If your project can reach and appeal to enough people, you might just get the funding you need, or at least secure enough funding to convince real loaners to join in. And the first step to this is to create your own crowdfunding website.

Today, I will demonstrate how to use the WP Crowdfunding plugin to begin gathering funding.

What is Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is a technique many start-up businesses utilize to acquire the funding necessary to start their business or fund specific projects. They achieve this by collecting small amounts of money from a very large group of people, and sometimes, it can take years to reach a goal.

Many of these start-ups will choose to use a third-party platform that already has an established reputation and userbase. This will ensure more people will see the funding request and that they will be likely to trust the project.

However, these platforms are not a charity and take a portion of the money raised to cover transaction fees and make money. Instead, you can build your own crowdfunding website and cut out the middle man.

That said, unless you have a way to spread the word, you may not be able to reach enough people with your idea.

How to Use WP Crowdfunding WordPress

Step 1: Install WP Crowdfunding

WP Crowdfunding is a WooCommerce-based plugin, which means you must also install WooCommerce on your website. With this plugin, you can create a WordPress crowdfunding section or dedicate the entire site to your purpose.

This means accepting payments from funders, setting goals, seeing progress, and just about everything else you will need to manage your fundraiser.

Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for WP Crowdfunding in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the WP Crowdfunding plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

Note: If you don’t have WooCommerce installed, you will receive an error message informing you to do so. This plugin assumes you have WooCommerce installed and set up as this is required for the plugin.

Step 2: Ensure Your Payment Method is Set Up

While I am assuming that you have WooCommerce set-up, there is one thing you really need to make sure of before proceeding, the payment method.

WooCommerce supports a variety of payment options including PayPal and Stripe. However, depending on how you have these accounts set up, they may not be in a position to, hopefully, accept hundreds or thousands of transactions as donations begin flooding in.

This is also a great time to take a deep look at the transaction fees of each platform.

While you want to ensure you make it easy for customers to donate, it is important to realize that the transaction fees can cost you a lot of that money. You might even want to exclude certain options.

I highly recommend getting into contact with each payment system and seeing what options they might offer a crowdfunding website. After all, crowdfunding is very common online today.

Step 3: Setup Pages

This plugin adds a variety of pages to your website that includes the CF Campaign Form, CF Dashboard, CF Listings Page, CF User Registration, Donation Confirmation, Donation Failed, and Donation History.

Each of these pages consists of just a basic shortcode and really needs to be fleshed out. Spend some time customizing these pages. That said, you could simply add the shortcode to an existing page if it better suits your needs.

In the next step, you will have to decide which pages are used when and where.

Step 4: Configure the Settings

With that out of the way, let’s get right into the settings of this plugin. For the most part, everything is very straightforward, but there is a lot to go through.

Note: There are multiple premium add-ons you can pay for which offer a variety of useful features. One big one would be access to the Stripe Connect payment gateway. That said, this tutorial will not go through the premium add-ons at this time.

On the left-hand admin panel click on Crowdfunding and select the Settings option.

The plugin is broken up into four main tabs that contain a variety of settings to configure.

I will cover each tab individually.

General Settings

The General Settings tab allows you to choose the funds manager, which is the system that will accept and manage payments. However, you can only select WooCommerce, so there is no choice in the free version.

You can then set up the default campaign status, campaign edit status, select a dashboard page, campaign submission form, and which user roles can create a campaign. I recommend only letting the administrator role have this privilege.

Click on the “Save Changes” button when you are done.

WooCommerce Settings

The Woocommerce Settings tab deals more with the way crowdfunding is handled and is broken up into multiple sections.

The first section allows you to hide both the crowdfunding page from the shop page and the billing address from the checkout page. You can also select the listing and registration page here.

The Categories section allows you to separate crowdfunding categories from shop categories. And below this, you can customize the submit form.

The rest of the settings allow you to customize various page elements like how many items will appear on the listings page. Simply fill them out and click on the “Save Changes” button.

Style

The Style tab is dedicated to the aesthetics of the plugin. You can select the color scheme, button color, hover color of the button, text color, hover text color, and you can even add your own custom CSS to better match your website’s design.

Simply select the options that work best for your website.

Field Settings

And finally, the Field Settings tab allows you to hide or display various information on your crowdfunding pages. These include things like the start & end date, minimum donation amount, videos, funding goal, and much more.

All of these options are handled with a checkbox, thus you simply need to check the box to enable a feature and uncheck to hide it. By default, everything is checked.

That concludes all of the settings the plugin offers. As long as you customize your pages, your crowdfunding website is ready to go.

Congratulations!

Build A Userbase

Crowdfunding can only succeed if there is a crowd. Starting a website from scratch is an uphill battle and you are going to need to put in a lot of work to build up a sizeable userbase that will attract businesses to use your website.

There are a variety of website marketing tips available, and you are going to need to take advantage of just about every single one of them.

Which WordPress crowdfunding plugin do you use? How easy did you find the setup process to be?

The post How to Set Up WP Crowdfunding in WordPress for Your Projects appeared first on GreenGeeks.

One of the best ways to quickly increase the amount of content you have is by using guest authors. In this platform, you allow others to write posts for the website while giving them a chance to link back to their own domains. This is a common practice and helps both parties drive traffic.

Today, I’m going to show you how to allow guest posts in WordPress to help cultivate more content. There are a couple of methods you could use, and both of them have potential to be very effective.

Using WordPress Roles for Authors

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to allow guest blogging contributions is to simply use registration methods on WordPress itself. This method actually has a lot of great possibilities, especially if you offer the same tools to your writers as you use yourself.

For example, guests would have the same editing tools you use such as TinyMCE Advanced, Yoast SEO and Proofreading should you have those plugins installed. This would help creators streamline their content and make it more appealing on your site.

Since you’re able to restrict the roles of registered users, you have less to worry about in the event someone tries to submit inappropriate content. As contributors, guest projects are held for moderation and editing as a draft. This means you can go over the material before hitting the “Publish” button.

Setting User Roles

To make registered users a viable option, you’ll need to change how people access your website. By default, WordPress sets all new registered users as subscribers. However, this won’t let guests write content.

Go to the Settings area of WordPress and scroll down to “Membership.”

Click the check box next to “Anyone can register.” This opens the site to accept registered users, which isn’t as dramatic as it may seem as long as you have measures in place to prevent bots from creating spam accounts.

Change the default user role to “Contributor.”

Scroll down to the bottom and click “Save Changes.”

There are two ways you can allow people to log into your site to create content: through the backend login screen or through the “meta” widget on the site itself. Either place will allow users to register and log into the website.

The only real downside to this method is that anyone who registers can submit content. This means you may be faced with a ton of drafts to sift through to find good material you want to publish on the site. Of course, this is true no matter what method you use.

The best way to avoid spam in this fashion is to accept guests through email and manually add them as contributors to the website. In other words, you can interview guest bloggers before they can create your content. If you do this, then don’t worry about allowing anyone to register. You simply create a new user with the contributor role.

Using Submissions Forms

Submission forms for guest posts in WordPress are often preferred methods as opposed to registered users I mentioned earlier. These forms only allow content to be submitted and don’t add users to the website.

The downside to using forms is that users will not have access to content tools within the WordPress system. For instance, guest authors will not have access to the readability feature of Yoast SEO if you have it installed.

Here are a couple of the finer plugins to add submission forms to your WordPress website. You will need to install plugins for the following methods.

User Submitted Posts

The User Submitted Posts plugin has a variety of options available to help you build a form specifically for guest blogging.

After installing and activating the plugin, go to the Settings area and click “User Submitted Posts.”

Click on the “Plugin Settings” area to expand its list.

The User Submitted Posts plugin has a very long list of options available for customization. I would advise you to go through each one-by-one and make sure you have them set correctly. This will directly affect how people submit content for posting onto your website.

These options allow you to govern over image sizes, author profiles, URL usage and much more.

Click the “Save Settings” button once your selections are made.

Now that you have the basic form created, you need to add it to your site so guest writers can submit content. To do this, you should use a separate page in WordPress. This way it’s stationary and can be easily added to the menu bar. However, you can also make it a post if you’d like.

In either case, you need to paste the shortcode.

Under the settings options you just saved, you’ll see a section for “Shortcode & Template Tag.” Click this header to expand the window.

Copy this shortcode and paste it into any page or post. This creates the actual form visitors of your website can use to submit their content.

Frontend Post

The Frontend Post by AccessPress is a great tool for collecting content from users without requiring a log in or being registered. Another highlight of the guest blogging plugin is that it’s responsive. This means it’ll look great whether a guest author is using a desktop computer or a smartphone.

One of the things I like most about the plugin from AccessPress is that guest authors have access to the WordPress editing system. So if you have custom tools for writing posts, those contributors will have access. Unfortunately, this does not include additional tools such as Yoast.

In general, I just find this plugin to look nicer than many of the others I’ve tried in the past. It’s a clean layout from the visitor’s perspective.

After installing the plugin, a new feature will be available in the left admin panel of WordPress. Click the option for “AccessPress Anonymous Post.”

AccessPress has a lot of customizable options available. You’ll need to take a few moments and go through each and make sure you have everything set to how you like before publishing the form.

Here is a break down of what you’ll find.

• General Settings Tab
  This area is where you put in the title of the form, how the post is published, media uploads and login messages.
• Form Settings Tab
  In this area, you can set what parts of the form are available to contributors. This includes author information, URLs, email and categories.
• Captcha Settings Tab
  To reduce spam, AccessPress includes a captcha system in the form builder. You can use mathematical or Google captcha systems.

Once you’re ready to place the form, click the “Save all changes” button.

Now that the form is built, it’s time to place it on a page or post. Like the earlier plugin, you’ll copy and paste a shortcode. Again, I would advise using a static page to place the submission form as it will be much easier for visitors to find.

Go to the “How to use” tab in the AccessPress dashboard.

Find and copy the shortcode on this page to paste in your content.

Quickly Grow Your Content

Guest posts have potential to help you grow content rather quickly. This is especially true if your website is already semi-popular. This means you’ll spend less time creating content while focusing more on the other aspects to build a great site. You never know; one of your guest authors just might write that next greatest piece that appears on the first page of a Google search.

How often do you accept guest submissions? Do you find guest posts to help drive your traffic?

The post How to Allow Guest Posts in WordPress to Grow Your Content appeared first on GreenGeeks.