10 Best Ways to Make Money Online Blogging with WordPress
More and more, small business owners and entrepreneurs are making money online. And with today’s technology, it’s easier than ever for even non-technical people to make a website that generates income.
In this article, we will share the top “proven” ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.
“make money online” articles, this is a comprehensive guide on how to make money at home legitimately, using blogging and WordPress.
Many of these methods require some investment of time and/or money to get started. As long as you’re willing to put in the effort, you’ll reap the reward.
Before you can start using any of these methods, you’ll need to have your own self-hosted WordPress blog. We have a step-by-step guide on how to start a WordPress blog for beginners.
Monetize Your Blog Content
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:
10 Best Ways to Make Money Online Blogging with WordPress
1. Freelance Writing
While this list is full of ways you can make money with WordPress, content creation extends to pretty much every niche. Just visit your favorite online blogs. Many have contributor application pages where you can submit your articles and get paid for them. So not only will you get some awesome backlinks from top-ranking sites, but you can get paid for your hard work.
You can also find WordPress content writing jobs on job board sites. A couple worth checking out includes Upwork and ProBlogger Jobs – both of which have tons of writing jobs available as of this very moment.
Before applying it might be a good idea to have an online portfolio set up to show off your previous work. Specifically, you should be sure to include a short bio, active social profiles, and links to recently published posts.
2. Create an Amazon Affiliate Store
Want to build your own online store, but don’t want to have to deal with the time, cost, and burden of selling your own physical product? Building an Amazon Affiliate WordPress shop might be a fantastic choice for you to make money with your blog.
Basically, you promote Amazon’s products on your website. When your visitors purchase those products through your links, you earn a commission. If you have a lot of traffic, this could be a fantastic way to make money.
The affiliate program, known as Amazon Associates, lets you go about this in a couple of ways:
- Create a new online store that promotes only Amazon products
- Add Amazon products to your existing eCommerce store
Starting a blog about a specific topic and selling physical products to help solve your readers’ problems is a smart way that bloggers are earning money online. This can be done with your own products too, which we’ll cover next.
3. 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 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.
You can see our guide on how to monetize a WordPress blog with Google AdSense to get started, and this tutorial on how to optimize your AdSense revenue for more tips.
4. Create & Monetize a Blog
Having a blog is a great way to generate passive income. You can make money using affiliate marketing, selling ads, sponsored reviews, etc from your blog. This requires no additional effort from you – it’s simply a way to take full advantage of the content and traffic you already have.
Most marketplaces and service providers offer affiliate programs. Some of our personal favorites that are easy to work with include Themeforest, Shareasale, CJ Affiliate, and Creative Market. Just signup for a FREE account and add links to your posts where it feels natural.
To sell ads you can offer your own ad packages or work through a company like BuySellAds. Or signup for a Google Adsense account and insert your code to let Google’s network handle the ads while you get a nice little check each month.
For more information on BLOGGING and the latest news visit the site.
5. Display Ads
Another popular way to make money blogging is by placing ads on your website for your visitors to see. There are several ad networks around, but the biggest is by far Google Adsense.
You make money when users see or click on ads that Google displays automatically on your site.
AdSense requires you to apply in order to run ads on your website. It usually takes about 8 hours for Google to review your application and determine if you qualify for AdSense.
6. Sell Ebooks
You still shouldn’t shy away from publishing an ebook to make money blogging with digital products.
For one, it’s really easy to do. You can use a plugin like Easy Digital Downloads to make selling your ebook super simple.
And, ebooks are a smart way to make money blogging because they’re insanely easy to create. If you already have some popular posts on your blog, you can repurpose that content into an ebook. This is a common way bloggers make ebooks fast.
Plus, you can also self-publish your ebook on Kindle Direct Publishing so people can find it on Amazon. This can help bring visitors to your blog and build your brand.
7. Website Maintenance
We mentioned blog setup, but there is a huge opportunity to generate ongoing income with maintenance services. Many website owners don’t want to deal with the day-to-day tasks of running a website – they simply want a way for people to find them on the web. And this is where you come in. Maintenance can entail WordPress updates, security monitoring, theme and plugin updates, hosting management, CDN setup, etc. Pretty much anything you’re already doing for your own website you can get paid a monthly fee to do for others.
It’s important to note that if you go this route you’ll want to use a site management plugin to make your life easier. A few of the top options are:
- InfiniteWP
- MainWP
- ManageWP
These plugins all allow you to manage core, theme, and plugin updates as well as monitor SEO, site speed, comments, and even backups all from one single dashboard.
8. WordPress Plugin Development
If you find a solution to a problem and create a plugin for it (that your audience might be interested in buying), there’s absolutely nothing that can stop you from making income from it. Analyze a few existing plugins (preferably in a similar niche) that are making decent money. See if they are using a premium (paid plugin) or freemium (free plugin with paid upgrade). Are they utilizing WordPress.org, a marketplace, or relying on their own website for promotion? You might also want to check the comments/reviews as well to get an idea of what support might be like for you. Then figure out how you can do the same to create a constant cash flow!
If you are thinking to make money by selling WordPress plugins, make sure to create them by focusing on a specific need. One of the best examples in this category is the Elementor page builder. This mega page-building plugin is focused on making creating custom page layouts easy and has grown to be used by over 4 million WordPress sites. Plus the plugin developer monetized their creation by releasing a premium Elementor Pro with more advanced features.
9. Sell Sponsored Blog Posts
Some bloggers aren’t interested in displaying ads to their audience and wonder how to monetize a blog without ads.
With ad networks, you lose some control over the content displayed on your site. Some readers will get annoyed or offended by ads, and more and more people are using ad blockers which affects your earning potential.
10. Create Members-Only Content
The easiest way to cash in on selling ‘members only’ or ‘gated’ content is to start a membership website.
It’s a great way to get recurring income by charging a monthly membership fee. Tools like MemberPress can help you set this up easily on your WordPress website.
