Selling memberships is one of the most popular online business models - its used by publishers, online trainers and sites like
Netflix. It's called a paywall. You put up a wall, block your content- and charge people to get in.
Whether you're selling access to your lessons, articles or videos or to the other member of your online community - you'll need
a way of blocking access, accepting payments and then allowing certain people access to certain areas.
In this video I'm going to explain how you can set this up with WordPress
Selling membership to a website may sound straightforward - but most businesses have their own requirements and need it to work
slightly differently For example, let's say you've setup an online training course
You want people to sign up on a monthly or yearly basis
you want to accept the 2 leading online payment systems - paypal and stripe - and for payments to reoccur automatically
you want to drip content over time so that people can't just download everything right away and then cancel on you
you want to offer discount coupons and create as many membership levels as you like
and you want people to be able to manage their account - maybe upgrade - and easily cancel if they want to
and finally, let's say you also want each member of your site to automatically be an affiliate so that they get paid to refer you new
users Now there's a lot going on there so how do you set that up? Let's look at your options
You're looking for whats called a WordPress membership plugin and man oh man there are a lot of competitors out there trying to sell you
their solution A few years ago there was a big digital marketing battle between the main companies
who were selling membership plugins at that time. That battle resulted in loads of fake websites getting setup with dodgy reviews
which made the whole process of picking the right plugin way more confusing than it needed to be.
So going back to our online training course example. Which is the best plugin for the job? Lets go through some of the big ones
Digital Access Pass: I tried this one but I didnt like it. People had difficulty logging in sometimes and then it wouldn't work when I
switched my hosting to wpengine so that was the end of that
s2member is a free plugin but people weren't able to edit their account or cancel payments or anything like that. It doesn't really handle
affiliates either.
Wishlist member is a popular plugin. Its been around for years. I'm not sure if it allows users to upgrade and cancel their account because
I've never bought it. The reason I never even bought it is that source code is encrypted - which means you cant hire a developer to
tweak it if you need to change something.
Since that battle took place a few years back a few new entrants came along and the quality of plugins has gone up. Way up.
Restrict content pro looks pretty good but if you've got discussion forums and social networking pages that you need to protect
then you need to keep looking
WooCommerce has add-ons that allows you to sell memberships and opens up some powerful possibilities. For example,
WooCommerce allows you to sell on Faceebook, and it works with just about every payment provider out there. There's a bit of
messing around with add-ons but they're all made by the same guys and they work so its not that big a deal
So which ones would I recommend? I'm going to recommend 3:
The free option that you should try first is PaidMembership Pro. It does we need with the exception of the built in affiliate program.
If you're testing your first membership site then this free option will let you focus on getting customers and getting to know your
customers as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The one I chose for my online training course is MemberPress. It accepts stripe and paypal, it does coupons, it handles dripping
content, it blocks forum and buddypress pages, it has a built in affiliate program - so it ticks all the boxes
A third option is iThemes Exchange. If you want to sell other kinds of stuff like physical products and e-books and all that then
iThemes exchange is a simple and powrful option. It's free which means you can play around with it and design your sales pages etc
but you'll have to spend nearly $200 on add- ons to add membership and recurring payments and stuff like that.
And so thats my 3 recommendations: memberpress, paid content pro and ithemes exchange.
I hope this saves you time setting up your new membership site. Honestly, deciding on the plugin is the hardest part of the whole process
that and getting people to sign up and give you their money obviously.
If you want more detailed research on choosing the right membership plugin then I suggest you check out ChrisLema.com.
Are you looking for help building a WordPress site for your business? Then check out the free tutorials on wp applied.
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