WordPress is probably the number one free blogging platform in today’s society. Thus, thousands of bloggers around the world (including me) use WordPress to power their blogs. But how can WordPress, a FREE blogging platform, earn you significant income? Here is a step-by-step guide showing how to make money with WordPress.
1.) Select a Niche
The absolute MOST IMPORTANT element of a website/blog is the niche. Choose a specific and unique place you feel comfortable writing about. For example, if you’re good at web design, write about a particular part of web design, such as coding. Ensure your niche isn’t vague because search engines like Google and Yahoo! will NEVER find your website/blog.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, brainstorm some articles you can write. Make sure your place is specific but broad enough so you can write at least 2,000 articles on it! This will help in the long run; trust me, you don’t want to start a blog, and half a year down the road, you have a severe brain fart and can’t write any more articles.
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2.) Create Your WordPress Blog
It would help if you created a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free blogging platform, but you will need a website first, and the website needs to be hosted one of two ways: Free Hosting or Paid Hosting.
Free Hosting
If you’re looking for a free hosting service to host WordPress, the best solution would probably be WordPress.com hosting. I recommend this option because it is 100% free and from WordPress! The WordPress platform automatically comes with a free web hosting service from WordPress.com (as the name suggests). You won’t have to worry about all the web hosting complications (name servers, updates, MySQL databases, etc.)! Plus, setup is a breeze, and you can choose your domain (it has to be a subdomain of WordPress.com, though). Trust me; free WordPress hosting doesn’t get any better than WordPress.com!
Another option would be to find free web hosting services and install WordPress manually. This is not recommended because finding a 100% free web hosting service with good uptime and support for WordPress takes a lot of hassle. I would definitely recommend WordPress.com hosting over free web hosting.
The last and worst (in my point of view) option for free WordPress hosting is self-hosting your website. This is the MOST complicated process as you have to port forward according to your router, install a self-hosting service such as WAMP, and get a free domain from No-Ip.org (subdomain, of course). The worst part is that your website will have NO capacity because you are hosting it. I’m not going to go in-depth with this; you can Google how to self-host WordPress because I will not waste my time explaining my least recommended method of free web hosting.
Paid Hosting
Paid Hosting allows you to have complete control over your WordPress blog (you can write whatever you want; with WordPress.com hosting, you must abide by their terms of service). Bloggers often use this to their advantage, as creating beautiful-looking templates and site design is a breeze with paid Hosting. First, you’ll need to find a good web hosting service. I recommend HostGator because (in my humble opinion) they are cheap yet offer the best support and compatibility for WordPress. With HostGator, sign up (you get a free domain with any plan), and in your control panel, you can 1-click install WordPress! Once you’ve installed WordPress, you’ll be good to go!
3.) Get a Theme, Configure WordPress Widgets, and Start Writing Stuff!
Once you’ve set up WordPress, I recommend selecting a theme. WordPress has a wide variety of pieces, and you can decide which one best suits your blog. The second step after installing WordPress is installing widgets. Widgets are special components of your WordPress blog with a specific function.
I think SEO, Backup, Cache, and Anti-Spam are the widgets you need. Other fancy devices are up to your discretion. After installing the machines (you can decide which ones you need and which you don’t), get ready to write! Remember step one? Hopefully, you can already spit out some blog posts from your brainstorming!
4.) Receive Traffic
As a webmaster, I really can’t emphasize the importance of Traffic enough. You may have the best article on the planet, but if your blog’s only loyal visitor is your mom, the world won’t be able to see your beautiful writing. That’s why Traffic is essential to your blog’s survival.
First, I immediately recommend you submit your site only to the top search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing). As a precaution, I urge you not to focus on raising your site to too many search engines because, most of the time, search engines should find your website automatically.
Generating some beginning traffic is pretty easy, given you have friends and family. Use Facebook, Twitter, and other methods to inform everyone about your website. Assuming you know more than 50 people globally, this should be pretty easy, and you should begin to have steady traffic. Not much, but steady.
Now, it’s time to go public. One of the most effective ways to get Traffic is to submit your website to the top directories such as DMOZ (Google). However, since you’re just starting, I don’t recommend this because DMOZ literally accepts less than 1% of all submissions, and your site will probably be among the 99% that get denied. Submit your website to lesser-known but trusted directories that guarantee to index.
Once you’ve submitted your website to at least ten directories, let’s move on to some more ways to earn Traffic. Traffic-exchange sites are good as long as they are MANUAL. NEVER join an auto-surf exchange site, as the Traffic has no value since everything is automated.
Yet another free and effective method to get Traffic is through free classified ads. This is effective as it is not time-consuming, and thousands of top-ranked sites will display your ads for no fee! Just Google “free classifieds,” and you’ll find many websites that allow you to post advertisements for free.
5.) Monetize Your WordPress Blog
So far, it would help if you had a blog that:
- has a unique niche
- has at least 10+ articles/posts
- is hosted by a trusted web hosting service
- has the WordPress blogging platform (duh!)
- has decent Traffic (500+ visitors a day)
- can be found on search engines such as Google
Now it’s time to reap the rewards of your painstakingly hard work! It’s time to make some money $$$! Advertising is the most effective and easiest way to earn a steady income. There are many paths you can take. The most famous advertising service is probably Google AdSense. However, they pay ONLY by check, which may be inconvenient if you wish to be paid by other means, such as PayPal. That’s why there are loads of AdSense alternatives!
Clicksor
Clicksor is probably the main competition to AdSense. Clicksor offers almost every type of advertising you’ll ever need for your blog; it’s an all-in-one solution for monetizing your blog. You can be paid in various ways, which makes Clicksor much more convenient than AdSense.
One major problem with Clicksor and other all-in-one advertising solutions is that the advertising is HORRIBLE for blogs. Some blogs lose Traffic due to advertisements filling up more than 60% of your blog and annoying visitors. You can either take the risk of losing some traffic and making your website ugly, OR you can use an alternative monetizing method: In-Text advertising.
Infolinks
InfoLinks is hands-down THE BEST in-text advertising. In-text advertising is effective because of its limited disturbance in your blog; it chooses random keywords and highlights them, allowing visitors to click them, generating income for the webmaster (in this case, YOU). How can in-text advertising services afford to offer this type of advertising? Advertisers pay sites like InfoLinks to promote their products/services. InfoLinks hands that responsibility to web admins like you and me, and we get paid in return for helping InfoLinks earn money. I hope I haven’t confused you. Put, you get paid for showing links on your blog!
Now, how do we integrate such a great service into our blog? Follow the simple 1-minute integration guide, and you should have in-text advertisements integrated into your blog quickly! InfoLinks has generously created a WordPress widget that you can install into your site.
InfoLinks has a relatively high payout per click (PPC); each click is $0.10 on average. Let’s say you have 500 visitors per day, and 10% (50 people) each click one in-text advertisement per day. That gives you $5.00 a day, translating to over $1,500 a year doing absolutely nothing! And that is only a mere 10% of your daily visitors! You could be earning some high income with InfoLinks. Regarding payment methods, InfoLinks pays by either PayPal or Check. Pretty convenient for me.
Other Monetizing Methods
There are hundreds of ways to monetize your blog, and InfoLinks is just one of them. Another 100% free method is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing works like this: major companies like Microsoft pay you when you help them make a sale. Every time you refer a friend to Microsoft’s website and make a purchase (i.e., Windows 7), you earn a certain percentage of the total sales (usually around 10-15%) from Microsoft. Considering the amount of Traffic you already have, this can be a huge moneymaker. Try this method out, as it is 100% free too! Many money-making solutions now offer WordPress widgets, too, and you can monetize your blog to whatever extent you, please. Just keep in mind that you don’t want more than 20% of your blog to be advertisements =P
6.) Have Fun Earning Some Free Money with your WordPress Blog!
Once you have accomplished all or most of the above, you have created a monetized WordPress blog, earning you around $2000-3000 a year. Remember that more writing = more visitors = more Traffic = more ad-clicking machines = more $$$$$$$$! A significant note is that a monetized blog should not be your main source of income. However, making $2000+ a year is extremely good because your visitors do all the work!
