The Top Ways to Make a Living with WordPress

WordPress is an open-source platform that’s free and accessible for everyone to use. It’s quintessential for building unique websites, and is loved by millions – but you can do much more than that using WordPress. i.e, you can also think of WordPress as a way to make a living. Now don’t assume that earning money from WordPress is something absurd and impracticable. As long as you have significant skills, nothing can come in between you and money! 

WordPress provides beneficial circumstances as people search for WordPress about 2.7 million times every month. As the most extensive CMS, WordPress is a forum for developers and designers to exploit.

Many people have already embarked on different ways to make tons of money with WordPress. So, here we are going to bring into light a few ideas to make money from your WordPress website. It is not mandatory that you need to be technically minded to make a living with WordPress. So, there’s nothing to worry about!!!

1. eCommerce

If you have products to sell, go for it and create an eCommerce WordPress website. By using a plugin such as WooCommerce, you can easily convert your WordPress website into your very own online store. That means you can start to list products, sell them, and accept payments. In addition to a regular storefront for your own goods, WordPress can also be used to create a dropshipping store. In such a case, you sell goods directly to customers but a third party ships them out. 

2. Selling Ebooks

Ebooks help you to earn money from blogging and also, improve your writing skills. This is one of the discoveries that technology brings home. As a writer, you’d initially have to go through a publishing house, a printing press and finally a distribution centre to get your book published for readers to buy. But due to the advancement in technology, you no longer need to go through the entire process, and just run the same process through a computer. It doesn’t require much capital and you can also escape from the printing cost and delivery fee. Thus, creating and selling an ebook is perceptible and beneficial.

3. Advertising

The easiest way of earning money from any kind of WordPress website is by displaying advertisements on your website. You will find most ads work on a pay-per-click (or PPC) basis, i.e you get paid every time someone clicks on one of your adverts. But don’t expect much. You’ll get only less than $1 for each. Still, something is better than nothing right? You can use Google AdSense which displays relevant adverts on your site. All you have to do is copy some code onto your site where you want the ads to appear. 

4. Affiliate Marketing

Another popular way of monetizing your WordPress blog is with affiliate marketing. Wondering what it is? This is the method where companies pay you for providing them with new customers. Affiliate marketing is easy to set up, as the blogger needs to sign up with the brand’s affiliate program and start promoting the product/service through the link they have provided.

You can either get paid every time someone clicks on one of your links, or every time someone uses your link to purchase or sign up to the company you’re promoting. These links look similar to normal web links, but with some numbers and letters attached on to the end.  This special code lets the company view exactly how much business they are getting through your unique links so that you can be paid correctly.

5. WordPress Maintenance

Most of the website owners don’t want to handle the everyday tasks of running a website. So, once you achieve adequate experience in WordPress, you can provide your services online to help other website owners to manage WordPress applications.

These services have a price tag depending on the level of expert knowledge of the managing developer. Maintenance can be about WordPress updates, security monitoring, theme and plugin updates, hosting management, CDN setup – almost anything you are already doing for your own website. You can get paid a monthly fee to do for others. 

6. SEO Consulting

As you know, SEO plays a major role in building up a website. People love working with a WordPress SEO consultant – someone who specializes in WordPress SEO and has good knowledge of Yoast, WordPress speed, plugins, themes, page builders, and WordPress in general. It will definitely help users to improve their SEO ranking. You can assist users with content optimization, link building, site speed or other site aspects SEO. All these are certainly areas many website owners are willing to pay for.

7. Security Consulting and Solutions

Security of their website is also another important aspect that website owners are concerned with. So, if you know tricks and techniques to safeguard a site from hackers and malware attacks, you can surely help the others and get paid. Just be sure to cover the key aspects of security such as default WordPress settings, passwords, file permissions, user role access, updates, server configuration, security plugin settings, backup settings, SSL certificate etc. If you are extremely familiar with the WordPress files, then Malware removal is also your cup of tea.

8. Build a blogging network

The idea of creating a paid access blogging network is suitable for those WordPress websites with the highest traffic and level of recognition. Do you have a high-traffic WordPress blog that is well-known on the Internet? Don’t waste time and money then! Instead, take the chance to turn it into a multisite network where people have to pay to set up a personal blog. The process is not very complicated. Allow multisite on your WordPress installation and then install a plugin such as Pay to Blog to ask for payment from customers before they can start their blogs. That’s it!

9. Start Online courses

The global market for online learning is expected to reach over $240 billion by 2022. That’s definitely something you can take advantage of! So if you have teaching abilities and knowledge on a particular subject, create a course! The first way is to use your website as a marketing platform with your courses hosted on a third party e-learning site. Popular e-learning sites like Udemy, Lynda allows you to upload your courses and set your own prices. Or else you can integrate plugins such as TutorLMS to your WordPress site and host your courses.

10. Host a Webinar

Webinars are a great way to increase your audience, share your experience, and grow your business. But it’s also a great way to earn money online. Webinars are more or less similar to online courses, but a webinar is live and usually includes an interactive session. WordPress makes it effortless to host a paid webinar. Whether you are using your site to actually host the webinar, or just to announce your webinar and register participants, it’s crucial for a favourable outcome.

11. Audio/Video Podcast

Podcasts are nothing but a digital audio/video file made available on the Internet for downloading, usually available as a series. It is a way of entertainment for many people during their leisure time. Since podcasts are a trending topic, it’s a productive as well as a creative platform to set up and make money. Another reason to create podcast streams on your WordPress website is to get recognition from the industry. Since blogging for money has been around for a while now, chances are that the topic you want to write about is already available on another mainstream blog. This is where starting a podcast can be useful.

12. Freelance Writing

There are millions of websites that need fresh content on a daily basis. If you have good writing skills just visit your favourite online blogs and check if they have contributor application pages where you can submit your articles and get paid. So not only will you get some astonishing backlinks from top-ranking sites, but you can get paid for your hard work. You can also find WordPress content writing jobs on job board sites such as Upwork, ProBlogger Jobs, etc.

13. Offer Paid Membership and Content

Let’s consider you have a WordPress website with pretty much visitors and you often provide them with free content. In such cases it’s high time to take the plunge and earn money by featuring some “premium” content for the paid members only! You can offer either a one-time membership fee or a recurring one that can give you a remarkable amount of money, on the condition that your content is interesting and useful enough. When someone is ready to pay in order to read your content, you have to give them the best, or else they will say goodbye to your website forever.

14. Develop Plugins

If you’re a PHP developer, or you have learned PHP skills from working with WordPress, you can create your own plugin and sell it on a marketplace. But make sure you analyze the existing plugins and create the new one by focusing on a specific need. Once you have built and tested your new plugin, you can make it public and sell it on to other people. The ideal way to do this is by building your own online store (using a plugin like WooCommerce) where you can display your plugins and trade them.  If you’re not confident enough to create your own online store, you can list your plugin on a marketplace like Envato or CodeCanyon.

15. WordPress Theme Development

Just like developing plugins, it’s also possible to make money by developing themes on WordPress with the help of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Theme marketplace like ThemeForest, TemplateMonster etc are a great place to upload your custom themes. Many people also customize actual themes and sell these themes as a service. If you are just going to hit the road when it comes to creating WordPress themes, and not strong enough to do it alone, you can form a team or can join an enterprise that is already in the business of making themes for others. This way you will be able to make money without much strain.

16. Building WordPress Sites for Clients

Now, this method is applicable for only those who are good with WordPress because it includes creating custom designs and building a full website from scratch. Therefore, you should have an old-hand in WordPress, with experience and coding wrapped under your belts. You need to have a portfolio of websites you have built before, be self-assured in your technical skills, have a sense for design, be mindful of security issues, and above all should be cooperative with the clients. If you have all these skills, build your own WordPress website to promote your skills and attract clients so that you can create a good impression on potential customers. 

17. WordPress Optimized Hosting Services

With its repeatedly growing adoption rate, WordPress comes out with possibilities for hosting providers because large websites’ owners now look for WordPress optimized server hosting or WordPress managed hosting. Think of Nestify, Flywheel, Liquid Web to name a few. So if downtimes are your deadly enemy, you should go all-in with WordPress managed hosting and start building your services around it. It is definitely going to be a competitive space, so you better be prepared. As a first step, you can get involved with the WordPress Hosting Facebook Group, once you gain confidence create an affiliate program with competitive commissions and then go ahead step by step.

18. Start Public Speaking as an Influencer

If you are promoting your own brand along with your blog, then over time you will gain some good amount of followers, thus endowing you as an influencer in your field. You can make use of this recognition to get some public speaking jobs. Many bloggers make a lot of money by speaking at conferences. Speaking at events whether paid or not helps you promote your blog and your personal brand. If you are good at public speaking and interacting with the audience, then this is right up your alley. 

Summary

WordPress is an admirable platform with boundless equal opportunities for beginners as well as masters. Whether you’re a beginner, developer, designer, blogger, educator or marketer, there are plenty of good ways for those wishing to work with WordPress. Here we have picked out the eighteen main ways you can monetize WordPress, and we hope there’s something for everyone on our list. 

Frequently Asked Questions about making a living with WordPress