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WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, and its impressive market share will not soon diminish.
Although WordPress is a free platform, the costs of premium plugins, your domain name, hosting, and crucial security services can all add up.
As WordPress maintenance experts, we’ve spoken to many site owners always looking for new ways to diversify their income streams and leverage new passive income ideas to support running their WordPress site.
If you’re looking for a new way to monetize your website and diversify income streams, here are some ideas for passive income you can explore with WordPress.
Passive Income with WordPress
1. Start a Blog
As WordPress was initially launched as a blogging platform, one of the best ways to create passive income with it is through the classic route of starting a blog.
If you’re able to find a niche that you’re an authority in and explore this topic with quality, engaging content, there are many routes to content monetization, including:
- Hosting paid advertisements
- You can offer premium content and member-only areas that you can charge for.
- Soliciting donations from supporters using Patreon or similar platforms in exchange for premium content, early access, and other perks.
If you plan to start a monetized blog, remember that the user experience will significantly impact your ability to attract the traffic you need for consistent revenue.
For a high-performing website that minimizes downtime, check out some of our WordPress Care Plans for 24/7 site support.
2. Join Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs are one of the more popular ideas for passive income among WordPress site owners. They allow you to earn commission simply by including approved affiliate links in your content and allowing these to generate traffic and sales for merchants.
Some best practices for finding an affiliate program that’s relevant to your niche include:
- Align merchants’ products or services as closely as possible to your site’s topic, or find merchants whose audience has a significant crossover with yours.
- Vetting affiliate programs thoroughly based on their commission rates, tracking and reporting capabilities, cookie duration, and other variables.
- Understanding your audience’s needs and their attitude to affiliate products and doing things accordingly.
Like other forms of blog monetization, success in an affiliate program will depend heavily on your ability to build a tremendous on-site experience for your audience.
Check out our WordPress speed optimization service for a quick and easy way to create a faster, more frictionless experience for all users and optimize conversion on your affiliate links.
3. Create a Course
This could be the perfect asset to sell on your WordPress site if you have unique knowledge or skills.
Though the initial work to set up your course distribution requires a lot of time and resources, once it’s all in place and you’ve carried out a little promotion, you’ll enjoy a steady stream of income as people engage with self-directed learning.
Some plugins that can help with organizing and distributing your course material include:
- Tutor LMS
- LifterLMS
- Masteriyo
- MasterStudy
- LearnPress
- Create Websites for Clients
Though not an entirely passive source of income, if you know your way around the WordPress platform and can reliably build great sites, this could be another effective way to monetize your skills.
In this case, WordPress is an excellent platform for building a web design portfolio. It allows you to showcase intuitive and visually stunning sites you’ve created in the past and let new clients know you have what it takes to build them a site of the same caliber.
Related ideas for passive income include becoming a reseller for web hosting plans, which allows you to profit from providing essential site architecture without maintaining the assets behind it. For further guidance on getting started, see this guide on ‘how to pick the best hosting.’
4. Sell Advertising Space
If you’re generating a healthy traffic flow to your WordPress site, you may be in a good position to start selling advertising space.
Many brands pay popular blogs and other sites to display paid advertising on their platforms, such as banner ads, sidebar ads, and in-content ads (e.g. video ad content that plays before or after videos).
Once you’ve achieved a moderate-to-high level of traffic for your website, you’ll need to formalize selling ad space by:
- Creating attractive advertising packages with a variety of options and transparent pricing plans.
- Building a professional media kit with data on traffic and engagement.
- Networking with potential advertisers with an audience that intersects with yours.
- Providing high customer service, communication, and support as you begin onboarding advertisers to your platform.
- Sell Links and Sponsored Posts
5. Link Building business
Link building, the process of generating and encouraging links to your site from external referring domains, is essential to SEO (search engine optimization).
Due to this, many site owners, marketers, and agencies will pay good money to place links on a high-quality site, pointing to a domain they’re trying to make more visible.
To capitalize on these passive income ideas, your site will need strong SEO metrics to maximize the value of any backlinks you host and make your domain an attractive prospect.
Our WordPress maintenance plans can help remedy many common technical issues that hold back a site’s organic visibility and provide a strong foundation for future SEO development.
6. Develop and Sell WordPress Plugins
Developing and selling WordPress plugins could be a good passive income idea if your WordPress site focuses on web development and design or a related B2B topic.
For example, developing an educational course, useful plugins, testing them thoroughly, and carrying out some form of promotion will require a lot of time and resources. However, once you’ve created a WordPress product with clear, tangible value for your audience, selling it will yield positive revenue results.
Some of the best platforms for selling WordPress plugins include:
- WooCommerce
- ThemeForest
- Template Monster
- MOJO Marketplace
- Creative Market
7. Exclusive Content Through a Subscription Model
Blogs, news, and educational sites can all make solid passive income ideas. However, if you want to maximize income from your WordPress site, try to avoid giving away all your valuable content for free.
Create passive income by selling exclusive content in paid-for areas of your website. These can include:
- Downloadable and reusable templates.
- Ultimate resource guides.
- Exclusive access to videos and podcast episodes.
Use WordPress plugins that help restrict non-paying visitors, such as MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, and LearnDash.
When collecting and storing customer data for memberships, remember GDPR concerns and ensure you have a comprehensive privacy policy.
8. AdSense
Google AdSense is a popular paid advertising platform and an excellent channel for WordPress passive income. It promises an intuitive interface for ease of use and a commitment to quality ads and UX that you may not find with other ad platforms.
While creating an AdSense account and running ads on your WordPress site is a relatively simple process, there are many steps you can take to maximize impressions and clicks. These include:
- Place ads in areas of your site where you know they’ll enjoy lots of visibility and improve the rate of clicks.
- Ensure your site has a responsive design to optimize the experience for different devices and screen sizes.
- Creating consistently high-quality, valuable, and authoritative content that attracts an audience that coincides with your advertisers.
Turning WordPress Into Revenue
Whether your site has been established for years or is just starting out, we hope this round-up has been helpful.
Check out our other blog posts or WordPress tech support services for more support with WordPress design, digital marketing, and other topics.