[ad_1] Building a membership website is a fantastic business idea. You can earn recurring income, enjoy the freedom to create content as you wish, and commit to your user base with value products and services. As this Paid Memberships Pro review will show, there are plugins that can do the job, and then some. That functionality can also help with other business models too, such as creating customer email lists, and building a community. I have to do both of these as part of my relationship with WordPress, so I’m excited to take this plugin for a spin. Throughout this Paid Memberships Pro review, I’ll look at why the features, functionality, interface, and pricing are all stellar. By the end, you’ll know just why I’m a fan, along with thousands of other users! Introducing Paid Memberships Pro Paid Memberships Pro does what it says on the tin. It’s a WordPress membership plugin that lets you sign up users to access your website’s content. The plugin focuses on facilitating user memberships, but its feature set has a lot of scope. As you’ll understand, that functionality can work for many different types of site that center around curating users and building a community ‘hub’. Speaking of which, here’s what Paid Memberships Pro offers in a nutshell: Content restriction and drip feeding for the whole site, and on a page-by-page basis. The ability to set up groups and member directories, to help you build a community with your site. Plenty of user management options, tier creation settings, and administration tools. Multiple payment options, including account pauses and proration. This isn’t everything the plugin can offer, but I’ll show you throughout the rest of this Paid Memberships Pro review what the plugin can do. DOWNLOAD Paid Memberships Pro Paid Memberships Pro Review: The Plugin’s Feature, Functionality, and Pricing Rather than simply tour the dashboard and run through the feature set, I want to explore what Paid Memberships Pro is like on a day-to-day basis. As such, I’ll work within the dashboard, set the plugin up, add memberships tiers, and look into extending the functionality of the plugin. Of course, to follow along, you’ll need your own copy of Paid Memberships Pro. Let’s start with how much the plugin costs. Pricing While there’s a free version of Paid Memberships Pro on the WordPress Plugin Directory, that’s not my focus here. Instead, I’m looking at the three premium tiers on offer. These will bundle in extras to the core plugin based on the plan you choose: Standard ($347 per year). This gives you a single-site license, more than 20 add-ons (more of which later), and functionality such as customization recipes, tracking for affiliates, e-commerce, and analytics, along with plenty more. Plus ($597 per year). While two site licenses seems ‘ungenerous’, I can’t deny the functionality you get in return. This tier comes with the full feature set of Paid Memberships Pro, which includes over 30 add-ons, pro-rata pricing options, variable pricing, and much more. Enterprise (over $5,000 per year). The plugin’s functionality is here in full too, but includes 50 site licenses, hosting, and a more personalized experience for your needs. For instance, there is telephone support, consultancy, onsite visits, and more. For most, the Plus plan will give you everything Paid Membership Pro has in the box, but you’ll pay a hefty price in return. However, each purchase comes with a 100-Day, 100 percent money-back guarantee. What’s more, there are regular sales on offer, which sometimes gives you 50 percent off of the typical price. New User Onboarding Once you complete the installation process, you’ll begin with an onboarding wizard. This asks you to fill in a number of fields across five different pages. There are a few key fields to discuss here: General Info. You’ll want to make sure the plugin generates the required pages to help build your site. Fortunately, this is an active checkbox by default – but make sure to take a second look before you continue. Also, check the box to indicate whether you will take payments on your site, and enter your license key to claim your extra functionality, support, and updates. Memberships. It’s up to you whether you let the plugin create membership levels for you at this screen. If you are new to the plugin, I’d recommend this so you can see the ‘optimal’ method of doing this. The final screen – All Set! – lets you know your site is ready, and offers up a helpful guide on building the type of membership site you chose from the General Info screen. You’ll also find some recommended add-ons, which we’ll get into later. Before that, I want to cover the rest of the typical process you’ll take to create your membership site. The User Interface (UI) and Experience The Memberships > Dashboard screen within WordPress is the hub for everything you do with Paid Memberships Pro: There’s a lot to get through here, and I won’t cover it all. However, there are seven top-level sections of settings: Dashboard. This gives you quick links to common pages, some analytics and reporting, along with links to social media and documentation. Members. Here, you can create, add, manage, and delete members of your site. Orders. In this context, “orders” means those who purchase a membership. If you only offer premium memberships, this will essentially show your current paying set of members. Reports. This screen shows the same reporting as on the Dashboard. You can see your active members, sales, revenue, visits, logins, and much more here. Settings. This is a collection of many screens that cover options for membership levels, payment gateways, security, design, and a lot more. Add Ons. You can install any Paid Memberships Pro add-on you have access to here. It looks a lot like the WordPress Plugin Directory dashboard, which makes it straightforward to use. License. This is where you’ll input and view your plugin licensing information. You should take a look at the setup
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Easy Digital Downloads 3.1 Adds 10 New Core Blocks, Introduces Email Summaries – WP Tavern
[ad_1] Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) put out a big release today, following several maintenance releases and the last major release in July. Version 3.1 introduces 10 new core blocks available to users who are running WordPress 5.8 or newer: Buy Button Order History Products Registration Form Login Form Download Terms Receipt Confirmation Cart Checkout (Beta) These blocks enable store owners to do more than their shortcode predecessors. Although the shortcodes still work, the block versions allow for much easier customization with a better UI. One example in the announcement is the Order History block. The previous Purchase History shortcode output a simple table of orders, but the new Order History block has a card style view and allows users to easily modify the number of columns and how many orders are displayed per page. Purchase History shortcode output New Order History block The other blocks have been updated in a similar fashion, with extended functionality and greatly expanded customization options. It’s important to note that the new Checkout block was released in beta. It is not turned on by default for new stores yet. Users who want to test the block will notice that EDD has reordered some of the fields to improve conversions, improved the user context detection (only showing necessary fields to users), and redesigned the payment method picker. Email Summaries is a new feature for store owners in 3.1. It sends a weekly or monthly email to the admin or other custom recipients with a store update that includes metrics like gross and net revenue, new customers, and average order amount. It can also be disabled in the admin. A few other notable changes in version 3.1 include the following: New setting to require users to login to download files Success Page has been renamed to Confirmation Page to differentiate it from the receipt More detailed views and filtering options for Reports reCAPTCHA keys added to Downloads » Settings » Misc so users can automatically enable reCAPTCHA for the lost password and the registration forms New color options for purchase buttons New “View Receipt” link in the orders table Easy Digital Downloads is installed on more than 50,000 WordPress sites. The ten-year-old plugin is continuing to evolve and become a more block-friendly tool for selling digital products. Check out the announcement post for a full tour of all the new blocks and their capabilities. Category: News, Plugins Tags: easy digital downloads Share this: Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Like this Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingThe Easy Way to Improve Your Content Production with Artificial Intelligence
[ad_1] If you’re relying on quality search engine-optimized posts to grow your WordPress website but you’re struggling to find the time, energy, and effort to create those posts, this Content at Scale review is worth paying attention to. Launched in late 2022, this powerful AI platform promises to take your keywords and turn them into complete, fully-optimized content with no intervention on your behalf, helping you to increase your content production tenfold. Still, Content at Scale isn’t the only AI writing software on the market, so what makes this one so special, and how exactly do you put it to work on scaling your content creation process quickly and effectively? You’ll find the answer to both of these questions, and more besides, in this comprehensive review. What is Content at Scale? Content at Scale is the first AI writing tool designed by marketers, for marketers. Many of the other similar tools you may have encountered are created primarily by AI developers who simply lack experience in content creation and search engine optimization. Ultimately, that means that while the content they produce may be of a good standard, it not only lacks many of the subtle nuances and emotional connection of human-created content but also requires more input to create the content. That’s before we mention the amount of work that you often need to carry out to proof, fact-check, and optimize that content. By drawing on their decade-and-a-half of experience in the digital marketing industry, developers Leadfuze have solved this problem by coming up with a platform that they promise will automate the entire process of creating engaging, well-optimized articles that require little (if any) intervention on your part. In fact, the company assures us that this sample blog post was created entirely without human input, using only a combination of three different AI engines along with two NLP (Natural Language Processing) and semantic algorithms. Article Continues Below Ultimately, this means that whether you’re a solo blogger who is pushed for time or a marketing agency that is already getting results from SEO content and now wants to scale that process further, you’ve got everything you need to dramatically cut the time it takes to write meaningful posts thanks to all of the following features. Content at Scale Key Features: AI-generated article length, headings, and media count based on what already ranks for your chosen keyword Search Engine Optimization features Plagiarism detector White label tools for developers AI-generated metadata Image gallery for adding featured images and in-post media Intuitive dashboard and post editor. Content at Scale User Experience: How to Automate Your Content Creation Process with AI 1. Create a New Project Your first task is to install and activate the Content at Scale plugin. If you’re not sure how to do that, we’ve written a step-by-step tutorial in our complete beginner’s guide to WordPress plugins. Activating the plugin ensures the platform is synced with your website so that the AI tool can do a better job at creating the kind of content that’s right for your website as well as publishing your AI-generated content directly to your WordPress installation. When that’s done, return to the Content at Scale app and log in. As a first-time user, you’ll find that your Projects dashboard is currently empty, so click the ‘Create New Project’ button to get started. 2. Enter Your Project Details Each website that you want to create content for should be its own individual project. With that in mind, you’ll need to enter a name for your project and your website URL. Below that, Content at Scale asks you to provide it with some context. This essentially means entering a few words on what you write about and who you write it for. To use WPLift as an example, we entered the following in the Project Context field. “We help WordPress users learn about how to build blogs and websites through plugin reviews, theme reviews, and tutorials.” To give you another example, if you were running an eCommerce or affiliate marketing site focusing on basketball, you might enter something like this: “We create content that helps basketball coaches, players, and fans.” From there, you can choose whether or not to enter the number of monthly posts you’d like to create the platform for you. Entering this figure here will help you to keep track of how close you are to achieving your content scaling goals, though you can always skip it and it won’t affect the quality of your posts. When you’ve done all that, simply click ‘Create Project.’ 3. Enter Your Keywords Your next job is to give the platform a keyword (or multiple keywords) that you want your content to rank for. If you’re not sure where to start with this, our guide to WordPress SEO has some handy tips on how to do keyword research, including using platforms such as SEMRush to find the most searched-for keywords in your niche. If you want to rank for multiple keywords, you can click on the attachment icon and upload them in a .CSV file. If you do this, Content at Scale will create an individual post for each keyword. After that, you’ll want to give the platform some additional context so that it knows what you have in mind for your finished content. For this tutorial, we’re creating a piece on the best AI writing software with the following context: “Cover the different types of AI writing software that are compatible with WordPress, including top plugins and platforms and how to use them. Mention at least one free tool and include pros and cons plus frequently asked questions about AI writing tools for WordPress.” Once all that is in place, all that’s left to do is to click ‘Create Content.’ The AI generator will then get to work on creating your post. You’ll be able to see how far that post is progressing under the status heading in your project dashboard. For our ‘Best AI Writing software’
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