Introduced as a humble tool to create hobby blogs, WordPress as an open-source platform has rapidly evolved into a well-rounded CMS in the past couple of decades. From total newbies and hobbyists to tech-savvy entrepreneurs and small business owners — WordPress effectively caters to a wide audience.
In fact, WordPress boasts a whopping 60.8% share of the CMS market, powering 35% of websites on the internet. Besides incredible flexibility, the platform’s potential to scale as your business grows is one of its biggest plus points.
That scalability also applies to monetizing your WordPress website — whether you’re looking to productize your services as a creative freelancer or earn some extra bucks with affiliate marketing as a budding blogger, there are plenty of ways to start making money from your WordPress website.
But before we look into some of these top ways to monetize your WordPress website, let’s understand some prerequisites to do the same.
When to Monetize Your WordPress Site?
If you’re planning to provide freelance services or do consulting/coaching, then you essentially have a monetization strategy right from the start.
But if you wish to start earning from your content, it’s best to consider monetization only when your website is seeing significant and steady traffic (at least a few thousand visitors per month). Here are a couple of other things to consider:
- You must have an established audience base that frequently revisits your website and engages with your content. This could be in the form of an email list and/or a social media following.
- You must have a strong on-site content strategy, with a stream of quality content being published each month.
With that in mind, it’s time to learn…
How to Monetize Your WordPress Website
Depending on your niche, the scale of operations, and goals, there are many methods you can adopt to monetize your WordPress website and turn it into an online business.
Here are three smart strategies to consider for monetizing your WordPress website in 2022.
Sell Digital Products
If you’re in the services vertical, you can monetize your WordPress site by turning your service expertise into digital products.
You can, for instance, package your most popular services as instructional guides and videos. These can take the form of eBooks, online courses, templates, and certification programs. The primary advantages of these digital products are their potentially infinite scalability and the profit margin (as there’s no logistical challenge). But you will have to invest substantial up-front effort in creating such a product.
Once you have created the digital product, use a WordPress payment plugin to set up and collect payments, optimize the checkout page, and store customer details.
You must also optimize your sales landing pages to organically rank high on Google search and draw in new leads at a low investment. This means creating value-adding, free content that leads to the paywall, along with custom WordPress development to ensure your WordPress website’s performance and user experience are impeccable.
A good example of a WordPress-powered website offering coaching services with the expertise packaged into an online course is Trailblazer Project Discovery Blueprint. Like Lee and many such experts, you can offer nominally-priced all-grant access to unique learning content for your niche community. Speaking of coaching…
Offer Coaching and Consultation, Online and In-Person
If you want to extend your website services based on your area of expertise, virtual coaching is an immensely popular and profitable online niche. Many content creators start by selling eBooks and courses and then, with increasing credibility, graduate to offering one-on-one, tailored coaching, and consultation services.
As these monetized services offer more value and subject matter expertise, you can garner a high premium from interested clients. If you have a blog, it can serve as an ideal avenue to establish your thought leadership to attract and convert potential clients.
Pro tip: You can also consider monetizing your coaching expertise in the form of speaking opportunities at conferences, networking events, virtual meet-ups, etc.
Promote Other Brands
One of the most common and straightforward methods to make money through your WordPress site is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing essentially involves promoting the products and services of other brands and grabbing a commission for every sale your site helps record. Its popularity as a source of passive income is borne out by the fact that the US affiliate marketing spend is pegged to reach 8.2 billion USD by 2022.
With your content marketing successfully pinging substantial numbers, the next step is roping in relevant products or services to promote from affiliate networks. With more and more businesses extending affiliate programs to bloggers and other small businesses, you can easily find one for your niche.
With affiliate marketing, the key to consistent success lies in promoting products that are genuinely valuable to your target audience.
Another way to monetize your site is to reach out for partnership opportunities with other brands in your niche and create sponsored posts for them. For example, you could partner up with a brand to publish and promote a comprehensive review of their product on your WordPress blog. You only have to make sure the brands you’re promoting are in sync with your audience.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it — three tried-and-tested strategies to monetize your WordPress site that hold good in 2022.
Remember, the important thing is to always keep your audience in mind at every turn, whether you’re directly tapping into their needs with services and digital products or turning their attention into money with ads and affiliate marketing.