If you missed Apple’s big announcement about it’s new textbook publishing platform recently, you’re not alone. Without the hoopla of a major device launch the textbook publishing announcement didn’t get the attention of the average consumer. But buried within the announcement was a nugget that could be a very valuable tool for membership site owners.

Apple unveiled a new publishing platform, iBooks Author, which on the surface appears to be something only educators would find exciting. Not so. This easy to use publishing tool gives everyone the ability to create media rich, Multi-Touch content that takes full advantage of the multi media capabilities of the iPad.

Anyone who can create a Powerpoint presentation can easily create media rich books that contain video, photo galleries, interactive photos (very cool), Keynote animation and interactive quizzes. I see this as a potential replacement for many small membership based modular courses…and then some.

Potential iBooks Author applications for membership sites

1. Use as a stand-alone modular course
2. Create a mini version of your membership site and give it away free (in exchange for joining your e-mail list).
3. Use to publish a cool interactive workbook
4. Publish iBooks about related topics to generate an ancillary revenue stream.

I played with the app for a few hours and was amazed at how easy it is to create well formatted books. Just enter your text (of course writing the content is the hard part) drag in photos, videos and even Keynote animations and you’re done. The formatting is handled by the pre-made templates. If you don’t like the half dozen templates provided by Apple you can buy 10 more for on $2.99 from Book Palette on the Apple Mac Store

Just today I found another collection from iBook Author Templates. These are a little pricier at $19.95 each, but they are very well done. And just yesterday Graphic Node introduced a collection of 50 templates for $12.99 each. This is only the beginning.

Under Apple’s EULA (End User License Agreement) you can distribute free versions of your iBooks any way you wish. However paid versions (and those part of a subscription) must be sold through the iBooks store. So be sure to read the license agreement carefully before you get in too deep.

Speaking of the iBooks store, you must open an account to publish books on the site. The application process is pretty easy, but you must have a US tax ID number (either social security number or EIN). Then you must obtain an ISBN number for each book you sell…at a cost of $125 each when purchased one at a time trough Bowker. If you plan to publish multiple titles pries drop significantly. For example 10 ISBNS cost $250 and 100 are $1,000. This can be a pretty big hurdle for casual publishers.

Application approval is pretty fast. Mine came through in just two days.

The iBooks platform isn’t for everyone. Although Apple has reportedly sold over 50 million iPads, that leaves a big chunk of the market that won’t find it useful. Fortunately iBooks Author can export to PDF as an alternative…without the rich media of course.

I plan to give it a try soon to publish an interactive tutorial about organizing and classifying membership site content. We’ll see how it goes.

One of our favorite plugin publishers is Pluginbuddy (a division of iThemes) who has created a series of Displaybuddy tools one of which is Rotating Images. Although it is a premium product (you have to pay for it) we often include it with web design/development projects.

Below is a quick video that shows the basics of how to use Rotating Images. To view this in full-screen mode click the TV image in the lower right hand corner of the video player.

Update:

After publishing this video a couple readers informed me that I neglected to show how to embed links in the images. Sorry about that. Rather than make a new video thee screen shot below will show you

Anyway several people report that sites running the Popup Domination receive an error message when attempting to log into the WordPress Dashboard. I’m sure the developers of Popup Domination will have a fix for this pretty quickly. So if you use this plugin check to see if an update is available BEFORE you upgrade WordPress…particularly if you can’t live without it.
The WordPress updater will highly recommend you update your plugins first. Look there for the new version of Popup Domination. It will save you a lot of grief.

I’m sure there are more, so again use caution. And if you are a WishList Member user please do not upgrade at this time. I know it’s tempting, but this app is mission critical to your business. So why tempt fate.

Some people claim that WordPress isn’t secure because it is open source (free), which means that hackers can easily access the software to find holes in its security. Which is silly.

Yes, WordPress is free and hackers have easy access to it, but so what? Hackers can easily download pirated copies of software they want. The fact that WordPress is a free, open platform makes it actually more secure.

As Ken Blanchard said “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
 

There’s Safety in numbers

Most website software is designed by one company with a limited number of employees on the project. Yes, WordPress has one creator as well, but the community that works on the program is huge. Thousands of people are involved in doing things like updating the software, creating plugins and making easy-to-use themes. It’s a giant community effort.

As soon as there is a problem, someone finds it almost immediately. And when they do, the WordPress development team works hard and fast to solve the issue. Each time, they also release a brand new Security Update. Those are the updates that have a third number in the version like 3.2.1. The “.1” means it is a security update.

Compare that to the software of other companies whose updates are much less frequent, and whose community is much smaller, and you’ll see the advantage of a group effort like WordPress.

Arguably, a web site’s biggest security vulnerability is the web host. More on that in the next in this series.

Photo by Mike Krzeszak

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Website security is like health insurance – you never really worry about it until you absolutely, positively need it and it’s too late to get it. You may think,

“That can’t happen to me” or “I’m busy…I’ll get to it next week.”

Famous last words!

Every day, hosting servers get fried, hackers break into accounts, websites mysteriously disappear, and whole businesses evaporate.

Think about it.

That is, unless you have proper website protection and security in place. If you don’t, then this series could make a huge difference to your online future. There is no time like right now to get your website completely secure and protected from unwanted attacks, hackers, and other unexpected disasters.

Since most of our clients are on the WordPress platform, this series will focus on it specifically. There are many great tools available for WordPress that make it easier than ever to automate your website backups and protection. Keep reading for tips on backing up your website, using plugins to protect against spam, scouring your site files for signs of hacking, and actions to take when your sites are attacked.

And don’t wait for next week! You’re reading this for a reason and I encourage you to take action now to protect your valuable asset today. If you don’t, you may regret it, and probably sooner rather than later.

Why You Must Protect Your WordPress Website

A recent post I wrote at WebGuys about hosting quality explained that your website is hosted on a computer. The term “server” is just a fancy term for a PC sitting in an office building, warehouse or datacenter somewhere. Most people don’t realize that the internet is not quite as ‘virtual’ as it seems. It may feel like it’s out there in cyberspace, but your website is actually a group of files on a computer sitting somewhere in a completely physical building.

Computers can have technical difficulties, as you’ve probably experienced with your own computer.

And so your hosting server, which is also a computer, can run into trouble too. It can get overloaded and have a hard drive crash, or it can get hacked. Sometimes it hiccups and needs to be rebooted. Any of these things can shut it down for a short or even a long period of time. And these servers are maintained by people who sometimes have bad days or don’t know what they’re doing.

Many people assume that it is the responsibility of their hosting company to keep their website safe. That is just not the case. Go take a close look at that hosting agreement you signed (you probably clicked a button online) and you will see that the responsibility of protecting your website and your business is your responsibility.

We are going to get into the how of it soon, but let’s first look at why. Why should you protect your website against hackers and other unexpected issues?

The obvious answer is that you don’t want to lose all the hard work you’ve put into building your website and your business. Trust me, this happens for real.

Just recently, I got to witness firsthand how being unprepared for problems and having holes in your security set-up can have devastating consequences. First a new client came to me asking for help with a rather routine issue. Upon looking through his website I noticed that he had been hacked. The hacker used his site as a file server to serve up all kinds of porno and other nasty content. He had almost 10 Gigabytes of somebody else’s garbage on his system.

Last month another client, in England, discovered his site was hacked as well. It was so bad he had to wipe it out completely and start from scratch.

Both issues were easily preventable.

Here are a few of the ways your website can become compromised:

− Website hosting issues
− Hackers add code or take down your site
− Malicious employee or contractor messes with your site
− An upgrade creates errors and takes down your site
− Website mysteriously disappears without reason (True story - this happened to a friend of mine!)

Any one of those possibilities is a good reason for taking action.

This is the first in a series that will show you some specific actions you can take and tools you can use to prevent problems before they occur. Below are the subjects that will be covered in upcoming posts:

• Is WordPress Vulnerable to Attacks?
• Common Problems That Can Take Down Your Website
• Top WordPress Security Plugins – Most Are Free
• Easy Ways Back Up Your WordPress Site
• WordPress Software Security Updates – Just Do It!
• Other Security Measures to Consider
• Employees, Contractors and Guests – Be Safe
• Being Prepared When Security Fails (it will)
• Free Download – WordPress Security Checklist

In order to help you make a more informed decision we will compare using PayPal by itself versus 1ShoppingCart. The reason I use 1ShoppingCart (1SC) is because it is the most popular shopping cart in our market and the the pricing and is readily available. If you wish to use another shopping cart service just substitute its pricing with the ones discussed here.

I will compare initial pricing, monthly pricing, discount rates (the percentage of each transaction retained by the processor) and fixed per transaction fees of both approaches. Then we’ll take a look at its some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. I will provide a straight financial analysis which will give show the number of additional monthly transactions required to justify the extra expense of a shopping cart service. Finally we’ll look at which approach might be best for you based upon your business strategy.

First let’s look at PayPal

PayPal is very simple there is no initial setup fee or no monthly costs. You simply pay 2.9% of each transaction plus a $.30 per transaction fee. This is for US transactions only if you are processing payments from outside your country there may be additional currency conversion fees, which is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Additional services? PayPal doesn’t provide any beyond the processing of transactions.

PayPal’s integration with WishList Member is excellent. It is very easy to set up and is fully integrated, which means when a member stops paying or their credit card is declined their membership is automatically canceled in WishList Member. In fact I prefer the PayPal integration over any shopping cart integration in terms of ease of setup.

The positives of using PayPal are it’s lack of ongoing fees, the fact that it accepts credit cards and full integration with WishList Member.

The negatives? First and probably most important is that you don’t control the user experience when members make a purchase. PayPal is known for changing the user interface frequently. Plus the order page has a different appearance to people who are PayPal members versus non-PayPal members. If PayPal recognizes the buyer as a PayPal member it’s difficult to use a credit card.

Another problem with PayPal is the you do not control the data. Unlike a shopping cart PayPal does not capture the name address credit card number telephone number and every every other vital piece of information into a database that you own. However because we are processing orders for membership site we will be capturing much of that information in WishList Member once the purchase is complete. This is something to consider.

Last, PayPal does not include an autoresponder or e-mail marketing system. If you plan to capture e-mail addresses for ongoing member communication or marketing purposes, it will be necessary to subscribe to a separate e-mail marketing service like Aweber or Mail Chimp. Fortunately dedicated e-mail marketing services are much stronger than the e-mail component of most shopping carts.

If you can live with these limitations, PayPal is an excellent choice

1ShoppingCart

Like all shopping cart services, 1ShoppingCart charges a monthly fee. In order to integrate fully with WishList Member you must subscribe to the one shopping cart pro level service which is $99 per month. In addition to this monthly fee one shopping cart charges $.25 per recurring transaction. This means when you have members pay you monthly each time they are charged by one shopping cart you will incur an additional $.25 in fees.

But the monthly and per transaction fees don’t stop there. You also must have a gateway service, the most popular being Authorize.net which costs $20 per month and also charges a $.10 per transaction fee. Beyond that you must have a merchant account which also charges a monthly, per transaction and discount fee which is a percentage of the sale. There are many many merchant account options but for the sake of our discussion here I used pricing from the Authorize.net merchant account. The monthly charge for their merchant account is $9.95 plus a 2.19% discount fee per transaction and a $.25 flat per transaction fee. All merchant accounts charge a host of other fees, but are not included in this analysis to keep things simple.

1ShoppingCart integration with WishList Member is also excellent. However you must have their Pro account for full two-way WishList integration.

The monthly fee includes several additional services that you do not get with PayPal. These include:

1. Autoresponder or e-mail marketing service. In my experience the one shopping cart autoresponder is not very good. In fact it’s pretty bad. Especially when you compare it to dedicated autoresponders like a Aweber.
2. Customer database. When you use a shopping cart service it captures your members name address credit card number and a host of other important information about them. If you need this information for future marketing efforts then this alone is well worth the price of the service. However because we are registering these members in a membership site, the WordPress database can also capture much of this information. So it may not be a problem for you.
3. Integrated affiliate program. If an affiliate program is an important part of your marketing strategy then this also may be well worth the price of using a shopping cart service. 1ShoppingCart has an excellent integrated affiliate program.
4. Shopping cart services like 1ShoppingCart accept PayPal and sometimes Google checkout as additional payment options.
5. Upsell Express. 1ShoppingCart has a built-in upsell program that can be quite valuable if it’s an important part of your marketing strategy.
6. Ad tracking. Most shopping cart services track the results from specific online advertisements. If you do split testing then this can be well worth the additional monthly fee.
7. Customization. 1ShoppingCart as well as other shopping cart services have robust API(application program interface) that enables you to customize many functions. While this is not for everyone, site owners who need this find it invaluable.

1ShoppingCart Positives

Some good reasons to use 1ShoppingCart are the additional services listed above, the fact that includes PayPal and other payment options, and the customer database. I’ve also read many times that shopping cart services have a higher conversion rates than PayPal alone. Of course that information comes directly from the shopping cart services so it’s not exactly an unbiased source of information.

Other advantages to using a shopping cart is that you control the user experience, credit card purchases are smoother from the customer’s perspective and you have a record of all order history.

1ShoppingCart Negatives

The big negative is monthly cost that includes not just the shopping cart but your merchant account and gateway. Also the additional transaction fees can be quite high. If you don’t need the additional services than they are overkill and not necessary.

Making your decision

If your decision is strictly financial have a look at the graphic of a simple spreadsheet that I put together to analyze the various costs of both options. Assuming a $20 monthly recurring subscription, you need an additional seven transactions per month to break even on using a shopping cart service. Depending upon your subscription fees, merchant account and gateway pricing your mileage will vary.

Recommendations

PayPal will be your best choice if the following apply to you:

1. You are a new membership site owner (keep it simple at first).
2. You don’t sell many additional products or services beyond the membership site.
3. Your budget is limited.
4. You’re testing a new concept.
5. You can always move to a shopping cart service in the future.

A shopping cart is a good option for you if you:

1. Sell a number of physical and digital products in addition to your membership site.
2. Need an integrated marketing solution that includes an autoresponder and database.
3. Need one solution for your order history and customer data.
4. Require an affiliate marketing program.
5. Need to control the entire customer experience from the sales page through registration.

If after considering all of these alternatives and still unsure I highly recommend you begin with PayPal by itself and move to a shopping cart later. As always the simple approach this almost always the best.

These are very critical content pages because they the first ones your members see when they first register. They’re also the ones most ignored by new memberhip site owners. Later I’ll share some real-world examples.

If you have a WordPress theme that automatically generates thumbnail images (like those cool little photos that appear next to your post excerpts) then you may be vulnerable to being hacked.

Many themes, premium and free alike, have been using thumbnail resizing app called TimThumb. It’s almost a WordPress standard.

Not long ago somebody discovered a security vulnerabliltiy that allows bad guys to potentially gain access to the root directory on your web server. Not good. Over the past few weeks I’ve heard of countless instances of web sites being hacked and the results weren’t pretty.

Since the announcement we’ve been pretty busy updating themes that were vulnerable. Of the ones we have worked with the past few years Thesis, Elegant Themes and many Woo Themes have been discovered to be at risk. Not to fear, if we installed your theme initially then we have already fixed the problem.

Fortunately we just learned that Peter Butler at Code Garage has written a free plugin called TimThumb Vulnerabilituy Scanner that will fix it up pretty quick. I wish this was available two weeks ago.

It is available from the WordPress plugin repository from within WordPress. Just choose Add New under plugins and in the search box type “TimThumb” (one word). The vulnerability scanner should be on top. Click Install Plugin and when it’s done you will find it under Tools in the WordPress Dashboard. Just follow the directions…it’s super simple.

If you don’t want to mess with it just open a support ticket with us and we’ll put you on the schedule. Normal support rates apply. If you don’t have an account with us we’ll show you how to set one up.

Photo by Johnny Grimm