monetizing WordPress

Creating a secondary income source is one of the best ways to protect yourself from layoffs, recessions, and other financial crises. This guide to monetizing WordPress will show you five ways to make money with a WordPress site, so you can build yourself a financial cushion.

We’ll explore five ways to monetize a WordPress site:

Let’s dive into it!

Five strategies for monetizing WordPress

1. Add a content aggregator

One of the biggest challenges bloggers face is finding topics to blog about week after week. You can avoid this problem by creating an aggregator site.

An aggregator site brings together posts from various sources to create a singular source where people can find information on a specific topic. These sites are particularly effective for sharing news, but you can use aggregator sites to collect information on any topic.

Monetizing WordPress: Flipboard news aggregator, "Technology" section
Flipboard news aggregator, “Technology” section

You can use a plugin like Feedzy to create an aggregator site in a matter of minutes, without learning to code.

You can use it to create a separate aggregator area on your site. Or, you could mix in aggregated posts with your regular blog posts.

Feedzy lets you collect data from an unlimited number of RSS feeds, filtering content by keywords so your users only get the information relevant to them. You’ll also get full control of how content appears on your site, tools to prevent duplicate content, and the ability to integrate affiliate links into your aggregate site so you can start making money right away.

Once you’ve set up your aggregator site, you can use programs like Google AdSense to share relevant ads automatically on your site. This is yet another excellent method for automating WordPress monetization, allowing you to generate income with minimal effort.

To learn how it works, check out our guide on how to create a WordPress news aggregator site.

2. Publish product reviews for affiliate marketing

Monetizing WordPress: Now Smell This perfume blog homepage
Now Smell This perfume blog homepage

If you want to do some writing yourself and you love trying new products and services, a review blog is the way to go. This route for monetizing WordPress is more time-consuming than running an aggregator site, but it can also lead to many rewards, including free access to products/services in exchange for honest reviews.

You can create a review blog easily by using one of the starter layouts from Neve, a highly flexible WordPress theme with numerous video tutorials to get you started. You can also enhance your reviews by using custom review blocks from a plugin like Otter Blocks.

When you’re first starting out, you’ll want to monetize your reviews through affiliate programs. These programs give you special links that allow you to make money every time someone purchases a product you’ve recommended.

The easiest affiliate program to sign up for is Amazon Associates, which makes it easy to get affiliate links for any product sold on Amazon.

However, you can often make more money using affiliate programs run by the actual creators of the products or services you review.

3. Offer sponsored posts

Sponsored posts are articles paid for by a specific company.

The most recognizable sponsored posts are articles where users provide a demonstration or review of a specific product/service. However, companies may also pay for articles more loosely related to their offerings.

For example, an outerwear brand might sponsor a series of articles about how to set up a campsite.

To find sponsors for your articles, you’ll need to do a few things:

  • Set up your website. Choose a clean, professional theme, populate it with high-quality graphics, and set up essential pages like your “About” page and a “Terms of Service” page.
  • Create a few posts. These articles will establish what your site is about, bring organic traffic to your site, and demonstrate the quality of your work to potential sponsors.
  • Identify potential sponsors. Create a list of companies in your niche that might be interested in sponsoring your site. Focus on smaller or more local companies to start with, as bigger companies often won’t sponsor blogs that don’t meet a minimum level of engagement, such as having 5,000 subscribers.
  • Approach potential sponsors. You can approach potential sponsors via email, social media, or by visiting in person if you’re approaching a local business. Be sure to explain the type of sponsored post you want to do, why you want to work with their brand, and why they might want to work with you (the quality of your work, traffic levels, subscriber numbers).

When your blog is new, you might struggle to find sponsors, but as your blog grows, it’ll become easier to find companies interested in working with you. After a while, you might even find that the companies are coming to you!

For some more tips, check out our full guide on how to get sponsored blog posts.

💡 Pro tip: Sponsored posts are a great addition to a review site. Consider combining these two strategies to create multiple streams of income from a single website!

4. Create an ecommerce store for physical or digital products

Another great option for monetizing WordPress is to create an ecommerce site. There are many high-quality plugins that make it easy to do this, with the most popular option being WooCommerce:

WooCommerce

You can install the plugin, set up your payment processing options, and build your WooCommerce shop without any code or prior website building experience.

This option is a natural choice if you’re already making products for friends or for sale at in-person events, but you don’t need to have your own products to start an ecommerce store.

Dropshipping companies make it possible to choose high-quality products and sell them to your audience without the need for you to make, store, or ship items.

You can check out our introduction to dropshipping post. We also have a guide on how to dropship with WordPress.

5. Repurpose your blog into a course or book

Our last tip for monetizing WordPress is finding ways to repurpose your blog content into a format that you can sell to users.

If you create original content for your blog, you can transform that content into information products you can sell to your audience.

There are two types of information products you can create with repurposed blog content:

  • A book. This is a natural choice for most blogs because blog posts can easily be converted into chapters. There are also many easy-to-learn tools for formatting books, such as Atticus.
  • A course. If you’re comfortable recording yourself and you like teaching, you can create a video course based on the content of your blog. Courses are great because you can charge higher prices for them, but you will also have to put a lot more work in up front, not to mention buying video recording equipment and editing software.

You can even create multiple types of information products to appeal to different parts of your audience.

If you’re interested in creating a course, we have two guides you might want to read – how to create an online course with WordPress and how to create a WordPress LMS site.

💡 Pro tip: You can start preparing to do this even if you only have a few blog posts! Pick out the best ones and copy them into a folder or file so they can be compiled into an information product later on. This will make it easier to find your best articles when you’re ready to make that book or course!

Final advice on monetizing WordPress

WordPress is an incredibly powerful website tool with thousands of plugins available to help you make money online.

While there are lots of ways to make money, we’ve focused on five actionable strategies for monetizing WordPress:

  • Build an aggregator site with a tool like Feedzy and host ads on it through Google AdSense or similar programs. Once you’ve built an audience, you can also sell ads directly to companies. 🏗️
  • Create a review site and use affiliate links for all of the products/services you share. Be sure to look beyond Amazon Associates, as you’ll often get a better deal by working directly with the companies that make the products/services you use. 🧰
  • Offer to create sponsored posts for companies. These can be reviews, tutorials, or anything relevant to the brand you’re pitching. 🎁
  • Use a blog to launch your ecommerce store. If you don’t have products of your own, you can still do this with dropshipping! 🛒
  • Turn your blog into a product like a book or a video course and sell it directly to your audience. 🛍️

Most of all, look for ways to build more than one income stream for your blog. The more sources of income you have, the safer you’ll be when a recession or other financial disaster hits.

For some other ideas to make money, you can also check out our posts on 👉 how to make money online and how to make money blogging.

Do you still have any questions about monetizing WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

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