Are you wondering how to monetize your growing blog? Building a loyal audience is just the first step.
Starting your own business and monetizing your blog will give you the freedom to live your life on your own terms. But knowing just how to get started can be a challenge.
No matter how you decide to monetize your blog, investing on the right plugins is vital for your business. Quality plugins will help you efficiently monetize your blog, saving you time and maximizing your blog revenue.
Let’s take a look at the best plugins that will help you to monetize your blog.
1. WooCommerce
Selling products on your blog is one of the best monetization methods because you have full control over the products you sell and the revenue you generate.
If you’re looking to create an online storefront that helps you to sell your products with ease, WooCommerce is the best plugin available for WordPress.
It has a lot of built-in features to help you manage your online store including shipping options, payment processing, inventory management, and more. You can also find several extensions that can add more advanced features to your online store.
WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform on the web. Because the community is huge, you can easily find supported themes and complementary tools to build a powerful eCommerce store. You’ll also find optimized WooCommerce hosting from Bluehost, so you can leverage the power of WordPress, reliability of Bluehost, and versatility of WooCommerce to get your site up and running fast.
2. OptinMonster
Looking to increase conversions on your blog? Want to turn your website visitors into email subscribers and customers?
OptinMonster is the best customer acquisition and lead generation tool that allows you to build and A/B test beautiful lead capture forms without a developer. It works for any type of business, so you can use it no matter how you decide to monetize your blog.
With OptinMonster’s powerful builder and high-converting templates, you can create visually stunning optin forms including lightbox popups, floating bars, sidebar forms, etc. Using its exit intent technology, you can also convert abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers by prompting them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they’re about to leave.
You can use OptinMonster on any website, whether it’s WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or even a static HTML website. To connect optin forms on your WordPress site, you can install the free OptinMonster WordPress plugin and easily publish them anywhere on your site.
3. AdRotate
When you think of making money from blogging, advertising is often the first thing that comes to mind. It’s the easiest way to get started by monetizing your existing content.
If you monetize your blog with advertising, you can use AdRotate to manage and serve ads on your site. AdRotate supports popular advertising networks like Google AdSense, Chitika, etc.
The basic version is available for free to download from the WordPress.org plugin repository. You’ll get more advanced features with the premium version, including live ad previews, mobile device detection, geotargeting, and much more. It also comes with an easy to use dashboard where you can review how well your ads are performing at a glance with daily, monthly, and yearly stats.
The plugin also allows you to sell ad space directly to advertisers, so you can keep the full ad revenue instead of just a percentage.
4. Easy Digital Downloads
Selling digital products is another great way to create a steady stream of income from your blog. If you’re looking to create a storefront to sell digital products only, Easy Digital Downloads is the best plugin for you.
Now you might be wondering, why not use WooCommerce to create a digital storefront?
WooCommerce is a good choice if you want to sell digital products along with physical ones. However, it comes with lots of unnecessary options such as shipping and inventory managements that you’ll never need for your digital storefront. Easy Digital Downloads offers a lighter weight plugin that offers more features specific to digital products.
Best of all, the Easy Digital Downloads community is also huge, so you can easily find many useful add-on plugins that help you enhance the features of your digital store.
5. WPForms
WPForms is a WordPress forms builder plugin that allows you to create WordPress forms easily. This plugin is a great choice for monetizing your blog if you want to easily create simple order forms without having to hire a developer.
With WPForms, you can connect your form with payment processors such as PayPal and Stripe, so you can sell goods and services and collect payments right from your WordPress website. You can also connect your form with your favorite email marketing tools and other online services.
WPForms comes with a drag and drop builder, so you can create any type of forms such as contact forms, order forms, newsletter signup forms, donation forms, and more right from your WordPress dashboard.
The lite version of the plugin is available for free in the official WordPress plugins directory. The free version comprises almost all the features you need to create a basic WordPress form. For more advanced features including payment processing, you can get the pro version.
6. Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates lets you monetize your website with affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is probably the easiest way to monetize your blog. The main benefit of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to create a product to make a passive income. All you have to do is to find a few good products with available affiliate programs that you think would be useful for your blog audience, and promote them on your blog. You make a commission when your visitor makes a purchase.
With ThirstyAffiliates, you can easily add and manage your affiliate links. You can quickly insert links into posts, cloak links, auto-insert links, and see how many clicks each affiliate link is receiving.
Thirsty Affiliates is free to download from WordPress.org plugin repository. For more enhanced features, you can purchase premium addons individually.
Final Thoughts on Blog Monetization
If you’re looking to monetize your blog, it’s important to use the right plugins for your site, or else you’ll find yourself wasting too much time on managing the details.
The plugins listed above have all the features you need to monetize your blog and maximize your revenue. What other tools do you use to monetize your blog? Share your thoughts by dropping a line below in the comments or browse Bluehost’s WordPress hosting plans.
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on Twitter @syedbalkhi.
Comments