I started EngageWP in March 2014, and have had a great time building it into what it is today, over two years later. Over those two years, I’ve established a solid stream of traffic, built a nicely sized email list, and generated a good amount of client work from the content I’ve written. My main goal when I started EngageWP was to give back to the WordPress community by documenting a lot of the things I learn while developing WordPress websites and software. I’m happy to say that I have done a lot of that, and I’m very pleased with the outcomes so far.

Today, I’m officially launching a couple EngageWP membership plans (“Spectator” and “Powerhouse”). The reason for this is to generate some additional revenue from the site, obviously. A lot of my work today is consumed with client development, and I’ve found myself strapped for time when it comes to planning out new content. By offering membership plans, I hope to begin increasing the income generated by the site itself, rather than the contract work I pick up. This will allow me to spend more time creating much more content.

What kind of premium content?

If you’ve followed EngageWP for any time, you’ve probably noticed that I do a lot of tutorials. I do more tutorials than any other type of content (reviews, opinions, etc.) because it allows me to teach my readers how to do cool things, and that’s what I enjoy the most. Tutorials, like all good content, require a lot of time to write. In fact, they may even require more time because to write a quality tutorial, you have to do a few things:

• You have to plan out what you’ll be teaching, and organize it into a logical flow that will benefit a reader who is trying to follow along.
• You need to write the code, test it, and document it. To produce a code tutorial, the first it obviously required, but the second two are essential to producing a quality tutorial. Without testing, your code may not work right. Without documenting, it may be hard to follow. These steps require a lot of time.

It may sound obvious, but, to produce good code tutorials, you also need to know how to code! You cannot teach others about code if you don’t know how to write it yourself. Learning to code properly takes a lot of time, usually years. Therefore, there’s a substantial, previous time investment that goes into writing these kings of posts.

All that said, the premium content on EngageWP will be tutorials.

Will existing tutorials become premium?

For the most part, no. Almost all of the tutorials I’ve written to date will remain free. However, there are a few that now require a membership.

Moving forward, I will still be writing a good amount of free tutorials.

Any other premium content?

In addition to premium tutorials, the higher membership (“Powerhouse”) will also include access to comments on tutorials for support, as well as every premium plugin and theme (Genesis) I develop.

How to register?

Signup here and follow the prompts.

Conclusion

I’m very determined to maintain EngageWP as a great resource for anyone looking to do more with WordPress. By offering membership plans, I hope to be able to do even more in the future. Over the next few weeks, I look forward to talking more about how I created the membership features, and sharing my thoughts about building membership sites in general.