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Not all the content on your website is accessible to the general public. To generate revenue, you can turn some valuable pages and posts into premium products and sell them to people in need.
However, you must set up many things on your WordPress website to achieve that. You must switch your regular blog to an e-commerce site using Shopify or BigCommerce or install WordPress eCommerce plugins. You don’t intend to sell every piece of content on your website; do it occasionally instead. Creating an e-commerce site seems too much to meet your requirements.
Fortunately, you can sell your premium content as digital products to customers using Gravity Form. They only need to pick their favorite products and fill out the form; the plugin will cover 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?
WordPress users are too familiar with Contact Form 7, a well-known open-source plugin receiving over 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 you style your form as you desire. Thanks to its intuitive user interface, adding conditional logic, such as hiding or showing fields, and configuring the submit button based on user’s choices can be done quickly without any code confusion.
The plugin’s trump card must be its ability to accept payments. Gravity Form comes with a thorough set of Pricing Fields, especially the excellent integration with reliable online credit card processors such as PayPal, Stripe, or Authorized.Net.
How to Sell Premium WordPress Content with Gravity Forms
To sell the content on your website, you need to turn it into private pages or posts and let customers or paid subscribers get the access link only. Then, please create a form to promote them to users and customize it 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 five 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 the 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 page, post, custom post type, and product effectively with one or multiple passwords. You must select which premium pages or posts you want to sell and then password-protect them.
We assume that you know how to install a plugin. After installation and activation, head to the Pages or Posts section in your WordPress dashboard. Then, 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. If you plan to create a custom password, switch to the New Password tab to modify it.
Under Type, select the roles in the drop-down menu to determine who should have access to the premium content. You can also set the password usage limit and expiration time. If you leave these fields empty, customers can enter passwords to unlock the content forever.
Regarding the example above, your customers can enter passwords for their purchased posts 5 times, and the password will become unavailable until May 31, 2021.
You can 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, connect it with a particular payment provider. The plugin is compatible with several processor add-ons such as Stripe, Paypal Payments Standard, or 2Checkout.
Each payment gateway provider has advantages and disadvantages. 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 worldwide. Based on your demand, you might prioritize one over the other.
Since PayPal is the virtual world’s online payment tycoon, this instruction will cover setting up your form with that provider.
Once you download and install the PayPal Payments add-on for your WordPress site, you must configure the PayPal Standard IPN settings. 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 PayPal IPN Setting checkbox to confirm that you have configured your IPN settings to enable the 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 bottom right are two critical sections to configure: Post Fields and Pricing Fields.
Post fields
The information in these post fields gives customers an overview of your product. Configure settings can be configured in the front end with a user-friendly interface.
You can drag and drop any fields on the right sidebar. The necessary fields are Name, Descriptions, Submit Button, and CAPTCHA. You can provide more details by adding images or other custom fields.
Remember to add the Email fields since most premium content is digital products. Unless you want to sell print copies of your content, you might need to include the Address and Phone Number areas.
Pricing Fields
Some fields are must-haves 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 in the Label, Value, and Price with your product preference.
Make sure you have the Credit Card option in your form. This is where customers can complete the transaction by entering their payment information.
Step 4: Create a Feed for Your Form
To interpret the information on 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 also be configured 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, it’s time to connect them with PPWP Forms Integration and start monetizing. It would help if you used the Quick Access Link extension to attach the password-protected content to your form and sell it to customers hassle-free.
In the Forms section, click 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 the checkbox right below to set the usage limit based on clicks or the product quantity. You can also restrict product access by expiring the access links after specific dates.
- Step 3: Gravity Form uses merge tags to create dynamic user content. PPWP integration provides essential tags to display information such as passwords, quick access links, and restrictions once customers submit the form.
Here’s an example of displaying 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 producing juicy, unique content that is hard to find elsewhere. Then there’s no reason to provide it for the public freely.
With the assistance of WordPress, Password Protect WordPress Pro, and Gravity Forms 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.
