The Internet is wide open, but sometimes your proprietary content that has value should she sold for a certain amount of money. This is where Paywall systems come into play.
This creates a membership or customer or client base for you as well, giving you email addresses where you may be able to sell similar content to the same previous customers.
For paying subscribers, they then get access to say your gallery, video, mp3s books, articles, or any other kind of files. Again to keep things under control, you will need a paywall system.
Paywalls have received a bad reputation because content people think should be free isn’t always free. However, that is the proper nature of things, that your works should have some sort of monetary value. You just need to make sure you publish interesting content that others can easily find for free anywhere else; that is the other half of things.
Setting up a paywall system should be integrated smoothly into your website. Some CMS’s (Content Management Systems) have plugins that can be used to setup your subscription system. Or maybe you are handy at programming and have developed your own paywall integration. However, the easiest option is to use Paypal’s service. See PayPal.com for their easy to use integrations. Search “Paypal Paywall” or can you certainly use another payment provider’s services. There are too many to list here.
Also, you should also enable your website to use SSL encryption to keep your customer information, such as credit card information, email, phone numbers – private. When your site is run under “https” potential customers feel more confident to use your services.
The final item you will need to take care of is how you plan to receive payment and the kinds of payment you will accept (Paypal, bitcoin, etc.)
Many of the members online plugins for CMS’s support most of the popular payment processors, and supply integrations with them as well. This minimizes the amount of work and headache for you to run your little private ecommerce service.
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