How to Start a Nutrition Business Online Using Subscriptions

Nutrition is an incredibly fast-growing business field. In 2022, the global nutrition market was worth around $27 billion and that’s expected to grow to $37 billion by 2027. If you can manage to grab even a small slice of that business and get recurring clients, you’re on a path to success.

Since proper nutrition is an ongoing process, it makes sense to offer client subscriptions. That way, you can guide them through their journey to improving their eating habits. WordPress and Paid Member Subscriptions make this possible by enabling you offer a variety of subscription plans, all of which you can fully customize.

In this article, we’ll talk about why it makes sense to start a nutrition business. We’ll also go over how to use the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin to build that business. Let’s get to it!

Why Start a Nutrition Subscription Website

A nutrition business based on subscriptions can take a lot of shapes. In general, you’re probably going to be offering ongoing dieting advice and providing users with the tools and information they need to make healthy eating decisions. With that in mind, let’s go over the upsides of learning how to start a nutrition business.

Guide Subscribers Through Their Dieting Process

The statistics concerning diets are not uplifting. A 2023 study by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) shows that around 52% of US residents followed some kind of diet during the year. The primary motivation for dieting is weight loss, followed by esthetic reasons and improving health.

Other studies show that around 95% of all diets fail and even when they succeed, most people end up regaining the weight within two years. One potential reason behind this is that a lot of people don’t have accountability systems or partners that can help them maintain a healthy diet over the long term.

That is where your nutrition subscription business can come in. There is clearly a massive market for nutrition advice and guidance. Giving users access to someone who can answer their nutrition questions and check in with them periodically can help subscribers meet their goals and maintain them over the long term.

Build a Community for Nutrition Enthusiasts

Your nutrition website can also act as a hub for subscribers. You can do this by setting up functionality such as forums or enabling comments sections throughout the website.

Paid Member Subscriptions works with both approaches. You can use the bbPress add-on to integrate the forums plugin with Paid Member Subscriptions. This enables you to set up restricted forums where only subscribers get to participate.

Community is an essential tool to encourage subscriptions. Adapting to a healthy diet can be incredibly difficult and a lot of people don’t have anyone to share that journey with.

Giving subscribers access to forums where they can share their experiences can help you turn them into long-term customers. Moreover, it can increase the chances that they’ll decide to stick with a healthy eating program.

Offer Exclusive Content and Services

Ultimately, users will only subscribe to a nutrition business if it offers great value. The internet is full of nutrition gurus and advice, so you need to find a way to differentiate your business from what is already out there.

One approach that can work is to offer personalized nutrition advice for each subscriber or ongoing chats to discuss their progress. This gives users access to a personal nutrition specialist without having to leave the house, which can be a fantastic selling point for subscriptions.

Aside from personalized advice, you can also offer group meetups, publish blog posts regularly, keep users up-to-date with the latest nutrition advice, and more.

What kind of content to offer will depend on your expertise when it comes to nutrition. If you want people to pay for a subscription, you need to offer them an amazing return on their investment. That can only happen if you know your stuff when it comes to nutrition.

How to Start a Nutrition Business in WordPress (3 Steps)

For this tutorial, we’re going to use the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin. This plugin enables you to set up subscriptions, manage payments, and protect content so only members can access it.

While you can use the free version of the plugin, we recommend getting a license if you’re going to be running a full-fledged subscription business. This will make it easier to start a nutrition business online since you’ll get access to add-ons, multiple payment options, content restriction, and more.

Step 1: Set Up the Paid Member Subscriptions Plugin

This step is fairly straightforward, but we’re going to show you how it works so you don’t miss out on critical plugin features. Once you obtain a Paid Member Subscriptions license, you’ll be able to download the premium version of the plugin. Go ahead and install it in the WordPress.

Once you activate the plugin, navigate to the Paid Member Subscriptions tab in WordPress. Select the option that says Open Setup Wizard:

The setup wizard will help you set up registration, login, account, and password reset pages for your site. These are all necessary, so toggle all the corresponding options in the User Pages screen:

The second step of the setup wizard will enable you to choose between multiple styles for the forms and tables the plugin uses. This is a personal decision, so try and choose an option that you think will look good with your active theme:

Note that you can always switch plugin styles later on if you want to try something different. Next up, the Payments screen will enable you to choose what payment options you want to offer. The plugin supports Stripe, PayPal, and manual payments by default:

What option(s) to use will depend on how you want to process payments and what processors work best in your region and with your audience. Click on Continue once you’ve decided and that’s it for the basic setup wizard. Now let’s move on to creating a subscription plan.

Step 2: Create a Subscription Plan

You can’t start a nutrition business online without subscription plans. Paid Member Subscriptions enables you to set up as many plans as you need. You even get to offer wholly free plans or temporary free trials.

Setting up a plan is simple. Go to Paid Member Subscriptions → Subscription Plans → Add New. This will open an editor where you can configure the plan’s settings. To get started, set a name and description for the plan:

Next, you get to set the duration of the plan and its price. You can also choose whether to charge a signup fee and enable free trials if you want to go that route:

In that example, you can see we’re not charging a subscription fee or offering a free trial. Note that your pricing strategy should vary depending on what type of plan and services you’re offering.

A lot of businesses need to experiment with different price points and subscription offers before they find what works for their audience. If you’re not sure how much to charge, don’t be afraid to try different offers.

Finally, you’ll need to configure the plan’s renewal settings and decide what user role to assign to subscribers. That last part is essential since Paid Member Subscriptions can help you protect content based on user roles.

By default, we recommend using the Always renew automatically option. Customers are used to auto-renewing subscriptions and this setting still enables them to opt out if they decide to do so. For the User Role setting, select the Create new User Role option. Now click on Save Subscription.

Once you save the plan, the User Role setting will update to show a new role. That role will share the same name of the plan, so keep that in mind for the next section.

After you publish a new plan, you’ll be able to see it if you visit the Registration page on your site. The plugin automatically set up that page during step number one:

Go ahead and create as many plans as needed. You can even create membership discounts and offer your visitors discount codes for your subscription plans.

Then move on to the next step.

Step 3: Restrict Content on Your Website

A subscription-based nutrition business should have content that is only available to paying members. Paid Member Subscriptions enables you to decide which members get access to which pages.

To restrict content, open the Block Editor for the page or post you want to protect. Add the content you want to protect and look for the Content Restriction meta box → Display Options settings:

This widget enables you to decide what user role has access to the page with the Display For settings. You’ll see a list of existing user roles and you get to select which ones can visit the page.

While restricting content is easy, you’ll still need to put in the work of creating it. If you want to start a nutrition business, you’ll need lots of private content to encourage members to sign up. Otherwise, you might have problems getting subscriptions or convincing members to stick around.

Conclusion

The hardest part of learning how to start a nutrition business is creating and publishing the content that will help you get and retain members. If you want people to pay for nutrition advice, you need to show that you’re an expert. That means plenty of blog posts, case studies, sharing the latest developments in dieting, and more.

From a technical standpoint, launching a subscription nutrition business is easier than you might imagine, at least with WordPress. Here’s how to do it:

1. Set up the Paid Member Subscriptions plugin.
2. Create one or more subscription plans.
3. Restrict content on your website based on subscription plans.

Do you have any questions about how to start a nutrition business online? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!