blogging and content writing have become an essential skill that anyone who learns it can practice and earn money through. There are several ways to make money from your WordPress blog , and among these methods is creating a WordPress website for paid articles or paid content (Premium Contents).
For example, if you work in blogging in the field of smartphones or computer programs and applications and you have important information, you can benefit from this and sell this information by creating paid articles and a membership system on your website or blog.
The effort, experience, and knowledge expended on some types of content require direct payment for what you read, and many international newspapers adopt this method, such as The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times, and the American publishing platform Medium , as well as the Harvard Business Review, which specializes in entrepreneurship.
There are several methods followed by these platforms to collect money for their articles, such as paying to read part of the article for free and paying to read it in its entirety, or reading several complete articles for free per month and you have to pay to read more, or monthly subscription to a package that allows you to access specific content or a specific number of articles per month. ..
In this article, we will learn how to create a WordPress website for paid articles through two add-ons, the first is free and has a paid professional version (Paid Membership Pro) and the other is paid (MemberPress) and you can choose what suits you.
1-Create a WordPress website for paid articles using Paid Membership Pro
If you do not have a WordPress site yet to publish your content on, you should start creating the site. In the following article, you can learn how to create a WordPress website from scratch on Amazon servers , Digital Ocean hosting , or any hosting you trust.
After completing the installation of WordPress, you must install and activate the plugin on your site. Paid Membership Pro is available in a free version and a paid version with additional features. However, we will limit ourselves to the free version here.
After activating the add-on on your site, you must first adjust the add-on settings and then move to the first stage.
1- Adjust the Paid Membership Pro add-on settings
1-A new tab will appear within your WordPress site’s control panel called Memberships . Click on this tab and then click on Dashboard
2- To create a membership, search for the Initial Setups section and click on the View Membership Levels option .
3- A page will appear to you where you can add new memberships. You can access this page by clicking on Settings under the Memberships section in the WordPress control panel, then choosing the Levels tab , then clicking on the Add NewLevel option .
4-A new page will now appear asking you to enter the membership information you want. Enter the name of the membership, for example (Gold Membership), then enter the description of the membership, and the message that will be sent to the subscriber.
Note 1:
You can create multiple memberships on your site as follows:
First Membership: Free and dedicated to a specific category of articles
The second membership is paid and is dedicated to other categories of articles.
Note 2:
Enter the membership data in English, because the add-on does not support the Arabic language. When I initially used the Arabic language to enter the add-on data, I later encountered problems as the data appeared in the form of question marks.
You can also translate the add-on into to make it more compatible with your site if your site only supports the Arabic language.
5- After completing the previous information, you must enter the payment details, i.e. will you receive an initial payment when subscribing to the membership and what is its value, and will the subscription for this membership be renewed monthly or will be a one-time payment.
6-Click on Save Level after you have finished adjusting all the previous settings.
Stage 2 – Pages necessary to create the Paid Memberships Pro add-on
After completing the add-on settings, we will create the necessary pages for the add-on to work properly through the following steps:
1- Go to the Add Memberships page. You will see a small note at the top of the page asking you to create pages, so click on it.
2- Alternatively, you can go to Settings under the Memberships section and then click on Pages. If it appears to you as in the following image, this means that the site does not have the required pages.
3-Click on Generate Pages for Me to generate the pages that the Paid Memberships Pro add-on needs to function properly.
4-Then the previous page must turn into the Page Setting page, as the add-on has created the pages you need from the login and registration page, the membership page, and others, and now you only have to set them up.
5-Click on Save Settings to save the previous modifications. After the page finishes loading and saving the settings, a new note will appear at the top to set the SSL security of the connection and set the payment gateway.
6- When you click on the previous note, you will be redirected to the payment gateways page. If you do not see this note, you can access this page by clicking on Settings under the Memberships section, then the Payment Gateway & SSL tab.
7-Here you can choose the payment gateway that you want to use to collect payments from customers when they subscribe to a membership, as the Paid Memberships Pro add-on supports many options.
8- When you choose one of the available methods, additional fields will appear to set the payment mechanism. This requires you to have an account with the service that provides the payment method, such as PayPal or Authorize.net.
Stage 2 – Pages necessary to create the Paid Memberships Pro add-on
You should pay attention to the Gateway Environment option , as its default value is Sandbox/Testing, which is an environment used to test the payment method without the need to use real currency, so when you launch the site for work, you must change the value of the option to Live/Production.
Now you have to choose the currency in which you will display membership prices and the payment cards you accept, such as Visa and Mastercard.
Click Save Settings to save your previous settings.
You now have a membership, specify its price and renewal period, in addition to the pages required to make the addition. You have also chosen the payment gateway and the currency that will appear to visitors, so we can now put the previous steps to trial by writing an article and specifying the membership required to be possessed so that the visitor can read it.
Stage 3- Adding your paid articles to the site
Now go to the Articles section and click Add New to add your article that you want to make available for a fee. After you finish writing and formatting the entire article, go to the upper left corner and click on the article settings icon to display it if it is not visible.
At the bottom of the side menu, you will find a new section called Required Membership . In this section, all the memberships you have added will appear, and you must choose the memberships that the user can read the article with. Not choosing any membership means that any visitor can read the article without having any membership.
In the current article, I will choose the Gold Membership as the membership that must be possessed so that the user can view and read the content of this article.
Now, when a regular user visits the article link, the following image will appear to him, asking him to register or log in and sign up for a membership.
When you click on the Register button , you will be redirected to a page displaying memberships so you can choose one of them, with the price for each one explained as follows.
When you register for one of the memberships, you will then be able to obtain login data that enables you to read the content of the requested article.
2- Create a WordPress site for paid articles using MemberPress
In this paragraph, I will explain how to use the paid MemberPress add-on , which enables you to charge sums of money for reading articles. After purchasing the add-on, you must install it, activate it , and then do the following for the add-on to work properly:
Stage 1 – Adjust MemberPress add-on settings
You must first go to the MemberPress tab in the site’s control panel and then choose Settings. The extension’s settings page will appear , consisting of several tabs. First, choose the first tab, License , and enter the activation key that you obtained when purchasing the add-on, then press the Activate License Key button .
Now that you have activated the add-on on your site, you must adjust the payment methods through which you will receive payments from visitors and subscribers, so go to the Payments tab to do that.
Choose the appropriate payment method for you from the Gateway drop-down list and fill in the necessary data to be able to receive payments from your visitors who wish to read non-free content on your site. As you can see in the previous image, the MemberPress add-on is distinguished by supporting several payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal.
Now go back to the MemberPress tab within the WordPress control panel and click on the Memberships tab to set how to control content and access to it by visitors or subscribers.
Click on the Add New button to display an interface similar to the traditional editor interface in WordPress, where you can add the name of the membership in the Add New Membership field , add its cost in dollars in the Price field , and the payment method, Billing Type , is it one-time or periodic.
Note that the Billing Type option is not activated in the previous image because the price is zero, so there is no need to set it. However, when you change this value, you will be able to choose one of two methods, which is one -time payment or recurring periodic payment .
You can also set the period of ownership of this membership: whether it is for life or will it expire after a certain period (Expire) .
In our current example, we will set the price to $10 and choose the monthly payment method with a 15-day trial period for $2. You can, of course, choose other values that suit the nature of your site and content.
Note:
At the bottom of this page, you will find additional membership options related to registration, permissions, and the price box, but there is no need to use them, as the default settings are sufficient for the purpose.
You can review the plugin’s documentation if you want to learn more about the function of these options and how to use them.
Through the Permissions tab shown in the previous image, you can choose who can purchase this membership and modify the message that appears to users who are not entitled to purchase it.
The Price Box tab allows you to adjust the design of the price box, as it provides a preview of its design and the gray box appears with the phrase “Subscribe now” inside it.
9- Finally, through the Advanced tab in the add-on settings, you can set advanced options such as setting a Membership Access URL and a Custom Login Redirect URLs .
After you have finished setting all the membership settings, now click Publish so that this membership is ready for use.
Stage 2 – Setting the rules and conditions for membership
Now we have to add rules to set the terms of operation of this membership by choosing the name of the add-on from the control panel and then choosing Rules . The Rules window will appear, click the Add New button
Here you can assign a name to the rule you want to add in the Add New Rule field , then choose the type of content you want to protect from the Protected Content drop-down list .
Then choose the membership you want to allow to access the protected content from the Access Conditions section . Here I will choose to protect all articles and allow access to those who have a gold membership.
It was possible to choose articles based on classification or tag instead of choosing to make them all non-free content. Adding MemberPress gives you great flexibility in this regard so that you can create different memberships to subscribe to different types of content according to the reader’s desire. Click on Save Rule after you have finished setting it.
Stage 3 – Verify that all pages necessary for the add-on are present
Go to MemberPress settings again and choose the Pages tab to verify that all the pages the plugin needs to work, such as the account page and login page, are present.
Also make sure that you have enabled the Show a login form on pages containing unauthorized content option . As shown in the following image, this option displays the login page when a visitor or user tries to access protected content that they do not have access to.
Stage 4-Add the paid articles you want to your site
Now go to the Articles tab in the control panel and add a new article with paid content. We will add a demo article here to verify that the addition works as it should.
Below the article, you will find additional options that did not appear before installing the MemberPress add-on, as shown in the following image. These options allow you to control access at the article level, meaning you can override the rules you set for all articles individually.
Activate the necessary options to make access to the article limited to users who have a gold membership, then we will publish the article on the site as usual.
After publishing the article, copy its link and try to access it using a different browser than the browser you use to access the site, or log out of the site and then try to access the previous article. A login page will appear to you as follows, and it will display a message (You are not authorized to view this page) stating that you do not have the right to access this content.
You can find out which memberships each article requires to access it by browsing the site’s articles. As you will notice, a new column will appear within the article information called Access , which contains the name of the membership required for each article.
Of course, most of the phrases are in English, and you can this add-on if your site content is in Arabic.
Stage 5-Customize the free articles you want to make available on your site
Finally, we will explain to you how you can allow visitors to access content without paying by customizing the number of articles that the visitor can read before he is forced to subscribe monthly.
To achieve this, you must go to the MemberPress add-on settings again, then choose the General tab .
Now go to the SEO & PayWall section and activate the Enable PayWall option and specify the number of articles that you allow visitors to read for free by writing the number you want in the Free Views field .
It is preferable that you follow this step on your website that you intend to create to profit from content. Because in this way, you contribute closely to visitors’ trust by allowing them to view a limited part of the site’s content, which helps them know the quality of your content and decide whether to subscribe or not.
Conclusion
With this, you have reached the end of our article in which we explained in detail how to transform a WordPress website from a blog that publishes content for free to a blog that requires a paid subscription to access most of the content, using two add-ons that provide you with a membership system: the Paid Memberships Pro add-on and the MemberPress add-on.
You should now be able to create a site that displays free or paid articles, as there is a special membership that visitors must subscribe to in order to read paid articles.
Start now by creating memberships on your site and choosing their validity period, cost, payment method, and type of protected content to start earning from your site’s content. But in the end, we advise you not to start asking for money in exchange for content until you have built a strong audience that trusts what you offer and knows that they are paying for distinctive content that they cannot obtain. Anywhere else.
