Question:
Hi Rob, Do you know anything about setting up a pay wall on WordPress sites? I am considering if I might want to set up a pay wall and am interested in hearing more about how it would work.
Is it possible to have a general pay wall where people gain general access to site content for a year, but I could also make individual posts public access?
Thanks!
Elaine
Answer:
Absolutely,
This is called a membership, the “paywall” requires users to have an account, and maintain a payment for access. There’s plenty of WordPress plugins to configure and I work with entrepreneurs who want to set this up and learn how to manage it.
The elements involved are usually a payment processor, like PayPal, or authorize.net, a plugin with WordPress, I use Wishlist but can adapt to others, and then configuring those to work the way you want. It’s not hard to specify pages to be protected, or unprotected, and then create a menu item that says “Members content” and have them listed somehow…but the more particular you want to get with what posts are protected and aren’t, and if there’s time rules, and complexity like that…the more challenging the setup, if you map out exacly what you’d like to see, I can check how compatible the tool I usually recommend, Wishlist is, otherwise we can start development and play it by ear, based on how you see things working.
If you map it out with specifics, I can put a price on it, if you’d like to just build it, and make calls based on what you see, and how it looks, more of a “can we do this, how about this, can we change this” vs. “this is what i want to see, and i let you know how close we can get to that exact vision, and agree on a price for producing it”. I recommend using my Lifeline support plan, and if you’re responsive, it could take less then a month, but shouldn’t take more than 2 to build. There would be an expected level of maintenance you’d have to learn to take on, such as configuring what content is protected, and not, managing users who have trouble with their sign up process, people with browser issues, questions, etc. You have to realize you go from being a blog which no one expects anything from, do a content provider that people expect a level of service from because they are paying for access.
Hope that paints a clearer picture of what this type of setup takes!
-r
