At DigitalAccessPass.com, we recently got an email from a prospective customer, who said this, in part (paraphrasing):
Finally, I have built a course that I will use for content, should I host it on my site, or put it on Udemy and then give free coupons to my members to take it on udemy?
And I'm going to break up my answer into multiple episodes.
So in today's part 1, before I can answer that question about Udemy, we first need to talk about the 3 options you have for running a membership site.
1) Self-Hosted WordPress Site
2) A fully-hosted membership site, and
3) A third-party marketplace like Udemy.com
Let's get into each of these in more detail...
1) Self-hosted WordPress site: If you listen to Episode 3 of this podcast - this is episode 14, by the way. So the title of episode 3 was "$1.5 Billion for a Membership Site? Membership Site Dream Team" - you can listen to it at subscribeme.fm/3/ , I have talked about having your own domain, the kind of hosting you should use, and how you should have your own WordPress site, what to use for video, and so on.
So having your own domain registered via Godaddy, your own hosting with liquid web - to support this show, please use my affiliate link , http://subscribeme.fm/liquidweb/ . Your own version of WordPress downloaded from WordPress.org and installed on your hosting account, and then using a membership plugin like DigitalAccessPass.com, now THIS... is a self-hosted WordPress membership site.
So be sure to check out episode 3 at http://subscribeme.fm/3/
2) A fully-hosted membership platform: The difference between self-hosted and fully hosted, means that on a fully-hosted platform, everything is stored on their servers. You can use your own domain, but the hosting, the content, the videos, the forums - all of these are hosted by someone else. Just like gmail hosts all of your own email. So these third-party platforms manage your site, the content, the security, the server updates, making backups of your content. They basically take care of all the "tech", and you just log in and create content and set up your funnels. Easier said than done. Sounds very simple, but in reality, it's not.
Anyway, there are 3 commonly known, fully-hosted membership solutions: They are Kajabi.com, Nanacast.com and Rainmaker Platform.
Kajabi is considered more newbie-friendly and easy to use when it comes to usability and look & feel of the web site. It is a proprietary platform where everything is hosted on their servers. Proprietary platform means, it's not running on WordPress. Which means you cannot easily extend the functionality of whatever they are offering simply by uploading a new plugin or a theme. That can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking to do with your web site.
Nanacast is also a proprietary but more full-featured platform that comes with a lot of features, but it is generally considered complex to set up. Nanacast does offer a WordPress plugin to let you integrate your existing WordPress site with the main account on their server, but you will probably need to hire a Nanacast consultant to help you set it all up.
Finally, Rainmaker Platform is from the team behind Copyblogger and Studiopress themes. It is all built on WordPress, but it is hosted on their servers.
If you use Infusionsoft.com as your CRM, then you can use either Memberium.com or Infusionsoft-owned CustomerHub to integrate your membership site with Infusionsoft. DAP integrates with Infusionsoft too.
So Kajabi, Nanacast and Rainmaker are all fully-hosted solutions, and these are a completely different animal compared to self-hosted solutions (like your own hosting account with WordPress & DAP). And usually, such fully-hosted solutions start at about 100 dollars a month, and go up from there, depending on the number of users, and add-ons you purchase. So it could become pretty expensive over time - like 300 to 500 dollars a month. And even when you pay all that, you won't really have the full flexibility you can have with your own WordPress site.
Here's a couple of key disadvantages of a fully-hosted membership solution:
(check out the full episode to hear the rest...)