You all probably know by now that I am a fan of Tiff Dow – she’s a real down to earth Internet Marketer and she is always happy to share what she has learned to help the rest of us. A couple of days back Tiff embarked on a 30 Days of Productivity “challenge” where she is making a video blog every day to track her progress to making $10k in 30 days.
As I watched her first couple of videos I decided that a 30 day challenge would do me good to. I’m juggling various things at the moment including the Super Affiliate Challenge and Membership Cube, and the current 100 articles in 100 days challenge at Ezine Articles. So for the next 30 days I’ll document my progress here.
My challenge will be slightly different to Tiff’s – for one I won’t be vlogging as I haven’t mastered that technique yet, but perhaps more importantly I won’t be setting a goal of $10k! TIff is an established marketer with a loyal following and a strong list. As for me, while I’ve been dabbling in this IM stuff for just over a year now (so don’t class myself as a newbie) I’m still laying the groundwork for future successes.
So enough of the background – onto Day One…
My goal for today is to transfer my Disney planning membership course to a new subdomain so that I can install the Wishlist plugin. Until now I’ve been using the WP Member plugin, but while it works, it doesn’t do everything I want it to. The installation should be easy – but I obviously have to rework all of the content to be in the correct structure so it might take some time…
Day One – Recap
Goal achieved – content all transferred and new Wishlist plugin installed.
It took a fair few hours and a really mundane job of re-dating all of the posts. The old plugin had a screen where you could set up what date each category should appear to the member, the new site uses WPDrip to convert the blog posts into an autoresponder -so it looks at the difference between the dates to decide when to release fresh content. I had to go back and change all the dates so the posts were 7 days apart.
PITA today – but in future when I set up sites from scratch it will be easy to set the dates as I go along. The great thing about WPDrip is that the content is dated based on the date the member joins, so as the years go by they’ll still think the content was posted that day!
I’ve used the theme from the main website so that people joining the members site will have a seamless transition – it looks pretty good too 
I did have a couple of nightmares with images that wouldn’t show up. I use Zemanta and had the images set to be stored on my server, so when I pasted across the posts all of the links to the images broke. I found a neat plugin called Add from Server which fixed it for me. I just went into FTP and transferred the images across from the old uploads folder to the new, and then used the plugin to have them added into the Media section.
I also managed to break all of my pages with the find and replacer tool – school girl error really but it will take me 20 minutes tomorrow to copy and paste them across from the other site.
My plan is to keep the old membership site running as there are a handful of members on there and I don’t want to even try and transfer them over. It’s a fixed term membership so they’ll all run off eventually. All new members will be added to the new site.
Moral of the story here is that if you want to set up a membership site don’t try and do it on the cheap – you need to invest in the best software up front as it’s way too much effort to try and switch it over later on. Luckily I haven’t done too much promotion on my site yet – but now I have the best system in place ready to kick off that traffic!
Products used today:
What about you? Do you have some things on your list that you would love to cross off? Why not join me and make the next 30 days all about being productive?
