In this post, WORKING FROM HOME – PART 5 – we find top “proven” ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.
You can use WordPress and blogging to earn money online by doing what you love. You can work from home, at your own time, and there is no limit on how much money you can make.
When you think of how to make money blogging, advertising is often the first thing that comes to mind.
Yes, it is possible to make money with ads on WordPress, but there are also other ways you can monetize your blog content.
Here are a few methods that work:
1. Make Money With Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service to your audience using special tracking links, and then get a referral commission for every time someone buys after clicking your link.
Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money because you can promote a widevariety of products. Just about every popular store like Walmart, BestBuy, Amazon, and others have an affiliate program.
2. Display Google AdSense on WordPress
Google Adsense is an easy way to make money from your blog. All you need to do is add a script from Google to your website and start displaying ads.
You will get paid for every time a user clicks on the ad. These are called CPC ads. Google Adsense is a good way to start earning money online when you are first starting out.
3. Use a WordPress Advertising Plugin to Sell Ads Directly
Google AdSense is easy to set up, but the amount of money you can earn is limited. Each ad click earning will vary.
Directly selling banner ad space on your website can be more lucrative. Instead of having to rely on an intermediary who takes a cut of the money, you negotiate the price and terms on your own.
While you could use CPC or CPM method for selling banner ads, most bloggers charge a flat rate instead. Charging a flat rate is easier than keeping track of views or clicks.
Still, directly selling ads takes more work to manage than using Google AdSense. Instead of just adding a bit of code to your website, you’ll have to negotiate the pricing, come up with an agreement and terms, and take care of administrative work like invoicing.
4. Sell Sponsored Blog Posts
Some bloggers aren’t interested in displaying ads to their audience and wonder how to monetize a blog without ads. An alternative way to monetize a blog is through sponsorships.
A sponsorship works just like it does in sports, TV shows, or other industries. Basically, a company pays you to represent their product, talk about it, and promote it to your readers.
5. Get Paid to Write Reviews
Similar to sponsored posts, you can also make money by writing paid reviews on your site. This is a slightly different monetization method than a review site with affiliate links, as mentioned above.
Instead, you get to try out products related to your niche for free, and even get paid for writing a review. You’ll want to review products that are relevant to your niche, that your audience would be interested in.
You can approach companies on your own to ask about doing paid reviews.
6. Earn Money Online by Flipping Websites
If you know how to build a WordPress website, then you’re way ahead of most people. Sometimes entrepreneurs like to buy already established websites that they can use for their own businesses.
This requires knowing the type of websites in demand, and how to price and sell them. There are websites like Flippa that serve as auction sites and brokers for selling websites.
7. Get Public Speaking Gigs as an Influencer
Many bloggers make a lot of money by speaking at conferences. Speaking at events whether you are paid or not helps you promote your blog and your personal brand.
If you are good at networking and public speaking, then you would be able to find lots of new opportunities on the way.
Here are some general tips you need to keep in mind if you want to make money as a paid
public speaker.
- Be an expert in your field. If you don’t have enough knowledge/skills at the moment, then start learning right away.
- Be consistent – You need to continuously promote your expertise on the topic through your blogging and social media activities.
- Let people know that you are available. You can announce on social media or privately reach out to event organizers.
- You may not find paid public speaking gigs right away. Many successful speakers start their public speaking career from smaller, more casual, and free community events and meetups.
8. Create a Paid Membership Website
If you’re not interested in selling ads or sponsored posts, there are plenty of other ways you can earn money online from your blog. A popular method is by having your audience pay to access certain content or areas of your site. Here are a couple of ways to do that.
Create Restricted Members Only Content
You can create a members-only area for them to share more in-depth blog posts, downloads, videos, audio content, and more.
Create A Forum
Another option for creating a paid membership site is to create private forums that users must pay to get access to. Forums are a great way for your audience to get one-on-one advice from you. Other members of the community can also interact and help each other
out.
While moderating a forum can be a lot of work, a paid forum is a great way to earn recurring revenue from your WordPress site.
Create a questions and answers community
Just like forums, you will have to spend some time building a sizable community. After that, you will be able to monetize user-generated content on your website using advertisements, affiliate ads, and other methods.
Popular question and answer websites are able to get direct advertisement and sponsorship deals from advertisers in their industry. This helps them negotiate a much higher rate and extra perks.
Create a Directory Website With WordPress
Another option for making money online with WordPress is to create a directory or listing website. You can then charge visitors to advertise their listings on your site.
Here are a few different directory ideas to get you started.
Create a Paid Business Directory
Directories might gather reviews of local businesses, share the best podcasts on a given topic, or list the best products in a certain niche.
Create a WordPress Job Board With Paid Submissions
Another option is to create a paid job board. Companies who want to advertise an open position to your audience can pay you to submit a listing.
It’s easier to create a successful job board if you narrow down to a specific niche. That way you can become the go-to site for anyone looking for a job in that industry, with minimal competition.
This works great for established blogs in a narrow niche.
For example, ProBlogger is now famous for their job board for professional bloggers.
Create a WordPress Event Calendar With Paid Submissions
A paid event calendar is a good monetization method for local or industry-specific websites. You might choose to advertise events in your local city, conferences in a certain industry, or even webinars or live streaming events.
9. Sell Digital Products With WordPress
If you’re looking for a more low-maintenance way to make money online blogging with WordPress, then selling your own digital products may be a good choice. While you do have to invest the time to create the product up front, after it’s created your work is very minimal.
Here are a few digital products you can create and sell on your website.
Sell Ebooks on WordPress
Ebooks are an obvious choice for creating digital products. They are relatively simple to write and produce. If you’ve been blogging for a while, then you can collect some of your old blog posts and turn them into chapters of a book.
Sell Online Courses
Selling an online course is another great way to make money online. Courses usually sell for a much higher price point than ebooks. You can charge a premium for your expertise.
You’ll need to create the lessons for your course, plus any supporting materials that you want to include such as downloads, slides, checklists, templates, etc.
I will be sharing more on this topic in my next post.
Host a Paid Webinar
Webinars are a great way to build your audience, share your experience, and grow your business. But did you know they’re also a smart way to make money online?
WordPress makes it easy to host a paid webinar. Whether you’re using your site to actually host the webinar, or just to advertise your webinar and register participants, it’s crucial for your webinar success.
11. Sell Services Online Using WordPress
If you’re looking for easy ways to make money online, selling services is the fastest way to get started. There’s no up front investment of creating a product or investing in inventory. Instead, you can just create a “hire me” page on your website and start looking for your first client.
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Offer Freelance Services
As a online blogger with WordPress you’re already an expert on your niche. You can start earning an income by offering your skills and expertise as a freelancer.
Start Your Own Consulting Business
Consulting is another way to make money online from your blog and share your expertise. As with freelancing, there is no startup investment. You can start offering consulting services on your existing blog.
All you need is to create a page with a form so users can request more information.
12. Sell Physical Products Online Using WordPress
While selling digital products or services can be an easy way to start making money online, there’s nothing quite like selling real, physical products.
Here are a few ways you can get started selling products with WordPress.
Start an Ecommerce Business With WooCommerce
Have an idea for your own product? Why not start your own online store? WordPress makes it easy to create a shop or even add a shop to your existing blog using the free WooCommerce plugin. You can also use Shopify or BigCommerce as WooCommerce alternative.
Create an Online T-shirt Store With WordPress
Creating your own t-shirt shop is easy with WordPress. Almost everyone wears t-shirts, so opening up a t-shirt shop is a great way to monetize any kind of blog. Designing t-shirts allows you to be creative and offer something unique to your audience.
Create a WooCommerce Dropshipping Store
Dropshipping is another way you can create an ecommerce store on your WordPress website without having to handle inventory or ship items yourself.
With dropshipping, you create the store, manage the website, and customer service. But a dropshipping service will take your orders and ship them out to your customers. They’re an invisible third party that your customers don’t even know about.
Create an Amazon Affiliate WordPress Shop
If you want an easier way to set up an ecommerce site without having to ship products yourself, then you may want to try an Amazon Affiliate shop.
As with many of the items on this list, this works best if you specialize in a niche. If you offer everything, it’s impossible to compete with a big shop like Amazon. But in a small niche, you can differentiate yourself and really stand out.
Create an Online Marketplace Website
An online marketplace is like an eCommerce store where users cannot just buy but also sell their own products. Normally, WooCommerce assumes that you run a single vendor website.
You can make money by charging commission on each sell, or you can allow vendors to buy membership packages for their listings.
Make an Auctions Website
Ebay is probably the best example of an online auctions marketplace. You can run auctions on your WordPress website and even allow third-party vendors to list their products as well. You can make money by charging for the listing or by getting a cut on each sell.
Create a Job Marketplace website
Unlike a regular job listings website, a job marketplace allows you to make money on each job listing. Fiverr and UpWork are probably the best examples of online job marketplace websites.
You can promote your job marketplace as a micro-job platform for people working in the same niche as your blog. To make your platform more competitive you can select a very specific niche.
You can charge a small fee for job listings or when a job is completed. More successful completion of jobs will bring you more customers and freelancers in the future.
13.Develop WordPress Plugins
If you have a basic grasp of how WordPress works and some simple PHP knowledge, you can create your own WordPress plugin.
As a plugin developer, there are many ways you can distribute your plugins. Anyone can submit a free plugin to the WordPress.org plugin directory, as long as they follow the WordPress plugin guidelines.
This is a great way to gain experience and build a reputation for yourself as a WordPress plugin developer. Once you’re ready to start selling premium plugins, you could choose to sell them on a site like MOJO Marketplace, or on your own WordPress site.
1. Which one of these proven ways is right for me?
Depends on what you are passionate about and which method would work best with your blog’s topics.
For example, as you gain more experience with online blogging with WordPress, you could run a blog about photography, then affiliate marketing, advertisements, and paid memberships may all work well for your blog.
Focus on offering useful, quality content, that users will find helpful and money will follow. Or as the saying goes, do what you love and the money will follow.
2. How much money can I make from blogging?
It really depends on how much effort you put in and the time you are willing to invest. To be honest, many beginner bloggers lose interest and give up quickly.
You will be making money based on how much traffic you get, the monetization methods you use, and the work you put in. Many successful bloggers make six and even seven figure incomes.
3. How long would it take before I start making some serious money from blogging?
Making money online is not a ‘get-rich-quick’ scam. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably trying to scam you. If you want to make money by starting a blog, then you will have to work hard and invest a lot of your time into it.
There is no easy way to tell you how soon you would start making money. Some bloggers start making small amounts soon after starting their blogs. Others struggle to get their blogs to take off.
4. How do I get started?
Getting started with your own online blogging with a WordPress blog is easy. However, make sure that you are using the right platform.
My that was rather a long post. In my next post – Part 6 – I will be looking at Selling Online Courses. So keep a look out for that. Check back from time to time. You don’t want to miss any of this.
