One of the easiest ways to sell content online is with a membership site using WordPress as a CMS with WishList Member as the membership plugin.

A membership site is where visitors have to register or pay to access information in a password protected area. Paid for content has long been a lucrative revenue model (over 2 billion dollars spent last year on online content in the US), however even if you take away the paying side, a membership site is still a great way to develop a community.

Using WishList Member with WordPress:

I spent a couple of weeks researching WordPress membership plugins before I decided to use WishList Member plugin. I purchased the Single Site Licence for $97 and overall I was very happy with the product.

The reasons I chose WishList Member were:

• the documentation videos were laid out simply and setup is straightforward
• there is an active forum for support (I always like a forum because users give better answers about a product than the people who have created it!)
• it is used by David Risley, something of a membership site expert
• they are a well-established company and well-respected within the WordPress community

Set up a membership site in a few minutes with WishList Member plugin

After you’ve purchased the licence from WishList Member they will give you a download link for the plugin. This plugin should then be unzipped and the resulting folder called "wishlist-member" (1.9MB) should be uploaded to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder in your WordPress installation using an FTP client such as Filezilla.

Setting up membership levels

Once you’ve activated the plugin through the Plugins panel of the WordPress administration area the first thing you must do it is to create your membership levels. Further down the line you may want to create different membership levels (bronze, silver, gold membership levels, for example) but let’s say you just want to start with one.

Go to WL Member > Manage Membership Levels > Membership Levels and create a new level, let’s call it “Subscriber”.