There is no doubt that WordPress is one of the best content management systems today, and we can do many things with it. WordPress has long been popular among bloggers, freelancers, and businesses, powering over 30% of websites on the web. The biggest benefit of WordPress is that it’s simple and easy to use, and its capabilities now go far beyond just being a blogging platform. Now, many people have found ways to make big money with WordPress – have you ever thought about making money with WordPress? In fact, ordinary people can also make money by developing a WordPress side business. You don’t necessarily have to become an expert in WordPress to get started. By combining your own strengths and figuring out what your target audience really wants, you’ll be on the right track.
There are endless methods and opportunities to make money with WordPress. You can monetize blogs, sell courses, build membership sites, promote affiliate products for commissions, do ecommerce, develop themes and plugins, and more. Money has always been the thing people care about most. Why do we pursue higher degrees or apprenticeships and training programs? The reason is simple: money. Millions make money online through various means – by watching ads, playing games, taking surveys, and so on. For anyone looking to work from home, especially women and the unemployed, making money with WordPress has proven to be a great money-making opportunity. In this article, I’ll introduce some of the best ways to make money using WordPress. Here are some tried and tested methods that are practical and can be implemented:
Ways to Make Money with WordPress Side Hustles
1.Content Creation
There are hundreds of sites today that need fresh content daily, covering almost any niche industry with news, trends, events, and happenings big and small. If you can publish articles consistently in a readable way, considering the number of established blogs already out there, it’s fair to say anyone determined enough can do it. There are many sites hiring for content writing jobs now that are easy to get started with – you just need to be able to type and have an internet-connected device to find work. Before applying, it’s best to build an online portfolio to showcase your strengths and previous work. If you have a blog, others can see the quality of your writing and style. You can find suitable content writing jobs on sites like Upwork, FlexJobs, ProBlogger, BloggingPro, Fiverr, and more.
2.Building a Profitable
Blog Starting your own blog and monetizing it is one of the most common ways to make money with WordPress. Building a WordPress site is not complicated – the key is finding your money-making niche. Choosing a domain and host, installing WordPress, picking a theme, adding plugins, writing posts and pages – that’s all it takes to set up a simple WordPress blog. If your articles have good breadth and depth to attract lots of readers, this can be the best way to profit, as long as you have the users. You can make money from your own blog through affiliate marketing, selling ads, sponsored posts, and more.
Most product and service providers offer affiliate programs you can join through networks like Impact, Awin, Amazon Associates, Clickbank, CJ Affiliate, Creative Market, and more. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and add affiliate links in your posts. When visitors click those links and buy the product you promoted, you earn a commission. Once you have traffic, you can also partner with advertisers like Google AdSense to insert their ads and get paid as they handle the ads and revenue. Of course you can work with other ad companies too like BuySellAds, OIOPublisher, BlogAds, Adsella, BuySiteAds, etc. You can also offer sponsored posts on your blog and include contact info – just be sure your sponsored post agreement states that all opinions are truthful and reliable. Remember to include a disclaimer that it’s sponsored and why.
3.Selling Courses
Reading to learn can be a bit dull, which is partly why people like finding video tutorial formats. We can create a YouTube channel and record our skills, explaining what we’re doing. If you’re a seasoned professional in some field and confident in your skills and expertise, you can create relevant courses on your site and earn from them. Every year millions of people use the internet to gain new skills. All you need to do is create paid courses to help them. There are many industries where you can produce courses – teaching gardening, makeup and fashion, photography tips, travel, dating and relationships, building a WordPress site, and more. If your skills and knowledge can help others, passionately discover and combine with your own experiences, and you can create courses around it.
We can simply use a website as a marketing platform and then host the courses on third party eLearning platforms like Udemy, Lynda (LinkedIn Learning), Skillshare, Coursera, MasterClass., Pluralsight, and more. We can also build our own site with WordPress and host courses, which is easy by using a WordPress LMS plugin. In addition to courses, you can charge for blog posts, videos, downloadable tools, virtual equipment – anything you can think of as a product or service.
4.eCommerce & Dropshipping
eCommerce is also an essential way to make money. With the internet proliferating and logistics and payments convenient, people like shopping online now more than ever before. You can sell all kinds of products and services on your site – physical goods, digital items, flip flops, phones, houses, ebooks, music, videos, stocks, and more. When starting an online venture, choosing the right platform to build your ecommerce site is crucial. Making the wrong decision will waste time and money and force you to start over.
Although WordPress is a robust CMS and blog builder, you can also build your online store with it by installing a plugin like WooCommerce. Compared to other paid tools, WooCommerce is 100% free and provides many extras to customize your shop. Of course you can also use specialized platforms like Shopify, Shift4Shop, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Ecwid, and more to build your online store. If you don’t have your own product sources and supply chain, you can do WordPress + dropshipping to run an online business where you just build the site and handle operations, while plugins take care of procurement, shipping, payments, etc.
5.Offering Blog Setup Services
Being well-versed in setting up WordPress blogs and wanting to make money with WordPress, offering blog setup services is a perfect fit. To attract clients, you can first build a simple blog setup services page on your own site. Offer both paid and free options. Put banner ads on your site for your services, reach out to other bloggers for guest posts, promote your services on relevant forums, and consider paid ads too. You can tier your pricing for blog setup services – different price solutions tailored to different people’s needs and industries. With the free service option, you can rely on affiliate marketing to profit by putting relevant affiliate links on the services page and recommending themes, plugins, security services, and other affiliate products to them – stick with good products you’ve used and trust.
6.WordPress Site Maintenance
Once a WordPress site is installed, issues pop up here and there, especially for beginners. Resolving such technical issues for a fee can save people a lot of time and headache. If you’re a WordPress expert, you can address a range of different technical issues to keep users’ sites running smoothly – a huge opportunity that can also generate considerable income.
Site maintenance can cover WordPress updates, security monitoring, theme and plugin updates, server management, CDN setup, and more – basically everything you already do for your own site, but others pay you to do for them. Having professionals handle professional work not only saves time and effort but greatly improves workflow and project progress. If you’re maintaining many other people’s sites, plugins like InfiniteWP, MainWP, ManageWP let you manage everything from one centralized dashboard so you can provide full maintenance services without monitoring each site separately.
7.SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Marketing Services
Building a WordPress site is easy, but turning it into a money-making commercial endeavor with WordPress is very difficult. SEO is one method of getting organic search traffic, and also the most important. When done right, SEO can drive huge free traffic to your business. Even small daily improvements in search rankings can send more visitors to our site. After building your own site and spending time learning to optimize it, you can offer your skills as services to those in need of SEO.
Whether assisting with content optimization, link building, site speed, or other website aspects related to SEO, there is huge demand in the market – and SEO services don’t come cheap. Many digital marketing professionals are willing to pay for professional SEO services too. Drawing from your own experience promoting your site, you can also provide marketing consulting services like keyword research, PPC ad campaigns, social media marketing, YouTube promotion, and more. This includes social media platforms, Google Ads, Google Shopping, and any other promotional or analytics-focused sites. However, the bulk of your work (e.g. order handling and payment acceptance) will take place in a dedicated online store you build.
8.Security Consulting and Solutions
Security issues have always existed online, especially for high traffic and high revenue websites. No site owner wants their site hacked – security is paramount. For those confident in their security competency, particularly coding skills, helping users solve security issues can be lucrative.
Common security solutions include security auditing, general security hardening, SSL implementation, malware removal, and more – each important issues with market demand. Consulting can be done with ease if you know WordPress, offering advice related to it. Now over 30% of sites use WordPress, so it’s a huge market for WordPress security professionals, and serving customers well translates to earnings. If you’re maintaining many other people’s sites, plugins like InfiniteWP, MainWP, ManageWP let you manage everything from one dashboard so you can provide comprehensive security services without monitoring each site separately.
9.Developing WordPress Plugins
If you’re a computer science grad, you can easily build on your skills or take online courses on PHP, CSS, and HTML to get into development. Having used WordPress yourself, you likely need at least a few plugins to properly run your own blog – WordPress’ rich plugin ecosystem is what enables all kinds of websites to be built. There are free and paid WordPress plugins, so finding user pain points in using WordPress CMS and developing plugins to address them can definitely generate substantial earnings.
Take Elementor, a WordPress page builder plugin that solves the problem of insufficient functionality from the built-in editor, empowering users to quickly build beautiful pages without coding. Elementor page builder is now used on over 4 million sites. As a developer proficient in WordPress development, building all kinds of plugins and profiting is normal. Getting people to pay to use your work also inadvertently helps improve plugins by having users uncover bugs through real-world usage, making them more robust for paying business clients.
10.Developing WordPress Themes
Becoming a WordPress developer is a fortunate thing to do. Today, WordPress developers can earn around $60 per hour on average. Like plugins, WordPress offers many free and premium themes. If you’re a web designer or developer, you can make money selling WordPress themes – you don’t necessarily have to be a top-notch designer or dev pro. Understanding user needs, solving their problems, and building fitting themes is sufficient without being overly professional. First address user pain points, then expand with more details. If concerned about doing it solo, build a team or join a professional theme company to learn first. Now many platforms exist to sell your themes – TemplateMonster, Themeforest, Creative Market, or even your own site.
11.Theme Customization
If you’re an advanced WordPress developer with ample free time, you can offer customized theme services for clients. This is easy to do if skilled in both WordPress and design. Design is time-consuming, detail-oriented work. Design services require not only design skills and an eye for aesthetics but also prompt communication with clients. Only with ample experience in theme building, coding, and studying many design cases can one provide such services. Compared to the above, this requires more time and effort since customization implies details and professionalism, but fees are substantial too. This value-added service filters to higher-end user needs, even long-term clients, though such premium users don’t actually need too many and custom pricing keeps increasing.
12.WordPress Design Services
Similar to theme customization, providing comprehensive design services is another great way to earn extra income, but only if highly adept at both WordPress and design. This is not easy to do casually. Design is tedious, detail-focused work. Design services require design skills, aesthetics, and prompt client communication. Only with extensive theme building, coding experience, and studying numerous design cases can one comfortably provide such services. More time and effort than the above options, since customization means details and specialization, but fees are naturally higher. This targets higher-end users, possibly long-term clients, though such premium users don’t need too many and custom rates keep rising.
13.WordPress Memberships
Membership sites allow you to make money by having users pay for premium content, features, and community access rights. If your blog has great share-worthy content and engaged visitors, you can consider turning your blog into a membership site with monthly, quarterly, annual, or lifetime membership options. Paid memberships can bring you a steady base of readers and income, while enticing those unable to join immediately with exclusive content like ebooks, podcasts, member resource kits, etc. You can also build a paid forum featuring experts in your industry and create a secret members-only forum. There are many WordPress membership plugins on the market to quickly build your own member’s only site.
But not every product has the specific functionality required to sell subscriptions at an individual level, while others provide diverse membership and subscription management capabilities. Choosing the right WordPress membership plugin is crucial for online business success as a better platform means more growth opportunities. Commonly used WordPress membership plugins include MemberPress, LearnDash, Restrict Content Pro, Simple Membership Plugin, and more.
In summary, unlike other online money-making articles, these are some legitimate methods to earn money at home using your blogging and WordPress skills. While many of the above can generate supplemental income, or be run as full-time businesses, there may also be other ways to profit with WordPress we don’t know about, as everyone has different talents and perspectives on money, yielding different avenues to profit with WordPress.
However, it’s important to note these are not get-rich-quick schemes for instant wealth overnight with online money-making as described. If you expect to get rich fast through the methods we’ve introduced, it’s basically impossible. Everything takes accumulation – making money is the same. Don’t indulge in unrealistic and lazy fantasies about expensive cars, mansions, or working on the beach lured by photos. In most cases these are carefully designed scams just wasting your time and money to buy useless courses and training from them. Compared to investing in a store, these require relatively little capital to start, as long as you’re willing to put in effort and execute persistently, you’ll reap rewards.
Once you know what you’re doing, making money with WordPress becomes easy. But please remember, if you have your own blog, be sure to update it regularly – this is a great way to profit as long as people are reading and you have traffic. Don’t worry your blog can’t earn you money. If you have extensive programming experience, developing themes and plugins can take your earnings to the next level. The key takeaway should be clear – WordPress simply provides us a new way to profit, but only brings wealth to those willing to persist in using it. If you lack interest in online money-making or find website building tedious, none of these options can resolve your monetary woes.