Whether you’re blogging for personal enjoyment, or you’re actively aiming to build an online revenue stream, WordPress.com offers a multitude of ways that bloggers can monetize their site.
Monetizing your content is completely optional, and many bloggers are more than happy to publish their content free of promotional content or sales. If that describes your blogging goals, that’s great! Feel free to skip this module.
If, however, you think your blog has the potential to earn even just a few dollars, take the time to explore this information.
This lesson will discuss the different tools and features available to help you achieve your monetization goals.
Before you start adding monetization features to your website, it’s important to think about your audience and why you want to monetize your blog. Now, before you say “Duh, I want to make money” it’s important to acknowledge that monetizing a website is not a “build it and they will come” situation. That’s why it’s important to understand why you’re monetizing the site.
Many bloggers fall into the trap of overloading a site with ads, donation blocks, and affiliate links only to be left scratching their head as to why they’re not making any money.
Monetizing a blog is about so much more than simply adding revenue options to the site. There needs to be purpose and value behind them.
Including ads is the one option that requires less purpose, and we’ll cover that in the next lesson, but understand that ad revenue on a website requires a notable amount of consistent, quality traffic and it will in no way be a quick buck. It’s also important that you don’t end up making your site look spammy by including ad blocks in every available square inch of the site.
For now, let’s take a look at some of the other considerations for monetizing your site.
In many ways, everything that you’ve learned up to this point (assuming you started at the beginning of this course) has been setting you up for the best possible scenario for monetizing your blog. In order for monetization to work well on your blog you need to have put some effort into the following:
As mentioned in the lesson on Finding your niche, you need to do some market research if you’re wanting to work with a profitable niche, because not all niches are created equal. So if monetization is a priority among your goals, then you need to put a bit of work behind choosing your niche to ensure that you’re in the best possible space (out of your areas of passion) to give yourself the best opportunity.
Then, when you portray yourself as a specialist in a particular niche, you’re setting yourself up to be the go-to authority. This builds trust with your audience and that trust will go a long way to encouraging them to invest financially in whatever monetization options you include in your site.
As you’re building your content and the trust of your audience, one of the most important factors will be to ensure that you’re providing value. There are tons of ways to provide value within content, and it will vary depending on your niche and your audience. Therefore, understanding your audience and thoroughly knowing your niche are critical to getting the value component right.
When it comes to specific revenue-generating strategies, there are infinite possibilities. For obvious reasons, we can’t possibly deep dive into the process of what and how on all of them. Instead, below is a short list of possibilities that you can begin to consider. At the end of this lesson are a number of articles that will help you to further your research into these options.
- Physical products
- Digital products (such as downloadable eBooks or white papers)
- Online courses
- Coaching
- Membership sites
- Internet advertising
- Affiliate marketing
- Sponsored posts
- Premium content
When you have a site hosted with WordPress.com, and you’re on an upgraded plan, there are several monetization tools available at your fingertips. The most efficient way to gain a deeper understanding of these tools is to work through our Payments feature support documentation. This documentation will be kept up to date with the latest features and digs into how to use each of the available tools, as well as providing tutorials to further explore some of the unique applications of these tools.
The Payments feature has multiple blocks available for various kinds of payments, including the Donations Form block, the Premium Content block, and the Payment Button block. It can be used to create monthly or annual recurring revenue or one-time payments and allows you to collect payments using Stripe, which ensures that credit card data is encrypted and sends receipts to subscribers automatically.
The Payments feature is available for all sites with a WordPress.com paid plan. The feature is also available for self-hosted sites on a paid Jetpack plan.
The three blocks available with this feature are:
Donations Form block
The Donations Form block allows you to accept credit and debit card payments for donations, contributions, and tips. You may ask your website’s visitors to support your creative pursuits, an organization, the work you’re doing, or whatever makes sense for your website.
Paid Content block
Use the Premium Content block to accept payments on your website for access to exclusive content that you create – video, images, text, anything. You can choose to offer all or some of your content as premium content to paying members, or keep your content accessible to all while encouraging ongoing support via a recurring membership.
Payment Button block
The Payment Button block allows you to collect credit and debit card payments for goods, services, subscriptions, memberships, donations, and more.
Pay with PayPal
If you’re not able to, or don’t want to, set up a Stripe account to use with the above blocks, the Pay with PayPal block lets you add a PayPal payment button to any post or page. You can then start collecting payments or donations securely through your site.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate links are another easy way to add monetization to your site. If you regularly publish reviews of products like books, toys, games, clothing, or even travel destinations or entertainment venues, there might be opportunities to earn a little money by adding what’s known as affiliate links to your site. Depending on the affiliate program you use, you’ll earn a little commission every time someone uses your unique link to make a purchase on the affiliate site.
| 🚨Important note: Your primary purpose for your WordPress.com blog must be to create and publish original content, not to serve as a home for all your affiliate links, which would be a violation of our Terms of Service. |
Methods for affiliate linking
A popular way to add affiliate links to your site is with Amazon. To learn more about how to add Amazon affiliate links to your site, follow the instructions in this support page.
Amazon is probably the biggest affiliate program on the internet, but there are dozens, perhaps hundreds more. Many popular brands use aggregators known as affiliate marketing networks to manage their affiliate programs. Examples include Shareasale, Pepperjam, and CJ Affiliate. Each of these networks connects brands and merchants with publishers and have their own application processes and qualifying criteria.
Some brands manage their own affiliate programs directly. If you have favorite brands that you often recommend on your site, check out their websites first to see if they have an affiliate program and, if so, if they manage it in-house.
Once you’ve been approved, you’ll generally be provided with an account that includes access to a dashboard where you can manage all of your affiliate accounts. That’s where you can find links, banner ads, and other marketing tools to start promoting the brands.
Again, keep in mind that all sites on WordPress.com must be used primarily for creating and publishing original content, not advertising or affiliate marketing. Be judicious in how you promote your affiliate brands and where you place affiliate links on your site.
In the lesson on Types of Content, the section about Serving as an online resource is a terrific place to weave in your affiliate marketing links. Use affiliate links to enhance your content, not dominate it.
Think about the topic(s) you’ll be writing about, and see if you can come up with at least five different ideas for earning money.
For example: Let’s say your blog is focused on something intangible, like your sweet, adorable rescue dog. What could you offer and sell? The good news is that people love dogs! Here are some quick and easy ideas to generate a little income from your content:
- If you have a flair for taking great photos of your pup, create some unique merchandise using a third-party service like RedBubble to sell dog-themed items like mugs, bookmarks, phone cases and more. Try adding a funny quote to boost the appeal.
- Loyal to a particular pet food retailer? Check to see if they have an affiliate program.
- Love reading books about dogs? Write reviews and add affiliate links to the books from the indie-focused online bookstore Bookshop.org or Amazon.
- Not interested in collecting donations but are passionate about your favorite rescue group? Many animal welfare charities, especially large nationwide ones, offer multiple fundraising opportunities for donors. You could create a custom donation button, add your unique fundraising link, and spread the word.
Click to explandResources
- Complete Guide: 8 Strategies to Monetize your Blog (Guide)
- Six Proven Ways to Monetize a Blog (Article)
- Electric Literature Moves to WordPress — Here’s How an Indie Publisher Thrives on the Open Web (Article)
- From Cooking to Cash: How to Earn Money as a Food Blogger (Article)
- Seven Ways to Make Money Online With Your Own Artwork (Article)
- The Magic of Monetizing Website Content with WordPress (Article)
- Start a Paid Subscription Blog to Monetize Your Content (Article)
- WordPress.com Plans (Support Guide)
- Monetize your site (Support Guide)
- Payments feature (Support Guide)
- Pay with PayPal block (Support Guide)
- How to add Amazon Affiliate Links (Support Guide)
- Terms of Service (Support Guide)
- Jetpack plans (External Site)
Back to top