When WordPress first came out, it was a simple blogging platform. It was also one of the first types of websites that people could set up without any prior programming knowledge.
Well, WordPress is much more than a blogging platform. It can be used as a framework to create membership pages, eCommerce pages, content pages, and more. This is accomplished through the use of additional functionality provided through "plug-ins" and themes. Plugins work for WordPress much like apps do for your smartphone, and themes determine the look and feel of your website. WordPress is so useful that it now powers 30% of the website on the internet.
Make Money Online With WordPress
To make money with WordPress, you need a basic business strategy. Making money with WordPress is not magic. It just takes a little discipline and some Googling to figure out how to do it.
Although there are many ways to start a business using the WordPress platform, the easiest way for most people to make money online from a WordPress blog is to:
- Create valuable content on your website in the form of blog posts.
- Get traffic to this content through free marketing and paid to advertise.
- Monetize this traffic with AdSense ads for Affiliate Marketing.
3 Steps to Make Money With WordPress
These monetization programs are easy to apply and easy to use on your website. Here are the basics for each of the three pieces.
1. Create Valuable Content
Valuable content is content that people enjoy reading. It has to be original or well curated. Valuable content will answer someone's question (like this article answers the question "How to make money with WordPress?").
Valuable content is often entertaining, educational, or both. Two formats that work very well online are how-to lists and how-to articles.
Surely you have already seen and read many lists. They can take the form of articles like "10 Tips for a Beautiful Cat Eye" or "Seen Ways to Get Your Baby to Sleep at Night." Even this article is in a semi-list format because it gives you three steps to make money online From WordPress.
How-to-articles are a bit more self-explanatory. Any question that begins with a "How to" can be answered in a How-to-article. This can be something like "How to save on heating bills" or "How to get 100% more sleep every night".
Once you've created some content, you need to drive traffic to your website.
2. Get traffic to your content
Traffic refers to the people who visit your website. There are dozens of ways to drive traffic to a WordPress-powered website. Check out the five methods listed below.
5 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your WordPress Site
1. Search Engine Optimization: also known as SEO, This is where the search engines will include your article in their search results pages. Typically, you get the most traffic when you rank on the first page of search engines. SEO isn't very difficult, but it does require you to learn some basic SEO skills.
2. Forums Commenting: If you comment on forums related to your topic and do it helpfully, you can often place a link to relevant content in your signature. This can work really well and you will be amazed at how much traffic you can get from forum marketing.
3. Paid Facebook Traffic: All those sponsored posts you see on Facebook are companies that pay to drive traffic to their sites. Facebook is a great platform because it's so cheap to start with. You can run campaigns on Facebook for as little as $2 a day, and even if your content is semi-viral, the clicks to your site can be quite cheap.
4. Reddit: There's arguably no more opinionated place on the web than Reddit, but where passion runs high, you can get clicks to your site. Use the same techniques you use when commenting on forums, you'll often find traffic coming back to your site.
5. Guest Posts: This is where you write for other people's pages for free. It sounds like a lot of work, but if you can reach a site with a lot of traffic, you can generate an influx of traffic when guest posts go live and keep the amount of traffic steady over time.
Now that you have some content and visitors to your website, it's time to start making money.
3. Monetizing Your WordPress Site
There are hundreds of different ways to monetize a WordPress site and make money from it. But the easiest way for most people to start is with AdSense ads and Amazon affiliate programs. AdSense is managed by Google and allows you to place ads on your website and get paid when people click on the ads.
Amazon's affiliate program allows you to link to any product that Amazon offers and gives you a commission when people buy.
Making money with a WordPress site is entirely possible. It usually takes people a little time and effort to get the Reddit of it, but there's hardly a better feeling than making that first bit of money from a website you own.