In The Private Video Creators Hub

WELCOME TO THE

Private Videos Hub

Here you’ll find all of the best resources we have to help you build and grow an online video business with WordPress and Paid Memberships Pro.

Members are the hub of your private video membership site.

Choose Your Tools

Create Your Video Content

Build Your Paid Video Site

Protect Your Private Videos

Sell and Get Paid

Market Your Website

Video Learning Materials

Get started by reading our guide How to Sell Videos Online to Members Only. This will give you all of the latest information about building and growing an online video business, and it links to all of our video-related content and downloads.

It’s roughly a 13-minute read, but it’s worth it…especially if you’re just getting started and you need an introductory education on selling videos online.

Whether you’re starting a new video library or you want to add private video content to your existing business, these resources will help to simplify the process and guide you through all of the fundamental steps you need to take.

1. Choose Your Tools

The user experience is at the heart of any online video business. Because web hosts are not designed to handle streaming, hosting videos on your site can cause poor performance.

If you have more than a few videos to host, it is best to use a dedicated video hosting service. Paid Memberships Pro integrates with the world’s most popular video dedicated video hosting services to offer secure, low cost video streaming worldwide. 

Here are the ones we recommend, along with how-to guides for each:

  1. YouTube: Build a Video Membership Site With Free Video Hosting On YouTube.
  2. Vimeo: How to Restrict Videos With Vimeo and Paid Memberships Pro.
  3. Bunny CDN: How to Use Bunny CDN to Restrict and Embed Video on Your WordPress Membership Site
  4. Amazon S3: How to Host Video on Amazon s3 for Members Only.
  5. Presto Player + Bunny.net: How to Restrict Videos with Bunny.net, Presto Player, and Paid Memberships Pro.

Software Recommendations

At Paid Memberships Pro, we stress the importance of owning the land your business is built on. So, we think that using WordPress with PMPro is the best choice.

The core Paid Memberships Pro plugin has everything you need to set up membership levels, restrict videos, posts, and pages, and integrate your payment gateway so you can charge for access to your private videos.

In fact, with Paid Memberships Pro you can get your private video website up and running—100% free. Plus, we offer a variety of free and paid Add Ons that are perfectly suited to running an online video business.

The User Fields feature of PMPro can be used to create additional custom profile fields to be collected at checkout, on the user’s profile, or for administrative view only. For example, if you offer a video library of quilting tutorials, you could add a select field for users to indicate years of experience with quilting and a free text field for them to enter their favorite place to buy fabric.

Plus, the User Fields admin page allows you to set up user profile fields for members or admins only—with loads of customization settings. Read more in our documentation on how to add user fields.

If community is a part of your video business, we offer a variety of integrations for Slack, Discord, bbPress, and more.

Our Courses for Membership Add On can be the perfect tool for video course makers. For example, it comes with features that allow you to:

  • Set up basic courses and lessons within the WordPress dashboard
  • Restrict your video courses to specific membership levels
  • Integrate with LMS platforms like LifterLMS and LearnDash

And don’t forget email marketing—something that’s crucial for any business. PMPro integrates seamlessly with major email marketing services like ConvertKit and MailChimp.

Looking for a specific Add On? You can now filter Add Ons on the Memberships > Add Ons Screen in the WordPress Admin by Use Case. Start typing the term, like “Videos”, and the corresponding Add Ons will populate for you.

2. Create Your Video Content

We’re expanding this section of content to give you the best creator tips for videos. For now, go check out our post on how the team at Paid Memberships Pro creates instructional videos for our software product.

3. Build Your Paid Video Site

This hub is focused on sites that use WordPress and Paid Memberships Pro to create and sell your paid video content. We recommend having a WordPress site whether your video content is the only feature of membership or if your video library is a component of a larger subscription website business.

Here’s how to create your video content site with WordPress and PMPro: 

  1. Set Up Your WordPress website on a hosting platform like Pressable.
  2. Download and Install Paid Memberships Pro
  3. Complete the PMPro Initial Setup

Your WordPress site is the primary place subscribers can:

  • Access premium video content and extras
  • Manage their membership account
  • View payment history and update billing information
  • Update profile information like name, email address, opt-in email preferences, and any additional user fields you need to collect.

We also recommend integrating an email marketing platform. With your email tool of choice, you as the admin can:

  • Contact your subscribers directly (outside of the video platform).
  • Initiate new broadcasts, create sequences, and manage automations
  • View reports on open rates, click throughs, and email deliverability

4. Protect Your Private Videos

In order to actually generate revenue for your online video library, you’ll need a way to restrict your videos and charge people for access to them. Our initial setup guide will walk you through all essential steps to setting up things like content restrictions and recurring payments with PMPro.

5. Sell Your Private Videos and Get Paid

Before you can make money with private videos, you need an audience that wants to buy them.

You might already have a prime target audience through:

  • An existing audience that consumes your public videos
  • Lots of followers on your favorite social media channel
  • Your most engaged YouTube channel viewers and subscribers

But what if you don’t have an audience?

Building a New Audience for Your Video Business

It’s hard to introduce yourself to potential subscribers if the only thing you offer is a paid product. So, consider offering free video content first. This can be shorter samples of many videos, or fewer full-length videos, for example.

Starting with free gives people a taste of your content. And people who’ve had a taste are much more inclined to sign up for your paid video library.

The type of paywall you choose will depend on your business model, the type of content you offer, and your goals for generating revenue from your website. Check out our post What is Paywall Content? to figure out which one is right for your video business.

Pricing Your Private Video Membership

If you’re going to sell memberships to your private video website, you’ll need to have a membership pricing structure in place. But figuring out what to charge can be challenging.

Start with our post about how to price your membership site to get some ideas. Want to have various pricing options for your videos? Check out our post on tiered pricing.

You might even decide to offer your videos for free. After all, a video membership site based around free content can help you build your audience and have direct contact with your most loyal fans.

Once you have a substantial mailing list, there are many ways to introduce paid products and services to your subscribers.

You can also monetize private video content without asking subscribers to pay. For example, offering video sponsorship is an effective way to generate income beyond video membership sales.

Just know that having sponsored content within your videos will make it very challenging to also ask subscribers for money.

6. Market Your Private Video Website

Once your private video site is ready to accept membership signups, link to it everywhere:

  • Link directly to the landing page on your website that accepts signups and payment.
  • Include links in your existing public video content or free newsletter
  • Add a link to your membership pricing or checkout page in all of your social media bios and descriptions
  • Insert a prominent link in the main menu of your website or at the top right section of your site’s header area
  • Add a signup form within your blog post content or in a sidebar

The same strategies that work for marketing any membership site work for a private video content site. In this case, we often see video site memberships being sold by an individual creator.

For this reason, many private video marketing strategies are unique to who you are as an individual. Embracing this and showing your target audience your authentic self will help you attract members to your private video site.

Case Studies

Looking for some inspiration? Maybe you just want to jump-start your motivation, or you need guidance on what tools and processes to use to create your private video website.

Learning from others who have achieved the goal you’re aiming for is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success. Check out some of our case studies featuring successful video membership sites that use Paid Memberships Pro:

Other Resources

Is there something we don’t have that you’d like to see here? Get in touch and let us know!

Click here to read our blog posts tagged with “Use Case: Videos”.