WordPress Paid Membership Sites

While traditional newspaper and magazine giants have taken a hard it from the online news revolution, they have also learned to adapt to the drastic changes in their environment and came up with new, revenue generating resolutions. Besides online advertising, paid memberships are not only becoming more popular amongst publishers, but also provide a sense of value to a customer. Just like the Wall Street Journal and many other online newspapers, you may also turn your site into a platform for members with restricted content for general site viewers and specific, targeted content for your members.Sounds like a major endeavor? Not necessarily! WordPress, having come a long way from a blogging platform to a major content management system (CMS), provides a great amount of free membership solutions for your site.

Why WordPress?

So, why would you want to use a former blogging platform for your professional membership site? The answer is easy. Most of us do not possess a formal web development background, get frequently “robbed” by freelancers who argue that their work is worth hundreds of dollars and most importantly most of us don’t have the time to develop a complex membership site. This is where WordPress glows like a star. Its ease of use, fully functional back end platform, and plugin integration enables even inexperienced online publishers to stay organized and maintain control over a site. Many of the paid membership plugins that are available for WordPress allow the site manager to make the entire web site, pages, or only specific articles available for members, hiding restricted content to non-paying guests. From design to functionality, you have a great variety of free WordPress membership plugins to consider for your site, beating any paid developer by far!

Some of the paid membership plugins come with certain functionality that will allow members to “pay per post”. This great supplement comes especially in handy if you have a product that you wish to promote on a single page in your online publication.

Here is another smart reason for using WordPress as your membership site platform … rss thiefs. The problem with most RSS feeds is their security. Readers that have signed up for your RSS feed but are not paying members of your site may still have access to your site content via the RSS feed. The beauty of WordPress paid membership plugins is that they are feed secure. Via the use of tokens, only paid members may access the feeds.

What are the benefits from a WordPress paid membership site?

Product owners, who are looking to spend as little time and money as possible, will greatly benefit from the WordPress membership functionalities. I will point out that some of the plugins do require a substantial up front cost, however when compared to the cost of hiring a web designer to create a membership site from scratch, it is incredibly cost effective. If you prefer a free plugin, NewsTemplates has already done some of the research for good membership plugins for you and has created a list of 5 free WordPress membership plugins for you.

Most plugins utilize Paypal as payment option and some allow payment through ClickBank.

In conclusion, a paid membership WordPress site provides great opportunities for those who want to take an online magazine or newspaper to the next level. If visitors enjoy reading your posts and value your content because it meets their needs, then a paid membership will only tie your readers even closer to you. One thing to always remember though is to keep your content relevant because relevance is a virtue!

Posted by Margrit Duckwitz on Friday, July 16th, 2010. Filed under Freebies and Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry