Do you have a passion for online education and a desire to start an online business?
In that case, you might have considered the idea of selling an online course on an online course website or platform.
But, can you sell courses on MemberPress?
Selling an online course requires a trusted, user-friendly platform, and MemberPress fits that description perfectly.
As many of our readers probably already know, MemberPress is a site plugin and learning management system for the WordPress site that allows users to post content and charge a fee for access.
MemberPress has a complete guide to creating an online course on the platform here, so if you’re just getting started on your project, you should check this out first.
However, if you’ve already designed your course and want to start selling it to members, this is the guide for you.
Always Have A Rule In Place
Once you’ve decided that you want to restrict access to your course and put payments in place, you need to set a rule for your course.
If your course doesn’t have at least one rule in place, it will be open to the public and anyone will be able to access it for free.
Luckily, creating a rule for your course is easy.
The most basic one you can choose is ‘All Content’ which protects all content from public view.
However, if you choose this, you will need to exclude any pages you need the public to be able to see (such as the login page or the account page).
You could also set a rule of ‘All Content Categorized’, where you can restrict certain content categories like online course content, or you can set a tag on pages and posts you want to restrict using ‘All Content Tagged’.
There are lots of other rules MemberPress allows users to set on their online courses, so check out the full list here before you continue.
Once you’ve done this, make sure to create a Sales Page URL.
You can do this by going into the ‘Settings’ tab on your course and inputting the URL in the box where it says ‘Sales Page’.
This means that anyone who visits your course page but doesn’t have access will be redirected to that URL.
Selling Your Courses On MemberPress
1. Individual Courses
Most people who sell online courses on MemberPress will allow users to purchase courses individually.
This is the easiest way to sell your courses, and it gives users more flexibility because they can purchase any of your courses in any combination they want.
To do this, you will need every course on your site to have a membership attached to it.
Creating a membership site isn’t complicated.
You just need to choose a title for your membership and input a price.
At this point, you should also decide whether you want users to pay once for a lifetime membership, or on a regular basis in the form of a subscription.
If you want, you could also set a trial period, but this isn’t mandatory.
Just make sure you include some text in the text box, so users know exactly what they’re purchasing when they pay for a membership.
Next, use the ‘A Single Course’ rule to restrict public access to that particular course and follow the instructions outlined above for the Sales Page URL.
This should be all you need to do if you want to sell one course on MemberPress (find out more about MemberPress courses here).
2. Course Packages
If you want to sell your courses in the form of packages on MemberPress, the process is slightly more complicated.
You will need to create a different membership to the one you set up to purchase each course individually.
You could call it whatever you want as long as it makes sense, for example, ‘Package Membership’ or ‘Gold Membership’.
As you did before, you will need to create a rule, but this time, you will need to select ‘All Courses’ rather than ‘A Single Course’.
This will mean that only people with the membership you just created will be able to view any of your courses.
Now, remember how you created a Sales Page URL for your individual courses?
You’ll now need to update these URLs so that they redirect to the registration page for your new membership.
3. Membership Tier Access
Things get a little trickier once again if you want to incorporate tiers into your courses.
If your courses have a tiered structure, you’ll want people with higher-tier memberships to be able to access the lower-tiered courses as well as the more advanced ones.
This means you’ll need to make sure that your courses are accessible to multiple memberships.
For example, if I have a Beginner’s tier, an Intermediate tier, and an Advanced tier, I would want the Advanced tier members to be able to gain course access the Beginner’s and Intermediate online classes as well.
To do this, you’ll need to create separate memberships in MemberPress for each tier, and add them all into an Upgrade Path Group, which will mean that members will be able to switch between different plans.
Make sure to tag the courses individually so that access is appropriately restricted.
For your Beginner’s tier, for example, you would tag to restrict access to all 3 tiers, whereas, for your Advanced tier, you’ll only put an Advanced tag.
Don’t forget to set a rule for every tier so that your tags are effective.
Once again, go back to your Sale Page URLs and edit them so that it redirects to the Group page when someone without authorized access tries to access the course page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I Sell A Course On WordPress?
In order to sell a course on a WordPress website, you will need to have the MemberPress Courses Add-on.
Is A MemberPress Membership Free?
No, you can’t get a MemberPress membership for free.
You will need to choose one of the payment plans offered by MemberPress in order to use it to sell your courses.
You can get the basic plan, the plus pan, or the pro plan.
The basic plan is the least expensive, while the pro plan has the highest price point.
Can I Sell My MemberPress Course On Other Platforms?
Do you want to make a course outline, create multiple courses and then sell them on multiple platforms? This depends on which other platforms you want to sell your course through.
Some platforms, such as Udemy, will not allow you to sell the same course elsewhere simultaneously since you sign a form to give Udemy a license to your course when you publish it on the platform.
However, some other platforms don’t take issue with you selling the same course on other platforms, so do your research and choose platforms that don’t demand exclusive rights to your course if this is your plan.
Final Thoughts
The process for selling online courses on MemberPress varies depending on whether you’re simply selling individual courses, course packages, or tiered courses.
You will always need to create one or several MemberPress memberships and include tags and rules to restrict access to unauthorized users.
You will also need to amend your Sales Page URL to redirect to the membership signup page in each instance, but this will look different depending on your course structure.
Log out of MemberPress and try to access your course(s) as an unregistered user to check that your tags and rules are working correctly after making changes.
