You will need to build it up to a point where other people can help you manage the work and generate passive income. To help you manage a profitable website, we have covered important best practices to follow. These steps will allow you to manage a site brings in more money than it costs.

Know Your Audience

Image Pixabay

A successful and profitable website begins with its audience. Whatever your target market, the audience has to be engaged and willing to spend. Otherwise, you will have a hard time generating a profit.

Just as you would research a market for a physical product, you need to have a strong idea of a profitable audience. For example, a fashion blog could cater to women who spend on clothing, accessories or jewelry. There are many niches out there for various audiences. By getting to know your audience, you can make decisions about your website and content to meet their demands.

Investing In High Performance Hosting

Once you have a specific audience, you need a reliable infrastructure for your website. The most profitable websites receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. If you are not technical savvy, you can have a hosting provider manage your entire platform. They can also ensure that your WordPress website is optimized for faster load times.

When you have a fast loading, high performance website, you will receive more page views. This will help increase the value of your site and income levels overall. A reliable infrastructure like the one offered by HostPapa is critical to managing a profitable wordpress website.

Monetizing Your Website

With a reliable platform in place, you need to monetize your wordpress website. You have many options of how to make money from a website. You can use PPC ads, affiliate programs, native advertising or your own products and services. Again, the type of website monetization you choose should depend on your audience. It needs to be relevant to their wants and needs.

Moreover, you should find a high converting product or service to sell. Whether the monetization is high or low priced comes secondary. Since you are online, the conversion rate can make the biggest difference to having a profitable website. As you grow your traffic, your site monetization can scale with your efforts to increase profits consistently.

Drive More Traffic

After finding the right monetization strategy for your website, focus on driving as much traffic as you can to the website. There are many ways to drive more traffic on a daily basis. You can attract organic, referral and direct traffic to increase your income.

However, this traffic should be relevant to your audience. This way, you will still experience high conversion rates and increasing sales with high quality content. In order to keep your site making money, your traffic levels should continue to rise. If you invest carefully in traffic generation, your website will continue to make money net income.

Build A Team

As you solidify your online business model, you will need to recruit a team that can grow your website. Even if you don’t want to grow your website too large, the site still needs to be maintained to keep up your existing traffic levels.

More so, a qualified team can take your website to new heights, generating more income and profits. This step requires you to make the shift from doing the work to managing others. When you successfully build a team, they will unlock time freedom you and sustainable profitability for your website.

As we mentioned, it can be very difficult to create a profitable website. It can take some time to identify a profitable audience and get known in the industry. Then, you have to make sure that your website can handle all the traffic as you grow.

After getting the infrastructure in place, you will need to test offers to see what the best way is to monetize your sites. This is where you find how profitable a wordpress website can really be. Once you have a profitable website model, scale it by driving more traffic and investing in a high-quality team. By following these steps, you can manage a successful, profitable website.

One of the most lucrative ways to make money with your blog is definitely with sponsored posts.

In this post, I am going to give you some tips to generate income with sponsored reviews and I’ll present you four interesting resources I use with success.

What is a Sponsored Post?

Sponsored posts (or sponsored reviews) are articles commissioned by third parties (typically advertisers, or agencies), where you usually write your point of view and experience of specific products or services.

Normally, you get in touch with the potential advertisers offering to write the review or, you can also be contacted directly by them.

There are pros and cons of sponsored posts, but if you put yourself in the shoes of your readers, you will end up having just advantages.

Like everything in life, just use a little of common sense.

General Tips to Make Money with Sponsored Posts

First, you want to have a nice layout and professional design (I use Genesis Framework personalized theme here).

Make sure to have an original and unique logo and your blog sidebar filled with important things like subscription box or social accounts.

After this, you want to set up an advertising page (with your media kit),  where you explain to potential advertisers your blog statistics. You want to showcase the best of your website, so be sure to write your strong points, like for example monthly impressions and visits, social numbers or the stats of your newsletter.

Now, there are different networks where you can create a profile to be found by advertisers (and below in this post, I am going to suggest you some websites I use to make money with sponsored posts). On the other hand, if you want to try finding advertisers yourself, you may want to read this guide:

How to Find Advertisers for Your Blog – 7 Tips to Make Money Online

But, how much should you charge for a sponsored post?

It really depends on metrics like your blog traffic or SEO rankings. I’ve been paid anything between $150 and $500 on nopassiveincome.com, depending on the project.

To set your rate, consider the following:

1. How many sponsored posts are you going to publish each month?
2. Can you offer something extra, like social promotion, for example?
3. How much time are you going to spend reviewing the product or the service?
4. How many readers do you have?

Once you set a reasonable price for your site, it’s also important you consider Google guidelines. Check the following:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Remember, be sure to accept advertisers related to your niche. When you get new requests, always ask yourself:

• Will this sponsored post help my audience?
• Will this product or service be useful to my blog readers?

If the answer is yes, then go ahead.

As promised, keep reading to discover some websites I use to make money with sponsored posts on my blog.

ValuedVoice.com

They used to be LinkVehicle, and they recently rebranded to ValuedVoice.

Once you register, you can submit your blog. Be sure to add your website title, description, category, and rate:

Remember to fill up your profile, with your information and, most important, your PayPal address.

Once your blog is on their system, you just need to wait for sponsored post opportunities.

I get work from them each month. I submitted almost all my niche sites (related to business, finance, social media, etc).

Here’s a screenshot, as an example, of my most recent earnings :

Payments are made via PayPal, with free cashouts the first day of each month.

You will start with a free account. However, you may decide to upgrade to a Premium or Professional Influencer Account.

I have a premium account (just $3 each month) and I can request a cashout 72 hours after completion of the assignments.

I also noticed I get more work, compared to a free account:

To start making money with ValuedVoice, be sure to sign up here.

SeedingUP

This is another platform where I get assignments each month.

You can register here and submit your blogs.

Now, start with creating an offer:

Type your URL, then add language, category, and description of your site. After this, you can click “Continue“.

In the next page, determine the amount you want to charge. The price of the offer is based on the average price on the market for offers with similar characteristics. If major changes occur, the price will adjust accordingly.

The return of your earnings should be based on the general quality of your website. SeedingUp is a marketplace, in which basic rules such as supply and demand of offers apply. The price of your offer can be adjusted at any time.

You can decide within a range of prices for each blog booking, but you may want to set the lower rate, to be competitive on the marketplace.

Once you are happy with all the settings, go ahead and click on “Create Offer“.
Seeding Up will check your offer and will get in touch with you once it is reviewed (calculate 1 – 2 working days for a new offer to be activated. In individual cases it may also take a bit longer).

I usually request the payout via PayPal.

Register here and start earning with SeedingUp.

GetReviewed

Another platform that works and where I get assignments, from time to time.

Sign up here and submit your website.

Here are some of my blogs, listed in their marketplace:

Here’s a screenshot of my most recent paid jobs at GetReviewed:

Check their guide if you need specific information, but it’s all pretty straightforward.

/syndicate.net

No, it’s not a typing mistake, that’s the title of the site.

A couple of years ago, BuySellAds announced the creation of their new platform : /syndicate.net

You can use it to monetize your newsletter or to find opportunities for sponsored posts.

Here’s my profile:

If you want to be part of this awesome paltform, you can apply here.

I have already worked with /syndicate and it has been a great pleasure.

The selection can be pretty hard (like to be listed at BuySellAds marketplace to sell banners), but if they accept you, you will be assigned a personal assistant which is going to guide through the completion of your blog listing.

For example, SearchEngineJournal is listed there at $1,700 for each sponsored post (they have 900,000 pageviews each month).

Conclusion

I’m sure you are already making money with sponsored posts on your blog. If not, I hope this small guide will help you start with this monetization method.

I’ll be updating this post, from time to time, with new platforms and resources to help you generate revenue with blogging.

And remember. Be sure to consider your readers as the top priority and do not oversell your blog. Good luck!

What do you think?

Do you have any other resources to add?

Are you going to sign up to the platforms mentioned? Are they new to you?

Please share your knowledge and experience in the comments below, thanks!

And here are some other interesting posts on making money blogging, in case you like more reading:

How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – A 7 Minute Guide

Make Money While You Sleep: 5 Passive Income Ideas Anyone Can Do

Copy My Three Top Ways I Make Money Blogging!

How to Make Money with No Blog Traffic

However, there are a few mistakes that bloggers often make when it comes to monetising their blogs. In this post I will talk about the crucial mistakes to avoid while starting to monetise your blog.

Monetising Before You Have An Audience

Many bloggers make the mistake of trying to monetise their blog almost immediately. While this can be possible, (in rare cases) it’s nearly always better to have an established audience first.

You don’t need hundreds of thousands of followers and readers per month; even just 100 engaged followers can secure you a decent monthly income from your blog.

When starting your blog, you need to make sure you have all the necessary things set up first. You’ll need the right web hosting provider, an effective domain name and an idea and strategy of the topics you want your blog to be about.

Before you even launch your blog you need to read an excellent blogging for beginners guide to ensure you have the right setup. You can then begin to work on establishing the right audience for your content.

It may take a little while to get your content seen by the right audience but once you do, you’ll be well on your way to monetising your blog.

Focusing Solely On Traffic Instead Of Engagement

While you obviously need some kind of audience before you start monetising your blog, it’s actually more important to have engagement rather than lots of traffic.

Of course, if you have millions of subscribers and readers of your blog then you’re likely to make a good income from your blog. However, if that many people aren’t actually actively engaged with your blog and content, then you may find yourself struggling when it comes to monetising your blog.

Focus on getting to know your audience and what they want from the content you produce. This will make it much easier to put together E-Courses and online products that your audience will actually want to buy.

Giving Up Too Soon

A lot of bloggers try to monetise their blogs almost instantly and then get disheartened when they’re not making a great deal of money straight away.

Monetising your blog takes a lot of time, patience and perseverance; it won’t happen overnight.

There are over 440 million blogs in the world today, meaning that the competition is pretty fierce. Naturally, not every single one of these blogs is going to be able to make a full-time income from blogging so to be the best really takes an awful lot of dedication and hard work.

It can be so easy to give up on monetising your blog if you don’t see the results you want straight away. But you have to remember to keep trying and work hard if you want to make money from your blog.

Trying To Use Every Money-making Method Possible

When trying to monetise your blog, it can be easy to think that you need to use every money-making method in the book in order to make as much money as possible.

This is a common mistake that many bloggers make. There is an abundance of ways to make money when it comes to blogging. From display ads to sponsored posts to online courses and products, the possibilities really are endless.

However, if you try and use all the different methods of making money through blogging then you’ll soon find yourself feeling quite overwhelmed.

It’s a good idea to pick a couple of income streams when it comes to making money from your blog. You can always try out different methods to see which ones work best for you and your blog. Trying to have too many income streams from your blog will just lead to burn out and the content you produce will likely be negatively impacted by this.

Your readers will also notice when you spam them with a million different products that you want to charge them for. It’s also imperative to remain as authentic and relatable as possible when it comes to blogging. This is so your audience keeps coming back for more, resulting in a higher engagement rate, as well as likely increasing the amount of money you make through your blog.

Not Having The Right Strategy Or Focus

Another crucial mistake to avoid when starting to monetise your blog is not having the right strategy or focus for what you want to achieve.

It can be all too easy to simply say that you want to make money from your blog, but it’s also a good idea to know exactly why you’re doing it. Do you want to make it your full-time job and income source? Are you looking for a way to make a bit of passive income on the side?

Whatever your reason for monetising your blog, you should have a strategy in place before you even start.

You should put together an effective strategy and plan before you start to monetise your blog so that you have a clear direction of where your blog is heading. It’s a good idea to consider the income streams you want to use, how much money you plan on making during a certain time frame, as well as the methods you’re going to use to ensure this plan comes into fruition.

Making money through blogging can be a very daunting but equally rewarding process if you manage to get it right. There are a number of things to remember to do and a few mistakes to avoid when starting to monetise your blog. Ensure you have a detailed strategy laid out, as well as an engaged audience who you can promote your products to.

This is a guest contribution by Charles Dearing

Let’s examine some of these widely used money making methods and see which of these is the best fit for your blog.

From one niche to the other, things are different and we must understand it. People in different industries and different age groups have different approaches. If we know this, it will help us in our effort to make money blogging.

There are however methods that will work across the board. Though this is an indisputable fact, doing things differently is bound to generate different results.

What Are The Different Ways Bloggers Make Money?

I have written an exhaustive article on 15 different ways bloggers make money. While you may want to check the post out, we will be dwelling on the most common of these methods.

Remember the essence of this post is to demonstrate that bloggers make money in different ways. And at the same time, not every method works for everyone.

So here are the most used channels:

1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Banner space sales
3. Sponsored posts
4. Link sales
5. Selling own products/services
6. Contextual Ads

Basically, without taking it far, these are some of the ways you see around and each of these can be a whole book to write.

Doing All At Once On A Single Blog

Now, I just listed 6 different ways to monetize a blog. Well, did I leave out Adsense? No because that falls within Contextual advertising. Chances are that anything else you think of is embodied in these broad topics.

Doing all of these on your website at once may sound crazy at some point but my problem is really not about how many of these methods should be used at once. You may also appear desperate if every space on your blog is taken up by some money making element.

Most of the top blogs you can think of, especially those classed on the list of top earning blogs limit themselves to a few monetizing strategies. They identify what works best for them, focus on it and become experts.

But Which Of These Works Best For You?

There is no one-size-fit-all method I can recommend. However, these 6 are just some of the methods I know can work for everyone. We will look into some details hoping this will guide you in picking the best choice.

Before diving into it, allow me quickly say something about Google Adsense, which is the best Contextual Ads platform recommended by many out there.

I have tried this on several different blogs. But at the moment I’m writing this post, it is not found on any of my sites. Meaning I have completely gotten rid of it for the following reasons:

• I blog in the Make money online niche. Adsense is relatively poor in this niche
• My blogs don’t get 50k page views per day yet
• Most of my traffic is from India where PPC amount is miserably small
• Etc

If we look at income reports for most of our blogging friends, Adsense is at the bottom if classed in other of amounts. I know the Google’s new AutoAds feature has remarkably improved earnings for most of us. That notwithstanding, it still remains a percentage of their initial earnings.

This means a 50% increase in earnings doesn’t instantly mean a $500 increase. It could be 50% of $10 which just takes you $5 up.

The best way to know what works for you is to try out different methods

6 Money Making Methods To  Chose From

1. Affiliate Marketing

Sometimes I get scared to think that Affiliate Marketing works well for everyone. But I really think it should because every industry has products for us to promote and earn commissions.

The only problem here is the fact that some bloggers have deliberately refused to think. All they do is copy banner scripts and paste on their blogs and hope for clicks to convert to commissions.

Competition is becoming more fierce. People are becoming more inundated with information. Banner blindness is getting more widespread. This means folks these days really need help to find and purchase what they want.

Yes! You need to help your readers beyond pasting banners on your blog and simply writing affiliate review posts or creating links. If you help your readers see the need for the product you promote, you bring them closer to a buying decision. That’s making you closer to earning a commission as well.

Affiliate marketing must be done differently. You need to think and add things that make your strategies stand out. The products you promote are being promoted by others. Why should someone buy from your link?

Well, before you move on, I recommend you check out this article I wrote on a new approach to affiliate marketing. You may find it helpful at some point.

So many bloggers are making it big with Affiliate Marketing

I’m not going to go too far. Take a look at Matthew’s income reports here. Affiliate Marketing is the master. If you need more evidence, step over to Pat Flynn’s income report. The examples are just every where. Affiliate Marketing works for almost every marketer.

Will this also work for you? Have you given it a try?

2. Selling Ad Space

Advertisers still buy space on active websites today . Take a look at buysellads.com and other similar sites. You will understand there is a big market for this model. But how much money you make with this will hugely depend on two factors:

1. The quantity of targeted traffic you get
2. The Geo location of your readers.

I have sold space on different websites. But the best property that generated the most earnings has not been the one with the most traffic.

Advertisers do their research and as it’s said, stats don’t lie. Once you are able to pull targeted traffic from areas with high purchasing power, you can always sell space on your blog.

If you get traffic from the United States, Canada and some European countries, you could be standing a chance to make some good earnings selling space on your blog.

– Using a 3rd party platform

There are platform like BSA, adclerks.com, etc, that make it easy to manage ads on your blog and collect payment from advertisers easily. What generally happens is that these platforms provide some code snippet for you to paste on your blog:

One downside of these platforms is that some cut a reasonable share of your sales. Though they have the market where your property could be found easily, they also decide how much fees you pay per sale.

In the past, I sold space on Adclerks. My first sale of $50 landed $37 in my Paypal account. That was a $13 charge on that sale. Are you comfortable with that? Please drop a comment.

Some of the platforms too are so demanding in terms of minimum requirements. Generally, you will need 20k monthly pageviews to be approved. For the most part, if your blog is less popular, you won’t be able to find your way on them.

– Using self-hosted solutions

If you don’t want your earnings shared with any third party platform, you may want to manage your ads on your blog. This isn’t something you can easily handle without the help of dedicated ad management scripts. Oiopublisher is a commonly used script that makes it easy for WordPress users.

This helps you manage you ads and collect payment from advertisers. If you use a script to run ads, your property may not get the exposure you would get as being on a popular marketplace. Whatever the case, you have to decide.

3. Sponsored Articles

I have seen many big blogs do well with this form of advertisement. Generally, there are two approaches to this method:

• The advertiser does the writing and you just publish.
• The advertiser provides the keyword or product details for you the blog owner to write the content.

Again, the price per article will depend on your blog’s popularity, who does the content and of course your power to bargain.

Advertisers have principally three reasons to sponsor content on your blog:

• To get access to your community with the hope to make some sales.
• To promote their brands to your market.
• To get some link  juice for SEO benefits.

Advertisers who want the backlink for SEO ranking boost would always insist on having a dofollow link from your content. While the pay package may be interesting, it is at the same time a danger if you rely on Google for some amount of organic traffic. If the search giant finds out (by some means) you were paid for the dofollow link, your site may get penalized.

What about disclaiming paid advertising on your blog?

Some advertisers frown on disclaimers. They want the endorsement to be “natural”. You know when the motivation behind an article is financial, it may compromise the value of the product and the FTC is adamant on that.

4. Selling Your Own Products

Everyone online can own a product these days.  It doesn’t matter the level of your expertise.  If you can only have a profitable product idea, the next step would be to hire the required skills to get your product developed.

Once your product is consumable, you can sell it on your blog and other marketplaces. This just tells you selling your own product on your blog is a pretty nice way to monetize your blog.

5. Contextual Ads

There is a lot of money to be made with this method. However, it doesn’t simply flow as some paint it to be. Monetizing your blog this way has some intricacies. Whether you are Google Adsense, Media.net  or any other platform, you need to give yourself to a learning curve.

I vehemently discourage this especially if your blog is new. Focus on building an audience and think affiliate marketing as you grow. However, this may depend on the niche you are in.

6. Link Sales

People are still making money selling links on their blogs.

I regularly get mails from some backlink mongers who offer to pay me $XX,X just to link to their website from within my blog. This looks like incredible source of quick money. Oh Yes it is. But it could also be a rope around your neck if the links are meant to pass PageRank.

Of course no one is ready to pay for a backlink if it’s not a dofollow link for some SEO ranking benefits. But Google frowns at this and considers it part of a link scheme, a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Which Of This Is The Best Way To Monetize Your Blog?

I highly recommend testing these methods out to find which of them gets the best results for you. Once you’ve found out your biggest earner, rinse it and repeat.

Don’t forget the implications of any method you settle on. For instance, selling links may be very profitable but this can land your blog into trouble with the search giant.

I know of blogs on which you are never going to find any form of advertising. Probably, they know what works for them the most. It’s not a weakness that they don’t accept sponsored posts or sell banner space. It’s a manner of strategy. Find yours and make it work for you.

Do Things Differently

Once you’ve found out what works for you, do it differently. Adding a special tough is likely to generate more results.

Some bloggers copy & paste. Of course that’s why their results are mediocre. In this post on Sue Dunlevie’s blog, I discuss how to do things differently and stand out. You may want to check that out for more tips on how to grow your blogging income.

Let me know what you think in the comment box.

Short answer: Absolutely.

There are a ton of ways that you can do to make a living online using WordPress beyond creating a food blog or starting a travel blog.

Just to be clear, these are not get-rich-quick schemes. What we’ve compiled are legitimate and proven ways for you to make a profit with the WordPress platform. Of course, it’s going to require some effort and time your part before you can start reaping the rewards.

If you’re ready, here are a number of ways that you can do to make money with WordPress.

Create Themes for WordPress

A lot of the basic themes of WordPress are not that great and the market for bespoke and custom themes can be quite lucrative. If you’re a web designer or developer, then you might want to consider developing custom themes for WordPress.

Do you need to be an expert at coding or be an amazing designer? Not necessarily. You can focus on niche markets and design specific themes that relate back to them. If you know who your target audiences are, then you can cater to them and not have any problem finding people to pay for your WordPress themes.

To get started, you can sell your WordPress themes on your own website or at places such as

• Creative Market
• Themeforest
• Mojo Marketplace

Setup WordPress Blogs for People

Majority of people who uses WordPress, use it to start a website blog. If you’re one of those people, then you’ve already got a set of skill that you can monetize: setting up WordPress blogs for other people.

Plenty of people and businesses wants to start a blog but lack the technical knowledge to do so. You can offer a WordPress blog setup service which can include services such as WordPress installation, setting a WordPress theme, give recommended plugins, etc.

In order to generate awareness for your blog setup services, we recommend creating a section for it on your website and advertise them either through banners, guest blogging, paid advertising, and of course, through social media as well.

Now, there will be instances where new bloggers won’t want to pay for your services. When that happens, you can opt to do your blog setup services for free and rely on affiliate links within your website to generate income. An example would be to recommend them to use a WordPress hosting company to host their blog and you’ll get a commission from them when they sign up for it.

Be a WordPress Content Writer

A great way to make money online is to be a content writer for WordPress related topics. You might not realize this but having the ability to write and articulate well is a great skill to have in the digital world.

If you can write well, then you can offer your writing skill to create content related to WordPress. Sites such as Problogger job board, Paid to Blog,  to name a few, are looking for contributors to create written content about WordPress.

You can even look at your favorite sites or blogs and check if they have a contributor application section where you can submit your articles. And more often than not, they are willing to pay for quality written content.

Before you go about pitching ideas for articles, we do recommend setting up your own website to show your portfolio and previous works. This will help greatly in letting potential employers see your writing style and give exposure to your work.

Make Plugins for WordPress

If there’s one thing that WordPress users will always need, it’s plugins. Plugins help elevate a WordPress website from good to great, by adding that extra features that you need in order to make the website successful.

Developers who are handy enough with coding can try their hands in creating and selling plugins for WordPress.

With thousands of plugins available in WordPress, there’s no shortage of demand for plugins that will help users make their website better. Companies such as Pippins Plugins or OptinMonster are great examples of plugins that offer a solution to problems that users face when using WordPress.

If you have an idea for a plugin or have created one, then you can start selling them at CodeCanyon, or even just sell them straight from your own website. Another way is to take on custom plugin projects from freelancing sites such as Freelancer, Odesk, Elance, etc.

Start a WordPress Consulting Services

An easy way to make money from WordPress is to offer a consulting service for it. If you’re good at WordPress and know your way around it, you can offer your expertise to other people who need it.

Of course, you will need to have an amazing portfolio that shows how good you are with WordPress before you can start making passive income with this. Build up your portfolio first by offering your consulting services (or on selected products you’ve created) for free to the WordPress community or influential bloggers.

You can then ask them to give feedback and testimonials on your website, as well sharing their reviews and experiences working with you, with their audiences. Use this to boost your reputation and generate more sales as testimonials from well-known online personalities will be great social proof.

Sell eBooks, Online Courses, or Webinars

We’ve mentioned earlier that you can make money by being a content writer for topics related to WordPress. If you want to take it another step further, start selling digital products such as eBooks, online courses, or even webinars for WordPress-related topics.

eBooks are relatively easy to write and produce. If you’re a blogger, chances are you have an archive of blog posts that you can convert into chapters for a book. Compile them all together, slap a nice design cover and convert it to a pdf and you have an eBook ready to sell.

Here are places to publish your eBooks:

• Lulu
• Blurb
• Smashwords
• Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

You can even decide to print your content and make it a real book.

More of a talker rather a writer? Then you can sell online courses or webinars where you can give lessons on things related to WordPress, such as digital marketing strategies or common mistakes that WordPress users should avoid.

Another advantage to doing webinars and online courses is that it helps you build an audience while establishing yourself as an authoritative voice on WordPress.

Monetize Your Blog or Website

When people think of monetizing their own website or blog, they just think of advertising. In truth, there are plenty of ways to generate passive income using your WordPress website without requiring any additional effort on your part.

Take advantage of the content and traffic that you have by utilizing affiliate marketing, directed ads, sponsored reviews, and more, on your blog or website.

Service providers and marketplaces are more than happy to offer affiliate programs for content that includes their links in a natural way. You can even opt for sponsored posts on your blog for brands or services and earn money by recommending them to your audience. Just remember to make it sound natural. Nobody likes a pushy salesman!

Set up a contact form on your website so that brands can get in touch with you and ask for paid reviews, guides, articles, or any other content that you can think of. Just don’t forget to include the stipulation that all of your sponsored content will be based on your honest opinions.

Conclusion

Making money or a decent living from WordPress is not rocket science. You don’t have to be a genius or an expert on all things related to WordPress. Just pick and choose the ones that you’re comfortable with and focus on that. Before you know it, you’ll be making good money using nothing more than WordPress.

Do you have a particular strategy for making money with WordPress? Share it with us in the comment below! Need more ideas on ways to make money online? We’ve got you covered!

Or do you want to start a food blog, but not sure whether it can make you money or not?

Then, this article is completely dedicated to you. It’s very easy to keep your food blog unique and also explore it in a cost-effective manner.  If you can follow this article you will completely know how to become successful enough in your full-time job. You can even make more profit out of simple food blogging.

How To Start A Food Blog?

For people who are interested in trying different sorts of recipes and reading them food blogging is the apt resource. At this sort of blocks are popular in recent days and or even easier to monetize.

If you are really ready to start a beautiful food blog then, there are two options available for you.

• You can either hire a web designer design the blog based on your preference.
• Alternatively, you can also do it by yourself which is more cost-effective.

The Basic Steps To Start A Blog

Before you start blogging you have to get access to the WordPress. If you are well known then you can set up a self-hosted WordPress on your own.

The WordPress needs to satisfy some specifications,

• Domain name
• Your identity
• Scaling factor to improve the blog.

Once you are ready for the above requirements, then you can easily start your blog. Follow the steps below and you will easily catch up making an interesting food blog.

• First get a blog on your own and then purchase the matching domain name for it.
• Next, find a reliable web host on your behalf.
• Make sure to install WordPress.
• Install some basic WordPress themes.
• Set up with Google tools by yourself.
• Install the required WordPress plugins.
• If you are all set ready, then you can have a happy blogging.

Tips to Help You

The below tips will help you to become successful in your food blogging and making money from it.

1. Make a Perfect Choice

Decide what type of food blogging you are most interested in so as to start it. It’s quite interesting to follow niches then regular topics to make your blog more interesting.

You can also consider choosing some sort of niches including some health-conscious content, carb, calorie burns, a special recipe, and so on.

2. Create your blog name

As a blog name is the first thing that hooks the readers to be very careful while choosing blog names. The blog name is also the domain name for your food blog.

Be very precise and flash the readers with your unique blog name. Catchy blog names are more preferred and or even easy to remember. This could easily drop lots of visitors to your food blog.

3. Purchase Your Own Web Hosting and Domain Name

There are many free bloggers that offer you with the facility to create a blog for free of cost. To be successful in your field you need to purchase your own web host.

They will provide you with your own domain name and some other unique features based on the web host that you have selected. Always try to choose a web host that provides easy installation of WordPress as it is unique and easy to learn.

4. Install WordPress on Your Web Hosting Account 

You can easily check and know how you can install WordPress on your web host. This can be easily explained by the host that you have selected. After the installation is completed, you can select the theme that works well on your food blog.

To set the themes simply go to the dashboard in your WordPress accounts and then select the appropriate food theme had to connect to install. To retain the interest of readers choose a theme that is more responsive and easy to navigate. It also gives you an option to purchase any sort of themes as they are even free themes available for you.

5. Install Plugins

Most importantly you should take some care to install plugins as this will maximize the site. Some of the basic plugins are Askimet for comment spam filtering, caching to upload your content faster, Google Analytics and social media tools as these are helpful for people to show your content on social networking sites.

It’s also interesting to add some sort of food plugins that makes you easy to enter and print recipes.

6. Make an Email List

Do you know that making an email list will help you to generate more money? If no then make an email list of your own.

It’s quite simple and the only thing you need to do is to email your list of recipes to the people. This is a sort of reminder for people to visit your blog regularly.

Apart from mailing recipe list, you can also use this service to offer some promotions.

7. Add Recipes

Once your food blog is ready to make sure that you had lots of recipes to eat. You can even create your own blogging schedule that will have several recipes in a week.

Most importantly when you add any recipes keep in mind to take the photos and provide step by step procedure and instruction to make it more interesting. You can even add your own experience while you are making your blog.

8. Promote Your Blog

Always try to promote your blog and create interest for the readers. Create your own social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest and try to make your readers know that you really exist.

Have the interesting conversation with your readers by comments or messages through any of the social networking websites. You can even make a short video and post it on the websites. Another important factor needs to be considered is that you can also make the online marketing plan to reach your target.

To wind up blogging is always a business so be very cautious while taking care of legal matters that include taxes and business permits. And this article will definitely make you be unique in the food blogger field.

The wait almost drove me to quit my blogs.

If I had, I never would have been able to grow my blogs to over $86,770 last year.

I still don’t get that much traffic, just over 50,000 monthly visitors total on five blogs. That’s led me to learn as much as I can on how to monetize a blog and make money no matter how many people click through each month.

The secret is in one of two strategies, niche targeting of your readers or reaching larger audiences on other platforms.

Here’s how you do both.

Post the Right Marketing Content on Your Blog

To some extent, making money online boils down to laws of probability—the larger the audience, the more potential sale opportunities.

Large traffic numbers increase your income potential because you have more chances to make a sale but there are ways to increase your sales on lower traffic.

Regardless of your audience size, there’s one secret that can be more valuable to any internet entrepreneur.

Successful content marketing is the most crucial ecommerce concept you need to understand. If you rank for the right keywords, effectively address your audience’s needs, and partner with the right affiliates, you can earn passive income with minimal visitor traffic.

Quality content is crucial to convincing your audience to make a purchase, tell their friends, and share on social media. It doesn’t matter how you do business online; you must be able to connect with your visitors.

In addition to 1,000-word posts that rank for a specific keyword, consider adding some of the following media to your blog posts:

• Video – connects with readers on a more personal level
• Infographics – prove your point through numbers and hard data
• Testimonials – help give you the social proof readers need to trust your content
• Case Studies – give readers real-life proof that your content delivers on its promises

These four content ideas make it easier to emotionally connect and build a level of trust with your visitors. Word-of-mouth recommendation is almost always the most effective form of advertisement and implementing these interactive content ideas make it easier to interact with your visitors.

Partner with the Right Affiliates

You don’t have to spend months creating your own products to sell.

Showing your readers how you make money online through your daily activities by recommending the products and platforms you use on a regular basis is called affiliate marketing.

Nearly every company offers an affiliate program that rewards you for referring future customers to their website. The important thing to keep in mind is that no two affiliates have the same payout.

With a small blog, you might think that Amazon links and Google Ads are the two most effective ways to make passive income online. That’s usually not the case because the pay-per-click might only be a few pennies.

Let’s say you have affiliate links for two products that cost the same price of $9.99. Amazon only pays you 5% per referral (49 cents per sale), but you can earn 50% of the purchase amount through an affiliate network like ClickBank ($4.99 per sale). You have to make 10 Amazon sales for each ClickBank sale to earn the same amount.

Because you can only include so many affiliate links in each post, it’s so important to compare all your options to choose the right affiliates the first time.

Look Beyond Your Blog to Make Money Online

Blogging isn’t the only digital frontier for making money online. In fact, it’s one of many ways. In fact, your blog may just be a landing page to introduce your audience to your other online services on other platforms.

That’s okay!

You can make even more money through other online media platforms to reach a different audience that may not even know what a blog is.

Self-Publish Your Own Book

If you’re talented with the written word, you can self-publish an eBook on Amazon. Sure, there’s an upfront investment of time and money to write, proofread, design a cover, and advertise before your book launches, but the potential royalties from selling your product on the largest online retailer is well worth it.

Amazon sells approximately 1 million eBooks every single day! This statistic doesn’t even account for the Amazon Audible audiobook lineup.

Use your blog to drive traffic to your Amazon listings and don’t forget to optimize your eBook product category and keywords to rank within the in-house Amazon search results too.

Teach an Online Course

If limited traffic means you’re only able to make a few sales a month, you might as well sell high-value products and get the most out of each sale.

With a DSLR camera and some editing software, you can create your own “how-to” video courses for sites like Udemy and Teachable.

If you’re more effective at speaking than writing, video can be your most effective media.

Online video courses have exploded in popularity as people prefer to watch videos than read a book to learn new skills like massage techniques, computer coding, investing, and photography. If you’ve ever taken an online course to expand your skillset, you know how useful these online courses can be.

While you might get all of $3 a copy for each book you sell, you can easily get $150 and more for your courses.

Video will only continue to play a larger role in the online world as we become more tech-centric. If you’ve been dismissing DIY videos as something only for funny cat videos, think again.

Make a Vlog

Although online courses are a great passive income avenue, don’t overlook another tried-and-true income method, Vlogging.

It’s never too late to create your own YouTube channel, Twitch channel, Facebook, or a Vlog on another video platform. Between advertising revenue, affiliate links, and product sponsorships, a 30-second video could net you hundreds or thousands of dollars in passive income.

Now that videos can rank in the first page of Google and Bing search engine results, your videos can rank for keywords your written blog posts don’t.

Start a Podcast

Another way to promote your blog and content is with a podcast to reach an entirely different audience that enjoys listening to a weekly dialog between the host (you) and an interviewee to learn something new.

The beauty of podcasts is that they can be played on demand (even five years from now) and reach an audience that prefer audio playback because they don’t have the time to sit down and read or watch what you have to say.

Use your podcast to promote your favorite products, sponsors, and even your own courses, newsletters, and digital content.

Your Turn: Transform Small Blog Traffic into a Goldmine

Owning a small blog doesn’t prohibit you from making a solid online income. By partnering with the right affiliates and promoting some your other online ventures, even when you’re not physically producing a product or service to sell, a blog can boost your income when you market your content efficiently.

Reach other audiences on larger platforms or deliver a hyper-targeted product to your readers. Either way, you’ll start making money even as you wait for your traffic to increase.

First, I won’t recommend you jump into making money if you are just starting a blog. You may not get any reasonable results and this may lead to discouragement and abandonment. The first thing every newbie blogger should do is focus on building flourishing community.

Your community is your market and I want to underline the word flourishing. There is no successful blogger with a thriving community. That’s what makes the excitement. So before you start thinking of your firs $1000 as a blogger, make sure you are getting targeted traffic and engaging readers.

That’s what I get on my blog. I see the results so I decided to share with you some of the things I do to get this income coming.

The Three Top Ways I Make Money Blogging

1 – Banner Advertising

There is a disease around that makes people think banner advertiser is dead. This sickness called Banner Blindness has made some bloggers to completely ignore banners. But the truth is, out of every 10 sites you visit, you are still going to see some banner advertising elements. If it no longer works, people won’t keep investing in it.

Erik for instance is making money with this blog through BuySellAds (BSA). That may not be your case because getting approved by them is like hitting a hard rock. To make things more difficult, once your application is rejected, they won’t even tell you where you are wrong.

A good BuySellAds alternative I recently came across is AdClerks (PC). Though I have more than the minimum impressions required by BSA, and my blog is premium with a great community of readers, my last application was turned down. I still think there an error though

I have sold banners in the past, managing everything by myself through a plugin. But this time, I decided I was going to use a platform so as to raise my chances of being located by many more advertisers.

The rejection by BSA got me surprised but not discouraged. After a few keystrokes in Google, I found over five ad networks and decided to go with PC. My friend here, Erik is doing well with BSA but if you want something quick, give PC a try.

2 – Affiliate Marketing

This is what makes blogging even more exciting. Everyone with a blog can do affiliate marketing and see results.

Though this is not as simple and easy as it used to be, Affiliate Marketing is still a flourishing business. You don’t need any investment. If you have a blog already, what you need is promote targeted affiliate products, generate sales and earn commissions.

I wrote an ebook Affiliate Marketing For Bloggers where I share my working methods and steps taken by other successful bloggers to make real money with Affiliate Marketing.

Most of the things you need to succeed are inside. But briefly, I’m going to give you some very powerful tips to help you succeed with Affiliate Marketing as a blogger:

1. Make sure you promote products that are targeted to your niche. Don’t try to sell anything because your cousin or grand ma is the author.
2. Focus more on products that pay recurring commission. That way, you are sure of a steady source of passive income.

Now, this is the killer method that constantly generate my income:

1. Get a copy of the product you want to promote and use it. There are different ways to get a copy: Generally, you may buy or ask for review copy from owner.
2. Once you’ve used it and gotten some results, share those results with your audience. Man has been programmed to copy things that are working for others. Therefore, if your readers see something working great for you, chances are high for them to buy that same stuff.
3. Finally, teach them how to use that product and get the same results. These tutorial posts are the triggers. If people don’t make the buying decision after reading your results, a majority will do after you teach them how to get your results.

3 – Sell My Own Products

There is nothing as rewarding as selling your own products but I know some folks are going to complain about this.

The truth is, creating and selling your own products is even more complicated but the income is a huge compensation.

Product creators have to deal with a lot of other things that eat up time and money. These are things like updates, upgrades, maintenance, shipping, customer service, etc. As an affiliate, you are never going to deal with all these.

But the truth is, once you’ve created a product that’s a big success, you will make more money than any affiliate and that income will help you handle any extra responsibilities.

In the past, I have created different products for bloggers and these all summed up are making the greatest share of my income online. And as a serial entrepreneur, each time I sell any of these products, my income doubles.

What if I can’t create a product Enstine?

I saw that question coming and I’m ready to answer!

I know I have worked hard, developed my skills so I can create digital products any time without hiring or outsourcing part of the job.

But I still have that strong believe that anyone else can create a product. Even if you are just from under a bridge and you know absolutely nothing, you can still create a successful product.

Today, PLR products are a fast way to go. As a matter of fact, my first ever product was a PLR ebook which I sold on Clickbank and make much more money than I ever invested. You can read more about it here

So it is no excuse that you can’t create a product. If you ain’t able to do it yourself and you feel PLR products are all crap, there are thousands of talented freelance developers and writers in any industry. You can fine them on Freelancer, Upwork, etc.

All you should do is put up your thinking cap and come up with a hot product idea. It could be an ebook or software. Digital products are doing well now so you won’t be wrong creating one.

Once you’ve brainstormed and arrived at something, you should hire talents from these job boards and before you know it, you are a product owner.

Conclusion

Those are the three main ways I make money blogging. I know many of you use Adsense and other methods.

I want you to share with us in the comment what’s working for you and how we can benefit from your experience.