WordPress.com is an easy way to start blogging. Get a blog, check out our features, read the latest announcements, choose from great themes, or learn about the team behind it.
Need help? Check out our Support site, then
Hi,
I was on another WordPress.com blog and noticed a button people could click to donate money and also seem to remember seeing a WordPress blog that required a paid subscription if you wanted to read more than one paragraph. Where can I find information on adding one of these options to my blog?
Thank you,
Annette
The blog I need help with is ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com.
You can add a PayPal donate button following this guide: http://en.support.wordpress.com/paypal/
Unfortunately, you can't really charge for subscriptions, as there's no way to implement a pay gate besides making your blog completely private.
You can put a paypal donate button here, but you cannot as far as I know do any sort of paid subscription since the only way to do that would be to make your site private, or password protect all posts and pages. The private blog is no good since no one would be able to get to the blog to even pay, and the password protection thing is no good since one person could pay and then give the password to 50 friends, or post it on facebook or twitter and all of a sudden you have 5,000 visitors and only 10 paid.
If you want a paid subscription site, you will have to go with a self-hosted wordpress installation at a third-party hosting service such as godaddy, bluehost, etc. Figure that will cost an average total of about $10 to $25 per month. There are some membership plugins for self-hosted sites, but most require you to pay a fee if you want some of the advanced features and can cost anywhere from $99 to about $450 per year.
Here is the support document on the paypal donate button.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/paypal/
If you are going to attempt to do some sort of paid subscription thing you really need to run that past staff since as I said, it might be against the Terms of Service here.
And I shouldn't have been so long winded. @macmanx was much more concise.
No worries, I like all of the details in your reply.
To answer your last bit there, it's not really against the ToS to sell subscriptions to your blog, because it's rather impossible. :)
So, you can do it, you just can't do it.
:-)
Exactly. :)
Hemming and hawing...I can already think of a way to do it and I haven't even had my second cup of coffee. :)
Yeah, I thought of a way to do it as well.
Does that mean we are devious?
:-)
I'd think rather use the term "creative". But after 35 free users it would involve a paid upgrade. :)
If you're thinking what I'm thinking, I suppose that might work, but I'm not telling. ;)
You already did! (trying hard not to throw in a quote from "The Princess Bride") Or at least half of it.
Capt'n! There be whales here!
@tsp LOL same-same but different.
Private blogs get no search engine juice, so there would have to be a public blog as well.
On that public blog, you could post excerpts of content from the private blog and a "if you want to read more of this" and a link to a paypal donate button. After getting the notice from paypal that the subscription has been paid, you could invite the person to view your private blog. (Up to 35 users for free.)
In order to avoid problems, you'd have to specifically state that the email associated with the paypal account (or mentioned in the notes to the seller) is where the subscription invitation will be sent. If they pay with a different email account other than the one associated with their WordPress.com account, it could get messy and your responsibility to clear up.
Thanks to All for great reply's - especially the long winded ones..lol!!...I definitely want to stay away from a private blog at this point, especially if it affects search engine status - at this point my rankings have been very good, wouldn't want that to change! Also don't want to run people off with a mandatory fee either, so it sounds like donate is the way to go. Thanks for the link macmanx, I'll look into getting set-up with paypal...
You're welcome!
This topic has been closed to new replies.
ascendingstarseed
