As I thought about what types of content I wanted to write about on Press Castle, I wanted to do something a bit more unique. Most sites are sufficiently covering news, tutorials and how-tos, snippets, and reviews, so I decided I would dedicate a section of the Press Castle blog to making money with WordPress. This is the first post in this category, and I sincerely hope that the stories and tips shared here will inspire others to chase after their dreams, reach financial freedom, and make the web and the world better.
There is a lot of money to be made with WordPress. A LOT of money. And there are several different paths to choose from. I’ll explore some of these paths in this post with the goal in mind of trying to give enough examples to choose from whether you are a super coder genius or you still hunt and peck keys on your keyboard. So here we go:
Develop Themes and Plugins
This is the most obvious one, so we’ll start here. A recent post at YangPress, showcases 10 people that have made a million dollars or more via WordPress. Aside from Mr. WordPress himself (Matt Mullenweg), 8 out of the 9 others listed made their money developing premium items for the WordPress community. Obviously, there is money to be made here if you have the skills.
Blog for Fun and Profit
This is probably the second best known way of making money using WordPress. Just set up a blog, crank out some quality posts, and wholla! Instant money maker. Okay, so it’s not quite that simple, but blogging about your interests, your business, your hobbies, DIY ideas, how-tos, your crazy life, news, or a favorite micro niche can be quite profitable. In upcoming posts, we’ll showcase some of these authors that are making cash money and using WordPress as their platform. For now, you can check out ProBlogger and CopyBlogger as two of the most well known blogging sites that run on WP.
Run a Business Based on an App Theme
App themes have become very popular because they allow you to easily set up a world class website with all the user-friendliness that WordPress offers. There are themes for small business directories that mimic Yelp or the Yellow Pages, coupon sites that mirror RetailMeNot and Groupon, classified ads sites, job board sites, dating sites, community sites, review sites, and clones of popular websites such as Etsy, Fiverr, and Pinterest. There is endless opportunity here to make money from these ready-made, done-for-you themes.
Freelance
Being that WP now powers around 1 in every 5 sites on the web, there is a great need for WP related help that includes simple tasks like setting up a new site or installing plugins and themes to more skilled jobs such as maintaining servers, implementing proper security measures, or developing custom code. WordPress has such a large following that you are almost guaranteed to find someone you could help that knows even less than you do, even if you don’t know that much. You could help people out of the goodness of your heart (which you should), but people are often willing to pay for quick answers and/or help.
Write For a Living
Nearly every WP site has one thing in common: They all need content. Good writers always seem to be in short supply, and many people make a full time income off of getting paid to write for newspapers, magazines, or blogs, many of which are powered by WordPress. You may have to start by doing some freebies to start making a name for yourself, but once you get the ball rolling, you can do quite well. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that I saw a post offering $200-$500 per post depending on the quality. If you could write a few of those per week, you’d be doing pretty well.
Start an Online Store
Once upon a time WordPress used to be only a blogging platform. Today, you can run a million dollar web store from it. With several e-commerce plugins to choose from, setting up your own store is pretty darn easy. You could sell “real world” items such as T-shirts, workout supplements, electronics, or hipster wear or you could sell digital goods such as ebooks, game cheat codes, music, or memberships… all using WordPress. As the old adage goes, “buy low, sell high,” and now you can do so on WordPress.
Buy and Sell WordPress Sites
If you like to shortcut the process of doing all of the work to get a site up and running yourself, you can simply buy a site that someone else has made. Sites like Flippa.com list websites for sale and you’re sure to find some WP sites that are already up, running, and making money that you can just buy outright and expand however you would like. Or, conversely, if you have a site that you don’t want anymore, you might be able to offload it to someone looking for a site to run.
Marketing WordPress Sites
Truth be told, it’s much easier to start a new site than it is to get people to come to it. The “If you build it, he will come”-mentality only works in the movie Field of Dreams. In the real world, you have to hustle to get your site or business in front of the people that are interested. That means advertising, networking, SEO, social media, and much else. There is a good deal of opportunity here to help people with WP sites get them in front of a targeted audience. Learning a bit of marketing could make you knowledgeable enough to help these people get the word out about their sites.
So there you have 8 ways to make money using WordPress. If you can think of any more, leave them in the comments!