How to Monetize Your WordPress Website

Making money online isn’t easy at first. It can be difficult but once you find your bearings it can be very fruitful. One of the most attractive things about generating revenue online is that the costs involved are fewer than doing it offline. The main things you need are time, effort and patience. The hidden cost of earning money online is hours of time spent developing your strategy.

As a WordPress blogger, there are a couple ways you can make money off your self-hosted blog. There are many plugins that can help you manage your advertisements and get them seen.

The first thing you need to do is prime your site. You want to optimize it so you can receive the highest amount of traffic that you can get. This involves search engine optimization and social media networking. There are other techniques, but these two cost virtually nothing if you do it on your own. If you need help you can hire and SEO expert or social media wiz to get things started.

After you have your site optimized, you need to generate traffic. This may take some time but once you have some decent traffic you can monetize your site. The main methods of generating revenue with your WordPress website are:

• Advertising Networks
• Affiliate Marketing
• Selling Products and Services
• Subscriptions

This article will go over the pay-per-click (PPC) method of advertising, as well as affiliate marketing and direct advertisements. We also offer up some tips and places where you can find tools to advertise on your WordPress website.

Pay-per-click Advertising

Usually the first kind of advertising model people run into is PPC. With PPC advertising, you get a sum of money from an advertiser whenever one of your site’s visitors clicks on one of their ads. There are many ad networks you can join. The most popular PPC ad companies are Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Bitvertiser.

Pay-per-click or Ad Networks are an easy way to reap the benefits of your hard work. It takes time to develop a site but once you’ve built an audience you can do a lot with it. Remember you will need a decent amount of traffic to earn some revenue.

As I mentioned there are various advertising networks, but in all likelihood your will be using Google AdSense, the most popular ad network on the web. Whether you can consider your site low, medium or high traffic depends on a number of factors. But for medium sized sites, say 50 visitors per day, you will be able to receive a decent amount of revenue for your blog. Below is quick and dirty on Google AdSense.

Google Adsense

For anyone new to online advertisement, Google AdSense is probably the best advertising service to start with. It pays well and offers quality advertisements. To use AdSense all you have to do is sign up for an account, ad your code to your blog and wait for it to be approved.

There are lots of ways that you can monetize using AdSense. You will be able to control what kinds of ads are placed on your site, and you have complete control of where the ads are placed.

You can place ads anywhere on your WordPress website. This includes post, pages, sidebars, the header or footer. You can place the ads above or below content or have the content wrap around the ad.

All you have to do is place the advertisement code blocks where you want them to display and the ads will appear. You can hand code the blocks in, use a plugin, theme or shortcode to put it up. With WordPress you can fully integrate Google AdSense into your WordPress dashboard. This is great way to manage your ads and measure their performance right from the backend.

What you should know before getting started

Getting AdSense is a bit harder than other advertising networks. If your blog is high quality and you follow Google’s program policies than you should be find. Keep in mind that they don’t accept certain niches like hacking, adult sites or warez. The minimum payout for AdSense is $100 and there are multiple payment models. The best thing about AdSense is that you have a reliable stream of income.

With AdSense you can also place ads in videos. One way to do this is to create a YouTube channel and post videos from it on your blog. YouTube allows users to monetize their channel with AdSense. You can monetize multiple channels. The ads will appear within the video. If people watching click on the ads you will earn income.

There are lots of plugins to help you place ads with Google AdSense available for WordPress. Some plugins integrate with WordPress fully and bring your entire AdSense account to the dashboard. Widgets and plugins also let you place the ad on your website. Below are two plugins that you can combine with AdSense with WordPress.

Google Publisher

This is the official WordPress plugin from Google. You get AdSense and Webmaster Tools in your dashboard. This plugin is easy to use and free. It helps you manage ads and place them quickly. You can exclude include ads, verify your site with one click, manually insert ads and enable mobile specific layouts. This plugin makes placing ads a lot easier. Without it you would have to paste the code snippet for your ad directly into the website’s text or the PHP.
Get it

Advertisement & Branding for Flow-Flow Social Stream

This plugin can help you style and place your ads. This plugin is an extension for Flow-Flow. It is not a standalone WordPress plugin. It is a very powerful addon that allows you to customize your ads. It integrates completely with Google AdSense. You can use it to optimize your ads and put them exactly where you want. Place ads randomly, make them sticky or put them in a specific order.

There are many ways to utilize custom cards within one of your social stacks. Create unique displays to feature your AdSense ads.  This plugin is a very useful tool for running successful ad campaigns with WordPress.

When it comes to advertising WordPress gives you a lot of tools to mess around with. Using your online real estate to place ads is a low cost way to earn some cash. Be selective though.

You don’t want to be overzealous and place too many ads on your site. This can drive visitors away and lower your traffic rate. Try to keep things balanced, and choose ads that you think people will like. Use the recommended number of ads and place them properly. Experiment until you start to see success.

More experienced web users often block ads, and that’s something you will have to deal with too. That’s why you can mix and match strategies to get the best results. Below are two other ways to advertise on your blog or website.

Affiliate Links

You can join affiliate link programs from companies like Amazon or Bluehost. Just like pay-per-click ads, you will use space on your site to display the advertisement. The money you make isn’t a specific amount per click. You will get a percentage of the sale value once the sale is made.

You may not get as many conversions, but when you do receive revenue it will be higher than a PPC payout per event. Most of these programs allow you to provide ads for your site’s niche. You usually won’t have to worry about getting irrelevant advertisements. Affiliate marketing is also very easy to setup.

Direct Advertisements

If you generate enough traffic, you will open the door to direct advertising. Websites or agencies advertise will contact you to advertise their products on their site. Usually they pay a fixed amount per week. This gives you the option to place ads from many different companies but you might have trouble keeping your slots full.

If you are out of advertisers you can always use PPC or affiliate marketing. Advertisers may not always approach you. You may have to make the first move and seek out a company. With direct advertising you will probably receive more of a payout, but you will most likely have to take care of the logistics on your own. With PPC and affiliate marketing payments are automated and the advertising code is provided.