Free Membership Question

I see the value on paying for your premium version – $69. With the free, my members would need to have a PayPal account but not if I use the premium version?

Here’s my main question:

I have dozens of contacts who should have full access to my membership directory content. But I don’t want to charge them.

If I put the membership options on the member options page, I could create a link to free membership with full access to everything. But that same page would have other paid levels. If a potential paying member saw the free link, I would miss out on a paid member because he would just sign up for free.

Can I just create this free member link and NOT display it on the member options page and instead email it to people I want to give it to so they have full access (like a best friend, etc.).

In other words, will the free member link only work (be processed) from the member options page or could it work if I email the link to select people?

Hi Mike.

In the Membership Options page you can put whatever you want. The only special thing about that page is that it’s where people are sent if they try to access a URL they don’t have access to. Other than that, it’s a normal WordPress page where you put what you want, but because people are sent there, it’s good to give all the options to gain access to the content.

About the free registration to get access to the paid content, I wouldn’t put it there for the reason you explained, but I wouldn’t send by email a link that anyone could use like that either, in case someone shared it.

What I’d suggest is to leave registrations open, so users can register for free at Level 0. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› General Options -› Open Registration[/hilite]

Send the registration link to your contacts, telling them that you’ll upgrade them to the paid level after they registered their account. Then monitor registrations and edit their profiles to change their role from s2Member Level 0 to 1. Or, if you don’t want to monitor registrations, ask them to email you their username after they registered.

You’d protect the content at Level 1 or higher, so only users that paid for that level, or those you upgraded manually, would have access to it.

I hope that helps. :)

The problem with your answer is as soon as you make it open registration as in your answer then anyone, not just those invited by email etc will have access to the registration link as it automatically appears on the login page.

Therefore you would everybody who tries to login able to register and not just the invited few.

That’s right, but anyone that you don’t upgrade to a higher level than the free one, would not have access to the content you protected at the higher level.

Anyway, I suggested it as an option, if you didn’t mind others registering an account, since they wouldn’t have access to content you don’t want them to.

What you can do, if you prefer Open Registration disabled, is to generate an access link for each person you want to invite, so they can register anyway. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› PayPal® Pro Forms -› Registration Access Links[/hilite]

I didn’t suggest this first, because it’s not a bulk solution, you will need to generate an individual link and email with it, for each person.