How to Monetize Your WordPress Website

It is fair to say that monetizing a WordPress website is a pretty easy thing to do. Thanks to the wide audience and the relative simplicity of the platform.

You likely already have a Google Adsense account and you can use that to easily make money from your website. However, you might be wondering if there’s more than one way to monetize a WordPress website.

Fortunately, there are several other options including affiliate marketing, selling and displaying ads on your site, and selling your own products via Amazon or other stores.

Monetizing With Affiliate Marketing

This is, hands down, the easiest and most popular way to monetize a WordPress website. Affiliate marketing means that you’ll earn a commission if someone clicks a monetized link or buys a product that’s promoted on your blog. The most popular affiliate marketing programs include Amazon Associates, Bonjoro, and Compete.

Let’s say you’ve written a blog post about a specific product or service, and you want to earn a bit of extra money from your blog. You could create a special link for customers that purchase the product or service you’ve covered in your blog post. When they click the link and make a purchase, you’ll earn a commission.

Let’s say you wrote a blog post about fashion and the product you promoted was a fashion accessory. You could create a special link for people interested in fashion that leads to a site selling sunglasses. When those people click the link and make a purchase, you’ll earn a commission.

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you don’t necessarily need a large audience to get started. As long as you have a niche website or blog in a small niche, you can become a virtual shop owner and start selling products. You’ll earn a commission no matter what.

Monetizing With Product Sales

You can also make money from product sales on your site with WooCommerce. When you set up a product sales page on your site, you’ll be able to choose products from a variety of online stores. You’ll then need to follow the instructions put out by the store to get the products.

WooCommerce also allows you to set up dropshipping so that you don’t have to keep inventory in stock. With dropshipping, you’ll essentially be acting as a merchant. When a customer makes an order, you’ll order that product from a third party (most commonly a manufacturer, vendor, or wholesaler) and ship it directly to the customer. You’ll earn a 15% commission for each sale.

Monetizing With Ads

Adsense is the most popular and probably the simplest to use ad network for monetizing a WordPress website or blog. All you need is a Google account and you can get started immediately.

With Adsense, you’ll be able to choose from a wide variety of ad units, which determine how your ads will appear on your site. You can choose traditional ads such as display ads or skyscraping (full-page ads that run the whole width of the page) or you can choose video or mobile ads that are more tailored to user’s interests.

You can also integrate third-party advertising platforms into your site so that you can choose which ads to show based on user behavior. For example, you might want to show a car ad after a user downloads a specific plugin or adds a certain keyword to their post.

A Few Helpful Tips

There’s a few things you can do to make the most of your WordPress website and start monetizing: