Knowing your way around a website and what buttons to press to make headings bigger, smaller, and better decorated is a major asset when it comes to doing business online.
A wall of text that looks as if it came straight out of 1995 won’t be of much appeal to a modern-day Internet audience.
It’s not only the appearance of a text on the Internet that can fend off potential visitors, either.
Nowadays, thanks to the oversaturation of Internet-based content, online audiences have a progressively shorter attention span than what it was in the initial stages of the World Wide Web.
Anyway, if you have the know-how to make your WordPress blog visually appealing and informative, you have a fantastic shot at making a good buck out of it, as well.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how you can put your WordPress skills to good use and start making money with your online venture.
Without further ado, here’s the deal.
How to Monetize a Blog in 2023
Before we get into more detail on what approaches you can take to make more money with your blog, let’s first take a look at some of the essentials of setting up your blog for monetization.
Theoretically, you can monetize any sort of content.
Whether it’s video games, health & fitness, technology, how to run a chicken farm, you name it – as long as you share valuable pieces of info, you will likely find an audience.
That said, simply posting content on your webpage may not be enough to get you started. Or, at least, it can give you a slower start than what you could have had if you followed the tips we’re about to share with you.
Choose a Niche
Being a jack of all trades and master of none will likely not fare well when it comes to attracting a blog audience.
One of the best ways to earn money with a blog is to pick a niche and explore it in great detail. You can leverage your knowledge of the niche you’ve chosen and build on it along the way, so you can give your audience something valuable.
Let’s say you’re a roofer.
By starting a blog dedicated to roofing, you will be on your own turf in terms of knowledge of the subject matter. A crafty writer will also know how to massively explore and expand a single niche. So, with a little practice and patience, you can end up developing a massive web presence with hundreds of thousands of words of content – all about fixing roofs.
‘The best type of roof for all seasons’
‘How do tile roofs compare to shingle roofs?’
‘Best metal roof brands in 2023’
‘How to fix a leaky roof in the middle of winter’
These are only a couple of ideas off the top of our head.
A single brainstorming session can get you an endless number of ideas that you can turn into profitable content.
How to Make Money with Your Blog
Now that you’ve discovered your niche and are ready to put in the necessary work hours to make your blog rich in high-quality content posted on a regular basis, you can start thinking about making money out of it.
From a technical perspective, starting a blog will be a piece of cake – all you have to do is to set up a website and start adding posts to it. There are plenty of excellent free or nearly-free website builders out there, so even if you’re a complete rookie, you will likely be able to figure this out relatively quickly.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to deal with making a website from scratch, hiring a website-building or a web design agency, like Webvolve, is a great way to get your website up and running without worrying about the technical aspects. They can take care of everything from designing the website to hosting it.
With so many top agencies out there, you can be sure to find one that meets your needs and budget.
There are a multitude of ways in which you can monetize a blog.
Often, many bloggers employ multiple approaches at once to maximize their money-making potential.
Different approaches to making money will land you different outcomes, and not all of them are suitable for every niche. For example, selling online courses does not make much sense if your blog is not about developing a certain skill.
In the subsections below, we will offer a brief overview of the most important ways you can monetize your blog.
Selling physical products
Representing possibly the most straightforward way of making money with your blog, selling a particular physical product means setting up your blog as an online speciality store with your product as the main attraction.
Let’s say you make excellent scented candles and want to sell them online.
What you can do is set up a blog and start writing about scented candles. You can add articles about the benefits of using them, what makes them so wonderful, and generally share your passion about them.
The goal is to attract other people who like these candles as well as inspire those who don’t much care or know about them at the moment.
Once you’ve established some sort of a presence and have some content posted on your blog, you can add links to a cashout page where you can offer the products themselves to the members of your audience.
It’s a simple enough principle, but it works like a charm if you’re patient enough and willing to constantly work on expanding your blog.
Selling online courses
If you have knowledge about a subject matter that is in high demand, you can consider selling online courses.
As an example, let’s say you know how to make 2D platformers in Unity.
Since an increasing number of people are interested in making computer games on their own, you will probably have an easy time finding an audience.
Initially, you may want to publish a couple of posts here and there and talk about Unity and how to get started making video games. You can share some tips and hacks for designing models or adding layers and backgrounds, for example.
Now that you’ve showcased your expertise and given your audience members some useful tips, you can offer them a full course for a fixed price. (Also, you can offer them the option to pay you in installments, this part is up to you.)
You can make a full, detailed course about making the character for your game.
Another course can be about programming and how to incorporate different formats into the grand scheme of the game, so to speak.
The third course can be all about animations or special effects.
The more knowledge you have, the more you can share with your audience, and the more high-quality content you can publish for this purpose.
eBooks
Sharing knowledge or your creative vision is highly monetizable when it comes to blogs.
For this purpose, one of the most commonly-used mediums nowadays would be eBooks. Relatively easy to make (well, in terms of formatting, at least), eBooks represent a way for you to express yourself and to offer your customers something they can hang onto, rather than just how-to guides and tips and tricks from your blog posts.
The great thing about writing an eBook is that there is no single correct way of doing it.
So, what you can do is create a bundle of blog posts related to one topic and then simply format it into an eBook. Of course, there has to be some structure to it and the book needs to be all about the same topic.
Alternatively, your eBook can be creative writing, as opposed to an elaborate how-to piece of content.
Nowadays, you can easily spend zero money and still come up with a fantastic eBook with the help of a free graphics program such as Canva or a free version of Photoshop. You can even illustrate your own book and publish it completely for free.
Affiliate marketing
If you don’t have a product or a service of your own that you can sell, you can always resort to affiliate marketing to start making some passive income over time.
The way affiliate marketing works is rather straightforward – you advertise someone else’s product or service on your blog and then earn a commission every time someone buys it.
Commissions range depending on the platform you’re working with and from product to product. For example, Amazon offers great commissions on eBooks and handcrafted items, while the percentages you get from selling high-tech equipment and gadgets tend to be lower.
One of the major advantages of affiliate marketing is that there is no real limit to what you can sell this way. Even if you’ve chosen one niche for your website, you can easily branch outward to add more and more links that are somehow related to the initial topic.
This way, you can end up selling a wide range of products via your blog and earning a decent commission out of them all.
Sponsored posts
This way of making money with blogging is a rather advanced strategy that will only work with well-established blogs.
The way this works is that once you’ve reached a certain level of popularity, you can start having guest posts made by companies or individuals who’d like to pitch their product.
What they get is a platform with a large readership where they can advertise their products. In return, you get a commission every time one of their products gets sold.
Conclusion
All in all, setting up a blog and starting to make money with it is not so difficult – as long as you have a niche that you’re passionate about and that you have some knowledge of.
That said, developing your blog to the point where you can have a stable income out of it is a pursuit that will take time and dedication.
The bottom line is that, as long as you’re willing to put in the necessary time and effort, sooner or later, you’re going to see the results in more visitors and, thus, more sales.
This is a guest blog post written by Nicole Kelly. Nicole is a Raleigh, North Carolina, US graphic designer, digital marketing consultant, and writer enthusiast. She loves writing about new business strategies, digital marketing, and social media trends for different blogs and DigitalStrategyOne.
