The model of Monthly Recurring Revenue allows your business to predict regular income from your customers, either by selling packages of your service via a tier system, usage-based, or calculated on per-user bases. If you need some revenue up-front, you can focus on yearly packages instead of monthly ones.
Why Introduce Monthly Recurring Revenue?
Selling a service or product once is a great accomplishment – every customer counts! What’s better is having that customer upgrade their current service or having them purchase another service or product from you. What’s even better than that is reselling the same service month after month for your returning customer. That’s where the MRR model comes in, you can sell your service or product on recurring bases and reap the rewards of predictable revenue each month.
Let’s say you sell WordPress maintenance. You don’t just sell that service once and let your customer go, you provide that service in a monthly package because you provide that WordPress maintenance service every month.
But what do you do if you don’t offer a service like WordPress maintenance which is easily resold every month and are struggling to figure out how to introduce MRR into your business? That’s what we’ll look at here!
How To Introduce MRR Into Your Business

Here we’ll look at some examples of products or services that seem like one-time purchases, and we’ll look at how to introduce MRR into your business by making a few tweaks here and there. Most WordPress services or products can be adapted to the MRR model, either by revamping the way that you sell your main product or by adding additional services that benefit your customers.
Plugin Developers
Selling premium plugins is a lucrative business in the WordPress space! You’re always in demand, and you’re only limited by your own imagination and skill as a developer. A passion for delivering new features to customers using WordPress opens doors to accepting monthly recurring revenue. If you’re selling your plugin code to customers once and not hearing from them again (or you are hearing from them again and not charging for your time) here are a few ways you can solve this:
- Recurring license for usage
- Sell monthly support packages at varying tiers (For example, increase the speed or scope of support you offer for higher tiers)
- Sell your plugin depending on who is using it. For example, an agency license would cover more installs than a personal use license
- Offer white-label recurring licenses to agencies
That’s just a few ways you can begin introducing MRR into your plugin development business so that you’re not volunteering your time to customers who purchase once and need ongoing support or require the plugin on multiple websites.
Content Writers
Writers of all niches are in high demand in the world of WordPress. You could be writing blog posts for businesses or articles for a specific niche or you could be a general content writer accepting projects on a wide range of topics. Either way, there are lots of opportunities to introduce MRR into your business.
- Recurring monthly consultations (offer your skills and knowledge to guide your clients on what type of content would perform well for their business – you could even set up recurring monthly packages which offer content planning and scheduling for the month)
- Content retainers – switching your clients to a retainer model gives you a stable income and gets you out of the feast or famine cycle.
- Offer content packages to your clients in a tier system – X amount of posts a month for a set amount on a recurring bases
Theme Developers
Just like plugin developers, theme shops can offer monthly packages via a range of options:
- Sell recurring theme use licenses
- Provide support packages in a monthly subscription package
- Offer recurring licenses to access theme updates and premium support
SEO/Marketing Services
Marketing agencies have a ton of opportunities to offer monthly recurring revenue packages. As a marketing agency or consultant, you’re likely already offering consultations, SEO audits, content writing and review services.
If you’re also offering more advanced marketing services like ads management, you will be able to increase your pricing by offering these more advanced services on recurring bases.
- Consider creating recurring packages which include different service options depending on what your clients require
- You can create recurring packages based on specific services, for example, recurring content writing packages, PPC and other ad packages, and even regular SEO audits on recurring services.
- Offering SEO audits regularly also opens the door to being able to provide recommendations for your clients that you can then sell via your other services.
- Offer regular consultations to your clients where you discuss the status of their SEO performance
- Consider offering website maintenance packages as an add-on service
Using Automation To Manage MRR
Once you’ve introduced MRR into your business, you’ll need to consider automating the management of this aspect of your business to save you a bunch of time.
When you’re managing recurring subscriptions, you’ll need automated systems in place to manage things like payments, failed payments, onboarding and other account management aspects such as where your clients can see the status of their subscription(s).
Once you’re on a roll with signing up clients to your recurring services, you’ll want to look at why clients cancel these packages and work to improve your systems bit by bit.
This short introduction to adding MRR into your WordPress business should have given you some ideas to look into and consider so that you can grow and scale your business. Check out some of the related posts below to dig deeper into MRR and to learn more about what you should consider when you’re managing monthly recurring revenue!
Featured Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Share Your Thoughts