How to Monetize WordPress

How to Monetize Your WordPress Site

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Whether you’re looking to make a little extra cash on the side from your WordPress site, quit your day job and run your site full time, or build an empire online, you need to monetize your WordPress site. The goods news is that there are a ton of ways you can make money with WordPress. While there are a lot of options as to how you can make money, there is a single common prerequisite – you need traffic.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling something or promoting someone else’s product, you need people coming into your site if you want to monetize your WordPress site. If you are just starting up your site and are trying to figure out how you can start making cash, you might want to pump the brakes. While it is good to understand your options and have an idea about how you want to monetize, if you’re just starting out your priority should be figuring out how to get traffic.

Once you have traffic – whether from SEO or a loyal community – you can figure out the best option to monetize your site. If you don’t have an audience though, there’s no one for you to sell to, or no audience that you can advertise to.

With that said, let’s jump into your options to monetize your site and make money online with WordPress.

Ads

Ads are the classic way to monetize an audience and has been around for long before the internet. Let brands leverage your audience and make some cash.

  • What is it: Show ads on your site
  • How you make money: Usually on an impression / pageview / CPM (cost per thousand) basis. Ex, you earn $1 for every 10k pageviews.
  • Who it’s good for: Ads are good for sites with large audiences in high value industries. You can get an idea of which industries will pay high CPM’s by benchmarking against Google cost per click (CPC) for Adwords – the higher the CPC, usually the better the CPM
  • Who’s it bad for: If you have a small, very niche audience, monetizing with ads is probably not the best route for you

If you’re looking to get started, here are some common ad networks you can check out:

Affiliate

Affiliate is a type of advertising but is distinctly unique. Basically instead of getting paid based on the number of pageviews, you get paid on commission. Every purchase you refer, you get a small cut.

  • What is it: You refer people to an eCommerce site where they purchase products that you talk about
  • How you make money: You get a commission for sales you refer
  • Who it’s good for: Affiliate advertising works for a wide range of sites. Unlike traditional advertising, you can successfully monetize lower traffic if the audience is niche enough
  • Who’s it bad for: People who get a lot of traffic from people wanting something for free

While Amazon is one of the biggest affiliate networks, there are several options to look into:

Create a Private Community / Members Only Content

Creating a private community where you share premium content and interact with your members behind closed doors is becoming an increasingly popular way to monetize WordPress sites. This is largely due to the recurring nature of the revenue and that potential to generate more revenue with smaller traffic. The only downside is that private communities are a lot of work to maintain and manage.

  • What is it: You share private premium content and interact with members
  • How you make money: Members sign up for a monthly subscription plan
  • Who it’s good for: People with expertise in an area and are passionate about sharing information with others
  • Who’s it bad for: People who prefer to outsource content production and aren’t interested in managing a community

To launch a private community, you’ll need a WordPress plugin to help you launch your private community – here are some of the best private community plugins that will help you monetize your WordPress site:

Sell Courses

Similar to creating a private community with premium, members only content, you can create and sell courses to monetize your WordPress site. This is a very specific version of the idea above and is well suited to people who have the ability to record a significant amount of video content.

  • What is it: You create courses that teach a skill to paying members
  • How you make money: Members sign up for a monthly subscription plan
  • Who it’s good for: People with expertise in an area and are passionate about sharing information with others AND who are able to record high quality video content
  • Who’s it bad for: People who prefer to outsource content production and aren’t interested in managing a community

While you can use the above membership plugins to sell a course through WordPress, you may want to consider getting a plugin specifically geared towards selling courses (often referred to as a “Learning Management System” or LMS) to provide users with a good learning experience and to make management easiest for you. Below are some plugins that can help you setup an LMS on WordPress

Sell eBooks

Similar to the previous section on setting up an online course, selling eBooks are a derivative of premium content. There are 2 options with eBooks – sell your eBook to make revenue or give it away (in exchange for an email) for lead generation for your main service offering (consulting, web design, online course, etc). eBooks are a great product that you can use to monetize your WordPress site as you create the content once and they typically are low touch sales and minimal customer service is required.

  • What is it: You create an eBook that teach a skill to people
  • How you make money: Members pay you for access to the eBook
  • Who it’s good for: People who are good at writing and like to share information and people who don’t want to deal with a community that many courses / private communities necessitate.
  • Who’s it bad for: People who don’t like to write

If you’re selling an eBook on WordPress, you can simply use a PayPal link to collect payment and then redirect users back to a page on your site where they can download the eBook. If you are looking for more functionality or just want a more fluid experience for your customers, you can use a plugin to help you gate the eBook and accept sales. Here are a few plugins that can help you with that:

Sell a Newsletter

Following with the premium content theme, a final way to monetize content is to put your premium content into a newsletter. You can use PayPal to setup a recurring subscription fee so that your newsletter members will be automatically charged every month. Then simply plug their email into your an email provider. If need to get set up with an email marketing software to run your newsletter, here are a few of the best options:

  • What is it: You send out a newsletter to subscribers
  • How you make money: Subscribers pay you for access to the newsletter
  • Who it’s good for: People who are good at writing and like to share information
  • Who’s it bad for: People who don’t like to write

Build Out a Directory

Depending on your site, you could build out a directory site to help your users find businesses related to your site. Examples of prominent directory sites include Yelp, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, etc. These could be local businesses if your site has a local angle to it. Alternatively if your topic has a theme, such as design, you could create a directory of relevant pro’s such as a designer directory. You could charge for either prominent placement on the list, or inclusion altogether.

If you’re looking to monetize WordPress with a directory, you’ll need to start with a plugin. Below are the top directory plugins to help jump start your research:

  • What is it: You provide a business directory on your site
  • How you make money: People pay to be included or for a better listing
  • Who it’s good for: People who get a lot of organic search traffic to their site
  • Who’s it bad for: People who are in niche’s with low lifetime value and low customer acquisition costs

Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts can be a good monetization method for you if you have either a) large percentage of return visitors (large non-google driven audience) or b) a high “domain rank” or “domain authority”. If you have a large non-google driven website users, you have a loyal audience and brands will pay for sponsored content to highlight their brand to your followers. If you don’t have a large loyal audience, you can still make money off sponsored content by selling sponsored content to brands looking to improve their SEO – this does carry some risk though as Google wants to penalize sites that sell (and buy) links, so it could come back to hurt you. (you can play it safe though by abiding by Google’s sponsored content guidelines) Additionally, if you are selling content for links, you’ll probably charge less than people who have a large audience.

  • What is it: You write content for other sites (or let brands write the content) and publish it on your site
  • How you make money: People pay you to have positive content about them on your site
  • Who it’s good for: People with a large non-google audience or people who have a high “domain authority”
  • Who’s it bad for: People who don’t have a lot of original content

How to Monetize a WordPress Site

To summarize, there are 8 good ways to monetize most WordPress sites:
  1. Put ads on your site
  2. Use affiliate links
  3. Create a private community / members only content
  4. Sell courses
  5. Sell eBooks
  6. Sell a Newsletter
  7. Build a directory
  8. Sell sponsored posts