WooCommerce is a great solution for e-commerce. In fact, it’s currently the most popular e-commerce platform on the web, being used on 26% of the top one million websites using e-commerce technology.
While WooCommerce has established a reputation for selling physical products, it’s also very much capable of selling virtual/intangible products, including premium memberships. This means that you can create paid content on your website, and make it available only to users who sign up for a membership plan.
What if you want to drip your content, though? This means that when a customer signs up for a membership, they don’t automatically get access to all of your premium content. Instead, the content is “dripped” out to them over a period of time. This helps retain members past the initial membership period.
Using WooCommerce Memberships and Elegant Modules for WooCommerce, dripping your content is simple. Let’s see how to do it.
Creating a Membership Product
First, let’s create the membership product. There is a difference between the membership product and membership plan that may be confusing. Since WooCommerce Memberships extends built-in WooCommerce functionality, it still requires normal products. The membership product is where you’ll configure things like prices, add images, etc.
To add your membership product, head over to your wp-admin, go to Products, and add a new Product. We’ll give the product a title, description, price, and image. We’ll also set the product type to Simple and Virtual, and ignore the Membership settings for now. Set up your product however you wish, save it, and we can move on to creating the membership plan.
Creating a WooCommerce Membership Plan
Next, let’s create a new membership plan. Creating a new membership plan will be very minimal. All you need to do is give it a title, select the membership product we created in the last step, and define a membership length like 1 year. Since we’ll be using the Elegant Modules Gutenberg + WooCommerce Memberships module, there’s no need to configure special access rules unless you have a particular reason for doing so.
Protecting and Dripping Membership Content
Last, we just need to set up our content protection and dripping. Elegant Modules has WooCommerce Memberships integrations with the most popular page builders for WordPress, like Divi, Elementor, and Beaver Builder. The same flexibility is included in all those integrations. In this step, though, we’ll assume you’re not using a page builder, and are using Gutenberg instead.
In your post or page, add your content like you normally do. To protect and drip the content, open up the Gutenberg block selector, and locate the “Content Restriction (WooCommerce)” block. Typing in “elegant modules” will bring it right up!
After adding the Content Restriction block, configure its settings by selecting your membership plan, enabling drip, and setting the drip timing. Then, add or move your content into the Content Restriction block. The Content Restriction block works like a parent-child block, so it acts as the parent with all the content acting as the children. Any block that is placed with the Content Restriction block will be protected according to the rules you set.
When you’re done adjusting your content, just save it, and you’re all done. The content will be dripped out after the time you set, and only to members of the membership plan you selected.
Elegant Modules integrations provide visual content protection and dripping for the most popular page builders and membership plugins. Check out our current modules, and take your membership website to the next level with simple content dripping!