Advantages of Building Your Membership Subscription Business on a CMS Platform
Selling content, services and products via the Internet is the most cost-effective way to reach millions of potential customers.
If your content and products can be distributed in electronic form then using the Internet is an even stronger argument for such business cases.
Typical business examples fall into one of the following categories:download clubs, support service or content access, Looking closer we can simply state that the entire business case is about providing access to premium content for a fee for a specific time period.
The content could be prepackaged as in the case of download clubs or personalized as in the case of support responses.
We have heard the phrase: "Content is King".
The key concept is that access to specific content is granted for a fee.
If this premium content can be placed in electronic form, then a Content Management System (CMS) can be used to organize and visualize it.
Typical free and open source CMS environments that come to mind are: Joomla, WordPress and Drupal to name a few.
Popular CMS environments have various (typically commercial) third-party extensions that permit you to set-up subscription plans that protect or unlock access to specific CMS content.
There are many advantages in selecting such a CMS driven premium content e-commerce platform, the most important ones are in my opinion the following: Content and Membership Management and Integrated Access Control Levels.
Content and Membership Management in CMS platforms allow you to easily organize your content in an online database driven publishing environment.
Content can be categorized and tagged and published in different formats and locations (pages) of a CMS powered website.
You can also have prepackaged content in the form of downloadable files that are stored in the CMS database or in a CMS managed filesystem.
Depending on the chosen CMS extra extensions might be needed.
CMS environments also have a variety of built-in or optionally installable features that help manage your membership community.
Newsletters, personalized emailing and messaging systems are available for a modest fee (and sometimes free) to help you in your marketing communications activities.
CMS systems have what is typically referred to as an Access Control Level (ACL) system.
In a nutshell, this allows you to create various internal groups (like the Unix group concept) that can be used to define which users have access to which content.
This concept is essential in order to protect who sees what with respect to your premium content.
Please note that depending on the CMS chosen the ACL concept might need extra add-ons to be installed and activated in order to function as described earlier.
A good third-party script can extend your CMS to handle paid subscription plans that automatically hook into your CMS membership management and ACL systems and allow or restrict access to your CMS content depending on paid subscription status.
This means you can easily sell your CMS premium content.
The CMS Membership Subscription Management software chosen should be able to support the following features
The end result is an integrated e-commerce content management environment that stores, organizes, publishes paid content and manages membership subscriptions.
If your content and products can be distributed in electronic form then using the Internet is an even stronger argument for such business cases.
Typical business examples fall into one of the following categories:download clubs, support service or content access, Looking closer we can simply state that the entire business case is about providing access to premium content for a fee for a specific time period.
The content could be prepackaged as in the case of download clubs or personalized as in the case of support responses.
We have heard the phrase: "Content is King".
The key concept is that access to specific content is granted for a fee.
If this premium content can be placed in electronic form, then a Content Management System (CMS) can be used to organize and visualize it.
Typical free and open source CMS environments that come to mind are: Joomla, WordPress and Drupal to name a few.
Popular CMS environments have various (typically commercial) third-party extensions that permit you to set-up subscription plans that protect or unlock access to specific CMS content.
There are many advantages in selecting such a CMS driven premium content e-commerce platform, the most important ones are in my opinion the following: Content and Membership Management and Integrated Access Control Levels.
Content and Membership Management in CMS platforms allow you to easily organize your content in an online database driven publishing environment.
Content can be categorized and tagged and published in different formats and locations (pages) of a CMS powered website.
You can also have prepackaged content in the form of downloadable files that are stored in the CMS database or in a CMS managed filesystem.
Depending on the chosen CMS extra extensions might be needed.
CMS environments also have a variety of built-in or optionally installable features that help manage your membership community.
Newsletters, personalized emailing and messaging systems are available for a modest fee (and sometimes free) to help you in your marketing communications activities.
CMS systems have what is typically referred to as an Access Control Level (ACL) system.
In a nutshell, this allows you to create various internal groups (like the Unix group concept) that can be used to define which users have access to which content.
This concept is essential in order to protect who sees what with respect to your premium content.
Please note that depending on the CMS chosen the ACL concept might need extra add-ons to be installed and activated in order to function as described earlier.
A good third-party script can extend your CMS to handle paid subscription plans that automatically hook into your CMS membership management and ACL systems and allow or restrict access to your CMS content depending on paid subscription status.
This means you can easily sell your CMS premium content.
The CMS Membership Subscription Management software chosen should be able to support the following features
- Accept one-time or auto-recurring payments from your payment channel (e.
g.
, PayPal, Authorize.
net, 2CheckOut, etc.
) - Automatically enable relevant content access when proper subscription is activated
- Automatically lock relevant content access when subscription ends or payment completion fails
The end result is an integrated e-commerce content management environment that stores, organizes, publishes paid content and manages membership subscriptions.
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