How to Make Money From a WordPress Blog

Starting a blog has never been easier and when it comes to promoting your business or making money, having a blog can do wonders. Plus, creating a blog today is so easy, you don’t even need to learn CSS, PHP, HTML, or any other intricate language to get started.

All you need is a reliable web hosting company (such as WebHostFace) with a good content management system like WordPress, and you’ll have a blog up and running in no time!

Let’s say you’ve already set up a WordPress blog and it looks awesome. How do you actually use it to make you money? It’s possible and there are a lot of ways but it’s important to remember that these are not get-rich schemes.

You’ll need to put in a lot of work and effort into it and once you do, you can start seeing profit from your blog. So, are you ready to start making money? In this article, we will show you how to make money from a WordPress blog based on our users` experience. These hard-learned lessons will save you time, effort and money and will lead you in the right direction.

Using affiliate links in your content

A great tool for monetizing your WordPress blog is to use affiliate marketing. In a nutshell, here’s how affiliate marketing works:

A company has a product or service that want to sell. They give you a commision from each sale if the purchase comes from your site.
They give you a unique link to track your affiliate code so that they know when a buyer used your link to purchase their products or services.
There are a number of ways that you can include the affiliate link to your site. You can either directly add the link to your content or through your banner ads. Whenever a reader clicks on the unique link and buys the product or service, you get a percentage of what was purchased.

Plenty of companies and brands, such as Amazon Associates and WebHostFace affiliate are offering affiliate programs that you can sign up for. You can even create new affiliate partnership yourself by engaging with advertisers and businesses.

Of course, to do all that you need to start a WordPress blog. You can choose to host your WordPress site using WebhostFace managed WordPress hosting which sets you up with a personal WP assistant that will help you with SEO, security, and performance on your WordPress site. Try not to go for free web hosting service if you are serious about making money from affiliate links. Especially when shared hosting is getting more and more affordable and with great features. Our Shared Hosting plans are now with 80% discount OFF the regular price and prices are starting from $1.38/month only.

Monetizing using CPC or CPM ads

When it comes to monetizing your WordPress blog, another most common ways is to place ads on your website. Currently, the two most popular types of ads are:

CPC/PPC Ads: The cost per click (or pay per click) ads are the banner ads that you usually see in a content or sidebar of the site. You usually get paid for the number of clicks that you get on the ad itself.
CPM Ads: Cost per 1,000 impressions or CPM ads is based on the number of people who see your ads and are usually paid a fixed amount of money (think YouTube ads).

Of course, if you’re thinking of trying these methods, you can use the Google AdSense program to get started. The program helps you set up the banner ads without having to deal directly with advertisers. All you have to do is place the banner on your ad and Google will choose the relevant ads to your content.

There are other similar programs available, such as Chitika, Infolinks, and Media.net, that you can use if AdSense is not working for you. The good thing about WordPress is, you can easily integrate these programs and track the numbers from your WordPress site. You can download all of the programs from the WordPress plugin directory.

Create sponsored content

While using ads can be an effective way to monetize your blog, it can be annoying for your readers if the ads become too obnoxious. And given that you don’t have control over the type of content that gets shown on your blog, using advertising networks might do more harm than good.

It’s not so bad if the readers just get irritated by the ads, but it’s going to be costly when they start using ad blockers to get rid of the ads or worse, stop visiting your blog entirely.

That’s why today, you’ll see a number of blogs opting for sponsored content instead of the usual ad networks. You can post sponsored content on your blog and mention a sponsor’s products, services, or just discuss them for a fee. It’s a great alternative to ad networks while still monetizing your blog.

In order to do this, however, you need to increase the credibility and visibility of your website to make it appealing to advertisers and businesses. Doing so will definitely increase your chances of getting a sponsored post.

Provide exclusive content/membership

Selling or providing exclusive content or membership access is also another great option to monetize your WordPress blog.

For example, if you are a travel blog, you can charge users $10 per month for users to gain access to exclusive advise sections or behind-the-scenes content. A blog that focuses on startups can sell memberships to forums where people can get professional and personalized advice on their business.

With WordPress site, it’s even easier to maintain the user rights with WordPress plugin like MemberPress, LearnDash, and S2Member. These are great plugins if you are planning to run a membership site. You can restrict access to any content including posts, pages, categories, tags, files, etc. Some of the plugins can also be integrated with email services and payment gateways.

Just remember that your exclusive membership needs to offer something more valuable than what your visitors can get for free on a different blog or website.

Selling digital products

For some bloggers, they might not want to advertise other people’s product on their site. Or maybe they just want to find another stream of income. If that applies to you, then you might want to consider selling digital products.

Digital products can be a number of things, such as:

Online courses/workshop
eBooks
Applications
Plugins
WordPress Themes
Images
Videos
Music

There’s plenty that you can dive into to start selling digital products on your WordPress website. What’s important is that you choose the ones that you can make relevant and useful to your readers and users.

To take a step further, you can build an online shop dedicated to your brand and start selling. We recommend using WooCommerce as they are a perfect choice for an online store if you are using WordPress. Pair it up with WebHostFace, which offers the best hosting solution for WooCommerce, and you’ll have your store ready!

However, one of the biggest mistakes that bloggers often do is assuming that the product they are making is what their readers need; you need to listen to your readers, only then you can create the digital products that will meet their needs.