Protecting streaming audio with a WordPress membership site
As I mention in the video above, I got a clarity call asking me about protecting streaming audio.
Their requirements were simple:
They wanted to charge users monthly.
They wanted to put those members on an email subscription list.
They wanted to protect streaming audio files.
Their problem was that there wasn’t a single membership plugin for WordPress that stated it could do this.
Here’s one of the most common things I tell people on Clarity calls – There is no single perfect plugin that does everything your business needs.
The Components of the Solution
To build this kind of site, I suggested that they use the following:
MemberPress for their membership plugin
MailChimp for their email list
Stripe for their payment gateway
SoundCloud for their streaming audio hosting
The wonderful thing? MemberPress integrates with MailChimp and Stripe already. So there’s very little work you have to do to finish this site up.
The 8 Steps to Protecting Streaming Audio
1. First, activate MemberPress. It comes with an additional extension to integration with MailChimp. As you can see, I activated that too.
2. Next, configure MemberPress. There’s not a lot to configure (a few tabs), but they’ll even create the pages you need for you automatically. So it’s all pretty easy and fast. The trick is that “Unauthorized Access” spot. Make sure you’re redirecting non-members to where you want them to go (pricing page, login page, etc).
3. From there, decide if anyone gets free previews. One of my favorite features is the ability to decide if you want to give people a certain number of free visits before charging them, or if you want to let Google have free previews.
4. Now we get to the good stuff – create your membership plan. You’ll see that this is a simple thing to configure – with a price (in the upper right hand corner) and an ability to send your member their first welcome email. You can also protect pages and define how your pricing looks from here.
5. Protect your pages. The protection rules are powerful with MemberPress. In this case, I’m just protecting a dedicated page for this month’s streaming audio.
6. Now record or upload your audio to SoundCloud. Remember, the real trick to protecting these files is to make sure that when you’re uploading or recording content you mark it as “Private.” This will ensure that only your members get it when you use that private link I mention in the video above.
7. Now get the private streaming audio link. When you click on the “Share” link on any audio file on SoundCloud, you get a Private Share link. That’s what you’ll use on your membership site.
8. Place that link on your protected page. This will only be visible by members with access.
That’s it. Now you’ll see that members and non-members will have different experiences when accessing protected streaming audio on your membership site, powered by MemberPress. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */