Can you make money on WordPress?…Yes, you certainly can! In fact, WordPress has made it easier for hundreds of thousands of people to make money blogging.
WP is the most well-known and widely used blog platform out there, having both a web-based hosted version as well as a downloadable self installation version. With its broad usage, there’s a huge potential for making money with WordPress.
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Making money through WordPress comes down to two different categories. The very first is making use of WordPress as it’s meant and developing a blog or website with it, then somehow monetizing it to earn an income. The second option would be utilizing the huge market for development, designing as well as customizing blogs for others.
Here are some of the best ways you can take advantage of WordPress and make money with it:
1. Building Your Own WP Based Blog
The very first option to make money from WP would be to utilize it for what it is actually designed for, which is building and running great blogs with ease.
There are many practical ways to make money blogging. The primary means of earning money through blogs, whether built using WordPress or another platforms is through ads. Displaying ads on blogs can include anything from text ads and banner ads to in-text ads and other forms of advertising. The biggest and most well-known ad network out there is Google Adsense which many thousands of bloggers use to monetize their blogs with.
In addition, you can also earn money through WordPress blog through promoting affiliate products as well as promoting and selling your own products such as e-Books and short reports.
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2. Programming & Designing WordPress Blogs
There are millions of people who use WordPress to publish blogs. As reported by Builtwith.com, around 79% of all blogs are built on WordPress platform. And almost every single one of those bloggers need some kind of help when it comes to building and maintaining their WP based blogs. You can take advantage of this need and earn money by providing services that address such needs.
- Designing templates for WordPress
By far the biggest way people make money from WordPress is through designing and selling WordPress themes. An average premium WP template can go anywhere from $30 to up to $100 or more. And considering the fact that you can sell the same template over and over again, it’s easy to see why so many websites focus on providing WP based themes exist out there.
- Customizing WordPress Themes
Another way to earn money using WordPress is by providing customization services to bloggers and also theme designers who need extra help customizing specific themes to meet the needs of a specific clients.
Customization work can be as simple and quick as changing a header image or as complicated and technical as changing the whole lay out of a site.
- WordPress Logo
A header or logo is any blog’s first impression, which is why blog owners are willing to pay a lot of money to make the right impression on their would be customers. Custom headers can sell anywhere from $5 (on sites like Fiverr!) for very simple headers to up to $500 or more for extremely great headers.
- Converting Existing Blogs To WordPress
There are many bloggers and site owners who found WP a little too late. They have established sites that they have worked on for years. They can’t just leave the site and build another from scratch. Instead, they hire people who can convert their existing sites to a WP based website.
Potential clients can include blogger who are using Blogger platform or perhaps other content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, and also website owners with static sites that want to convert their site into a database driven site with WordPress.
Work can include setting up the themes and essential plugins, moving database and the content and perhaps SEOing the new WP blog in order to keep the flow of traffic coming in, as well as redirecting URLs.
- Adding e-Commerce Features To WordPress Blogs
Although, WP is predominantly a blog platform, it can be used as an e-commerce site as well. All it takes is someone who knows how and what things to tweak to turn a normal website into a money-making e-commerce site. And that person can be you!
I saw an ad recently on eLance where someone was willing to pay up to $5000 for a plugin that could segment text and banner ads. While any one single plugin isn’t going to get you that much money, considering the fact that you can sell it over and over to thousands of WordPress users, it’s easy to see how one can build a real online business by creating and customizing plugins for WordPress.
- Creating / Customizing Plugins
When it comes to plugins, WordPress has the most number of plugins out there making it easy for anyone to modify their blog to their liking, and that is why 79% of the blogs are built using WP. If you can build plugins, you can make lots of money.
You can also work on existing (free) plugins and customize them to meet the needs of your clients. For example, some plugins may interfere with other plugins or the functionality of the blog as a whole, you can offer to tweak the plugin to make it compatible with the blog and other plugins.
I saw an ad recently on eLance where someone was willing to pay up to $5000 for a plugin that could segment text and banner ads. While any single plugin isn’t going to get you that much money, considering the fact that you can sell it over and over to thousands of WordPress users, it’s easy to see how one can build a real online business by creating and customizing plugins for WordPress.
As you can see, there are lots of ways you can earn money with WordPress. But for me personally, what WordPress has allowed me to do is the ability to focus on creating content and promoting my blogs without having to spend too much time on the building of the blog itself, as WordPress makes it incredibly easy for anyone to get a blog up and running in no time.
And that (being able to put more of my time and effort towards creating quality and hopefully useful content and promoting my blog), has allowed me to make money with my WordPress blogs faster and easier.