Wildkatana Design
Making a Drupal Paid Membership Site
Thursday, June 4th, 2009UPDATE June 21, 2009: For a more detailed, step-by-step guide with pictures on how to set up a Paid Membership site using Drupal and Paypal, check out: How to Build a Paid Membership Website using Drupal
There are numerous ways to make money on the Internet these days. One of them is to make a popular site with lots of good content, and earn money either by charging people for membership or running ads. In my experience, the best way to make real money is by charging members a monthly subscription to access your site. Imagine if you have 100 members of your site, and that each one pays $10 a month for membership. That’s already $1000 a month residual income! Would that change your life? It would certainly help. Of course, a good site needs to be maintained, updated, and cared for. There are some tricky parts to consider when trying to make a successful membership site.
First, you should consider carefully the content you will have. It should be something original, something good, something that the users can’t get elsewhere for free. The users have to want what you are giving. This is the part I can’t really help you with, but I CAN give you some good pointers. It should be something you are interested in, because this will help you enjoy updating the site, and increase the quality of the content. It should also be something that many people are interested in, so that you can have a good audience. Preferably, it should be a niche that is not already overrun by competitors as well.
The next step is to decide how to make the site. In my experience, it is by far better to use an existing open source CMS (Content Management System) like Drupal than to build a site on your own or hiring someone to build it for. The reason I suggest Drupal for the basis of your site, is because Drupal is the fastest-growing open-source CMS today. It offers thousands of custom modules which you can use to get your site going without doing much coding. I use Drupal exclusively in all of my projects now. It can be customized to fit any site design needs.
The final step is setting up a way for the members to pay you. You need a way to control the content you have so that only paying members can see the ‘premium’ content, and you need a way to sell membership. In the old days, people would just manually add memberships or just put a password on a directory and email the password to people who pay. We are in modern times now, and there are much better ways to do this. What we want is a system that will dynamically grant and remove access to site content depending on the payments it gets from a user. Drupal already has a robust User System and Node Access system, which can both be used to this end.
One thing that Drupal lacks is a good Paid Membership module. Users can either spend hours and hours adapting the existing Ubercart or Ecommerce modules to fit their needs, (and usually having to settle for less than what they envisioned) or paying for a commercial module which will fit their needs perfectly out of the box. The problem is that, until recently, the commercial modules that exist were all very expensive. That is why I decided to make a new module to handle Site Membership Paid Subscriptions, which I will talk about later.
To control who can access what content on your site, you need an Access Control module. There are a few good choices here, such as the Taxonomy Access Control, Content Access, and Node Privacy By Role modules. Using these modules, you can set up your site so that only members with a certain role can view certain content types, or categories. This is the ideal way to do this. You can make, for example, a new role called ‘Premium Member’ and give that role access to the premium content on your site.
Next, you need to be able to sell the Premium Member role to users. This is where the module I mentioned earlier comes in to play. Drupal Paypal Subscriptions allows you to sell membership to your site using Paypal. Paypal is the best option for collection payments, since so many web users already have a Paypal account, and if they don’t they can still pay with a credit card through Paypal. What this module does, is it integrates your site with Paypal’s Subscription functionality, allowing you to sell recurring site membership to your users. You can define any number of Subscriptions for your site, setting the Price, Length, and other terms, including up to 2 Trial Periods, and specify which role should be added when the user signs up and removed when the user cancels his/her subscription. The Drupal Paypal Subscriptions module is easy to use and basically works out of the box, with minimal configuration on your part. You don’t even have to set up anything in your Paypal account, it is all configured straight from Drupal. You can also track payments and subscriptions with the module as well. Paypal Subscriptions is available for purchase from MoneyScripts.net.
So, if you are thinking about making a Paid Subscription website, I suggest going for a Drupal User Roles + Access Control + Paypal Subscriptions setup. You can have a membership site up and running in no time at all!
WildKatana Design Blog has Moved!
Thursday, May 21st, 2009Hello all, since I have a new web-site for my portfolio and business, WildKatana Design, I have also moved my WildKatana Design Blog over to the other site. This is just a note, saying you need to go there to see more great tutorials and posts! Go to the new WildKatana Design Blog!
Drupal – Including Browser-Specific CSS Dynamically
Saturday, February 28th, 2009Content has been moved to www.WildKatana.com/blog
Drupal: Embedding Nodes, Views and Blocks into .tpl files or nodes
Thursday, February 26th, 2009Content has been moved to www.WildKatana.com/blog
Wildkatana Design Blog
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009Well, I’ve been thinking about doing this for quite some time, so today is the day to start my Wildkatana Design Blog! This blog will be a place I can post lessons on programming and/or designing which I have learned the hard way, which I think may be useful to others out there. This blog will also showcase some of my projects I have done and be used as a rebounder for my (future) portfolio. Welcome to Wildkatana Design Blog!