3 More Money-Spinners For Your Established WordPress Blog

We recently published an article on some Smarter Ways to Earn Money With Your WordPress Blog, where premium content, directories, and blogging networks were suggested.

Today, I’m here to expand upon that list and give you some more ideas as to how you can monetize your WordPress blog. The fact is, if you write great content and get a lot of love from your audience, your blog may be able to do more for you than you think.

1. Create A Product

This may sound daunting, but the fact is, you have already created a product! How many pages of quality content do you already have on your blog? All you need to do use that existing content and/or expand upon it, in a format that people will be willing to pay for.

Say you have been running a pretty successful blog for some time, but your content has primarily been in a written format. You could blow your readers away by producing a 10-part video series and charging $50 for it. Or you could consolidate and hone your best content into an easily-digestible eBook.

I am just scratching the surface here – let your imagination run wild!

2. Provide A Service

If you have been blogging for some time and have been doing it for love, not money, then you clearly have a passion for your chosen topic. Why not leverage that passion and provide a service for your readers?

Let me come out of left field here and give you quite an unusual example, in order to emphasize how possible it is to use the power of your blog’s reach to make money through service provision.

Say you are really passionate about your home. You have spent years designing and decorating, and have finally got something that you are really proud of. Not only that, your readers seem suitably impressed too. Now consider this – your audience (a) are interested in interior design, and (b) like your work. Don’t they sound like an ideal client for your interior design expertise? You barely even have to sell them on your services – they already love what you do!

If you want to know more about service provision, or perhaps even making your blog your living, then check out Siobhan’s great post on Building Your Own Freelance Business Around WordPress.

3. Affiliate Marketing

This one gets a bad rep, and on the whole, with good reason. The internet is flooded with internet marketers who are trying to make a quick buck from promoting products that they often don’t even use. Typically, they add no real value to the buying process whatsoever.

But we are not talking about that kind of affiliate marketing. We are talking about honest, added-value affiliate marketing.

You already have an established audience who like what you have to offer. You probably use products related to your blog’s topic. There is no conflict of interest in recommending your most favored products to your audience. As long as you remain honest in your appraisals and never compromise on your content, affiliate marketing can be an extremely easy way to generate an income from your blog. And don’t worry about having to become a salesman, because you don’t. Just recommend what you believe are good products, and let the audience make the decision for themselves.

We’ve got you covered for getting started out with affiliate marketing – just check out Sarah’s post on building your own affiliate program.

A Caveat – Consider Your Audience

Certain niches are extremely difficult to make money from. Sometimes, your audience is just not ready to spend money. Or perhaps your niche is one that doesn’t actually require a financial investment.

If the above 3 methods are not practically possible for your niche, you do always have advertising to fall back onto. If your niche is not particularly commercial, then you are unlikely to make a great deal of money, but something is better than nothing, right? If you are able to recoup the cost of doing something that you love, at a bare minimum, then you have the ability to carry on with your passion, which can’t be a bad thing.

How about you? Can you think of any other monetization methods? Can you give examples of methods that you have used on your own blog? Let us know in the comments section below!

Creative commons photos courtesy of brooksmemorial, Brent Chee, Robbie Virus and Matthew Stubstad

Tags:

• blogging
• marketing
• video