Are you looking for the best legitimate ways to make money online? WordPress is the world’s biggest publishing platform, and more than 43% of all websites run on it.
You can do what you love to do online and make money with WordPress and blogging. You can work from home on your own schedule and make as much money as you want.
In this article, we’ll talk about the best “proven” ways to make money online with WordPress and blogging.
First, a warning: these are not ways to get rich quickly. If you want to get rich fast by making money online, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Don’t let pictures of expensive cars, mansions, or people working from the beach fool you. Every single one of them is a scam, and any courses or training you buy from them will be a waste of your time and money.
Unlike other “make money online” articles, this one is a complete guide to using blogging and WordPress to make legal money from home.
To get started with many of these methods, you need to put in some time and/or money. As long as you are willing to work hard, you will get what you want.
You’ll need your own self-hosted WordPress blog before you can use any of these methods. For beginners, we have a step-by-step guide on how to start a WordPress blog.
Whether you are 20 years old or 60 years old, it is very easy to follow the steps. But if you need help setting up your blog, our expert team will do it for free. Click Here to Set Up Your WordPress Blog for Free! ←
Once you’ve set up your blog, you can start using this guide.
- Since this is a long article, we made a table of contents to make it easy to find what you’re looking for.
- Monetize Your Blog Content
- Make a website with paid memberships
- Make an online directory with WordPress
- With WordPress, you can sell digital products.
- Use WordPress to sell services online.
- Using WordPress, you can sell physical goods online.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Monetize Your Blog Content
Advertising is often the first thing that comes to mind when you think about how to make money from blogging.
Yes, you can make money on WordPress by putting up ads, but there are other ways to make money from your blog content. Here are some good ways to do it:
1. Affiliate marketing is a way to make money.
Affiliate marketing is when you tell your audience about a product or service using special links that track sales. If someone buys after clicking your link, you get a commission.
Affiliate marketing happens in real life when you help a friend open a bank account at your branch. Most of the time, they give you a gift card or some kind of bonus.
In the same way, you can join affiliate programs for a lot of online products and services. Affiliate programs are available for every type of business (niche).
If you want to get started with affiliate marketing, you can start by thinking about the products you already use that your readers might also be interested in. Then you can check to see if they have a program for affiliates that you can join.
You can find a long list of things to sell at:
Once you’ve chosen the products you want to promote, you can use a plugin for WordPress like PrettyLinks to manage your affiliate links.
It lets you quickly add links to posts, make branded links, have keywords automatically replaced in links, and even see how each link is doing on your site.
Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money because you can promote so many different products. Almost every popular store has an affiliate program, like Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon, and others.
For more information, check out our guide for beginners to affiliate marketing and these affiliate marketing tools and plugins that will help you make more money.
2. Google AdSense should be shown on WordPress.
Google Adsense is a simple way for your blog to make money. Just add a script from Google to your website, and you can start showing ads.
When someone clicks on the ad, you will get paid. CPC ads are what you call these.
What’s the CPC? CPC stands for “cost per click.” When you use Google Adsense to show CPC ads, you get a set amount of money every time a visitor clicks on one of your ads.
The advertiser decides how much each click will cost. CPM ads, on the other hand, pay you for how many times your ad is seen instead of how many times it is clicked. CPM stands for “cost per thousand impressions,” where M is the roman numeral for 1,000.
Google Adsense is a good place to start if you want to make money online.
To get started, you can look at our guide on how to make money with Google AdSense on a WordPress blog and this tutorial on how to make the most money with AdSense.
Want an alternative to Google AdSense? Attempt Media.net. They also have a lot of advertisers, and the money they give out is good.
3. Use an advertising plug-in for WordPress to sell ads directly.
Google AdSense is easy to set up, but you can only make a certain amount of money from it. Each ad click will earn a different amount.
You can make more money if you sell banner ads directly on your website. You don’t need a middleman who takes a cut of the money. Instead, you negotiate the price and terms yourself.
We’ve already talked about the difference between CPC and CPM ads, where you get paid per click or per thousand views. You could sell banner ads using one of these models, but most bloggers charge a flat rate instead. It’s easier to charge a flat rate than to keep track of views or clicks.
Still, it takes more work to run Google AdSense than to sell ads directly. Instead of just adding a bit of code to your website, you’ll have to negotiate the price, come up with an agreement and terms, and take care of administrative tasks like invoicing.
Using a WordPress plug-in to manage ads, on the other hand, can make the process easier. We recommend that you use AdSanity because it lets you manage both Google AdSense and your own ads.
See our guide on how to sell ads on your WordPress blog to find out more.
Some bloggers don’t want to show ads to their readers, and they wonder how to make money from a blog without ads.
When you use ad networks, you lose some control over what’s shown on your site. Some readers will find ads annoying or offensive, and more and more people are using ad blockers, which hurts your ability to make money.
Sponsorships are another way to make money from a blog.
Sponsorships work the same way they do in sports, TV shows, and other fields. Basically, a company will pay you to talk about and promote their product to your readers.
To get started, it’s a good idea to make a one-page media kit that shows your traffic numbers, how many people follow you on social media, the demographics of your audience, and any other information that will make your site more appealing to advertisers. Then you can talk to companies about sponsoring your event.
It’s very important to know the rules about disclosure in your area if you write sponsored posts.
For example, the FTC’s Endorsement Guides say that a blogger who writes a sponsored post must follow them. This includes saying when a post is paid for by a company. You can do that in WordPress by adding the words “sponsored post” before the title of your post.
5. Pay for writing reviews
Paid reviews are a way to make money on your site that is similar to paid posts.
This is a slightly different way to make money than through affiliate links on a review site, which was already talked about.
Instead, you get to try out products for free that are related to your niche, and you can even get paid to write about them.
This can be done in a way that is similar to getting paid posts. You should review products that are related to your niche and that your audience would like.
You can go to companies and ask if you can do paid reviews on your own. There are also websites like PayPerPost that can help you find businesses that might be interested.
6. Website flipping is a way to blogging for money.
Most people don’t know how to build a WordPress site, so if you do, you’re way ahead of them. Entrepreneurs sometimes like to buy websites that are already well-known and use them for their own businesses.
If you can set up a WordPress blog and get people to visit it, you can sell it and get paid for your work.
To do this, you need to know what kinds of websites are popular and how to price and sell them. There are websites like Flippa that let people buy and sell websites through auctions and brokers.
7. Get paid to speak as a person of influence.
If you use your blog to promote your own brand, you will get a good following over time, which will make you an influencer in your field.
You can use this fame to get some jobs as a public speaker. By giving talks at conferences, a lot of bloggers make a lot of money.
You can promote your blog and personal brand by speaking at events, whether you get paid or not. If you are good at making connections and talking in front of people, you could find a lot of new opportunities along the way.
Here are some general things to remember if you want to get paid to speak in public.
Make a website with paid memberships
If you don’t want to sell ads or sponsored posts, you can still make money online with your blog in many other ways. One common way is to make people pay to see certain content or parts of your site. Here are some ideas for how to do that.
8. Make content that only certain people can see.
Your biggest fans are your most loyal readers. They may be willing to pay to read more of your work. You can make a members-only area where they can share more detailed blog posts, downloads, videos, audio content, and more.
Membership sites can cost a lot of money because you have to keep making good content for your paying members. But because they bring in money over and over again, they can be very profitable (subscriptions).
A WordPress membership plugin makes it easy to make a site for paying members. We suggest using MemberPress because it is the easiest and most powerful WordPress membership plugin for new users.
We have a step-by-step guide on how to make a WordPress membership site that will help you get started.
9. Create a Private Forum
Making private forums that users have to pay to join is another way to make a paid membership site. Forums are a great way for people to get advice from you one-on-one. Other people in the community can also help each other out and talk to each other.
Even though running a forum can be a lot of work, a paid forum is a great way to make money from your WordPress site on a regular basis.
You’ll need to set up a forum on your site before you can start. Here are the top 5 best forum plugins for WordPress that we think you should use.
10. Set up a community for questions and answers
There are a lot of question-and-answer sites like Stack Exchange and Quora. They help you build an online community that is highly engaged, driven, and motivated.
Just like with forums, it will take some time to grow a large community. After that, you can use ads, affiliate ads, and other methods to make money from user-generated content on your website.
Advertisers in the same industry as popular question-and-answer sites can work directly with them to buy ads and sponsor their sites. This makes it easier for them to get a much higher rate and more perks.
blogging for money with WordPress
You can also use WordPress to make money online by making a directory or listing site. Then you can charge people to list their items on your site.
Here are some ideas for different kinds of directories to help you get started.
11. Make a paid list of businesses
Web directories may remind you of the early days of the web, before bots started to automatically index everything, but they aren’t completely out of date. Yellow Pages, Yelp, and Angie’s List are all well-known website directories.
Generic web directories aren’t needed anymore, but niche or local directories can be very helpful. For example, you can make a directory of real estate in your area.
The best podcasts on a certain topic might be shared in a directory, or the best products in a certain niche might be listed.
If you follow our tutorial, it’s easy to make blogging for money. You can also choose from a lot of directory plugins for WordPress, and many of them let you accept payments along with submissions.
12. Make a WordPress job board where people pay to post jobs.
You could also set up a paid job board. Companies that want to tell your audience about a job opening can pay you to post an ad.
If you focus on a specific niche, it’s easier to make a successful job board. So, you can become the go-to site for anyone looking for a job in that industry, with little competition.
This works well for well-known blogs in a small niche. For example, ProBlogger’s job board for professional bloggers is now very well known.
With WordPress, it is easy to set up a paid job board. See our tutorial on how to use WP Job Manager to make a job board in WordPress for a step-by-step guide. You can charge for job postings with the WooCommerce Paid Listings addon.
13. Make a WordPress event calendar where people can pay to add events.
You could make an event calendar instead of a job board and charge people to advertise their events. This also works well if you already have a large audience, because businesses will be willing to pay to reach your audience.
Local or industry-specific sites can make money online by adding a paid event calendar. You could choose to promote events in your city, conferences in a certain industry, or even webinars or live streaming events.
See our guide to the best WordPress event calendar plugins for how to set this up on your site.
With WordPress, you can sell digital products.
If you want a way to make money online with WordPress that requires less work, selling your own digital products could be a good choice. Even though you have to spend time making the product in the beginning, you don’t have to do much after that.
Here are some digital products you can make and sell on your website.
14. blogging for money to sell e-books
When making digital products, it makes sense to use ebooks. They are pretty easy to write and put together. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you can take some of your old posts and turn them into chapters of a book.
Once your book is written, you can use a tool like Canva to make a cover and turn it into a PDF.
With a plugin, it’s easy to sell digital products on WordPress. For a place to start, you can look at our guide that compares the best WordPress eCommerce plugins.
We like Easy Digital Downloads for digital downloads. It’s easy to use and comes with everything you need to set up your own online store.
Another great way to make money online is to sell an online course.
Most of the time, courses cost a lot more than ebooks. You can charge a premium for your expertise.
You’ll need to make the lessons for your course and any other materials you want to include, like downloads, slides, checklists, templates, etc.
You will also have to decide if you want your course to have personalized support. Some sites offer two levels of each course: a free version without support and a paid version with email support.
Once your course is ready, you can send it to your audience using a learning management system (LMS) plugin.
See our guide on how to use MemberPress to sell online courses for more information.
If you want a course builder that isn’t WordPress, check out our article on the best online course platforms.
Webinars are a great way to get more people interested in your business, share your knowledge, and grow it. But did you know that they can also help you make money online?
Webinars are like online courses, but they happen in real time and often have a section for questions and answers.
It’s easy to host a paid webinar with WordPress. Whether you use your site to host the webinar or just to tell people about it and sign them up, it’s important for the success of your webinar.
See our list of the 9 best webinar software for WordPress users for more information on how to host a paid webinar.
blogging for money : to sell services online.
If you want to make money online quickly and easily, selling services is the best way to get started. When you make a product or buy inventory, you don’t have to pay anything up front.
Instead, you can just make a “Hire Me” page on your website and start looking for your first client.
Here are some things to think about.
17. Provide services for free.
Since you blog, you already know a lot about your niche. As a freelancer, you can start making money by giving people your skills and knowledge.
Freelancing is a popular way to make money online because you don’t always have to spend time or money to get started. You can just start selling your services to the people who already know about you.
When you start freelancing, you will need a way to bill your clients and get paid. We recommend either WP Simple Pay or FreshBooks, but there are other plugins for WordPress that can be used to send invoices as well.
If you want to make a lot of money online by freelancing, check out our list of the best tools for WordPress freelancers, designers, and developers.
18. Start a consulting business on your own.
Consulting is another way you can use your blog to make money online and share what you know.
Instead of offering their own services, consultants give their clients advice and plans to help them do their jobs better.
Like freelancing, there are no costs to get started. On your blog, you can start to offer consulting services. Just make a page with a form so that people can ask for more information.
We recommend WPForms if you want to make a professional, mobile-friendly form quickly. To get started, you can look at this tutorial on how to make a request for a quote form in WordPress.
If you don’t feel like “consultant” is the right job title for you, you could become a coach instead.
A life coach helps people set goals and improve their lives by giving them advice, direction, and accountability. There are also blog coaches, writing coaches, and other types of coaches.
No matter what you’re an expert in, you can help your audience one-on-one with coaching sessions.
You can set up a booking form so that people can schedule coaching sessions right from your WordPress blog. This will save you time and make things easier for your clients.
Using WordPress, you can sell physical goods online.
Selling digital products or services is a simple way to start making money online, but selling real, physical products is the best way to make money. Here are a few ways to start using WordPress to sell products.
20. WooCommerce is a way to start an online store.
Have an idea for a product you could sell? Why not open your own store online?
Using the free WooCommerce plugin, WordPress makes it easy to set up a shop or add a shop to a blog you already have.
Starting an online store can be a lot of work because you have to make or buy the products and then ship them out yourself.
But it can be fun and profitable to sell physical products, and sometimes that’s exactly what your audience wants.
See our guide on how to start an online store with WooCommerce to get started.
21. With WordPress, you can open an online T-shirt store.
WordPress makes it easy to open your own T-shirt shop. T-shirts are worn by almost everyone, so opening a t-shirt shop is a great way for any kind of blog to make money. When you design t-shirts, you can be creative and give your audience something they haven’t seen before.
You can do it easily because there are services that let you upload your own designs and then print and ship them for you. You get some of the money made.
With the WP-Spreadplugin by Spreadshirt, you can easily set up your own T-shirt shop on your WordPress site.
If you want to get things done faster, you can use a Shopify store that connects to dozens of companies that print t-shirts.
22. Make a WooCommerce dropshipping store.
Dropshipping is another way to set up an eCommerce store on your WordPress site without having to handle inventory or ship items yourself.
With dropshipping, you set up the store, run the website, and take care of customers. But a dropshipping service will take your customers’ orders and send the goods to them. They are a third party that your customers don’t even know about.
You can set up a dropshipping store with the help of the WooCommerce plugin. You can also automate the process with a WooCommerce Dropshipping add-on plugin.
23. Make an Amazon-affiliated shop on WordPress.
One bad thing about dropshipping is that you have to find a good supplier, which can be hard, and sometimes you have to place a big order up front. Because of this, it can be hard to get started without a lot of money.
