Certain people make a WordPress blog with the only intention of generating money through it, whereas some find that with time their blog becomes so popular that making money through it becomes really easy. It doesn’t matter what is your reason for making a blog, once there is traffic on it, it is a nice time to look for different ways for monetizing the blog and choosing the ones that meet your objectives.

This article will take an in-depth look at the various ways a WordPress website may be used for generating a steady income. While the approaches mentioned here are applicable to regular websites too, thanks to the enormous availability of plugins, implementing these approaches is far easy and less time-consuming in WordPress-based sites. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to earn money simply by displaying ads, selling things, or endorsing your services, there must be an option available here that matches your website and audience requirements.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

The most popular service that falls under this category is Google AdSense; however, there are other choices too like Adversal and Chitika. The idea behind showing this sort of advertisement is that once you have made an account and incorporated the code snippet in your website, there is quite less to do thus making it a great income source.

There are numerous plugins for WordPress that let you manage your advertisements with quite ease, thus making this form of ads quite appealing. The code snippet added to your side scans the entire website site for determining the topic for every page, and then it shows relevant advertisements present in its network on your website. When any visitor clicks on the displayed advertisement, you get some money. This specific amount is called cost per click or CPC, which can range from some cents to some dollars, depending on what the website topic is. If your website is dedicated to a profitable topic like weight loss or fitness, then certain advertisements may earn you good money with every click. But, if your website has some difficult topic, then you may find it difficult to earn a lot.

Google AdSense is capable of displaying advertisements from numerous topics or niches, doesn’t matter what your website is about, there must be somebody already advertising something which would be related to your traffic, even if it isn’t as profitable as certain other topics. When you are using this form of monetization, the advertisements that show up on your website can take various forms ranging from textual links, images, banners, etc.

Pros: quite a little work is needed except for making an account and inserting the code in your website, ads available for nearly any website topic.

Cons: not very highly paid as compared to directly promoting the products or eliminating the middle person and working directly with the advertisers.

Affiliate Marketing

It is the process of product linking from your website such that when a visitor clicks it and buys it, you get some commission over it. This is applicable to nearly anything from actual products, membership sites, software, courses, downloads, and lots more. You need to sign up for the affiliate program of the product and then you may start making money by redirecting your traffic to that website to make some purchases. The most famous example of an affiliate marketing website is Amazon.

So if you own a blog with a fitness niche, inserting some relevant products links from Amazon within your post might interest the reader and hence generate some money for you. An initial 5 percent commission may not appear sufficient however if you link your posts to things like treadmills, for instance, every sale may make a figure that may swiftly add up once the sales begin to accumulate. There is also a free WordPress plugin that will turn all links to Amazon present on your website into affiliate links that may earn you a commission if the visitor then goes on to buy anything from their website.

To search for stores and sites having affiliate programs, you may sign up on a network like ClickBank or Commission Junction, or simply check individual product sites you are looking to promote, as numerous online services and products manage their own affiliate programs.

Pros: nearly unlimited amount of services and products to promote with tiny work involved in managing those links.

Cons: commission rates may fluctuate between programs and networks, are unpredictable, and have somewhat bad repo.

Selling Advertisement Space

As an alternative to showing products links or advertisements which will make money for you when the readers click and buy something, you may also sell ad space at a flat rate regardless of the number of clicks they get. This kind of monetization is more predictable compared to Google AdSense and affiliate marketing as you normally get a lump sum before an ad goes live. But this also means that you aren’t going to earn a large amount in case your content gets a lot of traffic and the clicking rate goes up; even though this may help you in negotiating a good rate for your next ad space.

There exists numerous ad plugins for websites with WordPress which enables the ad space to sell a lot easier. Some of these plugins connect you to ad marketplaces that put your website in front of advertisers, while some offer a self-service facility to visitors to see your site and place an ad without any kind of effort made on your behalf. When it is about finding out the amount you can charge for every ad, it usually depends on the website traffic, the blog niche, and certain other factors.

Pros: foreseeable source of income, numerous plugins for managing ad space

Cons: usually a flat fee, extra clicks don’t increase income, need high traffic site for earning a good sum of money and attracting advertisers.

Selling Links

This method involves a fee for those who wish to place a website link on your website which eventually links to the link placers site. This is a good idea since the links from high-rank websites is among the best way of improving the ranking on search engines giants like Google. Numerous people are interested in paying you in order to post a link within your website which will help them to get more traffic and increase their ranking.

But the sad news is that this practice is now outlawed by Google and this is no longer a good idea to adopt this method since if you are caught you may end up getting your website de-indexed or penalized from Google.

Pros: less work needed, predictable income

Cons: not permitted by Google, needs high traffic for attracting customers.

Sponsored Posts

Depending on your blog topic, it may be a good idea to offer a sponsored post. This option lets you take a fee for post publishing, normally a review of a service or product on your website. The amount of money you would charge depends on the traffic, and you can enhance this income by incorporating an affiliate link to this post so that you may earn a commission. Normally technology and travel niche blogs are targeted by those having products for marketing. Depending on how well-known your website is, it may get you a free or cheap trip to some resort or a new gadget’s review copy.

Pros: getting free things or payment in return for publishing or writing a review. Even small blogs may get some benefit from other small organizations.

Cons: needs a popular and high-traffic website.

Making a Product

With the passage of time, if your blog has gained some popularity and gets some regular visitors, then it is high time you should make a product or service for selling purposes. This may be something like a downloadable eBook, a website plugin or theme, graphics template, etc. Adding eCommerce or online store functionality to your WordPress site is easy with various plugins available. So, all it needs is some time and patience along with the hard work of developing a product in order to earn something considerable.

Pros: making digital products would require a one-time making effort and you can sell them over and over again without any further work needed.

Cons: needs a lot of hard work before even knowing if your audience would like it or not. It may need a great deal of after-sales support.

Promoting Services

If the content you provide gives value to your visitors, then there is a sufficient chance that certain people would like to pay you for your time. This may be anything including consulting, advice, freelance work, or attending a workshop as a guest speaker. It doesn’t matter whether your blog is regarding health, business development, or simply anything, if you get a large audience, there are high chances that somebody would want to pay you for your expertise.

Pros: maybe lucrative, may lead you to some interesting avenues, and has scaling-up potential.

Cons: may need large traffic, not suitable for all kinds of blog niches.

Restricting Content & Membership Websites

If the traffic to your website increases and you are adding value to the lives of your visitors then you may be in the right position to give a premium membership website or course and put restrictions on your content by making it paid. This may take the shape of publishing paid posts between your regular content posting or making a section of your website available just to paid members. WordPress offers a handful of membership plugins for setting all this up.

The premium content you have chosen to offer to your exclusive members may vary largely. This may comprise of private discussion forums, webinars, video courses, Google Hangouts, or simply text posts. You can offer an initial cheap membership or a seasonal membership to attract people to sign up.

Pros: easier implementation with WordPress sites, numerous content creation options, recurring income.

Cons: regular high-quality premium content creation, matching the expectation of users and retaining them.

Sell Your Website

Similar to any other regular business, if your website has gained some good repute and traffic, or even if the site shows early potential signs the chances to sell your website may increase enormously. Numerous WordPress websites are sold every year for a big sum of money. There exist a lot of marketplaces for selling sites, so if your website is already bringing in some income or can show positive traffic reports, you are in a good position to sell it off. If your site is already optimized for monetization, then sites may sell for 10 to 20 times their total monthly income may tempt you to put your site up for sale.

Pros: numerous marketplaces available for listing your site for sale, reducing your work responsibility, get a big sum of money at once.

Cons: no further income from the site.

Conclusion

By now you have seen plenty of methods of monetizing a WordPress website or blog. It doesn’t matter if your website is already established or you are going to make one, the key idea is to generate traffic somehow and once the traffic is there it would start making money one way or the other. So, it is all up to you to make a choice which method you would incorporate, either one technique would be sufficient, or adding two or three techniques would be a good idea.