16 ways to make money on the internet with WordPress in 2024

“How to make money on the internet with WordPress? Here we go, another clickbait title!”

I can hear you from here, dear readers.

Let me be clear: far be it from me to fall into the trend of those websites that promise a dream life to anyone in two or three clicks!

No. My goal in this article will rather be to demystify some of the ways to make a living on the web and to tell you the truth about the job of a web entrepreneur — a real one, who thinks about his clients on a daily basis.

So, are you ready to review all the methods and best practices for making money on the Internet with WordPress, plain and unvarnished?

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Originally written in July 2020, this article was last updated in September 2023.

Making money on the internet: Beware of excessive expectations!

You should know this: you won’t really earn your income on the internet by answering paid surveys or by filling in micro-tasks for online businesses!

The world of WordPress is full of ways to make money, but be careful not to get carried away by schemes that will make you just a few dollars per month. If your goal is to make this your core business, keep these ideas in mind from the start.

The competition is tough to make a good living from your business

As you know, many people have, like you, seen the opportunities that WordPress offers to make money on the internet. Developers, web designers, physical or digital product vendors, bloggers… All of these people are already well established in this business.

Their websites are well-built and well-ranked on search engines.

They have developed connections with other web entrepreneurs and influencers, and have some amount of popularity.

They have mastered the techniques necessary to develop a business on the Internet, and they know how to activate them brilliantly.

In short: they appear to be a tough, well-established competition.

What if, instead of seeing these well-established web entrepreneurs as competitors, you considered them as potential partners?

The trick is to find a problem that some of your targets might have, and develop a unique activity that will help them solve it.

In other words: you need to offer real, unique value to an audience that has specific needs. Help them achieve something or advance from point A to point B on one of their real challenges. This is a prerequisite for becoming a major new player in the web ecosystem and to not fearing potential competition.

You’ll have to be organized and disciplined

I know: you too must have seen, like me, these videos that explain how to make money with WordPress quickly and easily on the web.

Seen how easy it looks to line your own pockets.

Dreamed of being in the place of the YouTuber or the blogger who promise the moon.

Let me be the troublemaker, once again: financial success won’t come to you unless you are truly rigorous and consistent.

Even though it’s a simple platform to access and manage, no matter which method you choose… you’ll need to become an entrepreneur to make money with WordPress.

Beyond the web skills that you will need to master, such as SEO, web writing, Social Media Marketing, and sales, you will be required to create your company or become self-employed, to develop a medium- or long-term business vision, learn how report your income, create invoices… etc.

If you want to make WordPress your primary revenue stream, your whole life will be about that goal.

You’ll spend a lot of time on it

Let’s be realistic: no success without a minimum of personal investment.

And entering the world of WordPress to earn your daily bread means putting in a maximum of effort and investing a considerable amount of time.

I was already telling you about this when I gave you the keys to becoming a blogger: making a name for yourself on the Internet is a time-consuming activity. Very time-consuming.

Between the initial training time to understand web standards, the creation and management of your business, the implementation of your processes, and then the coordination of your actions on the internet on a daily basis… There’s work to be done!

Earning a living from the web isn’t something that can be done in the blink of an eye: you’ll need to organize yourself like a real entrepreneur, be consistent, develop your knowledge of the Internet process, and stand out from the crowd.

And for that, there are various methods that are more or less easy to access. Let me give you a little overview to show you how to get started.

16 ways to make money on the internet with WordPress

Throughout the following lines, I’m going to cover four main areas to help you make money on the internet with WordPress: selling products, monetizing a blog, selling your online services, and developing complementary channels to your blog.

Before detailing each method point by point, here’s a quick overview of 16 ways to make money on the internet with WordPress:

1. Sell physical products.
2. Sell digital products.
3. Create a dropshipping store.
4. Design a marketplace.
5. Create a site with subscriptions.
6. Rely on advertising.
7. Invest in affiliation.
8. Write sponsored articles.
9. Sell links.
10. Accept donations.
11. Offer freelance services.
12. Provide coaching.
13. Offer maintenance services.
14. Sell online training.
15. Create a YouTube channel.
16. Launch a podcast.

Let’s start with the first method, selling products with WordPress.

#1 Selling physical products with WordPress

With WordPress, you can create an online store to promote and sell physical products. Whether you are redistributing existing brands, dropshipping, or creating your own products, anything is possible.

The flagship plugin to create your web shop: the famous WooCommerce. With 5 million active installations, WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin on WordPress.

It’s also the most-used eCommerce solution on the one million sites that receive the most traffic in the world.

WooCommerce gives you access to all the eCommerce features you need to build the online store of your dreams.

From payment to security, through the Product and Order pages, and not least the classic Terms and Conditions… With WooCommerce, you carefully control your entire eCommerce shop within the WordPress administration.

Of course, depending on your goals, other plugins will be useful:

• If you want to make it easy for your customers to make online bookings, choose WooCommerce Bookings (premium).
• If you need to automatically add a PDF invoice to the order confirmation email your visitors receive after their purchase, activate WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips (freemium).
• If you want to calculate shipping costs based on order weight and/or your customer’s total shopping cart, use Flexible Shipping (freemium).
• If you want to manage cart abandonment on your store, use the WooCommerce Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin (free).

WooCommerce is only the beginning: it’s up to you to customize your shop afterwards to make it a must for your targets… and make money on the internet thanks to WooCommerce!

You can also choose, instead of WooCommerce, to use Shopify, for example.

• Pros: You avoid dealing with technical problems.
• Cons: A monthly subscription and being dependent on a platform external to WordPress.

Check out our detailed comparison to help you judge which of the two is more relevant and convenient for your online business.

Don’t like WooCommerce? WordPress offers other eCommerce plugins. These include Wpshop (made in France!), WP eCommerce, BigCommerce, and Easy Digital Downloads.

#2 Sell digital products

Easy Digital Downloads? Let’s talk about it. This plugin, which works in conjunction with WooCommerce, specifically enables you to sell digital products (WooCommerce can also do this).

This refers to an intangible product — as opposed to a physical product such as a t-shirt — that will be delivered directly over the web.

This other side of online product sales can therefore also be an interesting way of making money on the Internet.

There are many digital products that sell well via WordPress, including:

• High value-added ebooks that offer specific advice based on your expertise
• Online trainings in videos, where you offer a pedagogical value to your targets
• Photos or other graphical elements, if you have the soul of a music lover or artist
• Audio elements (music, sounds, noises) and videos
• Software programs
• Podcasts (we’ll talk more about this one)
• WordPress themes and plugins
• Etc.

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Here again, whatever the digital product promoted, WooCommerce will be the cornerstone of your online business. Linked to a website that promotes a tempting value proposition, this essential plugin will support you the best.

#3 Create a dropshipping store

So far, I’ve talked about selling products you own, whether physical or digital.

If you want to sell online and try to make money on the internet with WordPress, there’s another way: selling products on your online store… that you don’t own.

This is referred to as dropshipping. With this system, you act as an intermediary, selling products without having to manage the stock and logistics involved, such as delivery.

In the end, you earn a commission on a product you’ve never seen (you “just” have to display it on your site).

If you’re interested, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to dropshipping on WordPress. In this article, you’ll learn how to set up dropshipping on the WordPress CMS, including a list of must-have plugins.

#4 Create a marketplace

No inventory management. Little to no logistics. No after-sales service. In some respects, dropshipping shares common ground with marketplaces.

You’ve probably heard of marketplaces. The best-known are Amazon, Ebay, AliExpress, Alibaba, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace.

With these online platforms, individuals or professionals offer products or services for sale.

If you’re looking to make money on the Internet with WordPress, you may be interested to know that by creating a marketplace, you can earn a commission on sales.

On WordPress, the best-known marketplace is called Envato. It hosts several platforms, including:

• ThemeForest, a store for premium themes
• CodeCanyon, a store for premium plugins

Are you interested in designing a marketplace? If so, first activate an eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce on your WordPress site.

Then turn your online store into a marketplace with a plugin like Dokan.

The creation of a marketplace requires compliance with strict regulations. To make sure you’re doing things by the book, get in touch with a legal specialist.

#5 Create a site with subscriptions

Let’s look at one final aspect of online sales. How about creating content reserved for your subscribers only?

This can be done by creating a members’ area on WordPress. Now, there’s a prerequisite: you need to have a loyal audience for this (without visitors, there’s no point in creating a customer area).

A members’ area can primarily be used to offer free content to your members. But what makes it so useful is that it can also be used to earn money on the internet, because you can monetize it.

This can be done in a number of ways:

• You can use it to sell products
• You can take advantage of a space reserved for your WordPress subscribers to offer them unlimited access to premium content

On the official WordPress directory, there’s a plethora of plugins for creating a members’ area on WordPress.

Among the most famous are MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro, and WooCommerce Memberships.

#6 Rely on advertising to make money on the internet with WordPress

After selling products, I’d now like to talk about monetizing a blog.

If you want to know how to make money with a WordPress blog, you’ve come to the right place!

Let’s start with the first aspect: advertising.

There, I said the keyword that’s synonymous with cash in the minds of many of us: advertising. Ah, advertising…

You probably see them everywhere if you regularly consult blogs: those famous advertising inserts with more or less intriguing banners.

Yes, advertising on the web is a way to make money with WordPress on the Internet. But, substantially, how much is it really worth?

The truth is probably going to sound a little cruel. By putting AdSense inserts on your site, and being paid at Pay Per Click (PPC), you’ll probably make between $0.1 and $0.5 per click.

Given that, on average, only 1–3% of your traffic will click on your banners, and that many visitors won’t even see these inserts because of their AdBlock, the revenue you can make from online advertising won’t make you the next Bill Gates.

Think of advertising on your blog as a form of complementary income, and don’t expect financial miracles from it.

Therefore, the key to success in online advertising will be to position inserts on your blog in an intentional manner. You have struggled to get your readers to come to you: it would be a shame to drive them away because of a banner!

Take Facebook, for example, which skillfully scatters the news feed with more or less discreet ads. Integrate your ads into your content, taking care not to ruin the reading experience.

They should remain anecdotal elements of your blog, just as they are anecdotal elements of your Internet income.

Also note that by posting ads on your blog, you won’t control what is displayed and you will send your visitors to other websites (for a few cents). It’s up to you to see if it’s worth it.

If you want to get started, there are two key advertising networks:

• Google AdSense, which, as its name suggests, belongs to one of the giants of the web
• Ezoic

#7 Invest in affiliation

Affiliation, what’s that? If you regularly visit WPMarmite’s blog, you must have already seen it in action: it refers to highlighting other people’s products or services on your blog, in order to get paid when it results in sales.

How much can you earn when you become an affiliate? The answer can only be vague, as it depends on several criteria:

• The price of the products you promote
• The rate of pay that you have established with the affiliation program you choose
• The traffic your blog attracts, and therefore the number of potential buyers

In short, affiliation can be a workable method of remuneration only if a real strategy has been put in place beforehand.

In the context of influence marketing, more and more Internet users trust the opinions of expert bloggers on the products they recommend.

Here are a few basic rules for managing affiliations:

• Promote a product that fits your site’s theme, to keep your audience’s trust.
• Don’t make affiliation your main source of income. If the program’s conditions change, or worse, if it closes, you’ll be left with nothing but tears in your eyes.
• Be open with your audience about affiliate income. You need to show yourself to be trustworthy, so you don’t lose your credibility.

For the record, WPMarmite is compensated by various WordPress players through affiliate programs. These allow us to pay our team, finance the creation and updating of our content, and test new themes and plugins. However, to maintain your trust, we only recommend resources that we have tested and approved beforehand. To find out more, read our publishing policy.

When properly mastered, affiliate marketing can become quite a lucrative business, especially if you create niche sites to promote specific types of products. Does that interest you?

Check out some of the leading generalist affiliation platforms below:

• Awin
• Amazon Partners
• Affilae
• ShareaSale

#8 Write sponsored articles

Third way to monetize a blog: rely on sponsored articles.

The idea? Approach companies, or let them approach you, to write articles about their activity. The content you write, be it tutorials or LTEs (letter to the editor), is paid for.

Of course, this method requires having a fairly high-performance blog, with suitable and relevant traffic for the advertiser who approaches you. The more better-known your blog, and the more important your traffic, the more you will have the chance to earn a good amount of money for each article written.

If we want to talk in terms of figures, you can count on average about a $100 for a sponsored article. So there’s nothing to get excited about, unless you develop consistent relationships with many companies.

Note that nobody likes to read blogs full of sponsored articles! Work to find a balance between sponsored content and your own resources.

Do you want to try your hand at sponsored articles? Put these basic recommendations into practice to get off on the right foot:

• Create high-value-added articles about certain products, without expecting anything in return.
• Test products or services without overdoing it.
• Avoid over-promotion, so as not to come across as a serial product-placer only interested in making money.
• Stay true to your convictions. WPMarmite, for example, has always refused to do sponsored articles or external advertising, despite numerous requests.

Creating solid, quality content that will endure over time, while sparingly integrating a few product placements, affiliations, and advertisements… That’s a real action plan for making a living from your blog.

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#9 Sell links

Without further ado, let’s keep going on the monetization of your site, with a new aspect to consider: selling links.

Selling a link consists in selling a natural (non-sponsored) link to a third-party site so that it can position it on one of its content pages, with the aim of attracting more traffic and improving its SEO.

This monetization technique isn’t for everyone. You need to have a site with a certain volume of organic traffic, numerous positioned keywords, and “clean” backlink profiles (free of spam, for example).

If you want to start creating niche sites, this is an possible way of monetizing them.

Several netlinking platforms allow their users to buy links (and you to sell them)! These include:

• Nextlevel
• SEMJuice

#10 Accept donations

One more way — among others — to monetize a blog is to ask your visitors to make a donation. Yes, quite simply.

While this system is popular with charities, some bloggers also offer their readers the chance to make a donation to support their editorial work (research, writing, etc.).

Payment gateways such as Stripe or PayPal make it easy to set up donation buttons.

You can also rely on dedicated solutions like Buy Me a Coffee, and of course on WordPress plugins like GiveWP.

If you’d like to encourage your audience to make a donation, let them decide how much they’d like to donate. And don’t forget to give a brief explanation of your reasons for asking for money.

#11 Offer freelance services

After selling products and monetizing a blog, let’s move on to the third major area for trying to make money on the internet with WordPress: selling your services online.

To start with, you can capitalize on your expertise by offering your services as a freelancer or agency. This could involve:

• WordPress site creation
• Custom theme and plugin design
• Webdesign
• Web editing and copywriting
• SEO
• Etc.

However, if you want to get into website design, for example, your technical skills won’t be enough.

You’ll need to bring a host of other qualities to the table:

• Know how to sell yourself. Your website and your portfolio will be your main weapons to convince your clients. However, don’t forget to polish your sales pitch, both in terms of pricing and differentiation from your competitors.
• Be proactive and productive on a daily basis. Becoming a freelance WordPress developer means facing your own limitations on a daily basis, and having to motivate yourself. Know how to alternate your work moments with moments of rest, to be truly effective in dealing with your projects.
• Manage the customer service. Selling is good; following your projects carefully, getting respect from your customers is better. Your challenges will lie, on a daily basis, in knowing how to get paid by clients who are sometimes a little lazy in terms of accounting, or in knowing how to put limits to their sometimes extravagant requests.

These are 3 essential points to start selling WordPress websites that will make you a proud entrepreneur with a solid long-term business.

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#12 Provide coaching to make money on the internet with WordPress

Mastering a skill and selling it is the classic gateway to monetizing your services.

If you want to diversify your income and try to make money on the Internet with WordPress, you could very well offer a consulting service in parallel.

Think about it: your expertise isn’t limited to technical production. You can also share your knowledge with people who are looking for highly targeted support on a specific point.

I’m thinking, for example, of the person who’s just created their WordPress site and would like some feedback — from you — on its production. Has he or she done everything by the book? It’s up to you to answer!

Want to take action and offer a consulting service on your WordPress site?

Include a prominent button for booking an online slot in your menu. You can do this via a classic link, or a call-to-action button.

For your information, there are many WordPress plugins that allow you to book a time slot while paying for consulting services. One example is WooCommerce Bookings.

Another option is to integrate a Calendly link at the location of your choice, enabling your visitors to book an appointment.

When it comes to invoicing, think in terms of hourly rates. Generally speaking, a consulting service lasts between 1 and 2 hours.

#13 Offer maintenance

Let’s move on to another type of service, particularly suited to freelancers and agencies creating WordPress sites: maintenance.

This can provide you with an attractive recurring income, as a maintenance package can easily be invoiced at between $50month and $100/month.

Is this all new to you? Here are a few quick explanations. Maintenance refers to all the actions you take (modifications, corrections, improvements, etc.) to keep your customer’s site(s) up and running.

Maintaining a WordPress site is essential. It reinforces security, improves performance, and enhances the user experience of the sites you manage.

Thanks to maintenance, your customers’ sites will experience fewer errors and malfunctions, thanks in particular to regular backups and updates.

If you have several customer sites to maintain, the most efficient — and least time-consuming — solution is to use a dedicated tool like WP Umbrella (affiliate link) to perform all your basic actions in just a few clicks.

And if you’re ever short of time, there’s nothing to stop you outsourcing this service to a specialist agency like WP Sitter.

WPSitter, for example, offers a maintenance package starting at $89 excl. tax/month (paid quarterly). Find out more by clicking on the insert below:

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#14 Sell online training

Maintenance is very practical, since you can offer it to a customer as soon as you create your first site.

To sell online training, another complementary (or even main) source of income, you’ll have to work a little harder.

There are several things you need to know before trying to sell online training products:

• You need to have a committed audience that trusts you. Numbers aren’t all that important. You can very well sell to a list of 1,000 subscribers. To start building a base of loyal readers, add an opt-in form to your site and communicate from time to time via a newsletter.
• Competition is tough. You’ll need to differentiate yourself to create a training program that stands out from the crowd.
• This can be a time-consuming process. Between writing scripts, filming and editing videos, as well as post-sale updates, you’ve got your work cut out for you if you opt for video-based training. Several LMS (Learning management systems) such as LearnDash or LifterLMS can make the task easier.

However, don’t rush headlong into offering a video training program at whatever cost. You might start by offering an ebook training in PDF format.

#15 Create a specialized WordPress YouTube channel

To conclude, let’s look at the 4th major area for making money on the internet with WordPress: developing complementary channels to your blog.

The first of these? Creating a specialized YouTube channel for your field of expertise.

As with a website or blog, this requires a fair amount of work to get started. But once you’ve built up an audience (with at least 1,000 subscribers), you’ll be able to earn money by displaying ads when people watch your videos.

Now, I’d better warn you: don’t expect to earn astronomical sums like Mr. Beast right from the start.

On average, you can expect to earn $5 per 1,000 views. Earnings fluctuate according to a number of criteria, such as your niche and engagement rate.

In addition to advertising, there’s nothing to stop you “leveraging” your YouTube channel to promote your products/services in your videos.

The subtle addition of calls to action in your videos and/or their descriptions can enable you to link to a landing page or sales page, for example.

#16 Start a podcast

Finally, in the same vein as a YouTube channel, have you thought about creating a podcast to try and make money on the Internet with WordPress?

This could be an interesting lever to activate. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s talk briefly about the benefits of creating a podcast for your business:

• It enhances your reputation and brand image, positioning you as an expert on a specific subject.
• As an increasingly popular format (41% of Americans over age 12 listen to a podcast every month), it can also increase your visibility, and fits perfectly into a global content strategy.
• Very easy to consume (at home, on public transportation, in the street, etc.), podcasts can reach a wide audience, making them a popular acquisition tool for entrepreneurs.
• Podcasts require very little financial investment to get started.

Last but not least, it enables you to develop connections with new people and members of your network.

Would you like to embark on your podcasting adventure? There are several ways to monetize your podcast:

• Affiliation, by promoting products related to your podcast episode
• Monthly subscriptions, for access to exclusive episodes, for example
• Advertising, carried out by advertisers on your podcast
• Redirection to your service and/or training offer via your podcast
• Etc.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many ways to make money on the internet with WordPress. Some are more promising than others, more lucrative; others require more time to get started, or more advanced skills.

But one thing is certain: only those who give their all, who give themselves the means to succeed and stay the course despite the challenges and the competition, will be able to make a living from their activity on the web.

Alex’s story is very interesting in this sense. When he started, he had no choice but to succeed: he dropped out of school and didn’t want to find a full-time job. A real motivation to always give more of himself… which still persists to this day.

And you, what’s your story of entrepreneurship with the web? Do you make a living out of it? Do you still have fears about going all the way? Tell us all about it in the comments section: we love reading the success stories and hearing the experiences of our readers!

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About the author

WPMarmite Team

WPMarmite helps beginners get the best out of WordPress with in-depth tutorials and honest reviews. Meet the founder, Alex, and his team right here.