On today’s episode we talk about four ways to monetize your WordPress website. Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today we are going to be talking about four different ways that we can make money with our websites. Isn’t that the point of most of our websites and blogs? We wanna actually make money from having these websites that are online. So we’ll talk about that in just a couple minutes.

I do have a couple announcements that I do wanna talk about. The first one is about the WordPress webinar. It is happening this Friday. That’s October 2 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time. And we’ll be talking about PHP for WordPress beginners. Last month we talked a little bit about HTML and CSS and this month we’re gonna dive into a little bit more of the coding type of things that happen within WordPress. WordPress is completely built up of PHP. That’s the main source code that’s behind WordPress.

We’re gonna talk about the beginning steps and how to learn WordPress and how we can understand how to tweak different WordPress things within PHP. We’re gonna learn some of the very basic things. Some of the things like how you can add a copyright that pulls the current year automatically using PHP, so you don’t have to go and change your footer every year to have the right copyright date. Small, little things like that. That’s what we’re gonna talk about. It’s not going to be highly intense, but it is going to give you a good overview of what PHP is and how it works within WordPress. So if you’re interested head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar and you can register today and sign up for that webinar.

I also just wanna give you a reminder – there’s not a lot of news in the WordPress space this week, so I just wanna give you a reminder that I am doing a new rotation within Automattic. I’m now inside the Woo area so I’m doing support for Woo themes and for the plugin Sensei, which is the e-commerce – or, it’s the e-learning environment that – the e-learning platform by Woo themes. So I’m learning a ton about that and so I’m getting ready to do some shows about that plugin in the upcoming future and some of the other things that are happening inside of Woo themes. It’s kind of a neat opportunity that I get because I normally do WordPress.com support each and every day and I’m doing a small rotation just to kind of give me a break and let me see some new things.

So that’s really exciting and I’m learning a lot of really cool things, doing a lot of troubleshooting and spinning up servers and trying some things out and helping people with code and stuff, which is really exciting for me. So I just wanted to share that because, again, there’s really no other news in the WordPress space this week.

The plugin for that section today, I found a cool plugin called YouTube Channel Gallery. And this is a plugin that will allow you to show a YouTube video and a gallery of thumbnails for your YouTube channel. So if you are big into YouTube and maybe you just wanted to put on, highlight this, on your website somewhere, maybe on a video page, maybe on – you know, somewhere on your site, this is kind of a really cool way to do it. Basically you add your YouTube video API key and then you can customize this thing a little bit. And you can say what your video type is whether it’s updated by user, or things that you like, or things like that. You put your YouTube ID, your user ID and stuff in there, and you just kind of fill out the form in the widget area and you can use it as a widget or you can use it on a page or post.

And it basically will go out there and pull in, depending on how many – the number that you actually give it, it pulls in a big image at the top or a big video at the top and then a bunch of little thumbnails down below. And it also gives a link that can take your user back to your YouTube channel when they click the show more videos button. Kind of a neat plugin, it’s something out there that’s for a specific type of person. It’s got more than 50,000 downloads. It was just recently updated so it got 50 five star reviews. So it is a very highly, highly used plugin. So if you have a need for a YouTube channel or a gallery for your YouTube channel on your website, I’d definitely check out YouTube Channel Gallery.

All right. Let’s move on to the main section of the show today. I did get a question about, I don’t know; let’s see, back in May so I’m finally getting to answer the question. But basically the question was how can I make money with my WordPress website? And that’s really a big overarching question because there’s tons of ways that you can make money on your website. And I decided to talk about four different ways today that you can make money without having to sell something. Without having to install WooCommerce or another e-commerce plugin to actually sell digital – to sell real products. You’re not shipping out widgets, you’re not sending out books, things along those lines. These are all ways that you can actively make money from your website without actually having to go out and ship anything or send people to the people that are “buying things” from your website.

So the first one, the first way to monetize your website is affiliate links. And this is the main way that I monetize yourwebsiteengineer.com. All the products and services and things that I recommend on the resources page, those are affiliate links. They’re special links that give a credit to me in some way, shape, or form when somebody purchases by using that link. So for example, I have a bunch of these links on yourwebsiteengineer.com/resources and then if you click on one of those links it normally sets some sort of cookie in the browser and redirects through a special URL that lets the business or the owner of the company know that, “Hey, Dustin sent this person to the link.” And then depending on the company, they give different payouts, if you will. So I know that on Hover, which is the domain registrar that I use, I know that if somebody uses my affiliate link and purchases a domain I make $2.00 on the sale.

Now, I’m not gonna get rich when the $2.00 comes in, but if you’re sending hundreds of people, you know, hundreds of people times $2.00, that could be significant amount of money. There’s just different ways that things get paid out. Dropbox has a referral code and with Dropbox if somebody uses my affiliate link, I will actually get an extra 250 megabytes to my account. Dropbox starts out with a two gig cap. You have two gigs for free and then you pay for more if you like, but I’m up to like 24 gigs because I have so many people using my affiliate link for Dropbox. So that’s another way that people can – again, that’s not monetizing. I can’t make money with Dropbox, but I do get a benefit of added space. There’s hosting companies that are out there that will pay out very large commissions, anywhere between like $50.00 and $150.00 per signup and that depends on the hosting company and how big of a platform they’re using or things along those lines.

AWeber is a service that will pay you monthly. So if somebody signs up for AWeber using an affiliate link, then that person will make reoccurring commissions every month as long as that person is a member of AWeber. So there’s different ways that the affiliate links work. But I find that they actually can make a significant amount of money. I know that my friend Pat Flynn, he makes like $20,000.00 a month, just based on Bluehost. He has an affiliate link with Bluehost and people click on the Bluehost link, they sign up for hosting and then he makes whatever that rate is per click. He makes a ton of money just using Bluehost affiliate links on his website.

Now, a couple ways that you can generate more income when it comes to affiliate links, is you can create training products on how to use that product or just free training guides. I know that Pat Flynn has How to Set up Your Blog in Four Minutes. He’s got a video that he created years ago that people click on that link; they follow the steps in the link. And those steps walk them through how to go to his affiliate link, how to sign up for Bluehost and get started and get WordPress all set up and going. So that’s one thing you can do. You could create a free training, here’s a video, here’s how to do it, and then people can sign up.

Another thing that I think Pat does on some of his affiliate links; he offers bonus downloads if you email a receipt of their purchase. So this is kind of another unique thing. You wanna know how I set up this plugin? Go ahead and forward me your receipt and then you’ll automatically get the information that you want. So I think that’s another really neat thing that you could promote your listening or your following to purchase your product by giving them something free in addition to buying it. Granted, a lot of these things like the offer of bonus download, that necessarily, they could buy it without using your affiliate link and then you can send it to them. But that’s all generally being a good willed person and just giving them the information anyways. Not to do double, triple checking, did they buy from my affiliate? Did they not? It’s not that big of deal, but you just wanna make sure that you’re adding value. You’re giving them extra value by allowing them to use an affiliate link.

Another way affiliate links sometimes work is sometimes you get a coupon code. So sometimes you will be able to give a coupon code to your audience and then they will be able to save money within that. So most of the time affiliate links are…they’re not gonna cost the end user any more, but if you have a coupon code, that’s another way that sometimes companies track things. So maybe I have a coupon code for something, and I think the code that I have for Hover will actually give you $1.50 off the domain, plus then they give me $2.00. So it’s a win-win for the end user because they’re getting the best value they can get and you are getting a small kickback on the product or services that they’re purchasing. So that’s something about affiliate links. I really like affiliate links. You can really tailor those how you want them.

Another thing you can do with affiliate links is you can send them out in email newsletters. You could say – you could have a featured affiliate, or a featured product or service, or things along those lines and send those out in weekly newsletters. The one thing you do have to be careful about is you have to disclose that you are using affiliate links so that people will know that, hey, there are affiliate links on that. And it’s as simple as putting a little statement at the bottom of an email. I have a statement at the bottom of my resources page or at the bottom of my website in general saying that some links may be affiliate links if they’re on my website.

One last thing to think about when it comes to affiliate links is, one thing that I do for podcasting is I use a plugin called Pretty Link Lite and that allows me to create a pretty link for those specific URLs for my affiliate link. So all affiliate links have a special URL that’s distinctly unique to you. How that works is, like I said earlier, it sets a cookie in your browser and allows people to know – like usually if somebody goes to an affiliate link and then they’ve clicked on the link and, sometime within the last 30 days normally, and they make a purchase after that then you get that commission for that affiliate link. So what I do a lot of times is like for Flywheel I have a special, unique URL for affiliate links and so I just say, “Go to yourwebsiteengineer.com/flywheel.” This one makes it easier for you when it comes to saying it on a podcast for people to remember and actually go there.

And another way that you can use Pretty Link Lite is it just makes it easier if you’re using that on your website. Because if I’m writing a post and I want to say something about Flywheel on one of my posts, I don’t wanna have to go back and look up, okay, what is the Flywheel affiliate? How do I do that? So it just makes it easier. And so what I normally do is just create the whateveryourwebsiteis.com/whatever the service is, whether it be A2 hosting or Flywheel hosting or whatever it is. I make that the pretty link if you will. So affiliate links, that’s the first way that you can make money on your website.

The second way is you can actually monetize your website be creating digital products. This is one that my friend Cliff Ravenscraft does a great job of and there’s tons of people who do this. They create one hour training courses or modules that people can buy one at a time. And they can buy that for $100.00, or $50.00, or $200.00. You set the price point. But basically it’s a way for you to create something once and then people can just come and purchase it whenever they need help. Cliff does a lot with teaching people how to use – or how to create their own podcast. So he’s got a course on how to use Adobe Addition, he’s got a course on – I think he’s got a WordPress course. He’s got a ton of these small, little one hour courses that just gives him the ability to make a high-quality, digital training product and then people just purchase it over time.

I did some of these in the past and it’s a great way to create value for people that they can purchase and they can save and they can watch it on their own time. And digital products can range in – they can just be video, they can be a digital product and just be a PDF download that’s like an eBook, that can be a digital product. It can be an audio version of – a bonus section of the WordPress Your Website Engineer, there’s tons of different ways you can do this. The cool part about digital products is you can set your own price. And depending on the technology that you use and you get it all set up, you can vary that price, you can change the price, you can see which works better. There’s tons of different ways and tons of different ideas that you can do, I’m sure, for every different genre of websites that’s out there.

There’s a multitude of different digital products that you can think of that you can create to bring value to your website or value to your customers. They can come, they can purchase it and then, again, you don’t have to ship anything. You’re not actually sending anything out. They just go, they purchase, they get the video download, they download it, and then they watch it on their own time. And usually that’s really great to have it be able to be downloaded to take them with them. I know that there’s an OmniFocus digital training that I want to take that is on MacSparky, or David Sparks’ website and it’s $10.00. You just purchase it, you download it, then you watch it whenever you have time. So that really works and that’s another great way. Again, it’s $10.00, but if you have 100 people buying it that’s $1000.00 very, very quickly. That’s much, much quicker than some of the other ways that we’ll talk about to make money.

Another monetization strategy is sponsorships. And I don’t see this a lot for websites. I don’t see a lot – I don’t go to a website and see that it’s sponsored by somebody, but this happens more often on podcast episodes. It could be specific blog posts or newsletters could be sponsored by somebody. And this would just basically just mean a company would pay you a flat fee to be mentioned in a newsletter or a podcast. Sometimes things are sponsored that aren’t necessarily a product or service that are used. I ran a sponsorship a few months ago for DreamPress 2 by DreamHost and that was something that they came and they paid a set fee for mentions on four episodes and in two email downloads or email newsletters. So I met those criteria and then they just paid for that spot. They wanted to get in front of the eyes of people. So that’s a great way to get companies visibility in front of your audience and it’s a great way for you to make money as well.

So, again, I don’t think that happens a lot on just pure websites, but if you’re doing some sort of other content online, whether it be podcast or videos or things like that, you can have those be sponsored and you can make a significant amount of money. If you have a large audience you could make a lot of money. Now one thing that you may have to negotiate with these people with the people that are sponsoring your show, you may have to say how many downloads you’re getting or how many people may sign up, you may have to negotiate that, but that’s something to think about. But that’s another great way that you can make money with your website.

And the last way is you can put ads on your site. This is probably the most common way that people think that they can make money with their websites. But there’s actually two different ways that you can add ads to your site. Well, add ads. Anyways, the first way is you could create your own ads and you could create ads on your website for your own products. That’s one way you can do it. You can create images and logos that say, “Want to learn how to use WordPress? Click here.” And then that can actually take you to a product that you have on your website. Or you can have products or you can have ads for companies that have products that are similar to yours.

So I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but maybe you want to advertise for – maybe a company comes to you and says, “We have this really cool product for WordPress. We want to buy an ad on your website.” And what you could do is you could negotiate a deal. You could say, “Okay, well, we’ll take $100.00 per month to put this on there, or $500.00 per month to put this image on there.” And I think that will all depend on how many visitors you have to your site and what the click through rate might be and all that kind of stuff needs to be set up and negotiated between you and the company that wants to put an ad on your site. But basically you can create a nice image that will look good on your website, it will be maybe in a sidebar, maybe it’ll be somewhere within your website, maybe it’ll be some sort of a banner image somewhere.

Whatever it is, you can negotiate that and then you put that code exactly where you want it. You put that image right where you want it and then that will show up on every page on your website, or some of the pages, or whatever that may look like. So that’s one way. So you can create your own ads and you can negotiate your own fee which will probably make you a much more – a lot more money than doing the second method of that, which is Google AdSense.

And honestly this is my least favorite way to make money. I mean, the ads are gonna yield you like one penny per click or maybe it’s sometimes a few cents per page view, things like that. But I think that you actually have to have a lot of traffic or good, decent traffic every single month to make a significant amount of money from Google AdSense. And so that’s something that you want to think about. Google AdSense is also blocked from ad blockers within your browser. So if you’re running some sort of ad blocker, that will knock a lot of that stuff out. I also think that AdSense isn’t really the greatest, especially the big square images when you’re scrolling on your phone because sometimes your thumb will hit that button and it will – it frustrates users.

And a lot of times that stuff isn’t really even connected too closely to your website. Maybe you’re blogging about personal finance, maybe you’ve got Google AdSense set up to do some sort of personal financing type things, but most of the time it won’t be right in line with exactly what you’re talking about at that time on that blog post or on that page. So it will yield you some money and you will be able to make some money. Again, it depends on your page views. If you’re getting a million hits per week or a million hits per day, you can make some significant amount of money with ads. But if you’re someone that’s more along my lines that’s getting a few thousand page views per month, then we’re talking that you’re probably not gonna generate a lot of income. And it may be more frustrating for your users than the money that you’re actually making.

So those are the four different ways that you can monetize your website. The first one was affiliate links and that’s my favorite way to do it and you can make some significant money with affiliate links. Digital products. Now this one’s a little bit harder to set up initially because you actually have to create the digital product, but that’s one thing that you can do. Sponsorships. You can have your podcast episodes, your newsletters; you can have something sponsored by a particular company. And then the last way is ads. So ads are a way that you can have somebody pay you for a small portion of your website, a piece of the puzzle. You can put them wherever you want. If they’re your own ads you can add Google AdSense code. Google AdSense these days is actually pretty easy. It’s not super difficult. You sign up and then they give you some code, some tracking codes and different ratios whether they’re square, or long and skinny, or whatever that case may be.

Those are the different ways that you can monetize your website. And I want to take one quick minute to just say thank you to everyone who is using my affiliate links. Like, I said in the episode that I do make some money when it comes to people using affiliate links on my website. It’s a great way for me to pay for the hosting every month and to pay for the renewals for all the premium plugins that I use, the email newsletters, all that kind of stuff that it’s a great way to help to support me. So if you’re interested in learning about anything that I recommend, I highly recommend going over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/resources and that’s where you can find all of the WordPress services and plugins and things that I recommend and that I use on my website.

One thing about the affiliate links, especially for me, the affiliate links are only things that I use. And so if it’s a service that I no longer use, I take that off that page because, honestly, I wanna be able to know exactly and be able to answer any questions that you may have about that specific resource. So if there’s something that you’re on the fence about, you don’t know if you should purchase or not, head on over to – just find me. Email me dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com, ask me a question, I’ll be sure to answer it about one of the affiliate links I have on that page. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care. Bye-bye.