Are you looking for the top ways to make money online that are NOT scams? WordPress is the largest publishing platform on the planet, and it powers over 43% of all websites.
You can use WordPress and blogging to earn money online by doing what you love. You can work from home, at your own time, and there is no limit on how much money you can make.
In this article, we will share top “proven” ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.
First, a word of warning: these aren’t ‘Get rich quick’ schemes. If you are looking for a way to get rich quick by making money online, then you’re in the wrong place.
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Don’t be fooled by the pictures of expensive cars, mansions, or working from the beach. Every single one of them is a scam, and you will waste your time and money paying for any courses or training that you buy from those guys.
Unlike other “make money online” articles, this is a comprehensive guide on how to make money at home legitimately, using blogging and WordPress.
Many of these methods require some investment of time and/or money to get started. As long as you’re willing to put in the effort, you’ll reap the reward.
Before you can start using any of these methods, you’ll need to have your own self-hosted WordPress blog. We have a step by step guide on how to start a WordPress blog for beginners.
The process is really easy to follow whether you are 20 years or 60 years old. However, if you need help, our expert team can help you set up your blog for free. → Click Here to Get Your Free WordPress Blog Setup! ←
Once you have set up your blog, then you are ready to follow this guide.
Since this is a lengthy article, we created a table of contents below for easy navigation.
Monetize Your Blog Content
When you think of how to make money blogging, advertising is often the first thing that comes to mind.
Yes, it is possible to make money with ads on WordPress, but there are also other ways you can monetize your blog content. Here are a few methods that work:
1. Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service to your audience using special tracking links, and then get a referral commission for every time someone buys after clicking your link.
A real-life example of affiliate marketing would be when you help a friend open a bank account at your bank branch. Usually, they give you a gift card or a bonus of some sort.
Similar to that many products and services online have affiliate programs that you can join. There are affiliate programs available for every industry (niche).
If you’re interested in getting started with affiliate marketing, you can start by thinking about the products you already use that your readers may be interested in as well. Then you can see if they have an affiliate program that you can sign up for.
You can find a huge list of products to promote from:
Once you have selected the products to promote, then you can use a WordPress plugin like PrettyLinks to manage your affiliate links.
It allows you to quickly insert links into posts, create branded links, auto-replace keywords into links, and even see how each link is performing on your site.
Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money because you can promote a wide-variety of products. Just about every popular store like Walmart, BestBuy, Amazon, and others have an affiliate program.
To learn more, see our beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing and also check out these affiliate marketing tools and plugins which will help you increase your earnings.
2. Display Google AdSense on WordPress
Google Adsense is an easy way to make money from your blog. All you need to do is add a script from Google to your website and start displaying ads.
You will get paid for every time a user clicks on the ad. These are called CPC ads.
What is CPC? CPC stands for “cost per click.” By displaying CPC ads with Google Adsense, you receive a set fee every time a visitor clicks on an ad.
The cost per click is set by the advertiser. (This is in contrast to CPM ads, where you’re paid for ad views instead of clicks. CPM means “cost per thousand impressions,” where M is the roman numeral for 1,000.)
Google Adsense is a good way to start earning money online when you are first starting out.
You can see our guide on how to monetize a WordPress blog with Google AdSense to get started, and this tutorial on how to optimize your AdSense revenue for more tips.
Looking for a Google AdSense alternative? Try Media.net. They also have a large pool of advertisers, and their payouts are good.
3. Use a WordPress Advertising Plugin to Sell Ads Directly
Google AdSense is easy to set up, but the amount of money you can earn is limited. Each ad click earning will vary.
Directly selling banner ad space on your website can be more lucrative. Instead of having to rely on an intermediary who takes a cut of the money, you negotiate the price and terms on your own.
Above we mentioned the difference between CPC and CPM ads, where you are paid per click or per thousand views. While you could use one of those models for selling banner ads, most bloggers charge a flat rate instead. Charging a flat rate is easier than keeping track of views or clicks.
Still, directly selling ads takes more work to manage than using Google AdSense. Instead of just adding a bit of code to your website, you’ll have to negotiate the pricing, come up with an agreement and terms, and take care of administrative work like invoicing.
However, using a WordPress ad management plugin can make the process easier. We recommend using AdSanity, it allows you to manage Google AdSense as well as your own ads.
To learn more, see our guide on how to sell ads on your WordPress blog.
4. Sell Sponsored Blog Posts
Some bloggers aren’t interested in displaying ads to their audience and wonder how to monetize a blog without ads.
With ad networks, you lose some control over the content displayed on your site. Some readers will get annoyed or offended by ads, and more and more people are using ad blockers which affects your earning potential.
An alternative way to monetize a blog is through sponsorships.
A sponsorship works just like it does in sports, TV shows, or other industries. Basically, a company pays you to represent their product, talk about it, and promote it to your readers.
To get started, it’s a good idea to put together a one-page media kit that details your traffic stats, social media following, audience demographics, and any other data that will make your site more appealing to advertisers. Then, you can approach companies to negotiate a sponsorship deal.
When publishing sponsored posts, it’s crucial to know about the laws in your area about disclosure.
For example, in the United States, a blogger who publishes a sponsored post must comply with the FTC’s Endorsement Guides. This includes disclosing whenever a post is sponsored. You can do that by adding a sponsored post prefix to your post title in WordPress.
5. Get Paid to Write Reviews
Similar to sponsored posts, you can also make money by writing paid reviews on your site.
This is a slightly different monetization method than a review site with affiliate links, as mentioned above.
Instead, you get to try out products related to your niche for free, and even get paid for writing a review.
The process for doing this can be similar to getting sponsored posts. You’ll want to review products that are relevant to your niche, that your audience would be interested in.
You can approach companies on your own to ask about doing paid reviews. There are also websites like PayPerPost that can help to connect you with businesses who may be interested.
6. Earn Money Online by Flipping Websites
If you know how to build a WordPress website, then you’re way ahead of most people. Sometimes entrepreneurs like to buy already established websites that they can use for their own businesses.
If you can build a WordPress blog and start getting traffic to it, then you can sell it and make money for your efforts.
This requires knowing the type of websites in demand, and how to price and sell them. There are websites like Flippa that serve as auction sites and brokers for selling websites.
7. Get Public Speaking Gigs as an Influencer
If you are promoting your own brand along with your blog, then over time you will get a decent following establishing you as an influencer in your space.
You can utilize this recognition to get some public speaking jobs. Many bloggers make a lot of money by speaking at conferences.
Speaking at events whether you are paid or not helps you promote your blog and your personal brand. If you are good at networking and public speaking, then you would be able to find lots of new opportunities on the way.
Here are some general tips you need to keep in mind if you want to make money as a paid public speaker.
- Be an expert in your field. If you don’t have enough knowledge/skills at the moment, then start learning right away.
- Be consistent – You need to continuously promote your expertise on the topic through your blogging and social media activities.
- Let people know that you are available. You can announce on social media or privately reach out to event organizers.
- You may not find paid public speaking gigs right away. Many successful speakers start their public speaking career from smaller, more casual, and free community events and meetups.
Create a Paid Membership Website
If you’re not interested in selling ads or sponsored posts, there are plenty of other ways you can earn money online from your blog. A popular method is by having your audience pay to access certain content or areas of your site. Here are a couple of ways to do that.
8. Create Restricted Members Only Content
Your most loyal readers are huge fans and may be willing to pay to read more of your work. You can create a members-only area for them to share more in-depth blog posts, downloads, videos, audio content, and more.
Membership sites can be a big time investment since you must continually create premium content for your paying members. But they can be very lucrative because they are recurring revenue (subscriptions).
You can easily create a membership site using a WordPress membership plugin. We recommend using MemberPress, it is the most beginner friendly and robust membership plugin for WordPress.
We have a complete guide on making a WordPress membership website with step by step instructions to help you get started.
9. Create a Private Forum
Another option for creating a paid membership site is to create private forums that users must pay to get access to. Forums are a great way for your audience to get one-on-one advice from you. Other members of the community can also interact and help each other out.
While moderating a forum can be a lot of work, a paid forum is a great way to earn recurring revenue from your WordPress site.
To get started, you’ll need to set up a forum on your site. Here are our recommended top 5 best forum plugins for WordPress
10. Create a questions and answers community
Question and answers communities like Stack Exchange and Quora are huge. They help you build an online community that is driven, motivated, and highly engaged.
Just like forums, you will have to spend some time building a sizable community. After that, you will be able to monetize user-generated content on your website using advertisements, affiliate ads, and other methods.
Popular question and answer websites are able to get direct advertisement and sponsorship deals from advertisers in their industry. This helps them negotiate a much higher rate and extra perks.
See our guide on how to start a Questions and Answers website using WordPress.
