There are two types of blog owners – those who write a blog to earn some money, and those who do it for free to share some information or ideas. Maintaining a blog requires some money, however. You need to pay for web hosting and renew your domain name annually. So, if you run a blog and are planning to earn money from it, this article will give you some tips on how to monetize a WordPress blog. Since WordPress is the default blogging platform, I’ll recommend some plugins that will be useful for monetization.

Pay Per Click Advertisements

One of the most popular ways to monetize your WordPress blog is to display advertisements. You can integrate these ads into your pages as static displays or as popups. There are two payment models for display ads:

• pay-per-click (PPC): You are paid when someone clicks on an ad on your site.
• pay-per-impression (PPI): You get payment when a user sees an ad.

The PPI type is cheaper, as you don’t need users to click on any of the ads, but the PPC type will give you more money as long as users click on the ads at a consistent rate. Note that running ads requires your website to have a lot of traffic. Also, make sure you don’t include too many ads on one page, as you’ll end up annoying readers.

To start advertising, you’ll need to sign up for an ad network. Google Adsense is one of the most popular options, but there are many other networks as well. Additionally, WordPress provides some helpful plugins you can check out. As an example, the AdRotate Banner Manager plugin helps you to manage all of your ads directly from WordPress. You’ll be able to customize ad placement, check analytics and connect to several ad networks (including AdSense).

I also recommend you to read this official blog about AdSense to learn more.

If you are wondering how to set up ads, you can find instructions from Google Support. Once your AdSense is approved, it’s time to place the ad code on your website. This guide from Google Support will be helpful as well.

The advantages you’ll get from PPC include easy to set up passive income. Once you put the ad codes on your site, you don’t need to do anything else. Relevant ads will be shown automatically. As for the disadvantages of PPC, if there are no clicks on the ad, you’ll get no money. You won’t be paid much with page views only.

Using Affiliate Links

The easiest way to start making money from your blog is with affiliate links. Affiliate links are links that you put in your text or on images that will redirect your readers to a third party website. If your visitors make a purchase on that website, you’ll receive a commission for referring them.
Becoming an affiliate marketer is easy. Many websites that sell products or services have a link for “affiliates”. Other sites work through an affiliate network. With these sites, all you need to do is click a button to apply for their program. One of the most successful affiliate networks is Envato. You can read their affiliate program terms in this PDF document.

Important things you need to know about affiliate marketing:

1. Affiliate programs have strict terms and conditions. You’ll need to read them attentively to prevent being banned.
2. Don’t forget to notify your users that you are using affiliate links. It might be obligatory in some countries. Additionally, Google might delete your website from search results if you do not mention it.
3. Use affiliate links only in the right context, as you might lose your visitors because of bad user experience.

The pluses of affiliate links are that you’ll get high passive income. It’s much better than PPC, assuming that users buy products referred from your site. As for the minuses, if users don’t make purchases, you’ll get no income.

You can read more about creating an affiliate website via this blog post.

Sponsored Posts

If you’re running a popular blog, you can help external websites to get a lot of traffic. Many companies prefer to pay such blogs to publish sponsored posts forwarding blog visitors to their sites.

You’ll make money for your blog much quicker with sponsored posts than with affiliate links or ads. If you don’t get proposals for sponsored posts or reviews, you’re free to contact companies requesting sponsorship. If your site audience is large you’ll probably get an agreement for a sponsorship deal. Companies need to be sure that your sponsored post will lead to sales so that their investment is not a waste of money. This form of monetization will be better for bloggers with lots of experience rather than for beginners.

Sell Your Products

Another way to earn money with your site is to sell some products online. You can create an ebook, sell your photos or sell a service such as counseling on your website. You can even sell online courses. If you’d like to create an eCommerce site, you can achieve this with the Woocommerce plugin, which is bundled with the Jupiter X theme. Jupiter X also provides a lot of Shop templates you can choose from, saving you a lot of time when designing a product website.

An advantage of selling products is that you won’t end up banned, which could happen with PPC or affiliate marketing. On the other hand, you have to be patient and wait until you find your audience for your sales to increase. You need to promote your products and provide a good service to your buyers. If your products and your attitude are good, you’ll make a lot more money!

Accept Donations

The next option to monetize your WordPress blog is to allow your audience to make donations. To achieve this, you can use WordPress plugins such as Give, Charitable or PayPal Donations. You also can create a Call To Action button in the header and forward visitors to the donation form to make a payment.

To get donations, you should create valuable content for free first. You need to spend a lot of time researching to create a blog post that will interest a variety of readers. If you do, your audience will notice your hard work and will be ready to donate. When using WordPress plugins for donations, you should be ready to set up everything yourself, and if there are any transactional errors you will have to investigate them yourself or ask for help at the plugins support.

There is also the possibility to take donations for your products using the WooCommerce plugin. If you use this plugin on your website, we recommend reading this article.

Freelance Blogging

If you are fond of blogging, you can use your own blog to advertise yourself. Potential clients will find you to blog for them and will be ready to pay. This way of earning money is very popular in some blogging niches. For example, you can run a personal blog and create a “Hire Me” page to find freelance clients.

If someone likes your writing, they will definitely contact you and propose some work. To be noticed by clients, you need to have a lot of traffic to your website. Here are some tips you can use to triple your WordPress blog traffic.

Wrapping Up

So, what option will be the best for you? How you monetize a WordPress blog all depends on what you want. If you want to get passive income, you should consider using PPC or affiliate marketing. You should think about the quality of your blog and ensure that the content is valuable for your readers so that they will want to come back to your blog again and again. It’s important to note that you won’t get a lot of income right away. You should try all methods, mix them, and then decide which one works best for you.

Blogging is a balance of quality content, good traffic and an engaged audience. If you achieve all of this, you’ll make your blog profitable for sure!