The Basics of Running a Drip Content Membership Site

Creating fresh content for a membership site can take up a lot of your time and effort. It’s only natural that you’d want to maximize the results.

Drip content—or content that you slowly “drip” over time—is one of the best strategies to help you get the most out of your content production efforts.

Drip content can also:

  • Help you capture and retain your audience’s attention
  • Reduce refund rates
  • Prevent refund abuse
  • Be more manageable for your members

In this post, we explain the basics of running a drip content membership site, including the main reasons to drip your content and some different methods you can employ.

Modifying Payment Subscriptions in Stripe

If you run a membership site with Paid Memberships Pro, there may come a time when you want to make changes to a user’s subscription—billing amount or next payment date, for example.

These changes are necessary to do things like: 

  • Allow members to pause their subscriptions
  • Give active members a discount or temporary discount
  • Upgrade or downgrade a subscription
  • Raise the price for individual active members
  • Fix subscriptions for members who paid the wrong price or experienced some other price calculation issue at the checkout

If you use Stripe to accept recurring payments with Paid Memberships Pro, you can modify subscriptions directly from the Stripe Dashboard. In this post, we will walk you through the process.

How to Connect Paid Memberships Pro to Zoho CRM

Over 250,000 businesses use Zoho’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to achieve better customer engagement and revenue growth.

Zoho offers robust features like sales force automation, process management, omnichannel communications, and visual analytics.

The best part? It also connects with Paid Memberships Pro.

If you want to use Zoho CRM with your Paid Memberships Pro membership site, we’ve put together this step-by-step guide to help you.

How to Test Your Membership Business Idea with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

One of the most important parts of building any kind of business is testing the market—and memberships are no different.

Testing your membership business idea is essential if you want to gauge the potential return on your investment without risking a lot of time and resources.

What if your idea is not well-received? What if you don’t have enough resources to create your ideal product just yet?

Testing your membership business idea before committing to creating a full membership site allows you to address both of these concerns at the same time.

In this post, we talk about how to test your membership business idea with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), including a step-by-step guide for building your own membership MVP.

Creating Online Courses for Beginners 101: The Ultimate Guide

If you have a unique skill or expertise on a specific topic, you can build an online course—and create a new passive revenue stream for yourself.

When you create and sell online courses, you’ll be able to make money from areas of interest you already have.

So now you’re probably wondering how to create your online course, and thinking:

  • Is selling online courses profitable?
  • How do I create and sell my own online course?
  • Where should I sell my online course?
  • What kind of courses sell the most?

In this guide, we will answer these questions and cover the most important information about creating and selling online courses. By the end, you’ll be ready to start earning from your knowledge and expertise.

Subscription Updates

Payment subscriptions in Stripe can be edited directly from the Stripe Dashboard, giving administrators the ability to make different changes to a subscription.

Admins can change a member’s billing amount, adjust the next payment date, pause subscription collection, and more, all without having to make any changes in Paid Memberships Pro.

This guide explains how to update subscriptions in Stripe, and how to sync those changes to the member’s billing details in your membership site.

Legal Requirements for a Membership Site

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.

Backup Your WordPress Site: The Complete Guide to Site Backups

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.

Payment Plans

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.

Understanding the Difference: User Roles and Levels for Membership Sites

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 Product Ideas You Can Turn Into an Online Business 

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.

Switching Payment Gateways

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.

How to Find the Site Health Information in Your WordPress Site

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.

Paystack Gateway

Add Paystack as a gateway option for Paid Memberships Pro and accept payments from members around Africa.

How To Create an Online Course With WordPress Using a Learning Management System

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. 

Mega Guide for Trial Memberships: Everything You Need to Know About Membership Trials

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. 

Paid Memberships Pro Now Integrates Directly with Castos Private Podcasting

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: 

11 Things You Can Do To Automate Your Membership Site With Zapier

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. 

Gold Country Yoga Finds Membership Website Development Success With PMPro

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.

How The International Association of Workforce Professionals Built a Successful Membership Site with Paid Membership Pro

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.

How to Host Video on Amazon s3 for Members Only

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.