Cart66 is a great WordPress magazine plugin. It gives you all of the tools you need to publish your own digital magazine. You can even sell physical magazine subscriptions with Cart66 too. Enjoy features including content restriction, subscription billing for your online magazine, and subscriptions billing for your physical magazine. You can even sell multiple different levels of access to your content. Here is a demonstration of some of the features Cart66 offers for publishing your digital magazine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgCrjYAIErk
Cart66 As A WordPress Magazine Plugin
To run your online magazine you need to be able to restrict access to content, manage recurring billing for your magazine subscriptions, and handle e-commerce payments. Cart66 has all of these tools built in and ready to go.
Content Restriction
Perhaps the most import feature for a WordPress magazine plugin is making sure you are able to control access to your content. WordPress is a fundamentally awesome platform for organizing your content. You can set up categories, schedule the timing of when you want to release articles, and easily embed videos, music, and pictures. With Cart66 Cloud, you can flag certain content as paid / premium content while, at the same time, allowing free access to other content.
Organizing Content
A great way to organize the content for your digital magazine is with WordPress post categories. In this example, we’re setting up an online magazine about guitar playing. Our magazine will have the following categories of information. Most categories will require a subscription, but we’ll also have some free information as well:
- Magazine (chronological listing of all our premium content articles)
- Gear Reviews (premium content)
- Interviews (premium content)
- Lessons (premium content)
- News & Events (free content)
WordPress comes with the ability to organize your posts like this as shown here.
Requiring A Subscription
A good WordPress magazine plugin will have the ability to require that your visitor is logged in with an active subscription in order to view the content in certain categories. With Cart66 you can sell multiple different subscriptions and provide different levels of access to your content based on which subscription the visitor has. The subscriptions can provider overlapping access to content or they can be independent subscriptions to different areas on your site.
Overlapping Levels / Cascading Access
You might want to have a Basic subscription and a more comprehensive Gold subscription for your online magazine. The Basic subscription could provide access to a limited amount of content. Then, the Gold subscription level would include everything the Basic subscription provides plus additional content.
Distinct Content Areas
Another approach to selling your content is to sell membership access to individual categories of content. In our Acoustic Guitar magazine, we could sell a membership to access just the Lessons. Then another membership to access the Gear Reviews, and so on.
Category Restriction Settings
In your WordPress admin under the Cart66 Cloud Members settings you will see all the different categories of posts you have set up. Under each category is a list of the memberships and subscriptions you have for your site. Click on the checkbox next to the name of the membership that is required in order to view the content in that category. If you select multiple memberships that means you may view the content if you have either one (not necessarily both) of the selected memberships. If you don’t select any memberships, then the content in that category is open to the public (free to view).
Content Teasers
You can choose how to protect the premium content in your digital magazine site. One option is to completely remove all premium content from visitors who either aren’t logged in, or don’t have access to view the material. This option literally removes all premium content from the site. If a premium articles is accessed by someone who is not authorized to view the content, like from a bookmark or direct link to a page, then the visitor will get a “File not found” message when trying to access the page.
You may prefer to show teasers to encourage people to subscribe. Cart66 will show just the article titles followed by a message saying that you must first sign up to view the content. You can control exactly what the message says in your Cart66 settings in your WordPress admin panel. You can even include a Sign Up button so people can subscribe to your site right from the content they want access to see.
Flexible Billing Plans
Cart66 includes a built-in recurring billing engine so you can safely and accurately bill your customers. You can set up multiple different billing plans. For example, you can offer monthly, quarterly, or annual billing cycles – or configure your own. Cart66 handles all of the security to make sure your customer’s credit card information stays secure.
You can charge an initial payment, like a setup fee, that is in addition to the normal subscription price. You can set any number of months as your billing interval. You can offer a free trial period. You can even write a custom message describing the billing plan.
WordPress Magazine Themes
If you are using Cart66, you can turn almost any theme into a WordPress magazine theme. For example, the theme used in this demonstration is the free Fictive theme, produced by Automattic.
A lot can be accomplished with the built-in tools that WordPress brings to the table right out of the box. It is a common temptation to buy fancy themes and pile on loads of plugins, but before you do that, take a moment to learn what WordPress can do with the features you get directly from WordPress itself. You will probably find that you can do a lot of what you thought you might need plugins or themes for. You will end up with a faster, more secure, more stable, easier to maintain site if you learn to take advantage of the features WordPress has built in.
Cart66 As A WordPress Magazine Plugin
Cart66 offers a great suite of tools to meet your digital magazine publishing needs. As you can see, Cart66 is more than just a WordPress magazine plugin. It includes all the features of a WordPress magazine plugin, but also takes care of selling your online memberships and selling your physical magazine (if you have one). There are very flexible tools to restrict access to your premium content. All of this is wrapped in top of the line security to make sure everything remains safe and reliable for you and your customers without you have to worry with any of the technical details. You can just focus on creating and selling awesome content for your customers.
