Who is getting paid?

I use WordPress and Wishlist Member for the Elearning Blueprint. The blueprint is more of a reference site than a course, but some of the principles involved are the same.

I'm not sure that I would recommend Wishlist Member, but when I've looked for a replacement, I haven't found anything really appealing. I agree that aMember isn't very good-looking or intuitive.

An additional challenge is that many membership site programs assume you're selling individual access directly to consumers, so if you're actually selling group access to a business, you might have to customize or force things. Wishlist lets you determine how many IP addresses can use a single log-in, so one team of X people can share a log-in but can't spread it throughout the entire organization.

The "sell-your-course" sites assume that you're selling a linear, screen-by-screen course. These give you the advantage of LMS-style tracking for clients who need it, but they limit the formats you can use. For what it's worth, of the more than 500 customers of the blueprint, only two have asked if they can track users, and both were fine with the fact that they can't. (Again, however, it's more of a job aid than a course.)

Finally, I recommend avoiding PayPal. I'm one of those PayPal horror stories. PayPal froze my business account with all the money in it when someone else used my SSN somewhere in Minnesota. PayPal notified me of my lockout with an email in which they flatly accused me of stealing my own SSN, even though they had received and approved all of my proof-of-identity docs two months earlier. After several intense phone calls, I got unlocked again and left.

It's definitely worth it to go through the minor hassle required to be approved by a real merchant account provider and Authorize.net. Not only will you be treated professionally, your money will go directly into your own FDIC-insured bank account.

Russ, if you set up your mastermind group, I'd be interested in joining.