Meks
Do you know you can try any of our premium WordPress themes for free?Show me the themes
Top 3 proven methods to monetize your WordPress site or blog

Top 3 proven methods to monetize your WordPress site or blog

3Shares

One of the most usual challenges WordPress users deal with is how to monetize their blogs or sites. To have ways to have that additional income, whether you run a blog for fun or have a reliable online business. In light of that, and knowing there are so many new people joining this community, we’re writing this easy guide on how to monetize your WordPress site or blog.

1. Affiliate marketing plugins

Did you know that 15% of the total digital media advertising revenue is attributed to affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is considered to be one of the low-cost solutions to make additional income with your blog or site. The fact that it’s been around for 20 years or so is good enough indicator how solid this type of passive income still is. In one of our earlier posts, we covered earlier the basics and explained how to start an affiliate marketing business with WordPress. Now, we’re focusing on affiliate marketing plugins and how to use and manage them on your WordPress blog or site.

Top WP Hosting recommended by Meks

Affiliates

Affiliates is a freemium plugin that helps you run a successful affiliate marketing program. Use it to manage your affiliate links, track your progress, create reports, and more. It enables you to manage an unlimited number of affiliates, it works on shortcodes and comes integrated with many popular eCommerce, lead generation, membership platforms.

Affiliates Pro comes with more customizable features like more detailed Dashboard, referral Rates, Banner Management, advanced commission Rates, and more. The price starts at $49 for one site.

Affiliates Manager

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-affiliates-manager-plugin

No matter if you sell products/services on your site or are want to create an affiliate program for free, this is the plugin to use to manage it all and build more income with your site. With it, you can manage, track, and have your ads in order, as well as pay your affiliates directly from your WordPress based site.

Once you install it, you’ll get a powerful affiliate tool to manage and track your affiliates. Furthermore, with it you can set up a customizable affiliate registration, which lets users sign up to connect with you and promote your stuff, not to mention giving commissions – all for free and from your site.

Affiliates Manager works well with some of the most popular e-commerce solutions, such as:

  • WooCommerce
  • WP eStore
  • WP eCommerce
  • Simple Shopping Cart
  • JigoShop iThemes Exchange

and more.

A must-have tool if you’re in the referrals business with your WordPress blog or site, give it a go.

Affiliate WP

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-affiliate-wp-plugin

An easy-to-use marketing solution for affiliate business on WordPress. It’s a premium based platform that gives you all the tools for managing and running an affiliate program.

affiliate-wp-plugin-dashboard

Just look at some of the impressive features that come with it:

  • Automatic affiliate creation
  • Affiliate coupon tracking
  • Affiliate URLs
  • Customizable emails
  • Integrated payout services
  • Manual affiliate approval
  • Payout logs
  • Real-time reporting
  • Referral link generator, and more!

The price starts at $99/year for a personal plan and includes 16 official free add-ons, plugin updates, and email support.

Multi Affiliate Plugin

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-multi-affiliate-plugin

A premium WordPress plugin that helps you manage multi affiliate networks, such as Amazon or eBay. It lets you display your affiliate products as single or multiple products banner – all which you can see on their demo page.

The banners are displayed via shortcodes you can then put in posts and pages, or in a sidebar area. The price starts at 14,99€ for one site.

2. AdSense on WordPress

Did you know that 10,884,329 live websites use Google AdSense?

AdSense is one of the easiest ways to monetize your WordPress site or blog, that’s for sure. All you need to have is enough traffic and watch that income come by. Now, we covered all the basics of setting up AdSense on your WordPress, this time we’re sharing some of the best AdSense plugins you can use.

Advanced Ads

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-advanced-ads

This is a simple and easy-to-use ads manager plugin that works not only with Google AdSense, but all other ad types and networks, including Amazon ads, Google Ad Manager, or media.net. It also comes with the ads.txt support and has dedicated Gutenberg block for ads, for all of us who use the new WordPress editor.

Use it to manage and define ad types, display and visitor conditions, placements, and enjoy doing it all from one place. Regarding AdSense, this free plugin comes with unlimited ads banners, shows you AdSense revenue in WP admin, is compliant with Google AdSense terms, supports all ad types, and so much more!

There’s also a premium version that comes with more features and options, such as:

  • Ad rotation
  • More WP hooks and actions
  • Special support of Google AdSense
  • AMP ads insertion
  • Automated workflow and more.

The price starts at  €39/year for one site.

Easy Google AdSense

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-easy-google-adsense-plugin

If you don’t want to spend any time defining what type of Google ads to use on your blog or site, Easy Google AdSense is the plugin for you! This free tool helps you set up, track, and manage Google AdSense Auto Ads, aka the most relevant ones on your site. Whether you’re a novice or experienced user, this type of feature allows AdSense to decide which ad size, where and how many to place automatically. No manual work whatsoever, simply enter your Google AdSense Publisher ID in the settings, and Google will automatically start showing ads. As easy as that 😊

Google AdSense In-feed Placement

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-google-adsense-infeed-plugin

An add-on for the Advanced Ads plugin mentioned earlier. It lets you place Google AdSense ads between posts on your homepage, category or archive pages and such.

This extension comes with all Google AdSense ad type support, auto ads option, which helps your ads stand out naturally. So, this is not a standalone plugin, use it with Advanced Ads to display in-feed-AdSense-ads simply.

Woody Ad Snippets

woody-ad-snippets

If by any chance, you need your AdSense ads placed in Header or Footer, this is the plugin to use. It helps you create, store, and manage ad code snippets, not only for Google AdSense ads but also for:

  • Amazon Ads
  • Yandex Direct Ads
  • Media.net

It also enables you to insert GA tracking code, Yandex Metrica tracking code and counter, Social Media widgets, and more. With it, you can place AdSense ads to Archives, Categories,  tags, and taxonomy, in between posts, after Excerpt and pretty much wherever you want them to be. Apart from being free, this neat plugin comes with free support if you happen to experience any issue.

WP Simple AdSense Insertion

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-blog-wp-simple-adsense-insertion

A plugin to use to set up, manage and insert Google AdSense ads via shortcode or calling the PHP function (as explained in the Installation review). With the help of this free plugin, you can place AdSense ads on your posts, pages, and sidebar quickly and easily, even as in-feed ad as well 😊

For more details and explanations visit their tips and tricks page and enjoy setting up https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-plugin-for-simple-google-adsense-insertion-170

3. WordPress ads plugins

Did you know that WordPress has a 61.9% market share in the CMS market?

Depending on your WordPress theme, you can add a display or a banner ad into your sidebar right from your dashboard. Simply go to Appearance > Widget and choose either predefined features or go with the Text/Custom HTML/Image – depending on the type of the ad you want to show. A few snippets of code and an image and your ad is on your blog’s sidebar.

Now, if you want more customization, as well as advanced features, take a look at these WordPress ad plugins we recommend. Use them to control and sell your ads space as you see fit.

AdRotate Banner Manager

adrotate-banner-manager-plugin

A freemium plugin that helps you manage and place both networks and hosted ads with rotating banners. Use it to create either single ads or ad groups and display them through your WordPress site via shortcodes. It comes with the easy management features that help you add, edit, and manage your ad display all from your dashboard. And, you can use it not only for your ads but also for:

  • Google AdSense
  • Google Ad Manager
  • Bing Ads
  • Media.net
  • Yahoo! Adverts and more!

There’s also a pro version that comes with more advanced features, such as:

  • Geo-targeting
  • Mobile adverts
  • Live preview
  • Post/Page injection for widgets
  • Track with GA
  • Scheduling, and more.

The price starts at $39 for a single site.

Insert Post Ads

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-site-insert-post-ads-plugin

Great and easy way to post ads into your posts automatically. Insert Post Ads is a free plugin that enables you to create various ads with different sizes and choose where in your post content to display them. Moreover, you can choose to display more than one ad within the same post.

Its features enable you to select where you want to display an ad: posts, pages, custom post types, and whether you want it before content, after post content, or after a specified number of paragraphs.

Meks Easy Ads Widget

how-to-monetize-your-wordpress-site-meks-easy-ads-widget

One of our plugins that come integrated into our premium themes as well as a standalone free tool for displaying ads inside your WordPress widget. Simply install it on your site and use it as a widget to display an unlimited number of ads. You can customize ads size, choose between rotating or randomize ads, add „nofollow“ to ad links, define the number of ads per view and more – and all of it for free 😊

meks-easy-ads-screenshot

Check it out and let us know what you think of it, ok?

Wrapping up

Whatever option you choose to go with, these plugins will surely help. As being among the best ads-management plugins, use them to improve your income, bring more revenue and increase traffic to your site. They are a great marketing strategy tool and can save you quite the time you can use to focus on other types of blog monetization, which we talked about earlier.

We hope this article provides you with useful information and guides on how to monetize your WordPress site with (almost) no effort. Feel free to let us know which of the described plugins serves you best and share some love on social.

3Shares

Tags: , ,

Ivana Cirkovic

Ivana is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over nine years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and an active member of WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7. In love with Twitter, WP, photography and NYC.

Try theme now for free!
  • Access to a copy of the demo website
  • Full access to the theme options
  • No credit card required

* We will send you an occasional newsletter with special offers, news & theme updates but you can unsubscribe at any time.

Meks