Blogs are becoming an increasingly relevant part of the media landscape, and an important source of income for many otherwise traditional businesses. When it comes to blogging, few platforms are more popular than WordPress, a free resource you can use to distribute your content. This chain of events has made WordPress an important source of profit in many different ways. Here are a few ways to capitalize on the software.
Start a Blog
This is the most obvious way to earn money using WordPress, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s obvious how to go about accomplishing this. Making money blogging requires a source of traffic, and a way to monetize that traffic. While all the steps necessary to accomplish this won’t fit into a single article, here are a few basic principles you should adhere to:
Develop a social network
The network should consist not only of audience members, but other bloggers who have some influence in the community. You should stay active in this network and treat these people like your friends. This results in a loyal audience and powerful allies.
Research
Learn how to perform serious, quantitative research. Research your market, research your competition, and above all else, research your subject matter. Become an expert in all aspects of your business and show your readers that you get it.
Optimize
Make your site easy to find by including popular keywords in your titles and encouraging your allies to link to your site. Interlink your internal pages in a way that spells out which pages are most important and what each page is about.
Produce staggering content
Every page on your site should offer something that people want and that they can’t easily find elsewhere. Be entertaining, informative, and unique.
Stick to these basic principles and blogging should come easily to you. Remember to be a part of the web, rather than just a source of content. Many of these principles apply to any form of online business you intend to start, including the following alternatives to blogging.
WordPress Customization
Bloggers and businesses who want to stand out from the competition want a site that looks different and fits their business model better than a template. If you learn to develop customized themes for your clients, you can provide them with an advantage that they would be unable to achieve on their own.
Design is an incredibly important part of a business’s online presence. You can use it to send a clear message to their customers and improve the user experience. First impressions can be all it takes to keep a visitor from leaving right off the bat, and this is an important selling point that you can capitalize on.
Selling Themes as Products
Rather than customizing themes for clients, you can also sell premium themes as products. This is a great way to capitalize on the growing relevance of WordPress and the desire for sites to stand out.
Why would anybody pay for a WordPress theme when there are many of them available for free? Premium themes give you a professional edge that most free themes don’t offer. While anybody with some programming knowledge can potentially design their own theme, most people simply don’t have this knowledge.
It’s possible to design WordPress themes that can be easily customized by anybody with some knowledge of computers, and this is a product that is worth paying for.
You don’t necessarily need to set up your own eCommerce site to sell your themes either. There are WordPress marketplaces to sell your themes.
Alternatively, giving away great themes for free to the WordPress community can be a great way to grab attention and promote your brand’s visibility.
This is a great reminder of the true power of the WordPress platform and you havn’t even stratched the surface of everything that is can do. If I had to pick my top three I would go with the following benefits of this particular CMS. 1) Versatility – Only your imagination limits what you can do with graphics and theme set-up. 2) SEO power – because of the base way that this CMS is ordered your SEO efforts are easier to achieve with the proper plugins and setup. 3) So easy to teach how to use. Bringing in new members of my team it only takes a couple of hours to teach someone to be comfortable on how to take the best advantage of this system.
Hi Clint,
thanks on valuable content. Totally agree with “only imagination limits…”
Aw, this was a really nice post. In idea I would like to put in writing like this additionally – taking time and actual effort to make a very good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and by no means seem to get something done.
Hi Janice,
that’s why sometimes is good to promise blogger that you’ll finish post until end of week and set time goals for yourself. This helps in my case.
I was searching through Google and came across this site. This is quite a valuable content. I heard about a recently launched program by wordpress called wordads.
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/
Hi Ademola,
wordads is ppc for wordpress users, but only with wordpress.com account. I didn’t hear a lot about wordads in past 2 months but they started few months ago. It will be great for all bloggers to have a decent alternative to AdSense, am I right?
Very important points here, by reading your post I realize that I do not take enough time to research what my competition does and other fellow friends coaches that do parallel work as I do.
Thanks for this reminder and ll the points you so nicely emphasize here!
Thanks for the reminders you have given here.It’s reflect the very importance of wordpress and the points are very helpfull for all bloggers including me.Thanks again.