14 Top Ways to Make Money Blogging on WordPress

Curious how people use WordPress websites to make money blogging?

More and more, small business owners and entrepreneurs are making money online. And with today’s technology, it’s easier than ever for even non-technical people to make a website that generates income.

In this post, we’ll show you the top ways to make money blogging on WordPress, so you can start doing it today.

Top Ways to Make Money Blogging on WordPress

Here’s a table of contents for easy navigation:

WordPress is the best blogging platform for beginners. If you don’t have a WordPress.org site set up yet, make sure to check out how to start a WordPress blog.

Once you’ve got your WordPress site up and running, here are the best ways you can make money blogging with it.

1. Create an Amazon Affiliate Store

Want to build your own online store, but don’t want to have to deal with the time, cost, and burden of selling your own physical product? Building an Amazon Affiliate WordPress shop might be a fantastic choice for you to make money with your blog.

Basically, you promote Amazon’s products on your website. When your visitors purchase those products through your links, you earn a commission. If you have a lot of traffic, this could be a fantastic way to make money.

The affiliate program, known as Amazon Associates, lets you go about this in a couple ways:

• Create a new online store that promotes only Amazon products
• Add Amazon products to your existing eCommerce store

Starting a blog about a specific topic and selling physical products to help solve your readers’ problems is a smart way for bloggers to earn money online. This can be done with your own products too, which we’ll cover next.

2. Sell Your Own Physical Products

Maybe you’ve created your own or found a physical product you’d like to sell to the world from your blog.  Or, maybe you already have a storefront and you want to take your products global.

Online shopping is exploding in popularity and there’s a ton of room to make money in the industry, just check out these amazing eCommerce statistics.

You can easily start your own eCommerce store on your WordPress blog by using a plugin like WooCommerce. It’s easy to use and helps you completely customize your shop with tons of WooCommerce plugins and WooCommerce themes.

Plus, you can skyrocket revenue by adding live sales notifications for WooCommerce.

You can also create a simple order form in WordPress to start selling right away. Using WPForms, you can also add flexible payment options to let people pay via various credit card networks using Stripe and PayPal.

3. Display Ads

Another popular way to make money blogging is by placing ads on your website for your visitors to see. There are several ad networks around, but the biggest is by far Google Adsense.

You make money when users see or click on ads that Google displays automatically on your site.

AdSense requires you to apply in order to run ads on your website. It usually takes about 8 hours for Google to review your application and determine if you qualify for AdSense.

Once you’re qualified, check out tools like AdSanity that help you stay organized with your ad monetization.

4. Sell an eCourse

If someone loves your products or services enough, they’re pretty likely to want to learn more about you and your methods. If you’ve got some great tips and tricks to share about whatever you blog about, your audience could be willing to buy an eCourse from you.

Online courses are insanely easy to set up with LMS plugins. We recommend using MemberPress, it’s a membership plugin and an online course builder, all-in-one! And the coolest part is that you can work on your course upfront, then release it and get recurring passive income whenever someone buys the course.

Monetizing your blog long-term is easier to do with passive income like this. Especially because eCourses sell at a much higher price than other premium digital content like ebooks.

5. Sell Ebooks

You still shouldn’t shy away from publishing an ebook to make money blogging with digital products.

For one, it’s really easy to do. You can use a plugin like Easy Digital Downloads to make selling your ebook super simple.

And, ebooks are a smart way to make money blogging because they’re insanely easy to create. If you already have some popular posts on your blog, you can repurpose that content into an ebook. This is a common way bloggers make ebooks fast.

Plus, you can also self-publish your ebook on Kindle Direct Publishing so people can find it on Amazon. This can help bring visitors to your blog and build your brand.

If you decide to sell your ebook on your own website, consider tracking your CTA button clicks. That way, you can see which pages are most effective in driving sales.

6. Grow Your Email List with Pop Ups

If you’re asking yourself, “can you make money blogging on WordPress?” this is the tip for you. The money’s in the email list.

But, at least 70% of people who visit your website never return. So getting their email address should be a top priority in your email marketing plan. OptinMonster has mastered the art of high-converting pop ups that aren’t annoying.

One of its wildly popular and effective tools is the Exit-Intent pop up. It’s a pop up that appears just as a visitor is about to close your website.

A great place to add these pop ups is on the pages your users leave your site completely most often, called exit pages. To find your exit pages, we recommend installing MonsterInsights, the best plugin for Google Analytics.

7. Accept Guest Posts

While most bloggers accept guest posts for free to help them come up with user generated content, you can charge for guest blog posts if you’d like. Keep in mind, your site has to be large enough and have enough traffic for it to be worth paying for a guest post.

But accepting guest posts can save you time, get you fresh content for your blog, and make you some money. That could make WPForms worth it if you need more income streams.

The WPForms Post Submissions addon makes it easy to collect user-submitted content in WordPress without users ever having to log in to your website’s admin area. And using the Rich Text field, you can let users write and style their posts from your submission form.

You can easily add custom fields to your guest post forms as well. This makes it easy to collect information from your guest bloggers and display it on your website.

Plus, you can add a Stripe, PayPal, Square, or Authorize.Net payment form so you can collect funds when a user submits their guest post. For more details, check out our tutorial on how to require users to pay to submit a post in WordPress, or check out how to accept payments with Stripe on your website.

Don’t forget to let your visitors know each time you publish a new guest post on your site. The PushEngage plugin lets you easily send a browser notification to subscribers every time a new post goes live. That can help to build a loyal audience who keeps coming back to your site to read new content.

8. Affiliate Sales

Successful bloggers usually have an income stream that comes from affiliate marketing.

As an affiliate marketer, you simply use your blog to promote a product and recommend others to buy it. It’s another great way to make money blogging with passive income because once your special link is in place, you automatically earn a commission on sales of that product through that link.

Affiliate links are awesome because they work everywhere, not just on your website. So you can share the link in other places like your brand’s social media platforms and still make money.

You can use a tool like Pretty Links Pro to help organize your affiliate links and affiliate marketing plan. Once you’re set up, you can install MonsterInsights to track clicks in WordPress and see how your affiliate links are performing.

There are lots of affiliate programs out there, but ShareASale is a huge player that is popular with successful bloggers who make money online. If you’d like to learn more, here’s a great guide on getting started with affiliate marketing.

9. Sell Sponsored Posts

If you don’t do it too often, publishing a sponsored post that someone paid you to write is a great, easy way to make money blogging.

Be careful not to overdo it and lose your audience’s hard-earned trust. Check out how to add a sponsored post prefix to a post title in WordPress to make sure your audience knows it’s a sponsored post.

10. Start a Podcast

A simple way to make an audience fall in love with you and your brand is to hear your voice. Consider using WordPress podcasting plugins to create episodes where you share a little bit about yourself.

You can share affiliate codes over your podcast, plus run different campaigns and send users to dedicated landing form pages to make sales.

11. Create Members Only Content

The easiest way to cash in on selling ‘members only’ or ‘gated’ content is to start a membership website.

It’s a great way to get recurring income by charging a monthly membership fee. Tools like MemberPress can help you set this up easily on your WordPress website.

Check out our post on how to create a membership website easily for more.

12. Sell Freelance Services

Another spectacular way to make money blogging on WordPress is to highlight and sell freelance services. You can easily put together a ‘Hire Me’ page to highlight your skills. Here’s an example from website owner Elna Cain:

If you’ve gotten great with WordPress, you can coach or consult on that. Maybe you have a knack for copywriting and blog writing. Whatever you’re good at, a WordPress website is the best place to offer and sell those freelance services online.

To make it extra easy on yourself so you don’t get confused about all the income streams you’ve got coming in from your website, you can use a solution like Freshbooks to keep track.

13. Accept Donations

Sometimes the easiest way to get something is to ask. Keep in mind that most people are much more likely to give you their money if you make it easier for them to do it.

You can set up a pre-built donation form right on your WordPress website if you’d like to accept donations online.

And, you can always create multiple donation pages for things like one-time donations, recurring payments, or tributes and memorials.

Here are some more donation page examples if you need some ideas to get started.

14. Book Appointments with Contact Forms

A really smart way to make money from blogging is to add an appointment booking form to your website if you offer in-person services.

This is great for people in the beauty industry or others who may be trying to find more clients by creating a website. Plus, customers love filling out online forms versus having to call you for an appointment.

You can even connect your booking form to Google Calendar to stay on top of your schedule as you bring in more money from your site.

FAQs on Ways to Make Money Blogging

Thinking of more questions related to making money by blogging? Check out some of the commonly asked questions on this subject below.

Do I need to have a specific niche to make money with a blog?

While you’re free to have a broad website that serves multiple niches, it’s much harder to be successful with a generic website. Instead, think about your expertise and focus on your strengths. By focusing on a specific niche that you specialize in, you’ll be competing against a narrower range of websites giving you a better chance to come out on top. For this reason, we strongly recommend focusing on a specific niche, attracting a single targeted audience, and offering value with your blog.

Is it possible to make money from a new blog, or do I need an established audience?

It’s definitely possible to make money from a new blog, though it can be a challenge depending on the existing level of competition within your niche. If you already have an established audience because you’re a recognized individual or have an audience on another social platform, you’ll be able to drive traffic to your blog faster and make money from it.

Can I use multiple monetization methods simultaneously on my blog?

You absolutely can! But you’ll have to make sure that your monetization is consistent with your niche and matches audience interests. For example, if you’re a fitness blog, you can sell your own fitness ebook and recommend other fitness-related products to earn commissions simultaneously.

Next, Integrate Your Site With PayPal

There it is! We hope this list of the top ways to make money blogging on WordPress helped you find some great things to help you monetize your website. You’ll also love our list of top PayPal integrations for your site.

Want to get started with the perfect WordPress theme for you? Take a peek at our guide to the best small business WordPress themes.

And remember: don’t be tempted to try to save money with WPForms Pro nulled because it’s a huge security risk.

So what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today. WPForms Pro includes online payment forms, post submissions and more, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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