Lots of people are looking for way to leverage their website to provide a valuable service for their clients as well as increasing their income at the same time. There are several ways that you can do this, here are two examples.
- You could use your blog to provide lots of useful information, this could be technical explanations, useful business tips or even leisure information. While people are reading this information you can add adverts to the side or within the text that will direct you to other websites that sell products that are related to your blog posts. In return for directing your visitor to their website they pay you an agreed fee or commission on the sale. This is called affiliate linking.
- The second method is creating a paid membership area which contains information that people are willing to pay a monthly figure to have access to. There are several industries where this is a successful way to share your knowlegde. Business Coaching, technology, fitness and marketing are all ideal business types to run membership sites.
Today we are going to be looking at membership plugins. There are many membership plugins available for WordPress, some are free plugins and some are what is termed Premium Plugins.
Free membership plugins
Free membership plugins while having many features generally assume a reasonable knowledge of WordPress. If you need to style or make changes or you have installation or support issues, these tend to be dealt with in the WordPress.org support forums. There is no free support or anyone you can call on for specific help.
Many free plugins have a service that is either carried out by the plugin owners in house developers at a cost or you can upgrade to receive premium support if you need help.
Premium membership plugins
If you want additional features to the free plugins or you need support premium plugins are ideal. These companies make a living from their plugins and you can be sure they will be testing them constantly with other WordPress plugins and the core files to ensure they don’t clash or cause errors when they update etc. You tend to have additional payment gate ways and they are feature rich.
What membership plugins do we recommend
We have used the S2Member Plugin which is free however if you need more features or support you can upgrade to a premium version.
Visit the website here for more information on how the membership plugin could help your business.
If you need help configuring S2Membership please contact one of the team by email or on 01280 816580.