Not all the content on your website can be accessible to the general public. To generate revenue, you can turn some valuable pages and posts into premium products and sell them to people who are in need.
However, to achieve that, it requires a lot of setups on your WordPress website. You either need to switch your regular blog to an e-commerce site by using Shopify or BigCommerce, or install WordPress ecommerce plugins. The thing is, you don’t intend to sell every content on your website, just doing it occasionally instead. Creating an ecommerce site seems too much for what you are really asking for.
Fortunately, you can sell your premium content as digital products to customers using Gravity Form. They only need to pick their favorite products, fill in the form, and the plugin will take care of the rest.
Sounds interesting? Read on to explore how to install and set up Gravity Forms to put your precious works for sale effortlessly and safely.
Why Should You Choose Gravity Forms?
Apparently, WordPress users are too familiar with Contact Form 7, a well-known open-source plugin receiving more than 5 million active installations. The only limitation of Contact Form 7 lies in its function. Since this plugin only meets the basic demands, you must look for an alternative solution to perform a more complex and advanced form.
Gravity Form should be included in your list. It helps style up your form as your desire. On top of that, adding conditional logic such as hiding or showing fields, and configuring the submit button based on users’ choices can be done easily without any code confusion thanks to its intuitive user interface.
The trump card of this plugin must be its ability to accept payments. Gravity Form comes with a thorough set of Pricing Field, especially the excellent integration with several reliable online credit card processors such as PayPal, Stripe, or Authorized.Net.
How to Sell Premium WordPress Content with Gravity Forms
In order to sell the content on your website, you need to turn them into private pages or posts and let customers or paid subscribers get the access link only. Then, create a form to promote them to users and customize that form to make it a salable tool.
First things first, stop the general public from approaching the valuable content that you tend to put on sale. To do so, you need support from other plugins to support Gravity Forms. Among several options in the WordPress ecosystem, Password Protect WordPress (PPWP) Pro works best for this case.
Follow these 5 steps to start selling your premium WordPress content
- Step 1: Password protect premium content
- Step 2: Connect Gravity Form with Payment Gateways
- Step 3: Create an order Form using Gravity Form
- Step 4: Create a feed for your form
- Step 5: Associate form with a premium page
Step 1: Password Protect Premium Content
Password Protect WordPress (PPWP) Pro helps you lock every single page, post, custom post type, and product effectively with one or multiple passwords. Your job is to pick which premium pages or posts you want to sell and then password protect them.
We assume that you know how to install a plugin. Upon installation and activation, head to the Pages or Posts section in your WordPress dashboard. Then, simply click the Password protect option right at your desired posts or pages.
The plugin will display a password protection popup allowing you to manage your passwords efficiently. Once protected, it will automatically generate a new and strong password for your post. In case you plan to create a custom password, switch to the New Password tab to modify.
Under Type, select the roles in the drop-down menu to determine who should have access to the premium content. You are also able to set the password usage limit and its expiration time. Customers can enter passwords to unlock the content forever if you leave these fields empty.
Regarding the example above, it’s possible for your customers to enter passwords their purchased post 5 times and the password will become unavailable until May 31, 2021.
There is an option for you to grant direct access to customers without forcing them to enter the password via the “Access Link” feature.
With this attentive preparation, let’s move on with the settings of Gravity Form.
Step 2: Configure Gravity Form to Connect with Payment Gateways
To create an order form, you have to connect it with a particular payment provider. The plugin is well compatible with several processor add-ons such as Stripe, Paypal Payments Standard, or 2Checkout.
Each payment gateway provider comes with a set of advantages and drawbacks. While Stripe and 2Chechout are more secure, PayPal proves more reliable and simple. In addition, PayPal and Stripe let your business take money immediately after signing up. Authorize.net, meanwhile, partners with multiple banks and financial institutions all over the world. Based on your demand, you might prioritize one over the other.
Since PayPal is the online payment tycoon in the virtual world, this instruction will be about setting up your form with that provider.
Once downloading and installing the PayPal Payments add-on for your WordPress site, you need to configure PayPal Standard IPN settings first. It’s because the IPN will help you receive notifications whenever the payment has been transacted successfully.
- In your admin dashboard, look for Forms and open Settings
- Click on the PayPal Payments Standard section
- Tick on the checkbox PayPal IPN Setting to confirm that you have configured your PayPal IPN settings to enable the PayPal add-on
- Hite Update Settings to save your changes
Step 3: Create an Order Form with Gravity Form
In your admin dashboard, look for Forms. Hit Add New and you will be sent to the form builder to create a new form.
At the right bottom, there are two important sections to configure: Post Fields and Pricing Fields
Post fields
The information in these post fields gives customers an overview of the product you’re offering. With the user-friendly interface, configure settings can be done in the front end.
You just need to drag and drop any fields on the right sidebar. Name, Descriptions, Submit Button, CAPTCHA are necessary fields. You can provide more details by adding images or other custom fields for your purposes.
Since most premium content is digital products, don’t forget to add the Email fields. Unless you want to sell the print copies of your content, you might need to include Address and Phone Number areas.
Pricing Fields
There are some must-have fields for your products. In particular, Product fields will be set as a hidden type since they hold the total product price based on users’ selection.
Under Field Type, change the settings to Drop Down. In the Choices section, fill the Label, Value, and Price with your preference for the products.
Make sure you have the Credit Card option in your form. It’s where customers can complete the transaction by filling in their payment information.
Step 4: Create a Feed for Your Form
In order to interpret the information of your form, you need to create a feed to submit the form data to the selected payment provider. Open the Settings below the form title and click on PayPal’s add-on.
On the feed settings page, after naming your feed, choose the transaction type. It could be either Products and services or Subscriptions. The options will vary depending on the transaction type you pick.
The billing information should be configured as well to ensure every option matches the form fields. Then hit Update to save all the settings.
Step 5: Associate Form with Your Premium Content
After protecting your content with Password Protect WordPress Pro, and creating your saleable form with Gravity Form. Now it’s time to connect them together with PPWP Forms Integration and start monetizing. You should use the Quick Access Link extension to attach the password-protected content into your form and sell it to customers in a hassle-free way.
In the Forms section, click on PPWP Pro to open the PPWP Quick Access Link settings.
- Step 1: Attach the premium content that is already password protected with PPWP Pro by inputting the post or page ID
- Step 2: Tick on the checkbox right below to set the usage limit based on clicks or the product quantity. You can also restrict the access to the products by expiring the access links after certain dates.
- Step 3: Gravity Form uses merge tags to create dynamic content for users. PPWP integration provides essential tags to display information such as the password, quick access links and restriction once customers submit the form.
Here’s the example of how you can display those tags in your form.
It will turn out to be like this short and sweet message
Make Money From Your Marketable Content
“If you are good at something, don’t do it for free.” You have spent time and effort to produce juicy content that is somewhat one of a kind and hard to find elsewhere. Then there’s no reason to freely provide it for the public.
With the assistance of WordPress, Password Protect WordPress Pro and Gravity Form plugins, selling your premium content is easier than ever. These plugins guarantee perfect protection for all the content on your website and market it to potential customers.
