In this post we’ll talk about how to make money from your WordPress blog!
You’ve set up your blog. You’ve started writing content and promoting your posts. What now?
If you’re struggling to make money on your blog, I get it. It can be frustrating figuring out how to make money from your WordPress blog. It took me years before I realized I could not only journal about my passions – I could actually make money off of my writing!
The crazy thing is, you can actually make a full-time income from blogging about your interests. It’s actually not that uncommon to find bloggers making 5 to 6 figures a month. Take Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, and Lauren and Alex from Create and Go. These people are ALL making over $100k a month in passive income through their brands.
Monetizing your blog is hard, no doubt, but it’s not impossible.
Here we will cover 5 popular ways to make money on your blog.
How to Make Money from Your WordPress Blog (5 POPULAR WAYS)
1. Affiliate Marketing
Without creating ANY products, you can actually make a hefty sum of money through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is the practice of referring people to products you recommend, and whenever people purchase something through your link, you get a referral commission. For example, Ryan Scribner earns around $20,000 a month or more just promoting other people’s products!
The great thing about affiliate marketing is it is a win-win situation. The people you recommend products to get value, the owner makes a sale, and you make a commission as well.
If you want to do affiliate marketing right, you’ll want to be the go-to resource/person people can trust. You want to create content that is valuable to users where they will think of you as a thought leader in your niche. Rather than spam with links like many sleazy affiliate marketers do, you want to create trust with your users by providing value for them. And as you find products and tools you recommend, start reviewing them and talking about why they can help your audience. Check out this post on affiliate marketing best practices here!
2. Ads
Blogs also make money from ads. You can partner with an ad network and once approved, you can place a code onto your blog for advertisers to place ads there. Popular areas on your blog to put ads include your top header area, sidebar, and within posts. Companies will advertise on your blog and would pay per impression or clicks of your ad, which makes you money. Some popular ad networks include Google Adsense, Mediavine, and AdThrive. The latter two have requirements on how much traffic you need before being admitted to the program, but they can make you more money than Google Adsense. Another option is to provide ad space directly to companies and have them pay monthly to your blog (which can be more lucrative than Google Adsense as well).
3. Sponsorships
Sponsorships are another way to make money, and they can come in many different forms. For example:
- Sponsors can pay you to write a post about them on your blog.
- Sponsors can pay you to send you the blog post they want on your blog which links back to them.
- Sponsors can provide you with sponsored trips. For example if you’re a travel blogger, you may get a trip to visit a hotel and provide a review around your stay on your blog.
- Sponsors can also pay you to review a product of theirs
Sponsorships can be found through reaching out to companies or vice versa.
4. Courses
Courses are a great way to monetize your blog! The reason why you create a blog is usually to teach or journal about some interest of yours, which probably means you have some specialized knowledge you can provide via a course, that people may seek. Some people worry that they’re not enough of a master in a specific subject and that people would instead turn to other experts in their niche to buy courses from. But if you have specific knowledge that most people don’t, you may be more in demand because of your experiences, perspectives, and relatability. Whether you know it or not, you’re probably well suited to make a course.
You can create a course on Teachable (try the free version to get started) to educate your audience on a specific topic in your niche. Teachable lets you outline your course and put in videos, audio, text, files, images – anything to start illustrating your lessons clearly. Video is the most popular medium for courses, but I’ve seen online courses like “Making Sense of Affiliates” still make a killing when the whole course is ALL text based.
When it comes to the nitty gritty, your course should dive even deeper than your blog posts into topics to teach people step-by-step how to get results. Drive traffic to your blog through content, and then upsell your course for people who wish for more of a comprehensive walkthrough with even more information in the topic they’re interested in. On your sales page (the page where people see for more information on your course), highlight the benefit the audience will get so that they’re more inclined to purchase.
5. Books
If you want to sell books, two of the easiest ways to do so include creating an e-book that’s sold on your website, or selling a kindle or paperback version of your book through kdp.amazon.com. Both ways have their different advantages.
Selling On Your Website
If you sell on your website you can try using Gumroad or the Woocommerce WordPress plugin to host your digital download and collect payments. You can also sell your book in your own preferred format while kindle and paperback books on KDP have more specific requirements and charge more in fees.
Selling on KDP
One advantage with selling on KDP is that you’ll be able to leverage the Amazon marketplace and get sales through searches on Amazon.
Regardless, of which method you choose, the idea of selling books is similar with selling courses. You can provide value to people through different mediums, and books are one way to do just that.
And let’s be real. Having both a course and a book give off a strong impression of being an authority figure in your niche! People care about the different platforms you’re on and how much you’ve done with your brand.
By building up your brand with content and then selling your own products, you’ll be able to drive traffic, make money, and make a difference in your space.
Your WordPress Blog is Now Ready to Make that Money!
You should now understand 5 of the most popular ways of monetizing your blog. It’s healthy to not only help others with the knowledge you provide, but also help yourself as you don’t want to drain all your energy and forget about self care! Monetizing your blog is one way to help both others and yourself.
These are just a few ways to make money from your writing, but we hope these ideas get you brainstorming on what you can create with your platform! Do you have thoughts on more ways around how to make money from your WordPress blog? Let us know in the comments below.
