How to Make Money from Your WordPress Site

Running a WordPress site requires a lot of time and effort from your end. What if you can earn some money from your website to make up for your time? While it might not bring a full-time income, it would be nice if you can get something in exchange for the time you dedicate to the site.

In today’s post, I am going to introduce you to the best ways to make money from your WordPress site. Who knows, maybe one of these ideas hold the key to establishing a steady source of income for you.

Promote Affiliate Products

Affiliate marketing is a beginner-friendly way to make money from your existing WordPress site. In this method, you recommend a specific product or service to your audience. When anyone makes a purchase by using your special link, you will get a referral commission.

As there are affiliate programs for almost any industry, you can easily find some suitable products or services to promote. You can get started with a premium product you are already using that will be useful for your visitors as well.

If you can’t find a suitable product to promote, you will find some in the popular affiliate networks like Amazon, ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, Rakuten, etc. You can use a specialized WordPress plugin like ThirstyAffiliates to track and manage your affiliate links.

Show Google AdSense Ads

Displaying AdSense ads could be another excellent way to earn some extra money from your popular WordPress blog. In this method, you will display AdSense ads on your site and earn money when someone clicks on the ads.

You need to create an AdSense account to display the ads on your site. Once your account is approved, you will get a code snippet that you have to add to the website. The code will detect the type of your content and show relevant ads to the visitors. As they are already interested in the topic, the visitors will be more likely to click the matching ads.

Sell Ad Spots on Your Site

When using AdSense, Google handles everything from collecting ads to displaying them on your site and tracking the number of clicks. In exchange, they will take a hefty portion of the money the advertiser is paying for the clicks. If you are not comfortable with this revenue sharing method, you can sell the ad spots directly to the advertiser.

Unlike the AdSense ads, direct ads are not paid by the number of clicks or views. Rather, you will get a flat rate depending on the number of your visitors and the traffic quality. BuySellAds and AdvertiseSpace are some popular marketplaces that match website owners like you and the advertisers.

Sell Your Own Products

Selling your own products could be another way to create a steady income source from your website. Depending on your expertise, you can offer different types of digital products like online courses, e-books, cheatsheets, checklists, and so on. As there is no middleman, this method enables you to earn the most amount of money from the sales.

While there are several plugins available to help you sell digital items from a WordPress site, we strongly recommend you to go with Easy Digital Downloads. However, if you are already familiar with WooCommerce, you can use that as well.

Offer Sponsored Blog Posts

Some people don’t prefer to annoy their visitors by displaying ads. If you belong to that group, you have another option to make money from your site – you can offer sponsored blog posts, which are also called guest posts.

In this method, you will let another person or company to write a blog post for you in exchange for a fee. This works best when you have a large audience that engages with your content. In that case, the sponsors can reach a large audience by publishing a sponsored post on your site.

You can get started by creating a page containing all the necessary information for the sponsors. However, make sure that you are complying with the local laws regarding sponsored promotion.

Write Paid Reviews

If you like the idea of sponsored posts but don’t want to allow others to post on your blog, you can publish a paid review yourself. In this method, you find out the products or services that can be actually useful for your audience, and write detailed reviews about them on your website.

Depending on your situation, you can approach the companies yourself or find opportunities in specialized places like PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews. Regardless of which method you choose, make sure you are following the local laws about publishing paid content.

Create a Premium Forum

When you have a popular website with lots of engaged visitors or you possess a unique skill, you can add a premium forum to your site. The forum will help the members to get one-on-one help from you and other fellow members.

There are several membership plugins including MemberPress and S2 Member. You can use any of these plugins to create and manage different types of membership plans with various access levels. Once you establish your brand, it can offer a recurring income for you.

Offer Member-only Content

Creating a forum is not an easy task. Other than installing and configuring the plugin, you also need to take care of the style, moderate the forum, and offer professional support for your paid members. If you don’t want to go through all these hassles, you can introduce member-only content on your site.

Your member-only content could be more in-depth posts containing additional tips, information, multimedia, or any other bonus. There are several premium plugins like Restrict Content Pro and PrivateContent that can help you to restrict the in-depth posts within your paid members.

Create a Job Board

Has your WordPress site established itself as an authority in a specific industry? Do you receive a certain type of professionals on your website? If yes, you can create a niche-based job board to get some extra income from your site.

You can gain traction by offering free job posting with the essential features. Once the job board becomes well-known, you can introduce premium job posting or allow the employers to features their jobs for a small fee. WP Job Manager and WP Job Board are two of the most popular plugins to add job boards to an existing WordPress site.

Final Words

These days, everyone wants to make money online. But most of them are looking for the quick solution. While our today’s post doesn’t offer any such thing, it does include the most effective ways to make money with your WordPress site. Each of these techniques works, provided you followed the best practices for a reasonable period of time.