It’s the middle of winter. The grass is brown, the wind is cold and nothing’s blooming. Everyone’s staying inside … which might not be as fun, but it means we’re getting a lot of work done.
Our recent site audit promotion went well, and we were able to talk to several current Rainmaker Platform clients and new prospects. Thank you for your trust. Through our efforts, we’ve been hearing that many of our current clients don’t realize the extent of our services.
We can do anything from small projects (writing an email, setting up an AR sequence, creating a landing page) to full-scale agency engagements with custom development, media planning, advertising and branding, and anything in between. Need a copywriter, designer, developer or strategist for a project? It’s less time, money and hassle to deal with us — we already know you, and if you want to build the project in Rainmaker Platform, it’s easy for us to do it right there. Tell us your ideas … let us make them reality. (We’ve got some ideas here too, so stay tuned.)
If you follow us on social media, you may have seen our recent launch of something called Dispatch Discussions. For our first one, our copywriter David Brandon, our DevOps manager Lucas Hillebrandt and I sat down to break down site speed — how it works, how much it matters, and a few ways you can affect it yourself. You can see the full transcript of the discussion here, as well as clips on our social media channels.
Speaking of site speed …
Rainmaker Platform Update 3.5
Our 3.5 update to Rainmaker Platform is all about site speed. One of the most interesting things to come out of our site speed discussion was how much can actually be done by the administrator of the site — you, in other words. Two of the biggest factors in site speed are scripting and caching.
Scripting refers to the instructions the web page loads. As our DevOps manager Lucas brought up in our Dispatch Discussion, “Usually when you’re building a site you add CSS [and JavaScript], and some of that scripting is not related to the page that you are looking at, but it’s still being loaded.” With 3.5, we’ve added a way to automatically remove bloat from your scripts and make your page load faster.
Caching also speeds up your site. When someone views your page, caching creates a temporary local copy of the page and its assets. This makes visiting that page (and other pages that share those assets on your site) faster. In 3.5, in addition to tools to eliminate the loading of scripts that aren’t being used, we’ve also added new caching tools to greatly reduce server requests. The results are significant improvements in your site’s speed and performance.
We’re excited to launch these new tools, and we’ve seen major performance boosts in our internal testing. Let us know what you see on your end. For more information, see the changelog.
Gate Access to Your Pages
This month’s State of the Platform tip comes up often. Our copywriter David was recently on a call with a prospect who brought up the question of putting some resources behind a membership. This person didn’t know if they had enough value to actually ask people to sign up. Here is how David answered.
Value vs. Ask
There are two components to balance when gating digital content: the value and the ask.
Gating access to your pages and putting them behind a login is a powerful tool in your arsenal. The key is making sure what you ask for matches the value you’re providing. There are several different types of value. Whitepapers, unique information (like a study with proprietary statistics), unique resources (calculators, tools), and access (mailing lists) are the most common.
There are also several different asks. The simplest is an email address or phone number to gain access; this is relatively low-friction. At the opposite end is a paid subscription. Users of platforms like Patreon or Substack often have several tiers of subscription, some free and some paid. Consider how much value you’re happy with giving and how much you will expect in return.
Once you make that determination, you need to set up access controls.
Controlling Access to a Page
The most common way to control access to a page is to put that content behind a membership.
The best way to control access to a page on Rainmaker Platform is with MemberPress. We’ve covered MemberPress Rules in depth before, but here’s a refresher for a single page. This basic method can be extended to all types of content and access control.
All of these steps require that you turn on MemberPress. Here’s our setup guide.
Once you have MemberPress enabled, go to the left hand menu > MemberPress > Rules.
Then click the blue Add New button on the next screen to add a new Rule.
From here, start by adding a name for your rule at the top of the page.
Then look at the Content & Access panel.
From the drop-down menu on the left, choose A Single Page. You’ll notice there are a dizzying number of options; feel free to play around with these if you want to add more options to a Rule. Then type the title of the page you want to protect and choose it from the text box on the right.
After you’ve chosen what to protect, choose the access conditions. Membership lets you gate access to only a single group of members. Member lets you control access for a single member. Role lets you choose a website role like Administrator, Editor or Contributor. Capability lets you gate access by a task a user can perform — for example, Upload or Edit.
You can add multiple conditions with Boolean logic by clicking the + icon below the access conditions.
Finally, if you want to protect part of a page, click “Partial Content Codes.” Use the “show” or “hide” options in the code view of a page to protect the portion of the page between the tags, just like you would use an HTML tag.
There are also drip and expiration options which allow you to time-gate access.
Rules for a single page and single membership or role are fairly simple to set up; don’t miss out on using them. If you want more in-depth information, check out our guides “Getting Started with MemberPress” and “MemberPress — Rule Your Content.”
Rule Your Content
Provide value for your audience, ask them for something in return. It’s a win-win. Don’t ignore the power of MemberPress Rules to gate access to your content. And if you need a hand, don’t hesitate to reach out. Just drop us a line, anytime.
Best Regards,
Ed Bardwell
President
Rainmaker Digital Services