Looking for the best ways to make money online? WordPress powers over 31% of all websites. With the right strategies in place, it’s easy to make money online with a WordPress blog.

In this article, we’ll show you the legit ways to make money online blogging.

Making Money Online Blogging

While there are a lot of different ways to make money online, in this article, we’ll explain how to make money with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

To build a WordPress blog, you’ll have to own a domain name and web hosting.

A domain name is your website’s address on the internet such as Google.com or IsItWP.com and web hosting is where your website’s content and files are stored online.

The combined cost of a domain name and hosting can be quite expensive, especially if you’re just starting out.

That’s why we’ve worked out a deal with Bluehost to offer our users a FREE domain name and over 60% off on web hosting.

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Bluehost is one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. They are an officially recommended hosting provider.

Before you dive in, keep in mind that these are not get rich quick schemes. You’ll need to put in your time and effort to reap the reward.

For a detailed guide, check out how to make a WordPress blog.

Here’s the table of contents for easy navigation.

1. Display Google AdSense
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Sell Direct Ads
4. Publish sponsored blog posts
5. Publish Paid Reviews
6. Earn Money by Flipping Websites
7. Create Restricted Members Only Content
8. Create a Private Forum
9. Create a Niche Social Network
10. Create a WordPress Job Board With Paid Submissions
11. Sell Ebooks on WordPress
12. Sell Online Courses
13. Host a Paid Webinar
14. Offer Freelance Services
15. Start Your Own Consulting Business
16. Start an ECommerce Business With WooCommerce
17. Create a Digital eCommerce Store With Easy Digital Downloads
18. Launch a YouTube Channel
19. Create an Amazon Affiliate WordPress Shop
20. Accept Sponsorship for Your Podcasts
21. Rent Your Home or Room
22. Sell WordPress Plugins
23. Sell WordPress Themes
24. Sell Graphics
25. Accept Donations

1. Display Google AdSense

Monetizing a website with Google AdSense is probably the easiest way to make money online.

Google AdSense is a Google-owned advertising network that allows bloggers and website owners to monetize their website by displaying text, image, video, and other interactive advertisements on their websites.

Here are a few benefits of using Google AdSense to monetize your website:

• Minimal requirement: Unlike other ad networks, you’re not required to have a huge traffic volume in order to join Google AdSense. If you provide quality content on your website, then you can apply to join AdSense.
• More revenue: Google ads are targeted by site content and audience. AdSense ads are more targeted than other contextual ad networks. Due to the fact, it helps you generate more revenue than any other contextual ad networks.
• Easy to use: Ad management on WordPress is easy with Google AdSense. For optimal ad placement, you can either choose an AdSense ready WordPress theme or ad management plugins such as AdSanity.

Get started with Google AdSense now!

2. Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, you can choose a product you like, promote it online, and earn commissions when someone purchases it through your referrals.

The best thing is that, with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to bloat your website with annoying ads. You can refer the products within your article and generate a solid income when your readers purchase them.

You can start affiliate marketing in 2 simple steps.

Step 1: Find the Product You Want to Promote

The easiest way to find a product you want to promote is join an affiliate program like Amazon Associates, Commission Junction and ShareASale and browse through their site.

After selecting the product, you can get an affiliate link and promote the product through that link on your site.

 Step 2: Promote the Products by Placing Affiliate Links

Placing affiliate links in your website is easy. However, it’s advised to use an affiliate link management plugin like ThirstyAffiliates because you can organize all your affiliate links in a single place.

In case the company that you promote modifies the affiliate links, then you don’t have to waste your time by replacing every single link you added throughout your site. Instead, you can change it in the ThirstyAffiliates panel and all affiliate links on your site will be automatically updated.

You might also want to check out the best affiliate management plugins for WordPress.

3. Sell Direct Ads

Advertising networks take a portion of ad revenue that you generate from your website. If you have grown a significant traffic base, then you can start selling direct ads on your site. This way, you can keep the full ad revenue from your site.

Using AdSanity is the best way to sell direct ads on your site. AdSanity is a lightweight ad management plugin for WordPress.

You can read the complete AdSanity review.

4. Publish Sponsored Blog Posts

Publishing sponsored posts is one of the easiest ways to make money online.

You can publish a sponsored post once in a while to make some extra income from your WordPress blog.

When publishing a sponsored post, make sure to explicitly tell your audience that it’s a sponsored one. Otherwise, it might come off as a little out of sync to your trusting audience. Plus, in some countries, like the United States, a blogger needs to comply with FTC’s Endorsement Guide by disclosing whenever a post is sponsored.

If you publish sponsored posts on an on-going basis, then you might want to install the WPForms plugin on your site.

WPForms allows you to create a post submission form on your WordPress site. With a post submission form, you can allow users to submit a post in WordPress without providing them access to your WordPress dashboard. Alongside, you can require your sponsors to make a payment while submitting the post for your review.

For more details, learn how to accept a sponsored post in WordPress.

5. Publish Paid Reviews

Affiliate marketers often publish product reviews on their site so that they can refer affiliate products and make money.

Did you know that you can even get paid for writing product reviews?

The easiest way to get started with publishing paid reviews is join Sponsored Reviews as a blogger. This way, you can easily connect with sponsors who want to publish a paid review on your site.

6. Earn Money by Flipping Websites

Just like real estate, flipping websites is a serious business.

Because building and growing a website is a lot of work, entrepreneurs often prefer purchasing an established website over starting one from the ground up.

Flippa is the world’s largest marketplace that helps you buy and sell websites. Alternatively, you can partner with a website brokerage firm to sell a website, like Quiet Light Brokerage.

7. Create Restricted Members Only Content

Creating a paid membership site is another great strategy to make money online. You can create a premium content library on your site and make it accessible behind the paywall.

The easiest way to create a premium content library is by repurposing your existing content. For example, you can turn your blog posts into downloadable resources such as eBooks and make them accessible behind the paywall.

MemberPress is the best plugin we recommend to start a membership site. For more plugins, you can read 7 best WordPress membership plugins.

8. Create a Private Forum

Creating a private forum with paid memberships is a great way to earn recurring income on your site. To integrate a forum into your WordPress website, all you have to do is install a forums plugin such as bbPress.

Then, you can restrict the forum content based on membership level with a membership plugin such as Paid Memberships Pro.

9. Create a Niche Social Network

Building a niche social network or integrating it into your existing WordPress site is another way to generate a recurring income.

A niche social network provides you with more options than a forum. With a niche social network, you can create a social network in your niche that has powerful features like activity streams, groups, member profiles, messaging and everything else you can expect from a regular social network.

Now you might be wondering, why should you build a community around a popular social network?

Aside from generating revenue, it gives you more control over your content, lets you build a niche community and establish your expertise.

You can install BuddyPress on your site to build a niche social network.

10. Create a WordPress Job Board With Paid Submissions

WP Job Manager is a free plugin that allows you to easily create a WordPress job board on your site. Since it’s a shortcode based WordPress plugin, it can work with any theme and is super easy to set up.

While the core plugin is free, which comes with all the essential features you’ll need, there are also addons for advanced features.

11. Sell Ebooks on WordPress

E-books are probably the easiest digital product that you can create and sell on a WordPress website. You can either repurpose your existing high-value blog posts into an ebook or start writing a brand-new one from scratch.

Once you created an ebook, you can get a cover copy designed from a low-cost service marketplace like Fiverr.com.

Using
Easy Digital Downloads is the easiest way to start selling digital products on your website. For more solutions, you can also read our guide on best WordPress eCommerce solutions.

12. Sell Online Courses

Looking to sell online courses? Want to create an immersive learning experience to your students through various gamification methods?

Then, you might want to consider installing a Learning Management System (LMS) plugin on your site. With an LMS plugin like LearnDash, you can make learning on your site fun and easy with gamification. The main difference between a typical membership plugin and LMS plugin is that an LMS plugin entices users to take more lessons, build engagement on your site and increases the likelihood of retaining your students longer.

13. Host a Paid Webinar

Webinar is an online meeting or presentation held on your website in real time. Webinar is similar to online courses, but it’s live and often includes a question and answer section at the end.

WordPress makes it easy to host a paid webinar. You can conduct a webinar on Google Hangouts and charge users for joining a webinar with Webinars OnAir.

14. Offer Freelance Services

Offering your skills and expertise on your website as a freelancer is one of the best ways to make money online.

When you’re starting out as a freelancer, you might need to spend a significant amount of time for searching clients. If you built a website, then you can list your services on it and encourage your visitors to hire you.

As you freelance, you’ll need to invoice your clients and collect payments for your services. We recommend using FreshBooks, the best invoice and billing software for selling freelance services.

15. Start Your Own Consulting Business

Another way to make money from your expertise is by providing online consultation. Instead of selling a service as a freelancer, a consultant offers advice and strategies to the needy clients.

You can create a page on your WordPress site and start offering consulting services. Make sure to publish a form so that users can get more info and request a quote from you.

You can use WPForms to create a request a quote form on your site.

16. Start an ECommerce Business With WooCommerce

The ecommerce industry is booming and retail trends show that 51% of Americans prefer online shopping.

With WordPress, it’s easy to create an online store or integrate a storefront into your existing site. While there are a lot of WordPress plugins that help you create an online store, WooCommerce stands ahead of the curve.

WooCommerce comes bundled with PayPal (for accepting credit card and PayPal account payments), BACS, and cash on delivery for accepting payments.

For a detailed step-by-step guide, you can read how to create an online store.

17. Create a Digital eCommerce Store With Easy Digital Downloads

Do you want to create an online store only for selling digital products? Then you might want to install Easy Digital Downloads on your site.

While WooCommerce also lets you sell digital products on your website, the downside is that it comes bundled with many features you’ll never need for running an exclusively digital goods storefront (such as shipping options).

Read our complete Easy Digital Downloads review.

18. Launch a YouTube Channel

YouTube is arguably the world’s second largest search engine after Google. Not to mention, starting a YouTube channel is one of the best ways to build a steady stream of traffic to your site.

Popular entertainment websites like List25 publish videos regularly on their YouTube channel by transforming their blog content into videos.

You can upload quality videos to YouTube and start earning revenue by joining the YouTube partner program. To join the partner program, you need to have at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of view time in the past year.

To quickly grow your subscribers and view time, you can embed your videos on your website and encourage your visitors to subscribe to your channel.

19. Create an Amazon Affiliate WordPress Shop

Want to create an online store, but do not have the time and resources to create products? Then, you can build Amazon affiliate store in WordPress.

Amazon is a well-known eCommerce store with hundreds of thousands of products. They enable anyone to sell online by simply listing their products in their store.

Amazon also has a great affiliate program known as Amazon Associates that help you earn affiliate revenue by promoting Amazon products. You can either create a new online store promoting only Amazon products or sell Amazon products in your existing store.

Read how to create an Amazon affiliate store in WordPress.

20. Accept Sponsorship for Your Podcasts

Podcasting is pretty simple to start. In order to publish a podcast on your WordPress site, you’ll need to have an audio file and an RSS Feed that users can subscribe to.

Generally speaking, podcasts are large audio files. Since hosting your podcasts file on your website can consume a lot of server resources and slow down your site, it’s recommended to use a media hosting platform like Blubrry.

To earn an income from podcasting, you can start accepting sponsorship to run your podcasts. The sponsor’s message can be read out at the beginner, possibly in the middle and repeated again at the end.

Learn how to start a podcast with WordPress.

21. Rent Your Home or Room

With WordPress, you can easily build a room booking system on your website.

Whether you own a hotel business or offer vacation rentals, adding a booking system on your website makes it easy for your visitors to rent your home or room.

The Booking Calendar plugin is one of the most popular booking plugins in the WordPress plugin repository. It stores all your bookings data in your WordPress database, so you don’t necessarily need to have a third-party account to manage bookings. It also allows you to import feeds from third-party services such as Airbnb, Booking.com, etc.

22. Sell WordPress Plugins

If you’re a WordPress plugin developer, then you can consider creating and selling WordPress plugins. There are many different ways to sell WordPress plugins.

The easiest way is to use a premium marketplace such as CodeCanyon and list your plugin. You can also create a WordPress website and start selling your WordPress plugin on your site.

Creating a freemium WordPress plugin is another way to make money by selling plugins. This way, you don’t have to share your revenue with a marketplace like CodeCanyon.

23. Sell WordPress Themes

If you’re a WordPress theme developer, then you can create and sell WordPress themes on your website. As with plugins, you can use a premium marketplace to sell your WordPress theme such as Themeforest.

Alternatively, you can release a free version of the theme and sell the premium version on your website. You can promote the premium version right within your free WordPress theme.

24. Sell Graphics

If you’re a graphics designer, then you can design and sell graphics on your WordPress site.

You can create graphics such as stock images and sell them on your site. Alternatively, you can join an online marketplace to sell your graphics.

25. Accept Donations

If you run a non-profit or release free products on your site, then you can start accepting donations on your website.

Using WPForms is the best way to accept donations on your WordPress website.

WPForms is a complete WordPress form solution that also allows you to create a donation form on your site. The plugin supports two payment gateways: PayPal and Stripe. Depending on your needs, you can choose the right payment gateway and start accepting donations.

That’s it!

We hope this article helped you get plenty of ideas on making money online. If you liked this article, you might also want to read how to install Google Analytics on WordPress.

The post 25 Legit Ways to Make Money Online Blogging appeared first on IsItWP – WordPress Technology Lookup Tool.

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