Top 5 ways to make money with WordPress

1. Plugins and Themes

Plugins are designed to extend the basic functionality of WordPress. Want SEO optimisation? There’s a plugin for that. Google Analytics? Plugins have it covered.

If you want to earn some money with WordPress, making and selling the best plugins are a great place to start.

Remember, you don’t need to be the first – you only need to be the best. Identify gaps in the market and promote your plugins and you could be making a tidy sum in no time.

Are your skills more centred around design? There is an almost limitless demand for WordPress themes.

Responsive designs, stylish and modern layouts, funky, retro themes: the sky’s the limit. If you’re good at what you do, there is good money to be made with selling WordPress themes.

Top tip:

Both plugins and themes have marketplaces across the internet, as well as on WordPress, waiting for you to take them by storm.

WordPress.org can be daunting at first for some people. Not you, though. You’re an old hand at setting up a site on WordPress. Why not make money out of your expertise?

There are small businesses and entrepreneurs out there needing to get their WordPress site up and running fast, but don’t have the skills to do it.

Time is money: be the hero these businesses need by offering a full service setup for their WordPress.

You take care of the theme, plugins, pages, and full customisation – and they save money on the long run by getting their site live fast.

Top tip:

Set yourself apart from the competition and provide extras such as website protection or email hosting.

Your blog is the ideal place to promote your own products and services. Perhaps you have plugins and themes you want to promote, or a WordPress setup service to offer?

You can also make money serving third party ads to your visitors using Google AdSense or similar platforms.

While advertising on WordPress.com can be set up using WordAds if you have moderate to high traffic and appropriate content, it is subject to approval from WordPress.

On the other hand, WordPress.com VIP sites and WordPress.org are much more permissive and allow you to run any ads you’d like.

Top tip:

Make sure visitors come to your site for the content. Over-enthusiastic or aggressive advertising will only put people off and drive them away. Always deliver value to your visitors!

If your blog has a loyal and engaged readership, it is not a stretch to monetise it with sponsored posts.

Once you are being noticed, it won’t be long before brands and businesses want to be featured in posts – and your readers may find this less intrusive or more interesting than straight advertising.

How you manage sponsored content is entirely your own decision, and can require an amount of thought and planning.

Pay particular attention to if you plan to promise content in return for reward, how often you post sponsored content, and if you only write content yourself or accept ” guest posts” as sponsored content.

There are, however, strict rules to avoid being penalised by search engines – so make sure you know the details around using nofollow links, and clearly marking sponsored content as such. If you’re not clear or are unsure, check out the latest post from Google on the subject Best practices for reviewing products you’ve received for free.

Done properly, sponsored content can be win-win: brands will get exposure, your readers will get good quality content that interests them, and you will make money from your site.

Top tip:

Most affiliate links and sponsored posts from reputable merchants are allowed even on WordPress.com – so long as you are delivering original content. As with advertising, make sure you put content first – or visitors will vote with their feet and go elsewhere.

Whether you make and sell tangible products, or something less physical like WordPress themes, having a store on your WordPress site will enable you to start making money from your site.

There’s a variety of e-commerce solutions you can use to set up a cart on your WordPress site, including many free shopping cart plugins for WordPress, and it’s Crazy easy to do.

By integrating a store on your site, rather than sending your customers away to eBay or Etsy or any other site, you keep them on your site, right where you want them to stay.

Top tip:

Integrating eCommerce on your site can be free to do and means you don’t need to send customers offsite where they might get distracted, or exposed to competitor offers.