Top Ways to Make Money from Online Blogging via WordPress

WordPress is globally the largest publishing platform on the web, and it facilitates publishing for more than 30% of all the existing websites on the internet.

WordPress, along with blogging, can help you earn money online. You can work from home/ remotely, suiting your time slots, and the best part is that there does not exists a limitation on the amount of money you can make online.

Here is a comprehensive guide on legitimate online money-making methods via WordPress and blogging. Of these, several methods require some investment of time and money when you get on with it.

The prerequisite of starting to use any of these methods has your self-hosted WordPress blog.  The prerequisite to using any of these methods is your self hosted blog.After you have set up your blog. Once your blog is set up,, you are all ready to follow the techniques in this guide.

When you talk about making money through blogging, “advertising” is the first thing to come  that comes to mind. Earning money with ads on WordPress is possible, but there are other ways too with which you can monetize your blogs/ content. Following are a few useful methods:

• Making Money With Affiliate Marketing: When you are recommending a product or a service to your audience via specific tracking links, you get a referral commission every time a consumer purchases after clicking on your particular link; this is called Affiliate Marketing. A widespread practical example of affiliate marketing is when you help a friend open a bank account at your bank branch. They generally give you a gift card or some sort of bonus for your reference. Similarly, several products and services online, in almost every niche, offer affiliate marketing programs that you can join anytime. You can begin by creating a list of the products that you already use, and that might be a subject of interest for your readers also. Then you can check for suitable affiliate programs for which you can sign up. Platforms like Amazon, Commission Junction and ShareASale offer a lengthy list of products to promote from. Once you have selected the products to help, you can then use a WordPress plugin, such as PrettyLinks, for managing your affiliate-links. It allows quick insertion of links into posts, creation of branded links, and auto-replacement of keywords into links. You can also see and check the performance of each link on your blog site. Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to earn money because you can promote a wide range of products and services. Almost all popular stores like Walmart, BestBuy, Amazon, etc. have an affiliate program

• Displaying Google AdSense on WordPress: With Google Adsense, you can make money easily from your blog. You just have to add a script from Google to your blogging site and begin to display advertisements. You will get payments for each time a user clicks on the ad. These are termed as CPC ads. CPC stands for “cost per click.” When you display CPC ads with Google Adsense, you receive a set fee every time a visitor clicks on an ad. The advertiser sets the cost per click. Google Adsense is an excellent way to start earning money online when you are first starting. Media.net is an alternative for Google Adsense. Media.net comes with a massive set of advertisers, and their payouts are high.

• Using a WordPress Advertising Plugin for Selling Ads Directly: Google AdSense has an easy setup process, but the amount of money you earn is limited. What you make for each ad click varies. If you directly sell banner ad space on your website, it will be a more lucrative option for you. Instead of depending on the intermediary who is taking a share from the money, you can choose to negotiate the price and terms yourself. Direct selling of ads involves a larger volume of work as compared to using Google AdSense. Rather than adding only a small part of code to your website, you must negotiate the pricing, generate an agreement with specific terms, and manage administrative tasks. If you use a WordPress ad management plugin, the process automatically becomes easier for you. AdSanity could be the right choice for you as it lets you manage Google AdSense and also your ads.

• Selling Sponsored Blog Posts: Some bloggers do not have any interest in showing advertisements to their readers. They look for other means to monetize their blogs without showing ads. In the case of ad networks, you have to let go of a part of the control over the content that you display on your website. Few readers could be annoyed or offended by ads. The ratio of people using ad blockers is increasing with time, and it is affecting your earning potential. Hence, one of the alternative methods to monetize your blog is to go for a sponsorship. A sponsorship is when a company is paying you for representing their product, talking about it, and promoting it among your audience. It will be best for you first to arrange a one-page media kit including the details like your traffic statistics, social-media following, audience demographics, and similar kind of data that will enhance your appeal in the eyes of your advertisers. Now, you can address different companies to initiate, negotiate, and seal a sponsorship deal. When you publish sponsored posts, first, you must get all the information about it and know thoroughly about the disclosure laws in your area.

• Getting Paid for Writing Reviews: You can earn by writing paid reviews on your site. You will be able to explore products related to your niche for free. You can also get payments for writing reviews. You must be reviewing products that are relevant to your niche and would also interest your readers. You may approach companies by yourself and ask all the information about doing paid reviews. You will get websites like PayPerPost that will help you connect with interested businesses.

• Earning Money Online by Flipping Websites: It is an advantage for you if you know how to build a WordPress website. Sometimes entrepreneurs like to buy sites that are already established, which they can use for their businesses. After you create a WordPress blog and start driving sufficient traffic, you can sell it and earn money for your hard work. You need to research and find out the type of websites that are in demand in the present market. Hence, you will understand how to set your pricing and sell them. Several websites serve as auction sites, e.g., Flippa.

• Getting Public Speaking Gigs as an Influencer: If you are promoting your brand alongside your blog, with time, you will earn a sufficient number of followers to establish yourself as an influencer in your niche. You can use this recognition to crack some public-speaking jobs. Several bloggers earn a massive volume of money just from giving speeches at conferences and functions. When you are speaking at such events, irrespective of whether you are getting to earn from it or not, it helps you a lot in promoting your blog and your brand name. If you think you have excellent networking skills and public-speaking skills, then you will come across several such opportunities on your journey. The following are a few essential tips that you must consider if you are looking forward to making money as a paid public speaker.

  Transform and build yourself into becoming an expert in your field. Evaluate yourself and your knowledge. If you realize that you still do not have sufficient expertise for public speaking, then begin with your learning process straightaway.

  Keep a balanced consistency: You will always need to promote your knowledge and expertise in regards to the topic using your blog and social media activities/ strategies.

  You need to inform and remind people about your existence and the work you are doing. You can make announcements on social media. You may also contact event organizers privately.

  You will face difficulty to find paid public speaking gigs straightaway. Several well established and successful speakers have begun their career from smaller, and free community events gatherings and meetings.

• Creating Restricted Members Only Content: When you succeed in earning a sufficient volume of loyal readers, you will know that you now have a fan-base who may be ready to pay to read more of what you are writing. You may generate a members-only area for your readers to share further in-depth blog posts, videos, downloads, audio content, and much more. Membership sites will require an investment of a significant amount of time. Hence, you have to maintain a continuous flow of publishing premium content for the members who are paying to read your content. Such memberships can result in high income since they help you gain recurring revenue via subscriptions and memberships. You can build a membership site via a WordPress membership plugin quickly. You can use MemberPress, which is the most beginner-friendly and powerful membership plugin for WordPress.

• Creating a Private Forum: Another option to generate a paid membership site is to build private forums that readers will need to make payments to get access. Forums are an excellent means to allow your audience to get one-on-one advice and recommendations from you. Other members of your community can also interact and offer help to other fellow members. Moderating a forum demands an immense amount of work, but a paid forum is a compelling means to earn recurring revenue from your WordPress blogging site.

• Creating a Questions and Answers Community:  Stack Exchange and Quora are examples of questions and answers communities that have become massive platforms. These online platforms assist you in building a highly motivated online community, initiating a lot of engagements. Similar to forums, you must invest sufficient time in creating a sizable community. Then, you can monetize your user-generated content on your website via affiliate ads, advertisements, etc. You can direct popular advertisement and sponsorship deals from advertisers on question and answer websites. It becomes instrumental in negotiating a higher rate and extra benefits.

• Creating a Directory Website With WordPress: Creating a directory or listing website is another excellent option for making money online via WordPress. You can charge visitors for advertising their listings on your WordPress site.Web directories may initially seem to be obsolete, but the fact is that this method is not entirely outdated. Maintaining generic web directories is not a necessity anymore, but local or niche directories can be an advantage for you. Directories allow you to accumulate reviews from local companies, share top podcasts on a specific subject, or enlist the best products in a particular niche. You can build a web directory in WordPress quickly. There are several options of directory plugins for WordPress, and you can choose to opt for any of them that you find convenient. Several platforms let you accept payments via submissions.

• Creating a WordPress Job Board With Paid Submissions: There can be another option for you to earn. You can opt to create a paid job board. Companies who are looking to advertise any open position before your audience can pay you for submitting listings. If you choose a particular niche, it will be easier for you to create a successful job board. Hence, you can turn your site into the go-to place for any user looking for a job in that particular industry. It works wonders for established blogs in a narrow niche. ProBlogger is a famous example with a job board for bloggers who blog professionally. You can build a paid job board with WordPress quickly. You can utilize the WooCommerce Paid Listings addon to charge for job post submissions.

• Creating a WordPress Event Calendar With Paid Submissions: If not a job board, you can generate an event calendar for which you can charge your readers for advertising their events. If you have an established audience, it works best for you, since companies will be wanting to pay for reaching your audience. A paid event calendar is a suitable method for monetize local or industry-specific sites. You may opt to advertise events in your local city, conferences related to a particular industry, or live streaming events or webinars.

• Selling Services Online Using WordPress: If you are seeking secure methods for earning money online, selling services is the fastest way for you to begin. There is no upfront investment involved to create a product or invest in inventory. You can instead add a “hire me” page to your website and begin to look for your first client.

• Selling Digital Products With WordPress: If you are searching for a low-maintenance way to earn money via your online blogging WordPress site, then the right choice for you could be selling your digital products. Here are a few examples of the digital products you can sell online.

Ebooks on WordPress: A popular and convenient choice for creating digital products are Ebooks. Writing and producing Ebooks are comparatively simple. If you have been in the blogging industry for a sufficient period, you can collect a few of your old blog posts and transform those into book-chapters. Once you finish writing your book, you can then design a cover via design tools like Canva and further create a PDF of your ebook. Selling digital products on WordPress via a plugin is a highly comfortable option. Easy Digital Downloads is a good option for digital downloads because it is comparatively more natural to use and has every feature that you will require for creating your online store.

Paid Webinars: Webinars are an excellent means for building your audience base, sharing your experience, and expanding your business. Webinars are a brilliant way to make money online. Webinars are like online courses. The difference is that the webinar is live and usually consists of a question and answer section. Hosting a paid webinar becomes easier with WordPress.

Online Courses: Selling an online course is another excellent way of earning money online. Courses generally sell for a much higher price compared to the cost of ebooks. You can ask for a premium for your expertise in your field. Create the lessons for your course, and also support-materials that you wish to put in, e.g., downloads, checklists, slides, templates, and others. First, decide on whether you wish to provide personalized support for your course. Some sites give two-tiers on every session, i.e., a basic version excluding assistance, and a premium version along with support via email. After your course is ready, you can implement a learning management system (LMS) plugin to deliver the path to your readers. LearnDash with MemberPress is the right choice for this purpose.

• Offering Freelance Services: Since you are already an expert on your niche as a blogger, you can begin to earn an income by providing your expertise and skills as a freelancer. Freelancing is a highly convenient and accessible way of earning money online because it does not necessarily demand any upfront time or money investment. You can just begin providing your services to your existing audience. Once you begin with freelancing, you will require a means to invoice and collect payments from your clients. If you have an interest in using freelancing as a means to earn some severe amount of money online, you will get a wide range of tools for WordPress freelancers, developers, and designers to help you get started.

• Starting Your Own Consulting Business: Starting your own consulting business is another means to for online from your blog site and sharing your expertise. Rather than offering your services, a consultant provides strategy and advice so that the consultant’s clients can become more productive. Freelancing does not require startup investment. Hence, you can offer consulting services on your already existing blog. All you need to do is to build a page, including a form for users allowing them to request more information. WPForms is a platform allowing you to create a mobile-friendly and professional “form.”

• Becoming a Coach: If you are not entirely convinced about opting for consulting, you can instead choose to become a coach. A life coach provides guidance, advice, and accountability to define and set goals and improve lives. Other types of coaches include writing coaches, blog coaches, etc. Irrespective of your area of expertise, you can always provide one-on-one coaching sessions to help your audience. For saving time and making things convenient for your clients, you can build a booking form so that your readers can schedule coaching sessions directly from your WordPress blog.

• Selling Physical Products Online Via WordPress: Selling digital products/services are a secure method to begin earning money online, but there is nothing like selling real and physical products. Creating a shop or adding a shop to your existing blog becomes comfortable with the free WooCommerce plugin. To start an online store, you will have to do a considerable volume of work because you have to create/ buy the products and ship them yourself. Selling physical products have the potential of becoming a highly rewarding experience, and sometimes your audience does want a physical product. If you want, you can use Shopify or BigCommerce as a WooCommerce alternative.

• Creating a WooCommerce Dropshipping Store: Dropshipping is another way to build an eCommerce store on your WordPress website without having to manage inventory or ship items yourself. You will be creating the store, managing the website, and offering customer-service with dropshipping. A dropshipping service will be taking your orders and shipping those to your customers. They are an invisible third-party that your customers do not know. To create a dropshipping store, you can use the WooCommerce plugin. You will also get a WooCommerce Dropshipping addon plugin allowing you to automate the process.

• Creating an Amazon Affiliate WordPress Shop: One drawback of dropshipping is that you have to locate the right supplier, which can be challenging for you, and sometimes you have to place a large order upfront. Without investing a lot of money, it can be challenging for you to get started. If you want to set up an eCommerce site in a more natural way, without having to ship your products yourself, you may go for Amazon Affiliate shop.

• Offering Platform as a Service: WordPress includes several highly robust and full-fledged plugins. You can add one such platform to your blog site or e-commerce store and offer it as a paid service to your audience. You get a cut from each sale, from which you can earn passively via user-activity on your website.

• Creating an Online Marketplace Website: An online marketplace is similar to an eCommerce store in which users can buy and also sell their products. WooCommerce generally assumes that you have a single-vendor site. You will require a plugin like WC Vendors for transforming WooCommerce into a multi-vendor capable platform. Then, vendors will be able to register on your website and begin to sell. You can earn money by charging a commission on every sale, or you can allow vendors to buy membership packages for their listings.

• Making an Auctions Website: An auctions website lets its users to bid on products for purchasing them. It will allow the sellers to increase their profits to the maximum level and customers to come across unique deals. One of the best examples of an online auctions marketplace is eBay. You may conduct auctions on your WordPress site and also allow third-party vendors to list their products. You can earn money via charging for the listing or by gaining a cut on each sale. You will need the following add-on’s for building an auctions marketplace with WordPress;  WooCommerce for implementing shopping cart and payment features, a multi-vendor add-on, an auctions add-on.

• Creating a Job Marketplace Website: A Job Marketplace is different from a regular job listings website, as it lets you earn money on each job listing. The top and most famous examples of online job marketplace websites include Fiverr and UpWork. You can easily promote your job marketplace as a micro-job platform for people who work in the same niche as your blog. You can fix yourself on a specific niche for making your platform more competitive. This choice will enable you to quickly locate customers and professionals who are not able to utilize large platforms due to excessive foreign competition. You can charge a reasonable as well as minimal fee for job listings or when a job hiring process is completed. More successful completion of tasks will bring you more customers and freelancers in the future.

• Developing WordPress Plugins: Plugins are the components making WordPress extensively flexible and robust. Plugins function like apps that allow you to extend and modify any characteristic of your WordPress site. Plugins are available in all varieties, from simple code alterations to composite software applications, if you have a general knowledge about how WordPress functions and some pure PHP knowledge, you can create your WordPress plugin. There are many several methods for you to distribute your plugins as a plugin developer. As long as one is following the guidelines of the WordPress plugin, anybody can be submitting a free plugin in the WordPress.org plugin directory. It is an excellent way of developing experience and building your reputation as a developer of the WordPress plugin. After you are ready to start selling premium plugins, you can choose between selling those on sites like MOJO Marketplace, your WordPress site, etc. You must make sure that the plugin you create directly fulfills a need of your audience if you use your existing WordPress blog for selling plugins. To identify the problems they must solve on their WordPress site, you can survey them, and then create a plugin to solve that particular issue. Then, using Easy Digital Downloads, you can sell the plugin on your WordPress site.

• Selling WordPress Themes: You can start creating your WordPress themes to sell if you have an interest in web design and development. For this, you need to have both technical and design skills. You must know how to create a good-looking design layout, and also how to code it to function in WordPress. Genesis is a WordPress theme framework that you can use to kick start this method to earn money.

• Selling Graphics on Your WordPress Site: Another option is creating and selling graphics on your WordPress site if you are more interested in design than coding. You can also make graphics like logos and stock images, and sell them on your WordPress site via an eCommerce plugin.

• Accepting Donations: Lastly, another method for you to make money from your WordPress blog is to just ask for it. You can begin with accepting donations in a varied range of ways. You could choose to place a Paypal donate button or a Stripe give button on your site. To achieve a more executive vibe and advanced features such as email marketing integration, WPForms can help you in creating a donation form on your WordPress site.