What Is a Paywall? How to Charge for Your Community on WordPress

What is a paywall? It is a gate on your website: some of it is open to everyone, and the rest is only for paying members.

Transcript

What is a paywall? It is a gate on your website. Some of it is open to everyone, and the rest is only for paying members. Visitors see a preview. Members see everything. And you choose what sits behind it. There are three kinds. A hard paywall, where you pay to see anything at all. A metered one, with a few free visits before you pay. And freemium, where the basics are free and the best parts are paid. The third kind suits a community, because free members can look around before they decide to pay. Newspapers made it famous. Now course creators and coaches use it too. So do professional groups, clubs, and creators with an audience of their own. What goes behind the gate is up to you. It can be a whole space, where paying members talk and learn together. It can be a single post, with a short teaser left open for everyone. Or it can be the perks of a plan, on a monthly or a yearly membership. For most small businesses, the paywall that works best is a community. People join for free, take part in the open spaces, and pay to enter the spaces where the real value is. That turns one sale into an income that repeats. Here is one on a real WordPress site. A free member can see every space in the community. But this one is for members only. That screen is the paywall. One click shows the plans. Free to take part, or paid to open everything. The plans sit side by side, so a visitor knows what each one opens before paying anything. The owner sets the plans and the prices, and decides which spaces each plan opens. A member who cancels keeps the time they already paid for. The payments go to the owner, through a payment account they control. And the member list stays on their own website. New members can get a welcome series by email, sent on a schedule the owner sets once. And the owner can see how many members there are and how active they are, on one screen. You can rent a paywall from a platform, or run your own. On a platform, they take a share of every sale. On your own site, you keep the payment. Their rules on pricing, or your plans and your prices. Their member list, or yours. And if the platform closes your account, everything goes with it. Every month without a paywall is a month your best work is given away for nothing. BuddyNext is the free community plugin for WordPress. Put your best work behind a paywall you own, starting this week. Get BuddyNext. The link is below.