Imagine walking into a buffet where the appetizers are freely available to everyone, but the main course requires a special ticket. This is akin to using the Paid Content block (formerly known as the Premium Content block) on your site. It enables you to serve a blend of free and premium content, enticing visitors with a small taste of what you offer and encouraging them to subscribe for the full, exclusive experience. Just like the buffet, the possibilities for what to serve and how are endless.
You can use the Paid Content block on your site for access to exclusive content that you create – video, images, text, anything at all. And you can create plans for one-time, monthly, or annual payments, as well as donations or offer a “Pay what you want” option.
When you want your posts to include a combination of content that is available to the public and exclusive members-only paid content, the Paid Content block is the way to go!
If you don’t want any portion of the content in a post to be available to the public, you might want to consider creating a Paid Newsletter instead of the process described below. If you don’t want to charge for subscriber-only content, creating a Free Newsletter may be a better option.
While you can get quite complex with the Paid Content block for a membership site if desired, if you’re looking to add more advanced membership features we recommend working through our lesson on Membership Plugins as well before making a decision on the set up you want to create.
Using the Paid Content block to create a membership site is a quick way to offer member-only content that you want to charge for. Managing members (which will often be referred to as subscribers in this context) is also easier than using the password protection option previously covered since it’s an automated process, and it’s more secure since there’s no password for your members to share with other people. Remember that this option is only applicable for paid memberships. You can’t offer free, members-only content with this option.
The basic steps include:
- Connect or create a Stripe account
- Create your subscription plan(s)
- Create a page or post
- Add the publicly available content that everyone will be able to see
- Add the Paid Content block and assign the appropriate plan to it
- Create both the Guest View content and the Subscriber View content within the block
- Publish the page or post
When someone visits your site, they will see the publicly available content with the choice to subscribe or log in for the premium content. Once they’ve paid to be a member, and they’re logged in, they will see the subscriber-only, premium content that you’ve created.
If you include the Paid Content block with a specific plan on multiple pages or posts, logged in visitors will have access to all of the content throughout the site that is assigned to the same plan.
Our support guide for the Paid Content block covers the steps of using this block in detail, so it’s best to use that step-by-step guide alongside this course.
While you can connect or create a Stripe account, and create your subscription plans, on the fly when adding the block within a page or post, let’s start by getting these pieces setup in advance.
If you haven’t already, you’ll need to connect or create a Stripe account to use the Paid Content block. Our support guide on Connect a Stripe Account will walk you through the steps and options to get this part setup, as well as cover important information you need to know about.
Note: Stripe is available in many countries, but not all. Be sure to check availability for your country here↗︎ . If Stripe is not available in your country, this feature can’t be used. Instead, you’ll need to use plugin options that allow you to connect different payment gateways. We cover plugins in the Membership Plugins lesson.
Next, you’ll want to create at least one subscription plan.
Once your membership subscription plan(s) are set up, you can assign the applicable plan to each instance of the Paid Content block that you add to your pages or posts. This means that it is possible to offer more than one membership option, and your members will only have access to the content they’ve subscribed to. The trick will be in keeping your content and plans organized if you decide to offer more than one subscription plan option.
So let’s take a look at what types of plans you could consider offering.
Note: Much of the following information is also relevant if you decide to use a Membership plugin, it’s pretty much the backbone of any membership site. The logistics of how you set it up may change based on the tools you’re using.
Plan options
You have many options available for the way you handle your membership payment plan subscriptions.
Frequency:
- One-time charge
- Monthly recurring
- Annual recurring
Additional options:
- Mark it as a donation
- Allow members to choose their own price
Levels:
- One single membership plan
- Multiple plans
You can also mix and match between these choices.
One thing to remember is that each Paid Content block can only have one payment plan attached to it. This is important when planning your content.
While you can offer different membership levels, you will need to determine which Paid Content blocks will belong to each plan.
If you want more than one level included in the same page or post, you’ll have to add more than one Paid Content block to the same page or post.
Create a new subscription plan
To create a subscription plan, you’ll go to Tools > Earn and click on the Manage Premium Content button. This will open your Payments Dashboard↗︎ .
For each new subscription plan that you create, you’ll need to decide on the following information:
- Name of the payment plan subscription
- Renewal frequency: Monthly, Yearly, or One time sale
- Currency and amount
- Do you want to mark it as a donation?
- Do you want to offer a “Pay what you want” option?
- Do you want to allow customers to make the same purchase multiple times?
Note: Since we’re creating members-only content for a membership site, you don’t want to mark this plan as a “Paid newsletter subscription” since that’s a different feature. Check out our Newsletters 101 course if you do want to create a Paid Newsletter.
Be sure to give your subscription plan a name that will make it easily identifiable, especially if you plan to create more than one plan.
Pricing subscription plans can be tricky for some people, and this isn’t something we can give you definitive guidance on as it’s subjective. We recommend doing some research of other membership sites in your niche to see what they’re charging. This doesn’t have to dictate what you charge, but it can provide a good starting point if you’re not sure.
Another tip is to start with a lower price to gauge interest, and gradually increase the price to see how it affects your sign-up volume. One thing to note is that changing the price of a subscription won’t affect existing subscribers, it will only apply to new subscribers. If you start out with a higher price and decide to lower the price, then you may run into a situation of existing subscribers not being happy that they’re paying more than what you currently charge.
So, give pricing some careful consideration, but don’t let it stop you from moving forward. While you want to be mindful about making changes to prices, it is something you’re able to do at any time.
Single membership level
For a super simple membership, we recommend creating just one membership subscription plan. This saves you from having to keep track of multiple plans, and remembering which plan to apply to which content.
Take some time to consider which type of subscription plan will best suit you, your audience, and your content.
Aside from naming it well, and choosing what price and currency you want for it, the biggest question will be around the frequency and pay what you want options.
The benefit of choosing the monthly or annual option is that it creates a regular, recurring income stream for you that you can build over time. But you do need to keep providing new content consistently for your members for a recurring membership cost to offer meaningful value to them.
The one-time option is useful if you want to let your members choose to pay for the specific content pieces they want. This can also give you more flexibility for when you want to create members-only content, since you won’t feel pressured to create ongoing recurring content for an ongoing recurring membership plan.
The nice thing about the pay what you want option is that you set the minimum price that you’re comfortable with, and your followers can pay more if they wish.
There really aren’t any right or wrong answers for these options. It comes down to what aligns best for you, your audience, and your content. You also aren’t stuck for life with your decision. You can always choose to change your membership strategy later if it makes sense to do so.
If you do want to offer multiple membership plans you can get as creative as you like with how you do it, but we recommend one of two methods.
- Use multiple Paid Content blocks each assigned to a different membership plan in the same page or post.
- Categorize your content into Specialized Topic Memberships.
Multiple membership levels with Paid Content blocks
Monthly and Annual
Let’s say you want to offer both a monthly and an annual membership option. The steps for this would be as follows:
- Create a monthly membership subscription plan
- Create an annual membership subscription plan
- In your page or post, add the Paid Content block
- Apply the Monthly plan
- Create the Guest view content clarifying that this is the monthly subscription option
- Create the Subscriber view content
- Duplicate the Monthly plan Paid Content block
- Change the plan to the annual plan
- Adjust the Guest view content to clarify that this is the annual subscription option
By doing it this way, you only need to build the content once and both your monthly and annual subscribers will have access to the same content, just positioned slightly differently on the page.
Keep in mind that with this approach if you want to make any small changes to the content you’ll need to make the changes twice (in each of the Subscriber views for the two separate Paid Content blocks). An alternative, especially if you need to make big changes, would be to delete one of the Paid Content blocks, make the changes to the remaining one, then duplicate it and adjust the plan and Guest view again as explained above.
Bronze, Silver, Gold
Offering different levels of content can be done in a similar way as above by including separate Paid Content blocks that each contain different (or progressively more) content.
One approach might be to build out your Bronze content first, duplicate the block and change the plan to Silver, then add additional content to it. Then duplicate the Silver block, change the plan to Gold, and add some more content.
Just remember that making changes to one Paid Content block won’t affect any others, even if you duplicated the block initially. So if you create three levels that all include the Bronze content, and you then need to make a change to the Bronze content, you will need to make the change in all three blocks separately.
We also recommend providing a clear explanation of what is included in each of the levels you’re offering, so that visitors don’t think they need to subscribe to multiple plans in order to have access to the different levels of content.
Note
It is not possible to nest Paid Content blocks inside each other. So you can’t create a Bronze Paid Content section and then include a Silver Paid Content block as an add-on upgrade inside of it.
Categorize your content into Specialized Topic Memberships
Another option for a membership site is to create Specialized Topic Memberships. For websites that cover a range of topics, it could be useful to offer memberships based on each topic. For instance, a news website might have memberships for politics, sports, culture, or business. This allows your members to choose the membership content that interests them most.
You have the same choices of creating a single membership plan per topic or multiple membership plans per topic with this approach. Just keep in mind that the more layers you add, the more complex it becomes to manage and keep everything straight.
If you go with topic based memberships, you can also set up landing pages for each topic that includes a description of the topic, details of what’s included, and a Query Loop block filtered to show the posts corresponding to that topic’s category. This gives members a central location to access the category content in their membership plan while also giving non-members a preview of what they’re missing out on!
Additionally, to entice signups, this page could also include a special Paid Content block, using this topic’s membership plan, to offer visitors a sign-up bonus of your choice for subscribing.
The steps to setup a topic specific landing page for members-only content are as follows:
- Create a Post Category to use on your topic specific posts
- Add a new page
- Give the page a topic relevant Page Title that includes the name of the Post Category
- Add some enticing content to the page to get them excited about the content they’ll have access to
- Add either a:
- Payment Buttons block with the correct topic subscription plan OR
- Paid Content block that reveals a special bonus piece of content once they subscribe
- Add the Query Loop block and filter it to the taxonomy for the appropriate Post Category
- Add a subscribe block so that members can also sign up to receive email notifications for when new posts are published (be sure to set the appropriate Newsletter Visibility for each post you publish)
You can also add whatever other content you’d like to this page to dress it up, perhaps a video, or some images.
You would then repeat this process for each topic-specific membership you want to offer. Again, for simplicity, we would recommend using one membership payment plan per topic, but that’s up to you.
Note
If you’re using a Block theme with the Site Editor, it is possible to create custom templates for each category using the Category Archives template. This process is outside the scope of this course, but you can review our support guides to learn more about working with Templates and the Archive Template. While we don’t currently have a support guide specifically for the Category Archives template, the Archive Template functions in a similar way.
Once your category and landing page are set up, to maintain it you will:
- Create a new post
- Apply the correct category to it
- Add your public content to the post
- Add the Paid Content block
- Apply the topic specific membership payment plan
- Create the Guest view content
- Create the Subscriber view content
- Publish the post
New visitors can then subscribe, and members can login, directly on any post or the landing page to see the content they subscribe to.
Click here for a list of more categorization topic examples
Educational Websites: Memberships could be offered based on subjects or fields of study. Examples might include memberships for math, science, literature, art, history, or technology topics.
Cooking/Food Websites: You could offer memberships based on cuisine type (Italian, Mexican, French, etc.), cooking skill level (beginner, intermediate, advanced), or type of food (vegan, gluten-free, paleo, etc.).
Health and Fitness Websites: Memberships could be offered for different fitness goals (weight loss, muscle gain, cardio health, etc.), types of exercises (yoga, weightlifting, cardio, etc.), or health topics (nutrition, mental health, preventative health, etc.).
Arts and Crafts Websites: Memberships could be specialized by type of craft (knitting, painting, pottery, etc.) or by skill level (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
Travel Websites: Memberships could be offered based on destination type (beach, mountain, city, etc.), travel style (budget, luxury, adventure, etc.), or specific regions/countries.
Technology Websites: Different memberships could be offered for different areas of interest such as AI, data science, cybersecurity, coding languages, hardware, software, etc.
Music Websites: Memberships could be specialized by genre (rock, jazz, classical, pop, etc.), instrument (guitar, piano, drums, etc.), or music production (songwriting, mixing, mastering, etc.).
Lifestyle Websites: Memberships could be specialized by different lifestyle choices or interests such as minimalist living, sustainable living, luxury lifestyle, parenting, DIY home projects, etc.
Finance Websites: Memberships could be based on different areas of personal finance (investing, retirement planning, tax planning, etc.) or different levels of financial knowledge (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
Gaming Websites: Memberships could be offered based on game genre (RPG, strategy, shooter, etc.), platform (PC, console, mobile), or competitive level (casual, ranked, professional).
These are just a few examples. The possibilities are endless, and the best choices depend on the type of content your website offers and the interests of your audience. If you have a website offering several of the above broader topics, you could offer memberships for each section such as arts, travel, lifestyle, finance, etc.
Some important setting options to keep in mind include:
Members of Paid Content subscriptions won’t automatically be emailed notifications of new content. They do need to be separately subscribed to your site to receive email notifications. So, it’s a good idea to add the Subscribe block to each of your posts, or in the Footer of your site for all pages and posts, as well.
When you create a Paid Content payment plan, don’t check off the option for “Paid newsletter subscription”. This will restrict the payment plan to the Paid Newsletter feature only and you won’t be able to use the payment plan on the Paid Content block.
On the individual posts, make sure to leave the Newsletter Visibility option set to Everyone. This will ensure that the general public has access to the content, but your subscribers will still receive an email notification.
To access your subscribers and subscriptions, you’ll go to Tools > Earn and click on the Manage Premium Content button. This will open your Payments Dashboard↗︎ .
In this section, you can review your earnings, manage your customers and subscribers, and manage your payment plans.
We have a detailed breakdown of these sections in our support guide for Manage Paying Customers and Donors and you can learn more about associated costs in our Related Fees guide.
No matter which approach you take when using the Paid Content block to create your membership(s), you can include whatever content you like in the Subscriber view portion of this block. All blocks will work inside this block (except the Paid Content block which can’t be nested inside another Paid Content block).
This means you can design the content within this block exactly the way you would any other page or post that isn’t using the Paid Content block. The content can be anything from a single paragraph, image or video, to a full page worth of content. This allows you to mix free content with paid extras like a free summary followed by paid in-depth details. Or you might display half the page’s content to everyone, but keep the remainder as paid content, along with a member-exclusive video or a factsheet download.
There are no limits to what you can do or how you do it.
Regarding content types to include, explore all possible options. Our Intro to Blogging course might be helpful, as it covers content types and brainstorming techniques. For now, below is a list of ideas that might be different from what you’d expect.
Take the time to carefully assess each idea, avoiding hasty dismissals. Think about whether you’d enjoy creating a specific type of content and if it genuinely suits your topic and audience.
- Downloadable templates or printables
- Tutorials or mini-courses
- Poems, short stories, or a novel with one chapter per post
- Artwork
- Q&A advice
- Case studies or research papers
- Reviews
- Infographics
- Interviews
- Podcasts
- Video demonstrations
Many of these content types can also be offered for free, but there’s no reason you can’t enhance them into more substantial or exclusive pieces that your followers will pay for.
Pro tip
It’s often wise to provide some high-quality or exclusive content for free, giving your site visitors a preview of what they can expect from your paid content.
Note
Only the visual display of the content within the Paid Content block is currently protected. Non-subscribers can access files, videos, or images included in this block if they gain access to the direct link. This feature does not directly apply protection to the files in your media library specifically.
The ability to offer members-only premium content alongside free content makes the Paid Content block the ideal choice for a simple paid membership site.
If you’re looking to create a more robust membership site with advanced options, our lesson on Membership Plugins will get you started.
Which of the following is NOT a benefit of using the Paid Content block for memberships?
That’s right. The WordPress.com Password Protection option isn’t part of the Paid Content block, and in fact would prevent visitors to your site from being able to see that you have premium content available for them to purchase.
Whoops! This is a benefit of the Paid Content block. You can click Reset below to try again, or review the Overview section of this lesson.
What type of content can be protected using the Paid Content block for memberships?
You got it. You can include any type of content or block within the Paid Content block. The only exception is that you can’t nest another Paid Content block inside it.
Just keep in mind that “files” such as those within your media library aren’t separately protected. So if someone were to share the URL of a file that is stored in your media library, that file URL won’t be protected. Though this is typically a low risk for most sites.
Whoops! The Paid Content block gives you more options than this. You can click Reset below to try again, or review the Content Options section of this lesson.
What is the main difference between using the Paid Content block and the Password Protection option?
Indeed! This is a major benefit of the Paid Content block. You can publish your pages or posts to be public to help draw in more traffic, you can offer some teaser content to the public to spark their interest, and then offer them the means to purchase access to your exclusive, premium content.
Whoops! This isn’t a concern for the Paid Content block. You can click Reset below to try again, or review the Overview section of this lesson.
Which of the following is NOT an option you can offer when creating subscription payment plans using the Paid Content block?
Exactly. The Paid Content block offers the options of a one-time charge, monthly or annual recurring charges, and a “Pay what you want” option.
Whoops! The great news is that yes, the Paid Content block does offer this option. You can click Reset below to try again, or review the Plan options section of this lesson.
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