How to Monetize a WordPress Blog?

You may have read lots of articles on the internet that claim to tell you how you can monetize a WordPress blog. Yes, there are many different ways to make money with a blog. But let’s be real, monetizing a blog ain’t an easy task. Monetizing a blog requires plenty of upfront work, gaining the readers to generate traffic to your website or blog. 

In this article, we will be sharing various ways to monetize a WordPress blog. But do keep in mind, some of the strategies may not suit the type of blog that you are running and some will. So take your time and go check out each method.

Here is a small tip, try not to monetize a WordPress blog as soon as you create it. There’s no way to make money blogging without a web audience. Before we talk about how to monetize a WordPress blog, let’s talk about getting an audience for your WordPress site.

Step 1: Select a particular topic or niche of your blog

Your blog topics should be something that both you, and your audience, are familiar with or passionate about. Let’s say you want to make money blogging about cooking recipes. If you love to cook, and you understand the ingredients from top to bottom, you’re more likely to come up with useful content than if you were to write something completely uninteresting or foreign to you.

Step 2: Create a professional-looking blog

Choose a visually compelling design and style for your blog. You can find lots of amazing free themes and plugins on the internet, so you can build attractive blogs and maximize your full money-making potentials. If you want a professional-looking free WordPress theme, you can choose from Zakra, Radiate or Envice. 

Step 3: Post relevant, valuable, entertaining content on your blog

Create content that connects with your audience and also which your personality shines through. But in case you can’t think of any ideas, or if you don’t have time to create something on your own, you could always outsource the task to a reliable freelancer. Remember,  to make money through blogging, you need to invest time and/or money in providing excellent content. By posting valuable and interesting content, you’re slowly building a network of fans to your blog.

Step 4: Bring in the traffic

There are different techniques to generate traffic and make money blogging.

• Ping your blogs to be indexed faster by the search engines.
• Use Google Adwords or other pay-per-click methods to advertise your blog.
• Create informative or entertaining videos, advertise your blog in that video.
• Contact other bloggers and set up a proposal – you put their blog link on your blog, and vice-versa.
• Convert your articles to Infographics and post them to various images and infographic submission sites.

Once you have set up your blog, then you are ready to monetize your WordPress blog. 

1. Google Adsense

For a blogger who’s just starting out, Google Adsense is the best way to monetize your blog even before it has enough traffic for you to start selling ads.

You don’t require a great deal of traffic to run Google Adsense and while it may not pay for much more than a pizza at the start, you’ll see your Adsense revenue increase slowly as your traffic and rankings increase. To leverage your Adsense ads, however, it pays to understand which keywords pay better and where to place your ads to boost click-throughs and revenue.

The best way to start would be to install a theme optimized for Adsense such as the ColorMag from ThemeGrill. This theme allows you to get awesome click-through rates because it follows Google AdSense placement recommendations.

If you don’t use a theme optimized for Adsense, you can also use the Easy Google Adsense Plugin, that allows you to place banners anywhere you want to. This plugin investigates your webspace and aim to show only the most relevant ads at the most appropriate time.

2. Sell Ads Space

If you’re an intermediate blogger that gets thousands of unique visits to your blog, you can probably successfully sell advertising on your blog. Selling advertising space is a great way to make money each month or week. When you get a good amount of traffic and popularity of your blog, do what all bloggers do, create an “Advertise with us page” to list how to buy an advertisement. But again, the key is traffic. A lot of traffic means most of the time the buyer pays any fee you set. If you want to display ads, you can always use WordPress plugins to place Ad banners on your site. 

3. Sponsored Posts

If you write a niche blog that gets a lot of traffic, you’ll probably get people writing to you to ask you if they can sponsor a post on your site. You can simply approve or reject the post depending on how suitable it is for your site.

When accepting Sponsored Posts, keep in mind that you need to maintain a certain quality of content on your site, so that search engines and visitors continue to enjoy your content. If your content quality decreases, so will your rankings and traffic.

4. Product Reviews

What’s the first thing most people do when they’re not sure of a product they’re trying to buy? They look at product reviews which influence them to make a buying decision. That’s why a lot of companies use blogger outreach to get product reviews. By running a review site of your own you can stand to earn tens of thousands per year.

You can also reach out to businesses directly and ask if they want their products to be reviewed in exchange for affiliate commission. They will provide affiliate links that give those businesses information that the traffic is coming from your site.

This approach is definitely a lot of initial outreach, but once you’re able to establish a good reputation and build your online presence, businesses will be more likely to reach out to you themselves as they will come to understand the influence you hold over your readers.

5. Premium Blog/Membership Site

Yes, you saw that right. People do pay for the content just to read it. If it’s working out for others then it can surely for you too. Once you have that awesome content,  you could consider charging them to access it with a membership site. You could also run a membership site to create a community and give existing customers access to exclusive content, courses, guides, and tutorials.

Orelse, you can set up the membership levels that best fit your business, whether they are Free, Paid, or Recurring Subscriptions. You can also offer Custom Trial Periods (Free Trial, Custom-length Trial, ‘Introductory’ Pricing).

6. Sell Products

If you want to sell products from your WordPress blog, you can do that by setting up an entire eCommerce shop on your blog. There are a number of excellent WordPress plugins that make it very easy to set up an eCommerce site.

One of the most popular plugins that actually powers 30% of all online stores is WooCommerce. It gives you endless flexibility and access to hundreds of free and premium WordPress extensions.

WooCommerce allows you to sell both physical and digital goods, offer product variations, instant downloads, and even sell affiliate goods. It also comes bundled with the ability to accept major credit cards, PayPal, BACS (bank transfers), and cash on delivery.

If you want a great eCommerce theme for your WooCommerce shop, you can choose from Zakra Shop, eStore, Flash.

7. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the most popular way to earn money online with little effort. To summarize this up. You register for an affiliate program, grab the affiliate text link or banner image and add that to your blog post or sidebar. If someone clicks on that link and buys that product, you get a certain percentage of their total sale price. Some affiliate programs are residual affiliate programs meaning you can earn a recurring commission each month or yearly if it’s an annual membership that you are promoting. 

Conclusion 

Remember that monetizing a blog and generating revenue is not an overnight thing. It takes time, be patient, good things come to those who wait. Having patience and putting all the work are the key components to monetize a WordPress blog. 

I hope you’ve found these steps to monetize a WordPress blog useful. If you’d like to share more tips to help monetize a WordPress blog, please feel free to comment down below. Also for more informative articles about WordPress, why not take a look at some of our other articles.

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