Starting a membership website can be incredibly rewarding. You can create a membership website for almost any niche and gradually build a business that brings in consistent monthly revenue.
However, the legal side of things can make any aspiring membership site owner nervous. It’s understandable, as non-compliance can lead to all kinds of potential problems.
The legal requirements for a membership site can be challenging to understand, so we’ve simplified them for you in this brief guide.
The last thing any website owner wants is for their website to go down and lose important data in the process.
This is particularly important for membership sites, where revenue is directly generated online. Luckily, keeping up-to-date backups of your WordPress site’s data isn’t as difficult as you may think.
This post covers an often-overlooked, but highly important topic: Data backups.
Offer different recurring payment structures on the same level of membership, such as monthly, quarterly, or annual pricing. Users can select a payment plan during the checkout process.
Running a successful membership site can be complex. In addition to creating content that keeps members engaged, you need to effectively manage how members access this content.
Having a platform that restricts content access to members only is important, regardless of whether you hide your content behind a paywall or a sign-up form.
As a membership site owner, the big question is: How do you restrict your content and certain member functions to only paid or registered users? What about users subscribed to different membership levels?
The short answer is that you can achieve this with WordPress roles and levels.
Digital products are a great way to monetize your unique skills. From photography hobbyists to marketing experts, people from diverse backgrounds with low technology skills are turning their digital product ideas into profitable businesses.
With 4.95 billion internet users worldwide, it’s not surprising that people are shifting to digital products for learning and entertainment. In fact, Statista predicts that by 2026, digital products will account for 46% of the media revenue worldwide.
If you have a particular skill or an advanced hobby, you have a wealth of profitable digital product ideas waiting for your – from online courses, podcasts, videos, to templates and companion content.
Let’s see why digital products work so well and look at some ideas for digital products that you can turn into a profitable online business.
Sometimes site administrators need to switch from one payment gateway to another, such as moving from Authorize.net to Stripe, or from Stripe to PayPal, for example.
With some membership software you can lock you into using one specific gateway forever, or at least as long as you still have users subscribed through that gateway, we do things a little differently.
With PMPro, you can switch gateways for new member checkouts in just a few clicks. You can keep old members paying you through a previously connected gateway. Or you can choose to encourage members to move to the new gateway.
In this post, we go over a few key topics related to how subscriptions work with PMPro, how to set up a new payment gateway, and how to keep or move members from the old gateway to the new one.
WordPress’ Site Health screen offers admins a way to view an overall diagnosis of your site’s health. Paid Memberships Pro adds data to this screen to help your developer or our support team understand critical information about your membership site.
This guide demonstrates how to find your Site Health information and how to copy and share it with your support specialist here in the Member Support Area.
Add Paystack as a gateway option for Paid Memberships Pro and accept payments from members around Africa.
Membership websites and courses go hand in hand. Courses bring a unique selling point that incentivizes people to become members and membership websites provide one of the best platforms for courses.
Courses provide your members with tangible benefits — in the form of results they get from implementing the material they learn from you.
Still, the idea of courses and tutorials on your membership website can overwhelm website owners due to complexity.
Here’s the good news:
You can easily set up a new course website or add a course to an existing membership-driven website using Paid Memberships Pro and its Courses for Membership Add On.
You can create and handle an educational website in the same way you handle a blogging platform.
Are you looking for an effective way to acquire new customers?
Here’s a great idea — trial memberships. Free trials give customers a first-hand experience of your product and present you with a golden opportunity to convert them into paying customers.
However, to use them to your advantage, you must learn the ins and outs of trial memberships. After all, you need to strategize your membership offerings carefully to achieve a good conversion rate.
To help you achieve that, we’ll dive deep into the vast realm of membership trials, one step at a time.
Note: This was originally posted on The Real Jason Coleman.
I try to write these transparency reports every so often. You can find some previous transparency reports here:
I wrote most of this down last year, but it’s taken a while to publish. The 2021 Transparency Report should come out soon after this one.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Craig over at Castos
Never before has it been easier to make money in the creator economy. Whether you’re running an online course, an exclusive membership site, or a digital community there are more tools available to you as a creator now than ever before.
The ability for you to create unique, valuable content and charge real money for it is at the heart of what makes the creator economy tick. Here are just a few examples of a few people just like you who are making tens of thousands of dollars a month only selling access to their membership sites:
There are only a few weeks until Black Friday. If you haven’t started preparing, it’s high time you begin.
If it’s your first time running holiday sales, you might wonder how to prepare for Black Friday. What should you offer? How do you plan a marketing campaign?
We’ve got answers.
Running a membership website is incredibly rewarding, but it can also be very demanding. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes admin work that goes into making sure your site runs smoothly.
This admin work often includes various tasks such as adding new members to your email list as part of your email marketing strategy or to your CRM to keep them updated about their membership.
Other times, it’s about making sure your payment gateway is syncing with the appropriate accounting software and ensuring members get access to materials, communities, and customer support channels.
Although keeping track of these things can be draining, it doesn’t have to be that way.
By learning how to automate your business processes with Zapier, you can avoid being overwhelmed with tasks. That way, you can focus on nurturing and growing your membership business.
If you’ve never heard of Zapier, don’t worry. We’ll explain everything you need to know about Zapier, how it integrates with Paid Memberships Pro, and how to automate all of those tedious tasks to make running your membership site a joy instead of a headache.
Are you starting a new membership website and want to keep things simple by offering free access only? You’re not alone. Many communities, content creators, and organizations begin with a free membership model. It’s a powerful way to grow your audience, build trust, and set the foundation for future opportunities.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to launch a free membership site using WordPress and Paid Memberships Pro (PMPro). You’ll also discover why offering free memberships is one of the best ways to grow your online presence.
When COVID-19 first reached the U.S., businesses both large and small were forced to entirely reevaluate the way they operated.
People had to get creative when it came to transforming their in-person businesses into entirely digital experiences. For small-business owners, failing to innovate and adapt to a now-virtual world meant risking having to permanently close their doors. Gold Country Yoga, a studio located in the small city of East Sonora, California, was no exception. However, husband and wife team Mark Holmes and Ellen Cremer rose to the challenge.
By joining together their unique professional backgrounds and Stranger Studios’ plugin, Paid Memberships Pro, Mark and Ellen were able to reinvent a physical yoga studio as a successful online business.
In this showcase, we look at how The International Association of Workforce Professionals (IAWP) used Paid Membership Pro to build an association membership site. More specifically, how they run memberships, protect content, and manage recurring online payments and subscriptions. We also explore Robert Wilkins’ journey in setting up the IAWP membership site.
The IAWP develops and connects workforce professionals. Their mission is to strengthen the workforce development system through education and networking.
In this showcase, we look at how Philippe Kiener built the Innerchange Documentary project and how he is using Paid Membership Pro(PMPro) to run a video membership based on the gift economy concept.
Looking for a safe place to store your members-only videos? Why not host them yourself. In this guide, we show you how to host video on Amazon S3, a cloud-based hosting environment provided by Amazon Web Services.
Self-hosted web servers are an easy solution for storing your video content. But, while most cloud-based servers aren’t free, they are less expensive than dedicated video hosting services. Self-hosting video also provides more control over the streaming and restriction of your videos as compared to free hosting sites like YouTube.
Let’s dig into how to set up Amazon S3 for video hosting and protect video embeds for members-only using Paid Memberships Pro.
Is it your dream to build a business around your passion for music and musical instruments? Matthew, from howtoplaythesax.com, accomplished this and much more. We will explore how he started his music membership business and how he used Paid Memberships Pro to do it.
The Memberships > License page allows members to validate their license key and gain additional access. A license key unlocks the ability to install, activate, and update premium Add Ons in your membership site.
License keys are only assigned to customers with an active paid membership. View current pricing »
Do you want to add some custom user fields to your membership site but don’t know how? In this step-by-step guide, we show you how to code custom User Fields in PMPro (formerly know as Register Helper).
In June 2019, Lucca leveraged his 6 years of Martial Arts training experience to build an online training business using WordPress, Paid Memberships Pro, and a variety of other tools. His membership includes Martial Arts, well-being and fitness training through online courses, learning resources, and video tutorials.
In this showcase, we explore the business model Lucca chose for his membership and the technology that powers his successful online academy.
The most trusted membership platform is 100% free Join thousands of people around the globe who are getting paid on a recurring basis for their courses, content, downloads, products, and services using Paid Memberships Pro. Sign up to download the core plugin for free along with over 30 Free Add Ons. What You Get With (more…)
From your WordPress Admin Dashboard navigate to Memberships > Dashboard to get an overview of your membership site.
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