “The Must Have Plugins for your WordPress Site.” And you can register for it. If you’re not going to the Podcast Movement, you can sign up for the webinar or at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar, and that will happen on August 7 at 12:00 p.m. eastern. I’ve switched the time from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and that’s just based on the fact that my daughter sleeps at 12:00 p.m. so that it will be much more quiet in the house, and I won’t have to worry about making sure that she’s out of the room and away not making noise. So, that’s why the time change has happened.

A couple of other things that’s happened in the WordPress news – WordPress 4.3 Beta 4 has been announced, and so the software obviously is still in development. They’ve fixed through a lot of different bugs, and I just want to let you know that that’s out there. It looks like we’re still on target to be pushed out here in August, so we’ll get a new version of WordPress coming up really, really soon, so I’m excited about that. If you’re a developer or you’ve developed themes that are on the WordPress repository, I highly recommend going to check out this Beta and making sure that everything you have inside your theme works well with WordPress 4.3

The other thing that came out in the news this past week was WordCamp US finally has a location. It is going to be in Philadelphia, and it’s going to be the first WordCamp US and it will be December 4th through the 6th. It’s kind of an interesting place there; I think there were six places, six cities that were up for nomination, and Philadelphia was chosen as the first city, and they’ll also host it in 2016. So, they’ll do back-to-back years to just make the logistics and everything that much easier and simpler. And, it’s interesting that it was chosen to go in December, especially with the weather that could be happening in Philadelphia. I know that it can be beautiful when the snow is out, but that can really wreak havoc on some travel plans. I know I’ve been to New Media Expo before when half of the presenters couldn’t make it because there was so much snow, and they couldn’t leave the upper Northeast. So, it’d be interesting to see. That is over the weekend of my wife’s birthday, and I have some other travel that weekend, so I will not be at the inaugural event for sure. But it will be interesting to see how this plays out and what it looks like instead of having WordCamp San Francisco as the huge event where everybody travels to now, it’s going to rotate across cities across North America, which is really cool. I guess it’s just WordCamp US, so just across the United States.

So, that is something to keep your eye out for if you’re interested in that. There’s no dates on when tickets are available or stuff like that, and if you are in the Philadelphia area and you want to reach out, you wanna get connected with the WordCamp group or the WordPress meetup group in that area, and I’m sure that you’ll be able to help out and help with some of that planning. That’s one of the great things about the WordPress community. You can just get involved when you feel fit, and when you’re ready to volunteer and say, “Hey, I can help out, I can do whatever,” then that’s a great way to get started.

All right, today I wanna talk about a plugin in the “Is There a Plugin for That?” section. It’s called WP Slimstat, and it is a plugin comparable to Google Analytics. And I have never heard of this one before, but it looks really cool. It has over 100,000 active installs, and it was just updated yesterday or even today, earlier this morning. So, you know it’s one that’s being actively developed, and it does some really cool things. It can give you real-time activity so you can see heat maps, e-mail reports, you can see server latencies; it’s compatible with all the Total Caching plugins – W3 Total Cache and Super Cache. You can see IP geolocations – you can see almost as much as you can with Google, but it all lives right inside your WordPress dashboard. So, if Google Analyticator in WordPress isn’t quite right for you, I’d recommend checking out WP Slimstat, and you can find that in the WordPress repository and as always, there’s a link in the show notes at episode number 243 for this. And it’s got lots of different views. It looks like a pretty nice plugin. I’m gonna have to give this a full review to see what it looks like, and see, as a comparable to Google Analyticator and Jetpack – those stats. I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the middle between those, but you never know. It may be something that’s even better than Google Analytics. So, that will be something definitely that needs to be checked out.

Today, we’re going to dive in and we’re going to talk about how we can deliver an online course without using plugins. Because plugins are expensive sometimes, they’re hard to configure, and overall, they’re kind of a pain to get set up and get everything working. You wanna have different membership areas and people that haven’t paid, they can only see this part of the site – people that have paid the low price, they can only see this part of the site, somebody that’s paid the maximum, they can see everything. It’s really hard to configure and set up and get all of the things taken care of to make sure that your memberships site is up and working properly. So, I thought we could talk about two untraditional routes that we could go ahead and protect some of our content that is online.

The first option is actually to use WordPress.com. In my head, this how I’m thinking that we can use this. We can actually use WordPress.com as a separate site that could be password-protected, and that people would go and get access; somehow, you would give them access to your site. Now there’s some limitations, but first, let’s talk about how this would practically work, and how you could practically set this up. Basically, you’d want to go over to WordPress.com and you would want to create a new site and you can mark that as private. Marking it as private means that whenever somebody navigates to that URL, when they get there, it just says, “This blog is marked as private,” and no one can access it unless you give them specific access. Then, what you would do is you would build your site just like you normally would; you would add your content. The cool part in the optional update that you could do with your WordPress.com site is you could update it to the premium version. And then that would allow you to upload all of your content into VideoPress, which is Automatic’s video player that’s build right into WordPress, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about, “Where do I put my videos for my course?” You wouldn’t have to put them on YouTube where they could be searched, or you wouldn’t have to get a private account at Vimeo to make sure that they’re not locked down. Or, you wouldn’t have to pay the price for Wistia videos.

So, this is an optional way that you could go. You could add the VideoPress option to WordPress.com, but you’re more than welcome to use YouTube or Vimeo or whatever to get your videos on there. Maybe it’s just an online course where there’s just worksheets that you work through on the inside, or just blog posts that you read. Say it’s ten protected pieces of content – ten blog posts in e-book style, if you will, and you could put those all on a password protected WordPress.com site. You would give access to these people – they would give you their email address or their WordPress.com username, and from there, you could give them access to their site. When they have access to the site, once they’re signed up and logged in, anytime they would navigate to the site, it would look like the site is not private at all because they have access to that site.

There are some really good advantages with this. There’s no complex plugins to set up; there’s nothing complex that you need to set up. Basically, you’re just building a complete membership site. You’re putting all your password-protected content on a site that you’ll just lock down the entire site. You won’t need to do any theme modifications or anything along those lines because there’s nothing you need to do to make your site work better since you’re not using a plugin to protect all of that content. You can put the navigation menus exactly how you want them. You don’t have to have different navigation menus for different user levels. And the other thing is, you can set this up completely for free as long as you just want the website URL – something like MySite.com or MySite.Wordpress.com. You could always update it with a new URL. Maybe you have a course that’s coming out, and you have a specific name for the course; you could upgrade and you could use what’s called domain mapping to a WordPress.com site, and you can launch right from there.

There are some disadvantages with this. There’s no way to easily charge a member. Perhaps you could what I’m going to talk about in the next option to charge people for access to the account. Otherwise, this could be a community that is just based on free members, and they can get access. You would have your normal website; for me, I would have YourWebsiteEngineer.com and then maybe I’d have all my password-protected content over at YourWebsite.Wordpress.com, or something along those lines. You would have two sites you’d have to manage, so that’s one of the disadvantages of having this as well; it’s not integrated into your regular WordPress site. Another disadvantage is, users will have to have a WordPress.com username; if they don’t have one, the extra step that they have to go through is actually going in and creating a WordPress.com username and then you give them access to that username or that email address, and then they can get in. That’s kind of a little hurdle – a little blocker. If you’re using one of the WordPress plugins for your self-hosted site, a lot of times, that will automatically generate a username and password for the person once they’ve signed up, and then they can get access and they can navigate throughout the dashboard and throughout your membership area of your course.

Another disadvantage of using this method is, there’s no way to have different membership levels; there’s no real way unless you had multiple sites. You could have Your Website Engineer Premium, and Your Website Engineer Basic. You could set up two sites with different access points, but there’s no easy way to say, “Okay, I only want this person who has basic access to only have access to these four posts, and everybody else gets these seven posts,” or whatever that looks like. That is a disadvantage. I would say this would be a good thing if you wanted to just get started, you didn’t have any options, or you weren’t planning on charging anybody; you just wanted people in your own little community, I think that would be perfect for that. If it is something that you have different levels, different hierarchies of a Gold plan, and a Premium plan, a Platinum plan, whatever that is, then this isn’t gonna be the solution for you. It is a great way that you can create the entire site and password-protect the whole thing. Google can’t see it, and no one can see it unless you’ve given them access. So, that’s one option that you could do to password-protect some of your content.

The next option to password-protect your content is using a system called E-junkie, and you can use this with your current WordPress site and you will need a free E-junkie account. How that work is, you just go to E-junkie.com, and you get started. Here’s the workflow that you would do; here’s the steps – and I’ve actually used this. This is how I used to deliver digital training products. I did this back in 2012 or so – maybe part of 2013. Some of the webinars I did were paid webinars that you could watch beforehand or you could purchase afterwards. Sometimes, I had digital products where I taught people how to do whatever it was, and it was a digital training that they could pay for and download, and this was the easy way for me to set this up. This is a perfect option if you have one-off trainings. People would buy à la carte and they would say, “I wanna buy this digital product.” And they go ahead and add that to their cart and they check out. So, let’s think through this, and talk through how this piece works.

The first thing you wanna do, is you wanna create content that you wanna protect on a page. Say you’re doing a, “How to Set Up MailChimp;” that’s gonna be my premium product – How to Set Up MailChimp. I would put that on a page inside my WordPress website, and I would password-protect it, and I would make the password whatever I wanted it to be. That’s the first step. Set it up, and add a password, and then you can publish it, and nobody’s gonna be able to see it unless they have the password. The next thing you wanna do once you have it set as a password-protected page, then you wanna create another page that’s gonna be your Shopping Cart page, or your Buy Now page. I think I had one at the time; it was called “Products,” and you could click on the Products links and it would go and there was little blurbs about each one. So, I had, “How to Set Up Your MailChimp List,” and maybe I had one, “How to Customize Your Header,” or whatever they were. I could put all my products on one page, and then eventually we’ll get to the Add To Cart button. We wanna create that page; we created the Shopping Cart page. This is a little bit more manual, again, but it’s not a plugin that we’re using. Once we’ve got those pieces set up, we’re ready to go.

Now, we go over to E-junkie, and we sign in. We create a new product on that product page; we are going to give the product a name and a price. The cool part about E-junkie too is you can say, “Upsell,” and you can say, “These are linked products,” and, “Other people bought these types of products,” – you can do a lot of this stuff within E-junkie and so that’s really cool. Next part of the process is you’ve given your product a name, you’ve given it a price, and then you set the product requirements to redirection. It’s a checkbox; it’s a second option down, and there’ll be a screenshot in the show notes, as long as I remember to put it in there, for this page and how this is set up. On the next page, you add a redirection link, which is a link to your instruction page. Let me set up just a little bit about what this instruction page is. This instruction page will allow the purchaser to know where to find the password in the protected page content and what the password is to log in.

What I did was, I think I put something together in Pages or Word, I set it as a PDF and then I uploaded it to my media library; you can also put it to Amazon – that’s three or whatever you want it. You can put this wherever you want it, and what this did was say, “Hello. Thank you for purchasing. I appreciate your support. Thank you. You help pay for,” whatever. You can put whatever you want – a little “thank you” message on this page. I had my logo on there, and then I said, “Thank you for valuing and paying for my work. I’d appreciate if you don’t share this information with others because it’s password protected stuff,” and then you give a link to the password-protected page, and then you give the password to that protected page. So, essentially, they’re going through E-junkie, and then they’re paying for it through E-junkie, and then E-junkie is redirecting them to this instruction page, and then from the instruction page, you can go get the information and you can go and watch the tutorial and the comment on the posts.

So, we’ve done all this and we’ve saved it as a product. Now, it’s going to give us the option to add code to our website. And this code is actually just the “Buy It Now” button. And you can do a “Buy It Now” button, and I believe you can add the “Add To Cart” button. Depending on if you have multiple products, you might wanna have just an “Add To Cart” button and then it goes right to checkout; that would be an option if you only have one product. If you want people to be able to purchase multiple things, you want them to add to cart, then they can view the cart, and then they can check out. The cool part is, the checkout process all happens on E-junkie’s side of things, and they take out a little bit of their commission or their cut and those are the PayPal fees and whatnot. But you don’t have to set up an SSL certificate; you don’t have to worry about processing your own payments; all that stuff is handled by E-junkie. And it’s only $5 per month when you sell something. So, if you go months and months without selling anything, they’re not gonna charge you for anything. But, if you go one month and you sell $10,000 worth of product, they’re gonna charge you $5 for a flat fee for the month. Of course, they’ll take out that processing charge in every transaction, but you’re not paying more because you’re selling more, which I really like.

Another thing is, this is perfect for digital products; I really like this option for one-off sales – “Buy my course. Buy my e-book.” All these different things – this is a great way to do it without having to set up this complex system on your WordPress site to take payments and to sell and different types of things. It’s also pretty fast and easy to set up. There’s just a few steps to go through, and it’s really pretty easy to get things set up. The disadvantage is the system is a little bit dated. It is a little cumbersome to navigate, and it looks like everything’s in and IFRAME, so when you click the Back button, it doesn’t actually go back. You actually have to navigate using the Back button inside the interface, which is a little weird. Another disadvantage is, people can actually forward that instruction page to anyone that they want. If somebody forward’s it to somebody else, they can get access to your content, and you won’t be able to lock them out. That’s gonna happen; sometimes people share usernames and passwords for membership sites anyway. It does matter that people are doing this, but you have to trust the community, trust the people that are purchasing from you, that they’re not going to abuse it. You can’t waste all your time trying to protect things so intently that nobody can get to it, otherwise, you’re just gonna spend all your time trying to protect your stuff rather than creating more stuff that will make you more money.

Like I said, I’ve used this in the past. It’s a great way to get started; it’s a great way to get set up. You don’t need any complex SSL certificates and all that jazz to get your site set up. It just works. The cool part is, you can customize your Shopping Cart page, you can make that a full-width page, you can make that with a side bar, you can have upsells – you can do all of that stuff, it's just a little bit more manual. And if you wanna use WooCommerce, WooCommerce is free, but if you wanna do something other than PayPal to do transactions, then you’re paying $50 for an extension and then maybe it doesn’t quite do what you’re looking for. And then you have to pay for another extension, and you really don’t have to invest any money to see if the thing’s actually gonna work. I remember I put my first digital product up there, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money to see if people would actually buy it, because that didn’t make sense. “Oh, let me invest $1,000 to sell ten $50 copies of something.” That didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. So, that’s how I got started. That’s how I got everything up and running within YourWebsiteEngineer.com when I was selling products. I’d also like to explore some of the different membership areas and some other different things, but I think this is two great ways that you could easily password-protect your stuff and make sure that people don’t have access to it.

Another thing that you could do, and like I was saying on the first one, when you use WordPress.com, there’s no real good way to actually charge somebody for your content. If you use the E-junkie method, you could actually send them an email and say, “Hey, what is your username and password?” Instead of doing a redirect, you could send them an email, and within the email, it gives you all the information like, “Please respond with your WordPress email address. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account, then here’s the link to sign up.” Then, once they’ve signed up, reply with your email address or your WordPress.com username, and from there, you could add them. It’s a little bit more manual, and it wouldn’t be instantaneous. With E-junkie, with that redirection link, somebody could purchase at 3:00 a.m. and they could instantly have access and start working through the course. Using the WordPress.com method, there’s no “instant-ness.” You would have to be monitoring and seeing how often people are actually signing up, so that would be another thing to think about as well. If you have a lot people that are trying to sign up, then the WordPress.com route probably isn’t the best for you.

Before I wrap up and get out of here, I just wanna let you know that this episode was sponsored by DreamPress2. It is a faster and more powerful WordPress hosting platform, and I hope by next week I can get some speed tests for you on how fast this is. It is much faster than a shared hosting platform that’s out there, and it’s really cool because when you sign up for DreamPress2, you actually get two VPSs. Not just one, but you get two. So, your database and your sites are on two separate VPSs, which is really nice. You get 30 gigabytes worth of SSD storage, and we all know that SSD is so much faster than the spinning hard disks. You can have up to 2.1 million monthly visitors. That is more than enough to cover the traffic to YourWebsiteEngineer.com, so that’s another reason I like DreamPress. And you also get unlimited emails; this is rare. I know Flywheel and WP Engine are other WordPress managed hosting companies, but you do not get any email boxes. You have to set up your email accounts with another platform. But with DreamPress 2, you can get that unlimited amount of email for your professional email address. So, you can have Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com, or whatever@DustinHartzler.com or whatever it is. You can have those customized email addresses so you know you’re not having a @aol email address for your business. They’ve got 24-hour support. If you’re interested, there’s a link in the show notes where you can check it out; but head on over to YourWebsiteEngineer/dreamhost for more information.

And don’t forget about the upcoming webinar that is happening next Friday; it is August 7, 12 p.m. eastern. We’ll be talking about the best plugins and the best categories of plugins for your WordPress website. Remember, I am jetting off to Dallas in a couple of days. If you will be there, please let me know; I’ll be excited to hang out and see you. And swing by the WordPress.com booth, say hello, and just let me know what you need to learn and what you want to learn about, and we’ll talk about those on upcoming episodes. If you’ve got any suggestions, email me at Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care. Bye-bye.