Online communities are awesome way to bring people together but it can also be a game changer when monetized correctly. Here’s a few ways that you can monetize your Ultimate Member Community on WordPress.
Table of Contents
What is Ultimate Member?
So if you’ve just stumbled across this post, then let me be the first to tell you that Ultimate Member is a bundle of awesomeness! Seriously now, Ultimate Member is a free WordPress Profile and Membership plugin that you can use to make an online community in any specific niche. With the plugin and the addition of available addons, there’s a vast number of communities that you can create. You can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin repo. Here are few community ideas:
- Photo Community
- School or Class Social Network
- Dating Network
- Professional Network
- Company Intranets
Some of these ideas can be easily put together with plugins available here by us and from Ultimate Member extensions page. Now that we have the introductions out of the way, let’s get into how you can monetize an Ultimate Member powered social network.
Selling Subscriptions
Charging for Membership has long been a good way of making money from your social network. By having site members pay a one-time or recurring payment for access to features, content and other aspects of your site can be a game changer. For instance, let’s say you’ve created an online community for a popular game like Fortnite with 10000 active members ( obviously that’s a little for Fortnite ) and you would like to charge a monthly subscription of $9 to access the community then essentially you would be making $90000 ( 10000 x $9 ) per month. Now, wouldn’t that be a nice income? With Ultimate Member and a mix of other plugins that can be possible. Here are some plugins that can be used to make your community a paid membership community.
UM Switcher
To monetize your Ultimate Member powered site, you can use UM Switcher. UM Switcher is a WordPress plugin by ThemeDutch that uses a combination of the free WordPress plugins; WooCommerce and Ultimate Member to sell subscriptions to users. The plugin works by creating WooCommerce products that can be purchased by community members. When a user has an active subscription, the user role can be set to A and in Ultimate Member user with the role of A can have access to specific access to features and content then alternatively when the subscription is not active, the user will have the role of B with limited access.
Features offered through UM Switcher
- Create subscription products: days, hours and even minutes.
- Create memberships with fixed End date (new feature since 2.0)
- Send email reminders, the perfect marketing Tool to increase re-subscriptions.
- Restrict your UM custom fields based on user roles.
- Restrict pages, post, menu items and custom profile fields.
- Sell your um-switcher product easy via WooCommerce.
- UMS product button customizable to your own liking (new feature since 2.1)
- Email template included, or use your third party plugin.
- Easily create a cronjob for accurate sending reminders (easy feature since 2.1)
- 5 minutes setup, easy installation support available
- Re-direct option after checkout (new feature since 2.1)
- Change manual subscription start and end date (new feature since 2.1)
Use-cases of UM Switcher
- Theme and Plugin authors that offer paid support.
- Freelancer website, sell subscriptions for access contact details.
- Jobsites, sell access to contact details and more.
- Consulting sites, sell access to contact details and more.
- Video websites, give access to video’s for a limited time. (even 15 min.)
- Model website, sell subscriptions for access to portfolio + contact details.
- Sell subscriptions for your White papers or service.
- And many more.. The possibilities are endless.
Restrict Content Pro
Restrict Content Pro is a long-time favorite for many when it comes to creating subscription membership sites. With a combination of RCP and Ultimate Member, you can create a membership site by the following ways.
Limiting access to a user’s profile by hiding the profile unless a user has a paid subscription. For example:
[is_paid] [ultimatemember_account form_id="5"] [/is_paid]
Limiting access to certain features using shortcode. For example hiding the Activity Wall:
[is_paid] [ultimatemember_wall user_wall="true" ] [/is_paid]
Alternatively, if you are familiar with WordPress hooks, you can go as far as restricting access to certain profile tabs unless a user has an active subscription.
add_filter('um_profile_tabs', 'restrict_um_profile_tab', 1000 );
function restrict_um_profile_tab( $tabs ) {
// If user does not have active subscription, hide the tab.
if ( ! rcp_is_active( 34 ) && ! empty( $tabs['activity'] ) ) {
unset( $tabs['activity'] );
}
return $tabs;
}
The snippet above, will hide the Activity tab if user the doesn’t have an active subscription.
If coding is not your thing, we also found a plugin that integrates Ultimate Member with Restrict Content Pro. It is called Restrict Content Pro – Ultimate Member and is provided by Skillful Plugins.
This integration creates a tab in the Ultimate Member member account page where the member can manage their payment and subscription settings.
This integration will also track the members status, so that their Ultimate Member status will reflect their RCP subscription status. If the subscription expires, so will their membership.
Advertisements
The great thing about having a highly engaging online community is that it makes a great place for adding Ads. You can find plenty of ad networks that you can use to monetize your Ultimate Member social network. Here are a few:
Affiliate Sales
If your online community is a specific niche, affiliate sales may be your bread and butter in monetizing your community. By promoting relevant products to your community and taking a percentage of the sales, this can be quite lucrative. Here are some Affiliate Ad networks that you can embed and promote on your community.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways that you can monetize your social network. It much depends on your particular niche and other factors. The methods mentioned above are just options to get the ball rolling.