Website Owners - You Need An App - Here is Why

Key Takeaways

answer this one important question. When you use your phone, do you spend time in the browser browsing the internet through websites or do you spend time inside apps? Now, if you're like most people and probably 90% or more of your time is spent inside apps, not inside actual websites. And as a website owner, that should be a light bulb on moment for you because that gives you an opportunity to have better engagement, better customer retention, better business than your competition. So it doesn't matter if you're a publisher, if you're an affiliate website owner, if you are a course website, if you sell your own time or old products on old services or you have some any other products you're selling through website. If you build an app for your website or business, you will be more successful. But the challenge is building an app is the hard part. Either you spend a lot of money, 20, 30, $40,000 on on a developer or you figure things out yourself. There's no middle ground, right? But what if I told you that there is a middle ground? Let me show you how it works. So, the biggest membership plug-in for WordPress, MemberPress, has just released their app kit, which allows you to build your mobile app by yourself. And you might be thinking, hey, I'm not a developer. But the good news is, even if you have no development skills, if you can use WordPress, you can use AppKit to develop your own iOS and Android app right from your WordPress dashboard. Let me show you how it works. So, I'm inside my WordPress dashboard. Now, the obvious things that you need to know is that you'll need access to MemberPress already. Appkit is a separate feature and if you get appkit and memberress you can download them from your dashboard. You'll have to activate the license and since you're using appkit you'll also install the courses add-on. So on my website on my screen you'll see that I have member press already installed. I have the MP courses which is memberress courses add-on also installed and the MP app is also something installed and activated. So all three have to be active on your site. And now I'm going to show you how we can build our own website right here inside WordPress. So before we start building, let me show you a very few quick settings so that you know what settings to configure and how to make advant or take advantage of it. So we'll go into the MP app settings. We'll go to the component settings here. And inside this section, you can see few different settings. So the app pages is required. You cannot disable it. You also have push notifications built in. You can send push notifications right from uh your dashboard. So that is enabled. So if you don't want to use it, you can deactivate it. But obviously it's a good sign. Push notifications I think has seven times more engagement than traditional email. So you can you should be using that. So you can activate that inapp purchases if you're selling things online directly from your website. You can enable inapp purchases. You can enable or disable uh access controls and API caching. So once these are set up, you know what you're doing. Then what we can do is go to the branding section. This is where you'll design how your app performs and how your app behaves. So you can see here that on the branding side, you have the preview section on the right and you have the configuration options on the left. So if I collapse all the things, you can configure how your website looks like on the home screen, login screens, register screen, launch screen, icons, and Android uh uh the Android notification and adaptive icon as well. So let me quickly show you how it's going to work. So I took a couple of minutes and set everything up. So let me demonstrate how easy it was to completely configure the branding side of my app. So on the home home screen side, if I open the home screen up, you see I uploaded a logo. So whenever we scroll up like we do on apps, this is the logo that will be displayed. So you can see or read the description here. If I scroll down to the login screen, I configured the login screen as well. So this how the login screen looks like. I can also uh see the forgot password screen. So let it refresh. And now you might think that hey, the typography isn't going well with the background. Well, we can actually change that. So I'm not worried about that. Let's go back here. And of course, you can also see the iPhone and the Android version right here. So if I click Android, this is how your app will look like on Android. If I click iPhone, you can go back and forth and compare how your app will look like. If I collapse this, I can go to the register screens. And this is how the registration page will look like when somebody tries to register. And you can see it looks great. If I go to Android, you can see the Android version as well. Going into launch screen, when somebody opens an app, it usually has a splash display with an image. Right? So, this is where I configure it. And you can also add a spinner here, which I've configured. So, this is how it'll look like on Android. And this is how it'll look like on iPhone. All good. And if I go back here, you can also configure app icons and other stuff. Basically, just uploading basic images and you are good to go. That's how easy it is. Let me save these settings and I'll show you how to configure the typography settings as well. So, now that the changes are saved, you can also configure the typography and colors. So, you can just go here in the color section and for most of the sections inside the app on the login screen, the registration screen, you can actually change the colors. So for example, if you didn't like the colors on the login page, you can always just find the login screen, change the background color, change the login text color. So example, if I want to change the sign in to white, I can just click on it and now the color is changed to white. So that's how easy it is to configure everything in typography and colors as well. If I even go to uh the typography section, then you can also change the typography, the fonts, everything. So basically it's very simple to how you configure WordPress. You can configure how your app looks and performs. This is just one section in the branding section. Let's head to one next section which is the menus because that's very important. So for configure the menus, we'll go into the menu section here by going to click here and here we can configure the menus. Similar to how you open apps, they have menus on the bottom or the top. Usually the bottom because our thumb is on the bottom. We can actually configure how menus will appear. And it's very similar to how we configure menus in WordPress. So it's going to be just feel like home. So right now you can see I have I tested this out. So I configured a menu. So you can see my menu right now is the homepage, the courses page which is the second page, the blog page which is here and the settings page which is here. So basically in just a couple of seconds you can configure a menu. So I'll show you again if you want to configure something you can always let's say for example if I delete this page let's remove it. And now we can see that the courses page is gone. But I want to add it again I can just go into the app core click courses add to menu and now we have the courses page. but it's not the right position. So, I'll just drag it and keep it here. And now I have the courses set here. So, that's how easy it is to configure menus. So, we can configure the login page, registration page, colors, typography, everything else. And configure the menu as well. How people can actually navigate your website. Let me show you some other things you can do with the app kit, which is going to be phenomenal. The next impressive thing in app kit is actually building app pages. Because if you're building an app, you also need some specific pages that can be viewed inside the app apart from just your blog post, right? So you have complete control just by using the WordPress blog builder to build pages that'll be used inside your app. That's phenomenal. So let me show you how it works. So all you have to do is go into the app pages section which you can see here. I already created a test page but I'll start a new page so that you can see how easy the process is. So I just click add new app page. I'll open the blog builder as usual and you can start create uh creating the page right here in WordPress. So let's say if I name this [clears throat] appkit demo. So we can give it a title and every block that we add in WordPress is available to be added in this page as well. So I can just click and I'll see any block that I can add and it's always mobile optimized. So I can add an image and I can go to the media library to find an image if I like. Let's pick this one. And now the image is added. If I want to add a separator, I'll come here again, just add a separator. And now we have a separator. And I can add text content everything else. But one more thing, this is important to understand. MemberPress adds its own blocks to WordPress, which you can use when creating the app itself. Let me show you those. So to easy way to discover the apps or the blocks that MemberPress has added is just by clicking the plus icon here, which will open up all the blocks menu here. Just scroll to the bottom and you'll find meress app blogs. So any blog post that you add, you can add it here. Quick links uh you can add them here. Courses. This is a big one. So if you click the courses block now any course that you add or create with MemberPress, you can actually add a viewable grid right here inside the app. How cool is that? No coding required. And of course you can add the directory as well. So I'll just add a directory. Okay. All right. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize this. the directory block has to be added when no other blocks exist. So I can just click this and for now we can just demo with this. So now you can see this is currently viewable right here and you can just save this and it becomes a completely viewable app page and you can scroll around and see these are all test courses. So it becomes an interactive element like like how you would expect any app to perform all inside WordPress. How cool is that? Now of course you have all the other benefits of using WordPress. So if you want to configure the actual block, you can just click it and you have cosmetic changes you can make here. The background color, heading color, you can filter courses if you have multiple courses, which courses you want to show. You have can show courses by ID, orders, number of items, everything else similar to how you use the blog editor. And of course, if you want to just change the app page itself, then you can configure the background colors and everything else on how you want to configure this. It's amazing that you can do all of this right here in WordPress. So coming back to the WordPress dashboard, you can probably see on the left hand side that I haven't covered everything that appit does because this will be a two-hour video, right? You can see the settings here, integrations, I show you the branding menus. You have also translation. So you can translate your app into multiple languages and you can also send push notifications and have access control. Let me show you how push notifications work. You can send push notifications right here from inside your WordPress dashboard. So this is the push notification menu. You can just click now and create a new push notification by clicking send new and then configure the push notification and you are doing all the amazing things that app developers charge thousands of dollars for right here in WordPress and then you can just configure it and send it and the push notification will go live. So if you post new content, post new blog post, even running a promotion, you can send push notifications from right inside your WordPress dashboard. So let's talk about building the final app because once you've configured everything we need to build it and submit it on the app store and play store so the app can be approved. The process is pretty simple. We have to go to the configure option first and inside the configure option you set up basic things like the app icon name, minimum build version. You can set it in maintenance mode and you have iOS settings, iOS devices, Android settings and Google Firebase which we can configure. Pretty easy stuff. Once you've done everything all you have to do is go to the build option, request build and the build will start. So you can see here all you have to do is request a build and once you request a build it'll start building the app for you and you can request the status once it's done all you have to do is go to the upload section and then upload our app to the play store and app store and amazingly your app should be live very quickly now after all these amazing settings it's very easy to use the app app kit is pretty easy to use you might still be wondering that hey this is not something that I can pull off on my own and I have even better news you can get the app kit and do it yourself which is an easy thing to do or you can pay MemberPress a onetime fee for them to build the app for you. So if you are configure confused about how do I configure Firebase or anything else let MemberPress actually do it for you and then you can just manage the app the content create new pages and do the maintenance parts and even send push notifications right inside your WordPress dashboard. So I don't think there's any reason left for you to not have an app to support your business, your publishing business, e-commerce website or I'd say affiliate business or any other kind of website you have. Appit is accessible is definitely a separate product from MemberPress. So it's not included as part of MemberPress. You can check out the pricing. I'll leave a link down in the description. You can go to the blog post. I'll link in the description and read about it and make an informed choice if appear is worth it for you. I assume it will be. My name is Zraj. You've been watching Beginner on YouTube and I'll catch you in the next video very very soon. Make sure to subscribe and like and hype this video and do all that good stuff. And I'll catch you in the next video.