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Definitely one of the more common questions I receive is “how do I monetize my WordPress blog?”.

Many beginner bloggers get to the point where they set up their WordPress website, start publishing content and then are completely lost when it comes to monetizing it to earn extra income.

First, let me say that you must make sure that you are not starting a blog just for the sake of making money.

This is a sure fire way to fail and not generate a loyal following/readership.

On the other hand, if you are blogging to provide value instead of blogging strictly for income, then monetizing your website in certain ways can really pay off.

Of course as bloggers we want to earn some revenue from our efforts, but always be sure to put your readers first by answering questions, solving problems, providing solutions and producing high-quality content.

From there, the income will follow!

With that out of the way, let’s go over 6 practical methods on how to monetize a WordPress blog.

6 Methods for Monetizing Your WordPress Blog

A quick recommendation is to first focus on building up your blog a bit before you begin to monetize it heavily. Try to gain a little momentum first and generate a steady stream of traffic before trying the methods below. This way you will learn the foundational steps of content generation, search engine optimization, traffic generation etc., before you worry too much about earning an income. Once you gain more and more traction, these WordPress monetization strategies below will be a great way to get started.

1.) Build Your Email List

Any and every blogger should be building their email list. This is one of the best ways to monetize your WordPress blog as it offers a direct line of communication for those who opt-in to your list. You can simply place an opt-in form in your side widgets, at the top/bottom of your website, or trigger an exit pop-up whenever someone tries to leave your website (see screenshot below of my side widget email opt-in form). There are many WordPress plugins and tools to help you create attractive subscription forms. To entice people to subscribe to your email list, make sure you offer them something for free in return for their email address. This could be a free video training series, e-book, webinar, coaching call etc. Make this a valuable giveaway to have a better chance of people buying your paid products in the future, further along in your funnel. Build up the trust right from the start.

You’ll want to create an email follow-up series for your subscribers as well (7 days worth of automated emails or longer is recommended). A pretty good rule of thumb is to provide 80% informational/helpful emails and 20% that are promotional/sell your services or products. If you were to just sell to your subscribers in every email, they would quickly and easily hit the “unsubscribe” button and never return. Collecting email addresses and building a relationship with your email subscribers is one of the best ways a blogger can monetize their WordPress website. Eventually this can be an incredible way to earn income from your blog.

For bloggers, the email marketing software I highly recommend is ConverKit. They offer flexible pricing and also a free account for people to test out their services. You can also read my full ConvertKit review here to get more details!

2.) Affiliate Marketing (Recommend/Sell Products You Personally Use)

This has been a great monetization strategy for me personally and I would say one of the easier methods bloggers can try out for themselves. Affiliate marketing is actually how I made my first ever sale from my WordPress blog. I sold a simple web hosting package from HostGator and made $65!

Affiliate marketing is when you sell someone else’s product and earn a certain percentage of each commission. One of the simplest and most ethical ways to approach affiliate marketing is to recommend products to your visitors and email list that you personally use or have used in the past. Make sure these are high-quality products that you think would benefit the readers of your blog. For example, I have a dedicated page on my website “Recommended Tools” that shows people some of the services that I use to run my online business. This page contains affiliate links to these particular internet marketing tools and I’ve also added this page to my main navigation for increased visibility (see screenshot below).

Another form of affiliate marketing you can try is writing product reviews on your website. So this would be individual blog posts crafted around a particular product you’ve tried. If you optimize these properly, they have a great chance of getting ranked highly on Google which can in return generate targeted traffic for the life of that post. You can review products you’ve both liked and disliked. For the blog posts of products you’ve disliked, you can recommend a better alternative product with your affiliate link at the end of the article. I see this method being used a lot. Just make sure you write these product reviews in moderation. You want most of your content to be valuable and informational. But by all means, every once in a while, throw a product review into the mix. This could really be helpful to people who are maybe on the fence about a particular product. There’s also a lot of monthly search volume for “review” type keywords, which makes this strategy very effective.

Examples: To see an example of a post that earns me affiliate commissions on autopilot, check this out. Also, I wanted to highlight one of my coaching students Chuck from CigarPals.com, who utilizes this method to create really high-quality cigar reviews, see here.

3.) Sell Your Own Products

Selling your own products can be a great way to earn an income from your WordPress blog. There are many different types of products a blogger can create and then sell. For example, I see bloggers selling e-books, video courses, webinar series, software, marketing tools, physical books, clothing, music, artwork, graphics and much more. What you sell as a blogger really depends on your type of website and the niche you operate in. The powerful thing about selling your own products is that 100% of the earnings are yours (unlike affiliate marketing). If you have a good product or product line that you’ve created, sky is truly the limit to how much you can earn from your website.

4.) Sell Coaching or Consulting Services

Selling coaching or consulting services can be a great monetization strategy for many bloggers. Even if you know just a little bit more about a particular topic than someone else, your information is valuable and can earn you an extra income stream. Now if you truly specialize in something, that’s where the big money can be earned. For me personally, my coaching/consulting is the biggest income generator for my website. It’s also the most predicable as people are constantly looking for additional help and support in a given area.

Once your blog starts generating more traffic, simply set up a designated page to explain your expertise and coaching program. Add a contact form and/or your email address so people can get in touch with you. I like to offer a free 30 minute phone call to both screen and incentivize potential clients. Again, it’s all about providing value upfront first before asking for payment. When gaining momentum with your coaching business, you may find that you have more clients and coaching inquiries that you can handle. This is actually a good problem to have as you can be selective with who you take on board and also charge premium pricing since your time is limited. Be sure to collect testimonials as you grow this part of your business and add them to your coaching page for more credibility. Some tools that have really helped grow my coaching business are Calendly (scheduling), Zoom (screensharing software), ConvertKit (email marketing software), Google Docs & Sheets (homework assignments and reporting) and Elementor (WordPress page builder).

Pro Coaching Tip: If you provide good coaching services to customers, you will be surprised at how many people start referring your services to others. When you get to this point, you can even pay the referrer a certain % of each sale. This is a win-win as current clients will earn money from referring others and you will continue growing your customer base. You can have an army of people marketing your coaching program just because you are providing top notch services. Talk about word of mouth!

5.) Accept Sponsored Blog Content

Another great way for bloggers to monetize their website is by accepting sponsored content. For this strategy, you will need to build up the authority of your blog a bit first and make sure you already have a sufficient amount of content on your website. This strategy is a win-win situation for all parties involved. The publisher gets fresh/unique content for their website and the guest contributor gets more exposure and a backlink to their blog.

The higher your domain authority is and the more traffic you have coming into your website, the more you can charge per sponsored posts. I’ve seen people charging anywhere from $25-$1,000 an article. This can really add up to an additional and consistent stream of income overtime, plus you’ll be getting fresh content to upload to your website. If you do decide to implement the sponsored content advertising strategy on your own WordPress blog, make sure you watch my video here first. Please leave me a “comment” and a “like” and let me know if you have any questions. It covers a lot of ground about sponsored content and provides great insight to get the most out of this particular tactic.

Pro Sponsored Content Tip: Only accept the highest quality content and spot-check any sponsored content submissions with a plagiarism tool such as CopyScape. You only want to publish 100% unique content that will be valuable and helpful to your readers. Duplicate content (that’s been published elsewhere) will do your website no good whatsoever.

6.) Banner Advertising

A simple and popular way to monetize your blog further is through banner advertising. You can either place your own banners on your website to personal and/or affiliate products OR you can sell that space for other companies to advertise their product(s). If you sell advertising space to other companies, you will need to be able to provide them with metrics of your website so they see the value in this. I personally like only using one banner ad on my website, that links to an affiliate product or one of my own products. The more banner ads you put on your website, the more it can tend to clog things up and take away from the content a bit. Make sure to not overdue this strategy and in my opinion, more is less here.

Wrapping Up

Now these are monetization strategies that I personally use on a regular basis, but of course there are additional methods you can try. I didn’t mention tactics such as Google Adsense, Creating Restricted Membership Content, Accepting Donations etc., for example, but know that the possibilities are endless when it comes to monetizing a WordPress blog. Adopt a monetization strategy that works for you and that is unique to your own blogging business. Something that works for one website, may not necessarily be the best method for yours. It’s best to get your feet wet and test the waters to see what yields the most results for your WordPress blog.

If you’re looking for additional help on how to monetize your WordPress blog, make sure to check out my blog coaching services here!

How are you currently monetizing your WordPress blog?

I was inspired to write today’s post based on a recent coaching call I had with one of my clients.

Sometimes my best blog article ideas come from the questions and/or the situations I experience when working with different bloggers and companies.

Basically, my client Santanna was a fairly newer blogger and I noticed just from manually navigating her website that we needed to drastically improve the loading speed from page to page.

She had numerous high-quality images uploaded to her blog posts and pages which was great, but I had a hunch that this was part of the reason her website was so slow.

Most beginner bloggers do not realize that if your images are not compressed properly, it can negatively affect the website’s loading speed.

So the process we took with Santanna’s blog was as follows:

1. I plugged her website into a free online tool that analyzes page speed and provides recommendations based on what can be improved. I like using GTmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com/) and/or Google’s PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) for website speed tests. This generally only takes 30 seconds to a minute to run.
2. GTmetrix confirmed my suspicion and let us know that Santanna’s blog images were not compressed/optimized for speed. It also revealed that her overall loading speed was right around 14 seconds, yikes!
3. Next, I had Santanna install a very simple WordPress plugin call Smush which with a simple click of the mouse compressed all of her images and reduced their file sizes.
4. We re-tested her website after the Smush process was complete and were pretty amazed to see that we shaved off over 10 seconds in loading time according to GTmetrix! This test showed her website speed now at 3 seconds compared to 14 seconds from the first test. And just from utilizing this one simple plugin.

Now there are many different ways to improve loading speed and every website will require a unique approach. In fact, I wrote an entire post on the steps I took to improve my own website speed here.

But starting with the images is a good first step for many bloggers to get things loading a bit quicker.

If you know that your images can use compressing/optimizing, follow the steps below to install Smush and run a before & after test using GTmetrix.

1.) First, Test Your Initial Website Speed (Before Test)

Again I recommend using GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test your website speed.

Simply paste your URL into GTmetrix and hit “Test your site” (see screenshot below):

Next, let the tool run and analyze the data it provides. If your images need compressing you will most likely see a “C, D or F” rating next to “Optimize images” and an orange or red bar. The screenshot below reveals that my website images are well optimized already and compressed which is why you see a “B” rating and it showing green. You will also see a section for “Fully Loaded Time” in seconds, which is highlighted in the image below as well:

 

This will be your “Before” test that you can use as a benchmark. At the end, you will want to compare this to your “After” test once you install the Smush plugin, which brings us to the next step.

2.) Next Install The Smush Plugin for WordPress

Now we will want to install the Smush plugin for your WordPress website.

• To do this, make sure you’re logged into your WordPress dashboard and click “Plugins” in your left navigation menu and then “Add New”.
• Next search for “Smush” and select “Install Now”.
• Lastly, hit “Activate”.

Now find the Smush plugin that you downloaded in your left navigation. Smush will most likely take you through a quick setup process and all you need to do is select “BULK SMUSH NOW”. See screenshot below:

Let the Smush process run and it’s as simple as that!

You images will now be compressed.

Now we are ready for our “After” test.

3.)Lastly, Re-Test Your Website Speed (After Test)

Now the final step is to re-test your website in GTmetrix to see if there’s been any improvements in speed and performance.

Follow the same exact process laid out in step #1 above.

Analyze both the “Fully Loaded Time” and “Optimize images” section to see if you notice any progress.

If your images were not compressed prior, this should really help improve your overall website speed!

Wrapping Up:

Website speed is an area that you should look into consistently. You will want to re-visit this on a monthly basis and make a high-priority. Not only does this help with overall user-experience, but it also can improve your SEO. Google would much rather rank a website that is fast loading compared to one that is sluggish to provide their users with the best possible experience. Also, it’s recommended to check into other ways that you can improve your WordPress website speed outside of just compressing/optimizing images. This is just one area of many that can help your pages and posts load faster.

If you’re a blogger looking for additional guidance and coaching, make sure you visit my page here!

Are you currently using Smush or a similar plugin?

The web has become a very resourceful place for sharing information with the public that anyone can readily and easily access. Content gets uploaded daily from various channels and platforms. However, not everyone prefers to expose themselves personally when creating and publishing content which is totally understandable. As a result, people are increasingly inquiring about how to start an anonymous blog.

Starting an anonymous blog requires you to adhere to some important steps in order to be successful with it. To learn more about how to blog anonymously, continue reading.

Steps on How to Start & Create an Anonymous blog

If you are wondering how to start an anonymous blog, it is relatively easy, but you need to follow some critical steps as outlined below:

Purchase a Domain

The first step should be purchasing a domain domain (I recommend HostGator for their competitive pricing and quality support) but ensure that it doesn’t have your real name. However, it should be something appealing and one that you can easily connect with. You can use a domain name generator which would be of great assistance in giving you some ideas to align your name with your blog.

Design an Anonymous Email That Fits With Your Domain Name

Make sure you create a new email for your blog that matches your domain name. Note that while indicating your log-in details, you can easily expose your privacy. Therefore, refrain from using your email in the privacy policy section, contact form, or other areas to ensure that you remain anonymous.

Ensure that you set up a Secure Domain name and Web Hosting

Keep in mind that anyone can look into a blog and know who owns a specific domain name within a few clicks. Therefore, you need to keep your details private to maintain anonymous blogging. Hence, it’s worth investing in a proven system that adds an extra privacy level to your site.

Hostgator is a reliable web host to sign up for and create your domain. Upon purchasing your web hosting account and domain name, you have the option of adding additional privacy so your information remains hidden.

You can rest easy knowing that your blog is anonymous; thus, your information remains private. Note that you will probably still receive occasional spam emails and calls but in very minimal volumes compared to when you don’t have domain name privacy.

Create your Social Media Accounts

The next stage is to create your social media accounts for your blog. Remember to use an email address that does not contain your name. Also, avoid linking any account to your original identity/personal profiles.

Join Forums

Joining various forums is a great way to know what your audience would be interested in, what they would want to have, among many. Therefore, you will see the type of content that favors most of your target population. Some platforms that would be of great help include Reddit and Quora, or any other within your niche. You can also post anonymously on forums, so it’s a great way to make connections, gain additional insight and direct people to your blog.

Tips on How to Start an Anonymous Blog and Thrive

Here are some tips to keep in mind while starting your anonymous blogging journey;

Keep your Content Anonymous

You may have tried your best to keep everything incognito, but you can easily slip up if you share some personal details. Before sharing any information, it would help if you give it a second thought. Some of the elements to watch out for include; your profession, the car you own, the dog breed you have, and where you went to school. No matter how casual the details may seem, any of them may compromise your secrecy.

Note that readers are interested in the experiences and messages you share. You, therefore, need to put more emphasis on the emotions and give in-depth information on all details. Besides, you don’t have to go into specificity to ensure that your story is interesting.

Also, avoid sharing some day to day activities such as a voting exercise you participated in or a conference you attended. In case someone decides to dig into your data, they might end up discovering your identity. Therefore, be careful not to expose your location, the activities you commonly indulge in, and more.

Keep your Backend Anonymous

A majority of the anonymous bloggers who have been found on the internet is due to technical errors. Some of the elements to look out for include;

• Using your email – Avoid using your personal email since it can be traced back. Therefore, ensure that you create an email that’s the name of your blog and not your personal name.
• Registration of your URL – Remember to select private when registering your blog’s URL, to make it harder for anyone to dig into your details.
• Linkable Accounts – There are several sign-in services available online that enhance your blog. However, it would help to avoid using similar details to log-in to your blog and personal accounts.

Be Cautious on Social Media

Social media has taken over almost every aspect of our lives, but you may expose your anonymous blogging if you are not cautious with what you post. Here are some things you need to avoid;

• Liking your content or following yourself – In your blog’s initial stages, you may be tempted to like your accounts on various social media accounts. However, this is a wrong move since you risk being outed by family and friends. For instance, Twitter shows whom you follow and what you’ve liked among your followers’ recommendations and timelines.
• Connecting your email to your blog accounts – Whenever you sign up for your blog Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, use only your anonymous email address. Note that the backend of various social media platforms can lead to exposure; thus, you need to be cautious.Facebook is one of the sites that is a bit tricky to use since you need a page that gets aligned to your profile. Therefore, you need to be creative in designing a convincing name and other updates on your timeline. For instance, regardless of how cute a photo may be, avoid uploading it on your anonymous blog and personal account. Also, be cautious not to like something that would show up on peoples’ feed.

Keep Numbers Anonymous

You may overlook the aspect of sharing numbers on your blog, but it would be best to avoid sharing any real numbers. Indicating a single variable could be the lead opener towards discovering a whole bunch that eventually expose your identity.

Keep your Photos Anonymous

Photos are a significant factor that can give away your privacy; thus, you need to adhere to the following privacy measures;

• Avoid recognizable objects or locations

You may post a photo assuming that the background is a rare location, but it may be well known to another person.

• Avoid photos that you have posted elsewhere

Using the same pictures on your blog and personal social media sites like Facebook is a dead giveaway for your privacy. If someone conducts a reverse image search on such images, it will quickly expose your anonymity. Therefore, make sure you use completely new pics that you have never used in any online platform.

• Avoid recognizable people

Avoid scenarios where you show any pictures with a person who is tied to you. Remember, facial recognition is a rapidly growing technology; thus, a face without a name can be unearthed within a short time.

• Remove location tags

When you take pics with a GPS enabled camera or a smartphone, your location tags get stored in the picture’s metadata. In case a technical guru takes a keen look into the titles, especially when you are near buildings, they can quickly tell your location. You, therefore, need to ensure that your location details are off to prevent such occurrences.

Encrypt your Digital Presence

You may be using a different identity, but your location can still get exposed through the IP address. If you use a work or home computer, the information can easily leak into third parties.

You can utilize VPN to mask your real internet location, which also encrypts your internet traffic. It makes hackers’ efforts difficult if they try to figure out your region. Besides, it’s legal to use this technique but ensure you choose an option that doesn’t affect your system’s performance or throttle your connection.

Stay Offline as long as Possible

You may be used to writing directly on CMS or WordPress, but this method may eventually expose you. Note that the more time you spend online, the higher your chance of leaving digital footprints. Therefore, do all the writing, proofreading, and editing of all your posts while you are offline. You can use some text editors such as Pages, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word.

Once you have the final draft, remember to delete the files from your device to erase any evidence when someone uses your desktop.

How to Generate Traffic While Still Blogging Anonymously

When you start an anonymous blog, it isn’t easy to get traffic since people do not know you. Moreover, you are not sure when your blog will get the amount of attention you expect. However, it’s still possible to achieve this goal provided you remain patient since your primary motive is maintaining a secret identity.

Some techniques that you can utilize to get traffic to your anonymous blog include;

Participate in Different Forums

Remember that you already joined forums; thus, go ahead and be an active member. Participate by answering questions and remain honest. This can be a great strategy to drive free targeted traffic to your blog.

Create a Pinterest Account and Promote your Posts

In most cases, putting your focus on one account is a good strategy. However, a Pinterest account is a good addition in case you want to start an anonymous blog on topics such as;

• Fashion
• Style
• Photography
• Travel
• Design
• Beauty
• DIY and crafts
• Health and wellness
• Quotes and inspiration
• Food and drinks

Using Pinterest when creating the above content types increases your conversion rates and other terms of sales. Additionally, it increases your viewers and grows your list of blog followers.

Promote your blog via Instagram and Facebook

Using either Facebook or Instagram to promote your blog is an excellent and cost-effective method. It helps you grow your account while also promoting a specific article. With time, you can have a community within the social media platforms that can get instant notifications whenever you publish a new post.

Note that you need to keep your audience engaged continuously in every channel that you create. It leads to a continuous increase in your target audience.

Post on Medium

Medium is another great platform that you can post your blogs. You need to import your content, make the necessary editing, and click on publish. The tool shows the number of people who viewed your articles and how many went through the whole text.

When your article is among the top stories, it gets featured in a daily email digest, app, and website. Additionally, you can potentially get discovered by large publishers who need authors.

One significant advantage of posting in Medium is the assurance of getting legit engagements and followers. Also, you don’t need to come up with new content each time; thus, you can syndicate your existing work and still attract more people. Additionally, most of the hot topics do well on this platform on areas such as;

• Technology
• Entrepreneurship
• Technology
• Life learning
• Politics
• Culture

SEO & Create Long Form Blog Posts

Another critical step to generating traffic as an anonymous blogger is making sure you focus on SEO and also crafting high-quality and long-form blog content. Google loves comprehensive and helpful content more than ever and this could be an excellent way to rank for specific keywords. This in return will help drive targeted traffic to your anonymous blog and build your following.

Conclusion

The above guide on how to start an anonymous blog, aims at giving a clear picture of how to start a website without putting your personal information out there. You may have many reasons why you want to start your secret blogging journey, and hopefully, this piece of content will help you achieve your goals.

Remember to be consistent with your posts on various social media platforms, engage your audience in different forums and focus heavily on SEO. As a result, you will generate quality content that will boost your traffic.

If you’re interested in one-on-one blog coaching, get in touch with me here to see if you’d be a good fit for my program!