Selling Access to Content – a Review of Your Options

Hey there. Uh, we’re talking about selling access to content, and we’re talking about doing this, of course, on the WordPress platform. And the truth is you have a ton of options. That’s what we’re going to spend this half an hour going over your options. Now, if you’ve ever been at one of my talks, you know, I don’t normally start by talking about myself.

And this is just a rare occasion because my background specifically, when it comes to this kind of content, Is pertinent. Um, I built one of the very, very first online learning platforms. Uh, back in 1996. I also have spent the last 15 years building membership sites on WordPress. So, uh, The, the ability to navigate and compare all these different options is something I’ve been doing.

Uh, I’m able to do it today because I’ve been doing it for a long time. So that’s, that’s what we’re going to get into. And to be clear in order to do a comparison, you have to start with understanding what’s the criteria, what is the playing field that you’re evaluating on? Right. Uh, and so what I’m going to do is cover 11 different features.

That I believe you need to, uh, have, or that you’re likely going to want to have, um, When you build out this ability to sell access to your content, you may discover that you only want 10 of them or eight of them, but I’m going to cover the 11 that I hear most frequently when I’m working with customers and I’m helping them navigate and choose the right solution.

The first one is that they have to be able to protect content. That’s just a no brainer. You want to make sure that people who pay get access and people who don’t pay don’t get access. But the nuance in here. Is that you also don’t want to have to touch every single post and every single page. So being able to say all of these pages underneath this page, get the protection or all of these posts in this category, get the protection that will help you out a long way.

You want short codes so that you can protect partial pages, but frankly, right. Unless you’re going to stick with a plugin for the rest of your life. That can also make it more complicated later when you want to change a plugin and realize I got to go find all these. So, um, you know, there’s all this, I will say you get extra points, right?

Um, depending on the nature of how you can message. Like, Hey, you don’t have access to this. You don’t want to just four Oh four them. Right? You want to be able to say, Oh, you don’t have this. This is for paying members and be able to put a custom link there that redirects them to where they could buy it, or it just directs them to, Hey, you don’t have access to this.

Uh here’s you know, here’s how you can find, get access to it. Um, also when someone is a member and they log in. Where do you route them? Right. Do you have an ability to say, Ooh, I know what program you’re in and then take you somewhere there. So little nuances to the protecting content. The second feature is the ability to collect money.

And, uh, these days it’s not just about. PayPal or Stripe, you may need other gateways depending on where in the world you’re located. But also the truth is you want to be able to go, uh, daily, weekly, monthly, annually, right? Quarterly annually, you aren’t Mo you know, one-time payments. Uh, you want the ability to shape how you collect funds, and there’s another nuance to this, which we call multiple payment plans that we’ll talk about later.

Okay. Um, the third criteria. And you would think that more plugins do this? Well, most of them don’t, and it’s not the specific technical requirement of being able to say, I want to sell access to a single or do a specific set of posts. Everyone goes, okay. Yeah, we can do that. And you go, right. But let’s say I had 25 posts.

Am I going to create 25 plans? Uh, what am I naming? Those plans, the access to this one page plan and what happens when someone logs in then and they, they want to see the content they’ve bought, right? Like all the cloogy stuff happens after you go say, Oh yeah, you can create a plan for that. Um, so who does that and treats it as a first-class citizen who treats it properly and says, yes, we can do it well.

And who doesn’t. Right. And that’s, that’s what we’re comparing here. Um, Then we have the fourth criteria and that is the ability to automate access. Now, for the longest time, I mostly categorized this as content tripping, right? That ability to say, if you sign up today three days from now, you get access to this and 10 days from now, you get access to that.

But the truth is the more I work with customers, the more I get all sorts of different requests, like. Um, yes, I want that for some content, but here’s this other stuff that I just want to open it up on March 2nd and this other one on April 17th and you go, okay. That’s that’s specific, but okay. We can do that regardless of when you sign up, these dates are going to open up this content and that’s one part of the automation.

That’s the content dripping part, but what happens if you’re like, well, when I finished this material, when I get to the end of this one, I want to get access to other stuff, or you only get this bonus if you’ve done these other things. Those are Mazda phone-based, um, uh, access. And sometimes it’s not about opening up content.

Sometimes it’s about moving you from one program into another. And so the automated access or the automations of moving people between programs all becomes critical. Um, so that’s, that’s what you see here, right? That’s the fourth one. Uh, the fifth one is marketing automation. And I’ll be honest with you for the longest time.

Most of these plugins just said we support MailChimp and you’re like, yeah, but there’s a lot more than MailChimp, right? Um, you’ll see here, just on this list. There’s a whole bunch of others, right? Drip and convert kit and active campaign in a Weber. And. Constant contact and, uh, MadMimi and marrow posts. I mean, just get response and Ontraport, the list just goes on and on.

Uh, and, and, and you can’t expect a plugin to do everything and support everyone, but the more is better. Right? Um, a lot of times what happened in the early days is that plugins would just, they would build their own little template, structure and format so that you could go in and edit the emails that you wanted there.

And that was it. The plugin took care of it, but. Emailing from your web host is not always the most effective. It’s not always the most deliverable. Um, and so then they’d punt to going out and using a third party. The problem with just plain, I’ll just I’ll do that in campaign or I’ll do it. They Weber is it.

Sometimes you have to be able to communicate back and forth, right? And so you need tags, you need custom fields and all of a sudden it gets more complicated. So that’s, that’s the world that we’re living in there. All right. Uh, Uh, I think we’re halfway point of these criteria’s and that is the team or group access.

All right. Um, I’ll tell you a story. I was working with a guy a couple of years ago. Um, we did a launch in December. We did a follow-up launch in January. Each of these launches was a one week timeline. That’s it yet week opens up. He sends it mail list that he preps list, but he sends it out to them. They buy and then the week is done and they close up and we saw exactly how much revenue and it was good revenue, but how much revenue we were driving in a week.

And then we got to like late February. And I said, I think we ought to add. Team access, you can call it umbrella, access team, access, child accounts. You can call it whatever you want. But at the end of the day, the notion is one person buys and gives access to a small group of people. Um, in this case, we also said, well, since you’re going to, you know, have a five team member plan and a 10 team member plan, we’ll give you five and 10 copies of the PDF workbook so they can each manage and do their own homework.

Um, that was it. All we did was make duplicate, like made available multiple downloads of the same worksheet or set of worksheets. And we sold, we created a plan that was specific for five and another, for 10. And, uh, we didn’t. There was no change in content. There was no change in a big infrastructure, but that single change, right.

Doubled the revenue of that launch. Right. We had had two successful launches. The third launch, we doubled the revenue simply by introducing. Um, umbrella or team accounts. And that’s because, uh, the reality is people feel a lot more comfortable assuming you price. All right. They feel a lot more comfortable letting their team have access without sharing their own personal password.

Right. They feel a little bit like maybe that’s wrong, but when you just say, no, you have five people buy access to my people. It works out great. Now the next one is the request I get. Uh, almost all the time. It’s ridiculous how often I get it. And it’s also ridiculous how few solutions offer this as a first-class feature.

And that is this notion of being able to say, you get access to what you pay for. So if you start today and you pay for this coming month, you get access to that month. And if you pay the following month, you get access to that. If you pay for the year, you get access to the whole next year, but then it doesn’t give you the right to go backwards in time.

It doesn’t give you the right to look at the historical data. Right. And so I may want to charge it extra for that, or I just may want to lock it off. I worked with a guy about three years ago, he had this massive, massive historical content. And he’s like, they don’t, they don’t deserve it unless they’ve been a customer that long time.

I mean, there’s gems in there and I only want it for the people who pay extra. And so we just added this as you were buying, it said, here’s the little order bump that was like, do you also want to have access to all the archival stuff and charged an extra a hundred, 150 bucks? Everybody bought it. Right. I mean, it was just ridiculous how many people bought it and it was just like adding extra money, like gravy on top.

Here you go. Boom. There you go. It’s fantastic. But it’s because right. This notion is I want to be able to protect that, lock it down and only make it available to the people who deserve it. People who have paid for it. Um, and so this is that feature, the ability to restrict historical content. Okay. We’re past the halfway Mark.

Um, and we’re talking about articles and courses. Now I wrote about this the other day, uh, on christmas.com where I said, look, I was interacting right the last couple of weeks. Last part of December early January, I’ve been working with a client to, uh, launch a new online solution of online platform. Um, and of course she has content and she has, uh, courses and she wants them all together and she doesn’t want to take.

Content and shove it into a fake course, and she doesn’t want to take a course and just turn it into some pages and posts in the content. She doesn’t want to be constrained by the plugin that we choose. She just wants it to work naturally natively the way she thinks it should work and she’s not wrong.

So what happens is that for the longest time, if you were building a solution like this, you ended up picking one and then just jamming everything into it lately. Right. You look at lifter LMS and they added memberships as a first-class citizen. You look at, um, a to P courseware. They added memberships as a first class citizen.

Uh, you look at member press, they’ve added, uh, Online learning or a course as a first class citizen to their solution. Right. They’re both crossing the lines and going, yeah. Yeah. It just makes sense. If you’re selling access to content, you may want one or another approach and you want to be able to design a solution that works with both.

Not everything has to be a page or everything has to be a course. So, um, that’s what we’re looking at and evaluating against. Right. Um, payment plans is, uh, something that honest to God, just about every single internet marketer knows you need. Like, it’s just a no brainer for them. Cause you know that if you have a, you know, a special program, you’re going to want to be able to say, you can pay $500 and that’s upfront you get access to everything or you can pay three monthly payments for three months.

You’ll pay 200 bucks each. Right. And, and of course the person’s like, and I’ll get an extra a hundred bucks. Right. Or, uh, of course, if you want to spread it across the year, right. Um, it’s going to be a nine, $9 a month. Right. And you’re like, well, then I get $1,200 instead of the original 500. Right. Like I make more money, but it’s all three payment plans are coming out the same product.

You’re just financing access for customers. Um, What’s crazy is most plugins. Don’t do this. And it’s silly because every, every person selling digital content online content knows this. These, these are ways to help drive conversion is let’s figure out how much money you have in your pocket right now and what you’re willing to do.

Um, and, and so we’re going to look at which of the plugins do this and do this well, which ones don’t. Okay. Second to last. This is number 10. Of the 11 features we’re using as criteria. And that is the ability to do upsells or one-time offers. If you’ve ever bought anything online, where you are an information product, where you buy something inexpensive, like $39 and in and of itself, you think that’s a great deal.

Well, it is a great deal. They’re likely subsidizing the deal, right? They’re thinking it’s worth 50 and their sound to you for 20, because they know that after you’ve paid. They’re going to offer you a one-time offer. Like, Hey, heads up, you got that, but do you want this? And then depending on, if you say yes or no, they’re going to give you another one and another one for that.

Now in the, in the simplest way to do this, you would just be able to redirect post purchase, redirect to another URL. In the best case, you can model out the funnel. And, uh, of course, if you’re using WooCommerce, which not everyone is doing, but if you were using WooCommerce to sell this stuff, you can always just go get another plugin and drop it in an extension like cart flows and do it for you.

But what we’re looking at is do any of these platforms offer this natively so that you can do it with the platform in the last, uh, and I know we’ve spent, you know, half of our time looking at this criteria, Uh, but the whole point is there’s no way to know what you’re judging. If you don’t know, uh, what the scorecard is about.

Right. So, um, the, the last component here is, is it. Friendly for a developer. Meaning if you say I like this, but I want it on the right side to the left, or I want it to say this instead of that. Or can you hide this part of it? Um, all of that is something that eventually a developer has to get involved and use the hooks, the filters, the native parts of how to code in WordPress to suppress something, changed something, adjust something to tweak it.

And that’s when you’re going to discover whether the person who wrote or the team that wrote this plugin likes you or hates you. Right is how, how much they’ve opened it up and made it easy for you. That’s what this criteria is about. So, um, that’s, you know, we, we, we spent 15 minutes talking about the criteria in a 30 minute talk.

I told you, this is where we’re going to spend. Our time is doing a comparison. Well, the truth is that a majority of the work is understanding how you’re grading, creating this rubric is critical. You may not have the same rubric as I have. Right. You may add something like, well, I need member directories that wasn’t on my list.

I rarely get that request. So it’s not in the top of my list, but, um, you may decide that’s what I need and I don’t need historical content. That will change how you compare the available options. Right. But what I did was I took this 11 and then I compared 14 different solutions. And what you’re going to notice is that I also compared not just membership plugins, but also LMS plugins, because both of them are bringing the ability to offer digital content, um, to folks online.

Right. And so, uh, even though. You know, some like if you’re, if you’re, LearnDash, you’re going to say, well, but a bunch of these criteria don’t, don’t apply to me. You’re right. If you’re building a hardcore serious online course solution, um, and, and you know, they’re building stuff for universities and you go, yeah, I don’t, I don’t need all that.

Um, you mean this rubric might not be perfect for you, but most of the people I talked to who are offering an online course are not trying to build a university level course. They’re trying to just protect some content, protect their proprietary information. And in that scenario, you may want more of this list and less of their list.

And that doesn’t mean you can’t use them to do what you’re doing. It may mean that you have to do, you need to bring a couple more solutions to the table, but that’s a lot of words for saying we’re about to look at one person’s mine, scorecard. Uh, for this 11 criteria and 14 different products. And, um, this is it.

Okay. The green circles mean, yes, they do it. The gray circles mean, yes, they do it kind of like maybe with a workaround or, uh, in the case of this line that says integrate with marketing automation solutions. Maybe they do it with one or two, right. Rather than with five or six. And what I didn’t want to start doing is going okay.

Uh, let’s score them and get, give them an a plus and give them a, you know, a, B and them a B minus, I don’t want to, I don’t want to play that game. So, um, if they kind of do it, but, but you can say still yes, with a straight face, that’s a gray dot. If they totally do it, that’s a green.now. Totally do it.

Doesn’t say anything about costs. Right. So, um, some of these products cost more than others. Some of these products have multiple different versions and you may only get the feature that makes this a green dot. You may only get that feature if you buy the most expensive version. Again, my goal is not to make this chart more complicated.

My goal is to make it pretty simple so that you can look at it and you can say, Oh, well it looks like there’s mostly green dots. Let me. Go check it out myself. Right? So this is a jumping board, a starting point for you. It’s not the end destination that says this is the end all be all to it. You’re going to have to go look at it.

But that said, what you’re going to see is on the very left access ally, uh, has just every dot knocked off and on the very right ultimate member, um, has five dots, two of which are gray, and you’re going to go, Oh, well that must be the worst. No, it’s not the worst. Remember I told you if your thing is all about member directories, they’re awesome.

It’s just, that’s not one of my criteria. Right. And if you’re not charging any money, they’re even better. Right. Um, but if you want to charge money, then you need to integrate with WooCommerce because you need to buy an extra piece, then you got to configure it and then the WooCommerce needs the payment gateways, and you can see why that’s a great dot it’s a little more work.

It just depends on what you’re trying to build. But if you’re selling access to content, um, that selling part is kind of important. And that’s why that green dot may say, okay, that isn’t exactly what I need for now. So this is the chart, right? This is it. And, um, in the last 10 minutes of our time here, right.

What I want to do is just tell you a little about these, right? Um, so access ally, uh, and, and I’ll tell you, if you draw there’s, there’s 14 of these. If you draw a line right down the middle, which I think is somewhere. Around WooCommerce or wishlist. If you drop it somewhere in the middle and you look all the way to the left, you’re going to see, these are really, really solid alternatives to do a whole lot of stuff.

And if you look at the right, it’s not that they’re bad, they just don’t do everything. But if you don’t need everything, they may be perfect for you. Right. Um, there’s also a reason why some of this stuff, historical. Content member as a membership and as a course, uh, payment plans, upsells one time offers and developer stuff.

You’ll see the bottom half of this chart right on, on the, on the list here. You may say I don’t, I don’t need any of that. So suddenly if you take, uh, even up to team-based group groups, If you take the second half of this list out and you just look at the top four or five, you and discover almost everything has dots.

And then suddenly you’re like, wow. So then I have a lot of options. So it just depends on what you need. But depending on that, right? If, if I needed something and I needed something that did everything, access ally is going to be at the very front of the list. They do it all. Yes. There’s that one green dot because they, they need me to use my CRM and a tag to be able to make the historical content, um, available in a certain way.

And you go, yeah. Okay. That’s a little bit of a workaround, but. Everything else is solid for them being able to do a one-time offer or an upsell. It’s a first class, it’s a primary part of their platform. Being able to sell a course, but also sell membership is a primary part. There’s no workarounds here.

It’s totally solid. Um, being able to integrate with a ton of marketing automation solutions, totally solid. So on the very left, you’re going to go, wow. They have it all. And you maybe haven’t heard of them as much. Right. You haven’t heard of them cause they’re way more expensive, right? Uh, than maybe some of the other plugins that are available.

If you go down and look at WP, member’s been around a long time, super solid plugin does some very basic things and does it really well and it’s free and you pay a little extra for some of the other add-ons, but it’s a fantastic plugin. But if you can get something for free or very inexpensive, then the access, how I might have just been too expensive for you to look at.

But the truth is when you compare it to everybody else, you go, wow. They’re super solid and fairly intuitive, right? Like, I mean, it’s because there’s a lot there. You’re going to spend a little time on it, but fairly intuitive digital access pass is a name you may not have heard of in a really long time.

They’re one of the OGs they’ve been around a long, long time. The challenge was never what they could do. The challenge was that it took a little bit of work. Uh, to make it happen. And you had to kind of know it too, to be able to do it. There was not a lot intuitive about it. They have redone the, uh, inside of the, you know, the admin side of the plugin.

They’ve made it a lot easier. It’s still, there’s still a ridiculous amount of things you can do with it. And so that can also mean, wow, you’re going to spend some time trying to figure this whole thing out. I will tell you this. They have some white glove services where you can buy three hours or four hours of time to have their experts go configure it.

And I would tell you, there is nothing, uh, You know, to stop me from doing that. I would totally do that if our building adapt site. Cause they know it, they know inside now the team they’re super solid every time I’m like, Hey, I wonder if dad does this. Vena’s like, yeah, it does. And then she clicks six times and I go, Oh wow.

I know. I didn’t even look over there. Right. So it’s there. It’s solid. You just may want the white glove service to get it done. The third on the list is lifter LMS. Lifter LMS is an incredibly powerful LMS that has added enough membership stuff that makes you go. Huh. Okay. I think they could do work on both sides now, a little bit missing on that single post, uh, protection, uh, kind of thing.

And so that’s missing their historical content, not, not a perfect solution there, but everything else. Rock solid lie you can do. And if you’re a developer getting access to their, uh, hooks and filters, lets you do just about anything you want. Right. Um, they have built and designed their platform to be flexible.

Uh, digital access pass has a great out there. Not because you can’t do it because. Majority of their documentation is for end users, not for developers. And so, uh, you may want to submit a ticket, but it’s not the same exact thing of saying, Oh, look at all the content that tells me exactly what to do and how to do it, which is what lifter LMS does really well paid memberships pro uh, been around now a long time.

Right? It’s hard to believe it’s been something like 10 years. Uh, since WordPress 3.0 and when they created custom post types. And when a lot of these new membership plugins showed up in the market, but paid membership pro been around a long time. Uh, the base product is free. You pay for the extra ad-ons.

These green dots include some extra add on, so you’d want to pay for that. Um, They, uh, you know, they, they do some, uh, the integrate with some of the marketing automation ones. Uh, so that’s not bad. Uh, they, they don’t have the courseware part, but, uh, man, so much power in that platform and all their extras.

Uh, and again, very tiered, very, very focused on being able to make. Developers lives a lot easier by just having really clean code for you to manipulate a member, press one of the easiest membership plugins in the world to work with. So doesn’t have every single feature, right? Historical context content isn’t there.

Multiple payment plans, not something they do, whereas paid memberships pro does it. And does it cleanly a member? MemberPress doesn’t do that, but. For everything else you might need. It is a rock solid one. It’s cheaper than some of the others. It is easy. Uh, and so you’re, and they have introduced now, um, that you can do it with, you know, of courses or memberships.

So they’re, they’re one of the ones that made that tweak to add that feature so they can span both something well worth looking at restrict content pro uh, has the group memberships and has the historical protection. So that’s super awesome. Um, they don’t have a lot of, uh, uh, one-time funnel building, but they do have a thank you redirect that you can use to solve this.

Um, they don’t do payment plans, multiple for the same access. They don’t do courseware, but they do just about everything else. So, uh, well-worth looking woo commerce were memberships, super powerful, um, missing a couple pieces in the middle, but you can, you can get that. As I said before, right? Like a WooCommerce with memberships, won’t get you, uh, everything for an up sell, but cart flows does.

And so if you buy cart flows, you can add that in and keep going. Um, I will tell you that their payment stuff is whatever you have for WooCommerce. So in this case, the green dot does assume if he wants subscriptions that you’re buying their subscriptions extension as well. Wishlist member, another old school player kind of like DAP, been around a long time.

They have, uh, re invented the plugin, built a whole bunch of more stuff. They’re actually one of the ones like if I could put a star instead of a green dot, when it comes to marketing automation or payment payment gateways, these guys support. Every one of them. Remember we, I gave you that list. They support all of them.

It’s crazy. How many marketing automations they, they support. It’s crazy how many payment gateways they support. So if those two are hot buttons for you, that’s super awesome. There’s some other things they don’t do the, uh, uh, automation and moving people between plans stuff. It’s super solid. They got a lot of good stuff there.

Um, so it is worth taking a look at what they’re doing. Learn dash, as I mentioned before, Does less than some of these others, but excels on the core side and really excels. I mean like blows people out of the water with how well they do core stuff. So if you’re really just focused on courses, learn dash may be all you ever needed.

You don’t need to worry about the rest, but when you start commingling some of those other things, um, that’s when you’re going to go, Oh, okay. Uh, you know, learn dash D you know, it doesn’t do it. Doesn’t do everything the way you want it to do. I will say multiple payment plans for a single thing. They get it.

They get it. And so that’s, that’s good news. Um, Debbie courseware recently added the whole member membership stuff, like I mentioned before. So, uh, they get the green dot for that, which is good news. You’ll see that they are less about, um, membership content that they just rolled that out. They’ve long been a solution for, uh, Courseware and they integrate well with WooCommerce, which, uh, it’s one of my go-tos when I’m using WooCommerce to add a course because they’re clean, they do the integration.

Well, super powerful solution. Um, so, and that should highlight, right. That just because they’re this far towards the right, there are no bad solutions in this list. They’re just solutions that differ on what they’re doing. Um,  is one of the SAS products, the only SAS product really here. Um, there are a lot of other memberships, SAS solutions, and they do a light touch to WordPress.

The reason member is in the list is because it’s tight integration to WordPress. Um, it has less of the features that we’ve talked about that are kind of the extras, but on the basics of selling access to content, protecting that content, um, integrating with a marketing solution, um, it’s solid. And they, they have some very, very large membership sites running there.

So, you know, you may want to check them out. Dopey members, smaller set of features, clean code works the way you’d imagine it, uh, published documents on all their filters. Uh, you know, but you’re not going to get drip, uh, from them. And so that’s, that’s going to hurt you. Uh you’re you’re, there’s just, there’s a lot of the extra stuff you’re not going to get because that’s just not the world they’re playing it.

They’re playing in the plain vanilla, simple world. Um, paid membership subscriptions. It’s a cosmos labs is another company that does this stuff. Um, it sounds a little bit like the WooCommerce subscriptions and paid memberships pro uh, got together, had a little baby. That’s how they named it. They do a couple of things.

They do a couple of those things. Well, uh, and the rest, you know, it’s just not there yet, and that’s not, that’s not, uh, you know, a negative thing I have built and I have worked with folks using the plugin. It does some things really super well. Um, so, you know, and again, one of the, one of the early players that did group based stuff, so that’s solid.

Um, and lastly, ultimate member, which I’ve talked about before, there’s nothing wrong on that end. It’s just not focused on everything that you’re focused on. So if you’re trying to sell access to your content, That may not be where you go right away. But if you’re trying to build a community around your content, that may be it right.

Community is kind of their, uh, their button. They do some of that. Well, that’s just not on this list. So, um, that’s it right? That’s the, the list of these players. Again, my name is Chris Lima. You can find me on Twitter at, at Chris Soma. I have a blog@chrissoma and of course work at nexus.net where we’ve built hosting, dedicated to products, just like this, uh, membership sites, online learning.

Uh e-commerce we built hosting dedicated for that. Thanks.