Monetise your following with WordPress

As an entrepreneur or public speaker you may have grown a large audience/following either via your social networking channels or on your WordPress website. Beyond the day-to-day services that you may already offer you may be struggling to think of ways you can generate more revenue with your community whilst adding value. Let’s explore together, some ideas to monetise your following.

Premium content

As you are aware, with WordPress you are able to build up a website filled with valuable information through pages and posts. Using a third party plug-in, such as Magic Members or S2 Member, you could create a membership area on your WordPress website where people can pay a monthly or yearly or one-off subscription to access specific content on your site. This is in effect creating a paywall to premium and valuable content. Once the paid member has logged in, they’ll be able to see articles that aren’t available to the public as well as other resources, downloads, videos etc.

Pay per article

Expanding on the membership area idea, you could also offer a pay per post option on your website. Say you are not able to dedicate the resource to keeping a membership area up-to-date then you could instead publish the articles that would require a one-off payment for someone to read it. This will then always be available to them in their membership area to read in the future. You will find this feature in many membership plugins available for WordPress. With certain plug-ins, you can show the first few paragraphs of the valuable content and then require payment to see the rest.

Social network using BuddyPress

If you’ve now got a wide range of people communicating via your website comments section, it might be worth looking at setting up your own social media network. You can do this through a tool called BuddyPress. BuddyPress is a plug-in for WordPress which contains a vast range of features that you would commonly expect in a social networking website such as Facebook.

People can interact on each other activity feeds, they can add friends, create groups, share content and so much more. Utilising the membership area idea previously mentioned, you could run your own private niche social media network on your WordPress website behind a monthly subscription paywall. This also affords you the benefit of a membership area which is driven by the community, the valuable content that the community is sharing will bring people back and help keep the subscriptions going, but allows you more freedom in regards to content creation.

Why should Facebook own your community when you could?

Run Wix or Squarespace like service

You may’ve read from our previous article that with WordPress Multisite, you can offer the ability for people to register and create their own unique website with their own selected theme and plug-ins activated. You can monetise this through a plug-in called ProSites, which allows you to set up monthly or yearly subscriptions for people to access certain levels. (Example you can make certain plugins or themes available to higher paying members).

Because you are established as the leader in your field, this could be an attractive proposition for your community, to build that website through a system that you the thought leader of the industry is supplying. You could add useful niche relevant plugins that would add value to a community member site and set it apart from generic site building services.

Other ideas

We are going to continue over the next few weeks and months to explore ways of generating revenue through WordPress. You will see detailed blogs on the above ideas coming out giving you details on how you could get started. We will also be exploring the following further ideas:

• Digital downloads
• Online consultations with pay for time slots
• Sponsorship
• And many more (no we do have other ideas honest!)

What ways have you generated revenue with your community/following through WordPress? Share them in the comments below.

If you would like some help in getting any of the above ideas started, we’ve helped clients around the world get their service offering online so contact us for a free initial consultation.