Can Free WordPress Blogs Be Monetized?

There are various ways to monetize a WordPress (WP) blog. Some include paid membership, affiliate links, running ads, selling products, referrals, and courting sponsorships. But can you make money from your free WordPress blog?

The short answer is yes. It is possible to monetize a free WordPress blog if you use multiple monetization methods. You should also have at least 500 unique visitors per day before running your business idea by any ad network companies or affiliates of companies that offer advertising services on their websites.      

Ways To Monetize a Free WordPress Blog

1. Do Reviews or promote Other Sites

Promoting other sites or brands to your free WordPress blog’s audience is one of the most common ways to monetize a free WordPress blog. If you have an audience who trusts you, consider partnering with another site and making money by sharing their links in your posts.

You can also do reviews of products, books, and services and share them on your site. You can earn commissions from these links when someone buys from these websites after clicking on your blog post.

2. Post Paid Ads

Another way is to run paid ads from other companies on your free WP blog’s website. If you have over 1,000 unique visitors per day, you can even get advertisers who pay for “lead generation.” Lead generation means that a person fills out a form on their page to request more information from the company.

3. Consumer Directed Ads

One way to monetize a free WordPress blog is to use one of the many consumer-directed ad companies. These are typically small businesses that run ads on blogs for free to direct potential customers to their websites.

They can’t generate direct sales, but they often send you targeted traffic that you might not see. You’ll likely need at least 500 unique visitors per day before these companies take your blog seriously enough to consider monetizing it with their services.

4. Retargeting Ads

Another way to monetize a free WordPress blog is by retargeting ads like Apache’s. You only need your blog’s RSS feed and over 100 daily unique visitors.

Apache can work wonders if you have both. You can set up banners, affiliate links, and text links that direct to your site. You won’t get the same rates as a paid blog, but you can monetize your site and benefit from a huge increase in traffic.

5. Affiliate Offers

You can also find affiliate offers for free WordPress blogs by going through the list of companies at Shareasale.com. Some will work with you if you have less than 500 unique visitors per day, while others could care less whether or not people visit your blog before they sign up for their products or services.

Most affiliate programs pay between 1% and 8% commission on sales from offers that lead your website back to theirs. The advantage of using affiliate offers is that you don’t have to rely on a single company to keep your blog running. You could make it a steady source of income as long as you consistently send visitors their way.

6. Paid Membership Sites

Another common method for monetizing free WordPress blogs is creating a paid membership website and charging users to access it.

The concept is simple. Build a community of free WordPress bloggers that are into the same thing. Whether it is healthy cooking, child-rearing, or sewing clothes for dogs. Charge them money to have access to more in-depth information they can use.

A paid membership website might not be your best choice if you’re starting blogging. But after building up enough traffic on your blog site, it could be an interesting opportunity for you to earn extra income with little work involved once everything is set up and ready to go in place.

7. Sell Your Own Products or Services

If you have things people want in exchange for money, this can be another way to monetize your free WordPress blog, especially if you already have a following and a reputation for providing quality advice or products. You may sell digital or physical products on your website, including:

• eBooks
• Information products or programs you’ve created
• Physical goods like clothing or food products
• Services offered by your business
• Digital products

If you can sell products on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Bonanza.com, or any other site that allows people to buy what they see in front of them on the screen with a credit card payment system, you can also use this same platform to sell your own goods and services. This is why many bloggers who are serious about making money build their own websites around an existing monetized blog site.

If you’re very serious about making money through selling on your website, getting help from online advertisers may help you. Consider it done for you digital marketing if you visit Figment Agency.

How to Get People to Visit Your Blogs

To have a chance to monetize your free WordPress blogs, you need to start driving traffic there. If people aren’t visiting your blog site regularly, your efforts to make money with it won’t amount to anything. So you need to know how to get people there.

SEO

One of the best ways is SEO. You can optimize your blog’s pages, and posts with keywords people usually search regularly. This helps Google find your website when potential visitors search for them. Keywords are terms people type into a search bar on their favorite search engine website to look for specific information.

For example, if your blog talks about healthy recipes for kids, you want it to come out at the top of a search result if somebody looks up “healthy recipes” using Google as their search engine.

Unfortunately, SEO isn’t an easy project alone. You need expert help from a digital agency, such as these digital agency Surrey experts, to take you in the right direction and keep you there until your rankings are where they should be. But once you have SEO optimized content with high rankings on Google and other popular websites, getting people to visit your blog site regularly is a simple matter of writing about topics that attract potential customers who will benefit from what you provide them.

Social Media

Putting posts on social media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and YouTube help you get the word out about your blog site. Many of these sites are free to use. And once you have profiles set up on at least half a dozen of them that lead back to your blog site, you can easily share content with people interested in the same thing.

Some social media pages are more popular than others. So you want to make sure that when people visit your profiles on these sites, they see links to your postings on all your websites.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can get you some traffic to your blog site. You write posts for other people’s websites in exchange for them writing one on your blog site. Your guest post could be anything from a photo-sharing website, an article directory, or any number of different types of free WordPress blogs.

The key to guest blogging is to ensure that you aren’t just sending a link to your site in every post. You need to offer real value in each message you send out, with quality writing and content that the website owners will want to share with their followers.

You can add links back to your own blog when appropriate, but this won’t work unless you’ve already built a significant number of followers on the sites you use to share your posts. If nobody is reading what you write, it doesn’t matter how many people see a link to your website at the bottom of a post – they won’t go there.

The Verdict

Free WordPress websites can provide significant revenue in some cases, but it all depends on the niche that you choose to blog about. You won’t get very far without SEO and social media marketing strategies. And even when these are stable, they don’t always generate the money you expect.

Paid WordPress websites may cost more upfront than free ones, but the cost is worth it for the amount of traffic they bring through your doors. If you want to achieve online success today, then making the switch from free blogs to paid ones soon is an excellent idea. You may try SEO in London by Figment Agency if you’re nearby.