How to Set Up Your Site As a Paid Site Read more

Many people start websites for fun, but if a site becomes wildly popular there are several reasons why a webmaster should consider changing it to a paid site. With more web traffic comes more costs: You are charged for the amount of bandwidth used (the number of bytes that visitors download when they visit your site). Also, if you find yourself spending hours each day maintaining the site and answering requests, it can become more like a full- or part-time job.

Instructions

things you'll need:

• Merchant payment account
• Member services provider

1. • 1
     Open a merchant account that can be integrated into your website. These are called "gateways" and allow your web visitors to process credit card and check payments online. You can either use PayPal, which offers both a full online merchant account and a simple web-based shopping cart solution, or sign up with a company like Authorize.net that offers gateway merchant accounts that can be integrated with your site.
   • 2
     Open an account with a member services provider. Sites such as Authpro.com and CoffeeCup.com (website access manager) allow you to set up your website pages with member login screens. You can choose either password protecting all of your website pages or just a certain segment of your site.
   • 3
     Pay for the service and log in to your account. Answer the service provider questions: You will be asked for the URL of the page that you want users to be sent to when they log in (also called the "successful login page") and payment information. Configure user payment options for either a regular subscription or a one-time fee.
   • 4
     Paste the code provided by the member services provider into each page of your website that you want users to pay to see. Upload your website files to your web hosting server.
   • 5
     Test the site by checking the URL of each protected page. Each such page should default to the login page and ask users to register. For registration to be completed, the user will need to enter payment information.