Back when WordPress first came out, it used to be a simple blogging platform. It was also one of the first types of websites that people could install without having previous coding knowledge.
Now, WordPress is so much more than just a blogging platform. It can be used as a framework to build membership sites, e-commerce sites, content sites, and more. This is through the use of additional functionalities brought to you by “plug-ins” and themes. Plug-ins work for WordPress in a similar way that apps do for your smartphone, and themes create the look and feel of your site. WordPress is so useful that it now powers 30% of websites on the internet.
Making Money with WordPress
In order to make money blogging with WordPress, you need a basic business strategy. Making money with WordPress is not some kind of magic. It just takes a little discipline and some Google searches to gain knowledge of how it can be done.
Although there are many ways to create a business using the WordPress platform, the easiest way for most people to get started in earning money online with a WordPress blog is to:
Create valuable content on your site in the form of blog posts
Get traffic to that content through free marketing and paid advertising
Monetizing that traffic with AdSense ads or affiliate marketing
3 Steps to Making Money with WordPress
These monetization programs are easy to apply for and easy to use on your site. Here are the basics of each of the three pieces.
1. Create Valuable Content
Valuable content is content that people like to read. It needs to be original or curated well. Valuable content will answer somebody’s question (like this article answers the question of “How to Make Money with WordPress?”).
Valuable content is usually either entertaining, educational, or both. Two formats that work extremely well online are listicles and how-to articles.
I’m sure you’ve seen and read many listicles. They can take the form of articles like “10 Tips to Apply a Gorgeous Cat Eye” or “Seven Ways to Get Your Infant to Sleep at Night”. Even this article is in a semi-listicle format because it's giving you three steps to make money with WordPress.
How-to articles are a little more self-explanatory. Any question that starts with a "how to" can be answered in a how-to article. This can be something like “How to Save Money on Your Heating Bills” or “How to Sleep 100% Better Every Night”.
Once you’ve created some content, then you need to get traffic to your website.
2. Get Traffic to Your Content
Traffic just refers to the people visiting your website. There are dozens of ways to get traffic to a WordPress powered website. See five methods listed below.
5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your WordPress Site
Search engine optimization: Otherwise known as SEO – this is where search engines will list your article in their search result pages. Usually, you get most traffic when you achieve a first page listing on the search engines. SEO isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require that you learn a few basic SEO skill sets.
Commenting in forums: If you comment in forums that are related to your topic and d so in a helpful manner, you can often put a link back to relevant content in your signature. This can really work well and you’ll be surprised how much traffic you can get with forum marketing.
Paid traffic from Facebook: All those sponsored posts you see on Facebook are businesses paying to get traffic to their websites. Facebook is a great platform because it’s very inexpensive to start on. You can run campaigns on Facebook for as little as two dollars a day, and if your content is even semi-viral, the clicks to your website can be fairly cheap.
Reddit: Arguably, there isn't any more opinionated place on the web than Reddit, but where passions run high, clicks to your website can be had. Use the same techniques as you do when commenting in forums, you’ll often see traffic coming back to your site.
Guest posting: This is where you write for free for other people sites. It seems like a lot of work, but if you can get on a site with a lot of traffic, it can lead to an influx of traffic when the guest post goes live and the steady amount of traffic over time.
Now that you have some content and have people visiting your site – it’s time to monetize.
3. Monetizing Your WordPress Site
There are hundreds of different ways to monetize a WordPress site and make money from it. But the easiest for most people starting out are AdSense ads and the Amazon affiliate programs. AdSense, which is run by Google, allows you to place ads on your website and get paid when people click on the ads.
Amazon’s affiliate program lets you link to any product that Amazon carries and gives you a commission when people buy.
Making money from a WordPress site is completely possible. It usually takes people a little bit of time and effort to get the hang of it, but there is almost no better feeling than making that first bit of money from a site that you own.
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