Using your Paid Group Feature for Member Announcements

[Starrfire Price]

Many creators (not all) are always looking for good ways to monetize their Ning networks. Since the Paywall Feature was enabled for multiple areas of our sites I sat down and came up with some ideas for helpful ways to use the Paywall feature (I'll share some others later when I have a little more time).

The Group Paywall feature is great and it gives us the opportunity to use it to help our members share announcements (product sales for their businesses, new website launch, events, book launches etc.).

Prior to the paywall I did a monthly Member Broadcast Announcement that I would email out to the members of my site (I charged $19 for a Text Broadcast (30 words max) & $29 for a Text w/ linkable image broadcast), the announcement information would also be placed onto the front page of the site and featured in the Admin Announcements area of my site. The one broadcast would be comprised of a max of 20 member announcements. Yet, now that we have the availability to use the Paywall feature I found that the Member Broadcast Announcements can be easily implemented into a group feature and it's pretty much hands free.

With the Group Paywall you can set it up for Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-Annual, Annual etc., so, you could easily open up a Public Group for member announcements w/ the Paywall Feature installed and allow your members to join the group and add a monthly announcement. To share the announcements with your members use the Group Forums feature (the place they individually add their announcement) go to View All to grab the RSS link (at the bottom) and then use the RSS link with your sites RSS Link Feature (Features Layout area) and place it where ever you wish for the member announcements to show up on your site.

A note when setting up the group: Feature the Group so it appears on the front page of your site. Turn off the group comments Feature (believe me, people will confuse the comment area for the place to place their announcements and then you'll be left with answering a lot of messages as to why they're info is not showing in the feed) and disable the Allow Members to send out messages to the members feature. There may be some light administration needed for the group if you only allow x amounts of announcements per month, per member but I think it's easy to implement and can be very beneficial to your members who have news and products that they would like to share with the community members.

I hope this idea is helpful to someone :)

[SweetPotato]

Very interesting concept, and great thinking. Will give this some thought. Cheers for sharing

[Starrfire Price]

Thank you! I'm so glad it could be helpful. Have an awesome weekend!

[Jeff Bean]

Interesting idea!

I haven't implemented a paywall yet, but I think I get it. Sounds like you use a paywalled group's discussion forum which you then feed to your mainpage. Kinda like a community classifieds.

I don't see you saying you use it as the basis for a broadcast message. Thought at first that's what you were saying. (Though I suppose the same feed could be used for that, but I've not tweaked my broadcasts a lot so I'm not sure that's all there would be to it.) So you're finding the announcement section on the mainpage served your purposes and used it to replace the emailed broadcast message?

Thinking this might be a way to monetize all types of members' announcements. I was going to use the Events feature, but aside from not being monetizable, it's really only good for Events anyway.

Thanks for the tip.