How to setup a paywalled blog?
After all the ‘theory’, now the juicy part.
The Content/Blogging System
I am using WordPress for this blog. As much as I don’t like the many ways WordPress took over the last decade, it’s still just the most easy and flexible to use blogging system out there. It’s free, there are tons of themes that make your blog look nice from day one and also many plugins that make your life easier.
Content Locking Plugin
I did paid content sites over a decade ago with WordPress and I have to say, I didn’t expect how much things have changed since then. All I wanted to do was showing some message instead of the post, and making people to register to unlock the content. This was super easy to do in the past, but today every Plugin asks you for ~$200 a year. Some platforms handle everything for you, including payments and you can easily pay $50-$200 a month(!) for their service. Ridiculous.
I tried some of the paid ones, but they all sucked. Instead of doing just the membership part well, they decided to overload each plugin with features while neglecting basic functionality. Thus many also had bad reviews.
After some testing and searching and testing again I stumbled upon Simple Membership Plugin (https://simple-membership-plugin.com).
It handles different membership levels, the members and even payments with Stripe, Paypal and some other payment processor I can’t remember. It offers plenty of free plugins (and some paid ones). The best part, the plugin is completely free. Also check the documentation. It’s outstanding. You can barely find such a detailed documentation even on stuff you paid a lot of money for.
I won’t repeat here how to setup everything, you can find everything described in very much detail in their documentation.
My Tweaks
I wanted to use Lemon Squeezy for letting members subscribe to paid posts since I am already using Lemon Squeezy. Do I recommend Lemon Squeezy? Not sure. They work well, but they have plenty of bugs and the support when you report bugs is… let’s say, not that good.
One reason I stay with Lemon Squeezy is that they are a so called ‘Merchant of Record’ (What’s a Merchant of Record?)
Especially with many small amount payments I don’t want to take care of invoicing, refunding and whatever headache awaits me there.
Lemon Squeezy and the Simple Membership Plugin both offer an API. Lemon Squeezy can trigger a hook everytime an event happens (someone subscribes, a subscription expires). This makes it super easy to add members once they paid or upgrade their user level. And also downgrading their user level back to free again once they canceled their subscription.
Everything else could be done easily within the plugin’s config settings in the WordPress dashboard.
Putting everything together requires some PHP knowledge. That’s why I’m always saying ‘Learn to code!’. You can easily build whatever you want and need without having to rely on others.
Another solution would be to use something like Zapier, but this makes you dependant on a 3rd party service again, coming with another subscription. We don’t want that. We want to stay lean and flexible.
More Tweaks: Mailing Lists
In addition to the tweaks above I also used the API of Mailchimp. Mailchimp is a provider for newsletter services, similar to beehiiv. Every user that registers gets added to my Mailchimp list.
With newsletter providers as Mailchimp you can create so called ‘sequences’, which are a series of mails that get automatically sent once someone gets added to a specific list. In my case for example I am assuming that most people registering to the blog just got to know me through Twitter.
I added a sequence which explains the benefits of a paid subscription and offers everybody to subscribe to the more advanced but paid articles on the blog. Since I assume that most will be new to affiliate marketing I offer them the ebook I wrote (https://store.ralf-christian.com/buy/142f81fa-908d-4dd7-9cc7-dc57bd772c09) to help them getting starting with affiliate marketing, and finally I invite them to the free Forum (https://forum.ralf-christian.com) so they can learn even more and also connect with others.
Those are my first tries with funnel like mailing lists and there’s a lot to learn, test and try. Pretty exciting 🤓
Final Tweaking
The Simple Membership Plugin offers several pages for login, registering, the member’s profile and a page which shows the different membership levels you are offering (called Join there). You also want to link to logout from the blog again. Support from the plugin for doing this in a menu is kind of rudimentary. But they are offering many functions you can use outside of their plugin. One of them is
SwpmMemberUtils::is_member_logged_in()Put a function for that in your functions.php and you can check inside your menu of the member is logged in or logged out. You can see this in action in the menu of my blog.
Final Words
We reached the end of this series. I hope you got an idea of where the web will move towards to and what this means for content publishers and even creators as we are seeing them today on social media. I hope I also gave you a clear idea on how to proceed with your own content/creator business to make it future-proof.
This wasn’t meant as a tutorial you could follow. Your idea of a locked content site might be different than mine. That’s also why the developers of Simple Membership Plugin said their plugin can never solve any problem and is meant to solve the basic problems a membership site has. So you will have to tweak it to your own idea of a membership site. And that’s great. It would be straight boring if everybody would do exactly the same.
Good luck. I hope to see you creating some beautiful source of knowledge worth paying for.