About 16% of Americans make money through gig platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and Uber. These are great platforms to earn extra cash, but you’re giving a cut of your earnings to huge companies.
Not only that, you’re still responsible for your costs like gas, taxes, and health insurance.
It’s time to look at other options to make money online. One option is to build a WordPress website and monetize it. Many people have done just that and created a platform for their work.
They’re making money and building a viable business for themselves. Do you want to know what they did and do that for your own WordPress website?
Read on to learn how to make money online with your WordPress website.
1. Choose a Niche
The starting point for WordPress for bloggers is to choose a site topic. You want to make sure that there’s enough interest in your topic and that people will buy something from your site.
Write down a list of things you’re passionate about and can talk about for hours. From that list, check Google Trends and research potential keywords for your site.
Choose a niche where your interests and the interests of your audience align.
Now, decide how you’ll help your audience. Your job is to figure out how you’ll provide enough value to your audience. Research who they are, what their needs are, and how your content will help them.
2. Create a Plan to Make Money Online
Once you have your niche, you can find creative ways to monetize it. You can sell coaching services, memberships, online courses, print-on-demand products, and add affiliate marketing links and more.
It’s best to choose a few ways to make money online. That allows you to increase your average orders and give your customers great service.
For example, you can sell a course online and offer an upsell to coaching. That gives customers more value and accountability as they go through the course.
You can have affiliate links that let you earn money while doing little work.
3. Build a Marketing Plan
The mistake that many people make is that they have only one main source of website traffic. That’s a business killer. Let’s say that your main source of traffic is TikTok.
That’s great until TikTok makes an algorithm change. Your content gets zero engagement and your site gets a little bit of traffic.
That’s the challenge with relying on other companies for your business. They can make a change and you’re powerless to stop it.
The best thing to do is to diversify traffic sources. You can incorporate SEO and one or two social media channels. Just don’t overdo it because you’ll get overwhelmed trying to create a ton of content each day.
4. Find a Great Website Host
The website host you choose determines your success. A slow website causes you to lose traffic and hurts your search engine rankings.
You’ll see a drop in conversions because people won’t wait for your host to serve your website. Any downtime makes your brand look unreliable.
5. Create a Fast Website
Your host isn’t totally responsible for your website’s speed. You have a responsibility to deliver that, too.
It’s fine to use a template for your WordPress website. The issue is that you can choose one that is cumbersome and takes forever to code.
Keep your site’s design simple with images and text. You don’t need anything too flashy or fancy. Those things often take away from the user experience.
Install plugins, but don’t install too many. Too many plugins can slow down your site, too. Keep it to a caching plugin, SEO plugin, and one for website security.
If you’re monetizing your site with affiliate links, you’ll want to know the best Amazon affiliate plugin WordPress, and install it. This allows you to track traffic and conversions on your site.
6. Treat Your Site Like a Business
It’s so much fun to build a WordPress website and monetize it that you can forget that it’s a business. If you treat it like a hobby, you’ll make money online like it’s a hobby.
Treat your WordPress website like it’s a business. That mindset helps you shift into gear and make money. It helps to set goals for your site to give yourself something to work towards.
7. Create Content Consistently
Your audience and search engines want to be able to trust your website and brand. The best way to do that is to show them you’re reliable.
Create content consistently and you’ll be able to build your audience and get found on search engines. You don’t have to post something every day.
Create a schedule that you can stick to. Most people start out posting once a week. That’s enough to deliver value and build up your site.
8. Check Your Conversions
It’s not enough to just build a website and drive traffic to it. That traffic has to take action and convert.
Check your conversion rates regularly. If you find that they’re low, check the traffic sources and bounce rate. It could be that you’re driving the wrong kind of traffic to your site.
9. Don’t Give Up Too Quickly
It takes time to make money online. Don’t let people fool you into thinking that you can make money online in 30 days or less.
You need to have patience and perseverance after you build your WordPress website. Don’t give up when things take longer than you’d like.
Keep optimizing and improving. Once you make your first dollar online, you’ll find that it’s easier to make more and more money.
Build a WordPress Website and Make Money Online
These tips showed you how to build a WordPress website and make money online. Put them to use and you’ll be able to have your own business. You can apply these tips to multiple websites and create a publishing empire.
Check out the blog often for more WordPress tips and more on how to get more traffic to your site.