No matter your niche or industry, a membership site is an excellent way to build a community. However, creating one can be challenging if you do not have the right tools for the job. This is where Kartra membership websites come in. Want to create one? Kartra gives you all the business tools to do that quickly and easily while you learn how to make a paid membership site platform.
What Is A Membership Site?
A membership website is a website where visitors can sign up to get login access to the content created for its members. These types of sites are great for times when you want to share content with just the people that are members – such as a paid online training course, a private club, etc.
Quick Notes About Membership Sites In Kartra
Before we get into the “how to”, I wanted to quickly cover a few things about Kartra’s membership site tool:
- The platform allows you to create membership sites available in all Kartra plans for marketing your business. Even the cheapest starter plan allows you to create up to 2 of these sites. Kartra replaces the need for creating a WordPress site or something similar.
- You have the ability to create sections and sub-sections to help categorize your content on the site.
- When you add posts to your Kartra membership website, you can post them immediately, drip them over some time, or a mixture of both.
- You can set up different access levels to your site for your business. Most likely, this can be based on how you price your content. You probably see this most commonly on membership sites with bronze, silver, and gold levels; certain content gets unlocked based on the member’s level.
- The content you can create and share can be just about any format – videos, articles, downloadable files, resource pages, podcast audio, etc.
- Advertising banners. Want to supplement your membership site’s income, you can put banner ads on your landing pages to help generate leads for your membership portal.
- If you set up multiple membership sites, you can set up a portal page that links to all of your membership sites. A great way to cross-promote your sites with your current members. Not only that, if a person is a member of multiple membership sites that you own, they can go to this portal and get access to them without having to juggle usernames and passwords for each. This portal also allows visitors to easily order access to sites they do not already have access to.
- Kartra hosts any files that you need to share. Very easy to get your downloadable files out there and share them!
- Thanks to Kartra’s other features, you can create an affiliate program using Kartra for your membership site signups.
Learn more about Kartra here with our Kartra review.
How To Create Free Or Paid Kartra Membership Sites
Start The Site
When you first log into your Kartra account (click here to get a 14-day trial for only $1), you will see a list of options down the left side of your screen, one of these options is “My Memberships”:
After you click this, you will see a green button on the right-hand side of the screen that says “+ Membership.” Clicking this button will allow you to start putting together your new website.
Give Your Site A Name
Next, a popup lightbox on your screen allows you to type in the name of your new site. For our purposes, I chose “Test” since we are just demonstrating how to create the site.
Configuring Your Site
Now, this is where the fun starts – configuring! We start with membership service details, such as the name and description of the site. You can also give it a URL of the sales promo page, which is the page where you send traffic to hopefully convert visitors into a member.
You can also set it up so that users either need a user and password to access the content or just a URL without a password:
Got all this done? Click on “Save and Next”.
Create Your Content Sections
This is where your site will start coming together because this is where Kartra’s powerful page builder gets launched, and you can get creative on how your site looks. Once you click on the blue “Builder” button, you will be presented with a quick one-minute tutorial that identifies each option and how it works. When it is your first time doing this, definitely take that short amount of time to understand the tutorial. Once you are done with the tutorial, you land here:
I love how this page is set up because it makes it so intuitive.
Want to change the logo? Just hover over the logo, and you are given an “upload logo” link.
Want to add content? Take a look at the blue sidebar in the image above. There are three sections:
- Navigational Menu – this is where you can set up your menu.
- Sidebar contents – drag any elements from the sidebar section into the sidebar content section and edit them as needed.
- Post contents – drag any elements from this section to the post content or section and edit it there. This is where you add information on the courses you offer as part of your membership site.
As you can see, you have all the elements that you need here to create the page.
In the top right-hand corner of the screen, there is a green “Actions” button that allows you to save your work, see a preview, and exit.
Choose A Template
Got your page built? Save and Exit, and you are presented with several templates to help enhance the look and design of the pages.
This is cool because not only does it give you a variety of templates to choose from, but it also allows you to choose from several different color schemes. After you choose this and click the same and exit button, you are brought back to the main screen where you can click “save and next” to get to the next step.
Enable Or Disable Comments
This quick section gives you the option to turn on or off comments. Whatever you prefer. If you are starting and do not have any content created yet for the site, you can choose to configure it later.
How To Give Access To Kartra Membership Site – Access Levels
This is where you configure all the different access levels you may have.
Setting Up A Help Desk And Customer Support
When you have a membership site, you will want some way for members to contact you or someone you assign to manage site issues, members’ questions, support, etc. This step is where you can configure this. There are a few different options for this:
- No support – this is how you may want to set up a free membership site.
- Kartra help desk – this will allow the site to use the Kartra help desk tool.
- External – this is where your support link will go to an external page or email.
Welcome Message
When a new user signs up, you will want to send out a welcome email to show them how to access the content, where to start, and to say, “thanks for signing up!” All the email template stuff is built into Kartra, so this is super simple to set up.
Automation
Finally, we have the automation section. This is where you can set up the following:
- Assigning tags to members.
- Setting up an email list to automatically be subscribed to when a person becomes a member.
- Subscribing to sequences based on access levels.
And that’s it! All you need to do now is load up your membership site with lots of content your members will love.
Charging Money To Be A Member Of Your Site
Now that you have your site up and running, you probably want it to at least pay for itself and give you a nice profit on top – this is very easy to set up in Kartra software. Once you set up your website, you can turn your membership access into a “product.”
Click on the “Go to my products” button presented to you after the site is created and follow the directions on the screen to set up your membership access product, pricing, etc.
Now all that is left to do is get out there and promote it and bring in some members!
Kartra Membership Site Examples
I am looking for some good examples of membership sites created using Kartra. Feel free to comment below to share yours.
Want to try it out for yourself? Get Kartra for 14 days for only $1 by clicking here and signing up.
