We know monetization is important for many site owners. We support many methods of monetizing the hard work you put into your website.
You will find many of these options available from your dashboard at Tools → Earn. Read on to find out how you can turn your website into a source of income.
In this guide
Plans: Business, Commerce
You can create a full-featured online store to sell anything directly through your website. Using the free WooCommerce plugin you can sell products, handle shipping, collect taxes, and more. You can find more information on the WooCommerce website.
Plans: All
Our Payments block features let you collect revenue from your site visitors for anything including products, services, memberships, subscriptions, and donations supporting your website. You can accept one-time payments or set up recurring payments — either monthly or yearly — to create a predictable revenue stream for your blog or website.
Payments are processed through Stripe and are limited to the countries where Stripe is currently supported.
Watch an overview video covering all these payments features to learn more:
Video Transcript
Looking to make money with your website? With WordPress.com’s payment features, you can easily accept credit and debit card payments from your visitors for just about anything. Digital or physical goods and services, memberships and subscriptions, donations, paid newsletters, and premium content are all examples of things you can collect payments for. Start making money in a matter of minutes when you add one of our payment features to your site today.
WordPress.com has easy-to-use blocks to support your payment needs. Blocks are the individual components you can use to add content to any post or page on your website. This video will give you an overview of the three primary blocks you can add to earn money with your website, the Payments Block, Premium Content Block, and Donations Block.
The Payments Block allows you to take payments from memberships and subscriptions, digital and physical goods, and more. For example, if you want to create a monthly membership to sell fitness workouts or cooking recipes, you can make it happen with the Payments Block.
The Premium Content Block will let you share specific content exclusively with paying subscribers. For example, if you have a video file, post, or audio file that you want to share only with people who are paying for it, you can do so with the Premium Content Block.
The Donations Block can be used to take payments to support your creative or professional pursuits. your musician, writer, or creator who is simply asking for people to support you so you can continue your passion.
All of these blocks give you the option to collect one-time payments, recurring monthly or yearly payments, or a variable pay what you want option if you want your visitors to pay whatever they would be willing to pay.
To help your visitors and customers make purchases or donations on your website quickly and securely, we’ve partnered with Stripe, a popular, secure, and reliable payment processor that allows you to collect money from people all over the world. Let us handle the processing so you can focus on your passion and make money doing so.
On the WordPress.com Earn tab, you can see your earnings, view future recurring payments, and view all of your paying followers, and edit the features and prices of your products and subscriptions.
If you’re looking to set up an ecommerce store and have inventory to sell, be sure to check out the WordPress.com store function, powered by WooCommerce.
And once you have something published, don’t forget to tell the world about it. You can email your friends, family, customers, or followers. Or you might post updates on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. Telling people about your content, products, and services is a great and necessary step to making money with your website.
We’re making it easier than ever to start accepting payments on your website. Head over to your WordPress.com account and add one of these payment blocks today.
To learn more about the payments, premium content, and donations blocks, or about ecommerce store functionality, go to WordPress.com/support and search for any of those things to get step-by-step instructions, tutorials, and other helpful information to get you up and running. Happy earning!
Plans: All
Publish blog posts for paying subscribers only. Your paying subscribers will receive your posts via email. Non-paying subscribers will be encouraged to pay to access the content. See Create a Paid Newsletter for more.
Plans: All
With the Premium Content block, create monthly or yearly subscription options to share select content with those who pay for it – text, images, videos, or any other type of content. Only subscribers paying you monthly or a yearly fee can see the content. Offer different subscription levels and customize the premium content available at each level.
Plans: All
Both the Payments and Premium Content blocks mentioned above allow you to create subscriptions or memberships on your website. Learn about creating a paid membership site with WordPress.com from our special tutorial site with more information and step-by-step information to get going.
If you’re just getting started, we recommend watching this video on what memberships are and how to add them to your website:
Plans: Personal, Premium, Business, Commerce
You can solicit donations or tips from your readers using the Donations block.
Plans: Premium, Business, Commerce.
Use Pay with PayPal to accept credit and debit card payments via PayPal. Whether you’re selling a physical or digital item, collecting payment for a service, or asking followers to show their appreciation financially, you can add a Pay with PayPal button to your site in a few clicks.
Plans: Premium, Business, Commerce
If you’d like to make money on your WordPress.com site with advertisements, use our official WordPress.com advertising program available for site owners. The program features ads from external ad networks such as Google, Facebook, AOL, and more. Learn more about how it works.
Plans: Business, Commerce
Advertise through third-party ad networks like Google AdSense, OpenX, Lijit, BuySellAds, and Vibrant Media, or selling advertising space on your site. When you sign up for other services, they will typically provide you with a piece of code to add to your site. You can do this by following the steps here.
Plans: All
You can add affiliate links to your WordPress.com content as long as the primary purpose of your blog is to create original content, and as long as the code for the ad is supported.
When blogging about books you’re reading, the music you love, clothes that strike your fancy, gadgets you’re drooling over, or whatever interests you and your readers, feel free to post relevant affiliate links using either text or images.
There are a few restrictions on what affiliate programs are allowed. We do not allow affiliate links for gambling, get-rich-quick schemes, multi-level marketing programs, disreputable merchants, sexually explicit material, malware, or phishing-type scams. We also do not allow sites that exist primarily to drive traffic to affiliate links.
An easy and popular way to get started with affiliate links is Amazon. Read our support documentation for specific instructions on adding Amazon Affiliate links to your content.
Plans: All
You can publish sponsored posts on WordPress.com. We define a sponsored post as any content that promotes a specific product or service, which you were encouraged to post by the company or individual who makes/sells/provides it. Including this type of content on your site typically results in some kind of compensation for you in the form of payment, freebies, etc.
We do not allow sites where the vast majority of content is sponsored content. Sponsored posts also may not include any content that violates our Terms of Service.
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