Digital Access Pass [DAP] is a complete membership management solution that allows you to easily and effortlessly run a membership site through WordPress.
Now, even though this allows you to run a membership site through WordPress, you are not limited to WordPress.
Which is a pretty cool thing. But, before I get into the details of Digital Access Pass let me give you a little story of how I happened to stumble across it.
Not too long ago I decided to start my first membership site. But, I wanted to run that membership sites through WordPress. So, I went out looking for solutions that would allow me to do this. At the time, there was not many options that I could find.
I ended up finding a product called WishList Member and decided to go with that from my membership site. Unfortunately, I was not very happy with the plug-in. It has great features and was very easy to work with, but it was virtually impossible to integrate with my payment systems.
Now, I could take payments, but I could not integrate the two. So, whenever someone would cancel their membership I’d have to manually go in and cancel them from my site.
As you can imagine that was a huge pain in the rear end and got old fast.
So, that led me to start looking for a different solution, and that is what led me to Digital Access Pass. I was actually introduced to it by a friend of mine “Bob the Teacher”. He was using it to develop his membership site called The IM Classroom.
So, after asking a few questions I decided to dive in and give DAP a try. Well, I have to be honest and say my journey with this solution started out as a nightmare. I had problem after problem, and issue after issue. Now, normally I would have just walked away and not dealt with that plug-in. But, the features were so rich that I decided to stick with it.
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Being that I had a bunch of different issues obviously I was contacting their support team. Well, the first thing I need to say about this program is there support staff is absolutely phenomenal. I’m talking about to the point where they spent over three hours with me on Skype troubleshooting my server and getting things to work.
So, come to find out the problems I was having had nothing to do with the actual program itself. The problems I was having were because of my server settings. For some reason my hosting company had turned on a couple of features that were making the DAP software go crazy.
So, after we are able to figure out what the culprit was I was up and running with ease.
I was very impressed with the service and support I received from this company. To be honest, I cannot think I have ever received such superior support from any other company in any other dealing ever. I’m talking about off-line and online. The level of support and service was not remarkable, it was extraordinary! I really need to tip my hat to Ravi and his team for getting me up and going with Digital Access Pass.
Now let’s get into some of the features and what I do and don’t like about this membership site solution…
1. It Integrates with Authorize.net – this is actually a new plug-in that they just came out with at the time of this post. But, I already have it up and running on my server and it is absolutely amazing. Now, it is separate from the actual Digital Access Pass plug-in, but it is well worth it. The reason why it makes it a no brainer is the authorize.net plug-in allows you to utilize one click upsell’s. Now, if you are new to marketing you may not realize how valuable that actually is. But, I can tell you that one click technology gives you a dramatic increase in your upsell conversions.
2. The True Drip Feature - One of the things that I absolutely hated about WishList Member was in order to drip content I had to set up multiple levels of membership for each and every membership that I decided to have.
So, if I was going to offer a silver, gold, and platinum membership level I would not only have to set up each of those membership levels themselves, but I would also have to set up membership levels for each week or month of content I wanted to deliver. This became a very daunting and time-consuming task. It was actually one of the main reasons why I left the plug-in.
With Digital Access Pass they have what’s called the True Drip feature. What this means is you can actually select the post and assign a sequence for it to be delivered. For instance, if I create a membership called the Gold membership, all I would need to do is set the membership, and then protect the posts. After that, I just tell the software when to release the post to the members. So, if I wanted one posts to be delivered the day they signed up I can do that. Then, seven days later to deliver another post, and then seven days later I could deliver another post, and so on and so forth.
Very cool stuff.
3. Built-In Affiliate Program - Digital Access Pass actually has a built-in affiliate program so you do not need to go to a third party in order to allow affiliates to promote your products. The biggest advantage of this though, is whenever someone purchases your product through the Digital Access Pass system they are automatically made an affiliate. This is huge because it eliminates a step for your customers to become affiliates. Also, They do not need to buy your product to become an affiliate.
They have also instituted a feature where you can have one click affiliate sign-ups. So, if you are recruiting potential JV partners and affiliates, you can simply build a link with their e-mail address and their name inserted into the link and all they need to do is click it to become an affiliate.
The system will automatically create an affiliate account and send them there password so they can login to start promoting your products. That is very powerful.
Now, whenever I approach potential affiliates I can give them one click access to my affiliate program.
There are a bunch more features that I absolutely love about this product. I wanted to point out those three because those are the three that made me switch from one program to the other. Now, remember I already had a membership site all set up. So, I had a lot of work just to switch.
That should tell you how good this plug-in actually is.
Anyway, with anything good there is usually some bad, and that is not any different when it comes to this program.
There are a couple things that I have an issue with and hope that they are addressed in the future.
1. Whenever you protect your posts it leaves huge gaps in your blog. What I mean by that is this… lets say you put together a product and decide to break that product down into 15 different modules. Then, you make each module a blog post. Then, you decide you’re going to deliver the blog posts for the different modules seven days apart.
That is done very easily and after the actual contents inside the blog it only takes a couple minutes to accomplish that. Here’s the bad part though, if you do it that way it will actually jack up the front page of your blog.
Digital Access Pass does not actually control the post inside of the wordpress database. So, if you put a bunch of protected posts altogether you’ll have a huge gap inside of your blog and it will throw off an error saying that this content is protected.
So, when someone goes to the home page of your blog they do not see the unprotected posts. They see an error because there is no post to show you.
Now, there is a very simple workaround for this and that is to simply set your blog to display the last 50 posts on the homepage. That way if you have 15 posts protected you still have another 35 that can show up on the homepage. I really do not like that option though.
So, what I’ve decided to do is just protect my posts with the more tag “a feature called sneak peek inside of DAP” and have parts of every protected posts visible. That takes care of the gap problem on the homepage. Since your posts is protected and still showing some content it will show up on the homepage so it doesn’t leave the huge gaps. This is a viable solution and not really that big of a deal, but I’m hoping it gets taken care of.
2. The new authorize.net plug-in does not allow you to do pre-transactional bumps on the ofrder page, or any were now that I thinkl about it. This is a more advanced feature so it’s not going to bother most people, but it is something I have grown accustomed. So, this is a feature request I’m going to submit to them.
3. The interface is plain ugly. I’m not very tech savvy so a clean looking interface is pleasant for me. If I have to look at a ugly interface I get frustrated for some reason. Just a preference really, but something that bothers me. If you’re like me and like to look at a clean interfaces, this will probably bother you as well. But, the functionality works inside the interface so who cares.
I’ve also made a video going over some of the likes and dislikes as well. This way I can make it a little more clear on what I’m talking about. Sometimes when I write I can not articulate exactly what I’m trying to get across. I am much better in person and on video. So, I went ahead and put this video together for you as well.
I hope you enjoy the video review, and I hope this helps you with your decision on whether to buy Digital Access Pass or not.