Ep 121: How to Monetize Your Content DTC Without Relying on Big Tech

Make Sharing and Monetizing Your Content Incredibly Easy

Instead, you’re better off transitioning to a WordPress site, where you’ll control the scaffolding that supports your business. That way, you can protect your content monetization and take full command over your data. Your insights will get sharper, and your marketing will be powerful and seamless.

They start building up their business on a host. And that is great in many ways, because the barrier to entry is pretty low. I think we see a lot of people migrating from those platforms to something on the WordPress platform or some other open-source CMSs like that because when you get going in your business, you start realizing that, hey, I communicate through this platform with my customers, right? And I don’t necessarily have access to all the data that I need to run my business.

Tip #1: Think Like an Owner

Imagine trying to sell your business. When you don’t control the platform on which your content lives, all a potential buyer sees is uncertainty.

The asset that you have is your customers. And in a lot of cases, these types of sites will have recurring revenue, so it’s like a subscription. And so, who’s charging that subscription? Where is that subscription located? Is it on your post, or is it with your payment provider, or is it something that you own? That’s the real value of your business is your customer and your subscriptions, and your data. Building your membership site or online business on a hosted platform, it’s actually like putting your eggs in your own basket.

Tip #2: Make Your Site A Great One

When you transition from a big membership site to a WordPress site, it can feel like you’re losing a huge toolkit of easily accessible bells and whistles. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Remember, the goal is to monetize your content DTC, and Memberpress makes it seamless. 

MemberPress will protect your content. It ties into Stripe and PayPal and authorized.net to charge for access to WordPress– simple as that. But then, with WordPress  you also have thousands of other plugins that you can choose that will work along with MemberPress as well.

Tip #3: Use MemberPress to Supercharge Your Email Marketing

MemberPress tames the chaos of your mailing list. 

A lot of our customers use Drip, Convert Kit, MailChimp… MemberPress integrates with all of them. But your user list is still contained in your database on WordPress. Right? So even though you’re sending contacts over to active campaign or whatever, you still own the central reservoir of data.

Tip #4: Power Courses with MemberPress

Courses offer a uniquely powerful means of connection between you and your members. And yes, you can host them yourself.

The largest group of people using MemberPress are course builders. So they’ll build a course around something that they know, and MemberPress has a full LMS feature set at this point as well. You can upload videos to WordPress. You can lock them down, you can protect them. I mean, there’s a visual drag-and-drop curriculum builder quiz builders. So you can build quizzes into your courses as well. It makes things pretty simple.

Blair Williams Recommends:

• WPBeginner – Beginner’s Guide to WordPress
• MemberPress – The “All-in-One” Membership Plugin for WordPress
• MemberPress on Youtube