Make Money with WordPress – A Simple Strategy
Let me start with a small disclaimer – I am about to discuss a strategy to make money with WordPress that I advocate but have not yet explored in full for myself :-) The strategy is very simple – build a small site with WordPress that earns a little money, then repeat the process over and over… It’s so simple and so obvious that it hardly seems worth blogging about but I think that many people over-complicate things and overlook the simple stuff.
My ebook that I recently released is all about developing small niche sites using Wordpress and in the ebook I briefly discuss some simply monetization options such as AdSense and affiliate marketing. I don’t really discuss the money making aspect in the book that much because I haven’t made very much money myself yet but I am convinced that it is a sound strategy which is why I wanted to blog about it in a little more detail.
Authority Sites v Small Niche Sites
I’ve had a lot of feedback from the book and a popular opinion is that it is better to concentrate on building a single large authority site rather than invest the time and energy into many small sites. Personally I think that both strategies can be highly profitable but it is not easy to build an authority site unless you really know your subject well. I have pondered this dilemma many times and I am yet to come up with a topic that I think I know enough about to build a really good site.
However, I have enough interest in many smaller topics that would allow me to knock up a small niche site with perhaps a dozen pages of content. Not only that but a small site like that can be developed using PLR content so that you don’t even have to know your subject if you don’t want to.
By definition, if you want an authority site, you need to be able to consider yourself an authority on the subject! Having a small site with just a few pages of tightly focused content allows you to relax – you don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to write about the subject every day, you don’t have to be able to answer people’s questions. You can just knock up a simple site that provides good value to its visitors, ensure it gets traffic and monetize it.
The Key to Residual Income – Assets
We all want a residual income right? That’s an income that is not in proportion to the amount of work you do. Day jobs are not residual – you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Freelance and client based work is not residual – you don’t have contracts or clients, you don’t get paid. Blogging is not residual – you stop posting, you don’t get paid. Okay so your blog can survive with a posting break for a while but if you stop blogging altogether then your blog will eventually die.
So what kind of web asset can provide a residual income? One that can continue to generate revenue long after it has been established and requires no maintenance – or at least minimal maintenance.
In my WordPress ebook I walk you through the steps to setup a small niche site and I wrote it by doing the process myself and documenting it with screen captures as I went along. The bulk of the book and thus the site itself was built in a few hours. However, I didn’t write the content – I used PLR articles. If you are writing your own content then that will be your most significant time sink.
But lets crunch some numbers here. I am sure that most people could create a decent niche site in a week, working part-time. The goal is to drive enough traffic to it to earn say $1 a day. If you repeat that process for a year and each site earned that amount you would have 50 assets that combined are earning you a total of $1500 a month. That may not sound like much but remember that the maintenance is minimal so that money is coming in regardless of whether or not you continue to build sites.
The Issue of Scalability
In my opinion, the biggest problem that any business faces is one of scalability. I’m sure many of us want to make BIG bucks online and not just a basic income so to do that we need to find business ventures that can scale in some way. This scalability factor is the reason why I advocate making static sites that can be forgotten about once created, rather than creating blogs that require regular posts to continue to provide value.
If you have 50 blogs, that’s a lot of posts to write isn’t it? Well maybe… Let me introduce you to Garry Conn. I first came across Garry’s blog months back and one of the first things I do when I find a new blogger is I have a look at their MyBlogLog account. I checked out Garry’s profile and was utterly amazed to find that he manages over 100 blogs!
How on earth does he do that? And does he make any money? All is explained in this post where Garry assures us that money can be made online. I mentioned above that a goal of $1 a day is something to aim for and that is exactly what Garry did. Not all of his blogs earn that much but one of them makes $40 a day and another almost $100 a day! Garry makes over $5000 a month from his blogs!
Garry likes to blog and all of his sites are blogs. I recommend making static sites but there are advantages are disadvantages to both methods. I go into more detail about this in my ebook but basically, if you can build a site that attracts some search engine traffic and then monetize that traffic, you can repeat the process and build up to a large income online.
Managing All Those Sites
However, I’m sure you are seeing a problem here – the maintenance of the sites. Aside from the content issues there are technical issues with WordPress. It needs upgrading from time to time, plugins become out of date etc. In my ebook I explain how to do all this stuff but it’s very manual and of course you have to repeat the process for every WordPress installation.
WP ManagerDX2 is a tool to help you manage all your WordPress sites from a single control panel. If a plugin becomes out of date rather than logging in to each site, uploading the new version of the file to every domain you do it once and the manager will update ALL of your sites at once.
Conclusion
Let’s outline this process step-by-step:
- Pick a topic
- Do some keyword research
- Write or buy some articles on that topic targeted to those keywords
- Use the articles as your site content
- Monetize the site with ads of your choice
- Allow the traffic to come in from search engines
- Go to Step 1
Another advantage to this method is that it allows you to start small. It can be overwhelming to try and start an authority site but with this method you can develop one small site and then move onto the next.
I’d be interested to hear your feedback. Do any of you manage multiple sites? What kinds of sites are they? What issues do you face and so on?
Want to Make Money Blogging? My free course, The Bloggers Bible contains everything you need to know about building a highly popular and profitable blog from scratch!
Just fill in your email below to get your first lesson immediately:
[...] being down I was forced to procrastinate further because the content for those pages comes from an older post that of course I did not have access [...]
Just stumbled on your site and I am enjoying the content. I have a few static authority sites that bring in good money. I am new to the blog world, however, and I am looking to monetize on a smaller scale several niche sites.
I’ve seen several plugins which claim that they can pull rss articles and place them as new posts in your blog. It seems to me that this would be an ideal way to feed the niche to keep good pr. All you would have to do is clean up the seo to achieve good natural rankings. Has anyone tried any of these plugins and what was your success with it?
@TK, I wouldn’t recommend such a plugin – that technique is known as scraping. Its ok if the RSS feed you are pulling from is your own but if you are pulling other people’s content to feed your own site that is known as a spam-blog or splog. Not good at all.
Thanks for this post Caroline.
Very interesting read.
And thanks for the link to gary conn’s post
dianis last blog post..Many Paid Review Jobs
What is the difference in creating 100 different wordpress websites for niche topics or creating one wordpress website with 100 different niche articles? I assume its SEO, but what if the articles had different sub-domains, can anyone shed more light on this?
@YeFind, yes its an SEO thing. When google ranks a page it is not just the page on its own that it ranks, it also considers it in the context of the site as a whole so if you build a tightly focused niche site where every article is closely related then they all rank better for terms in that topic. Of course if you can build a 100 page site on a single topic then you will have a very strong site on your hands! But I assume you mean a site with 100 articles on mixed subjects – that would lessen the effectiveness of the individual pages.
I have used your excellent strategy to make minisites.
Thanks for this priceless resource. Have made a special mention of it in the hub:
The old problem of writing about a subject before you know much about it.
You write about what you do know and work to learn more about the subject. Caroline, how much did you know about blogging before you started this one?
What you need to learn you will–just in time.
Rick
Rick Hoovers last blog post..Hoover S3765040 Canister Vacuum Review
Caroline,
Just got done reading your post….IMPRESSIVE! Thanks for the inspiration and motivation.
It is a bit crazy online with all of the various ways of creating an income. I heard of blogging for money but never looked into it.
Thanks for explaining this pathway of additional income. I also subscribed to the “Bloggers Bible”. Look forward to seeing what that is about!
Keep up the great work.
Earl
[...] Make Money with WordPress A Simple Strategy Caroline Middlebrook Posted by root 3 days ago (http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com) One thing that stuck with me from your ebook was your comment regarding how it better a simple strategy to make money online with wordpress from tweet this post links powered by tweet this v1 3 9 a wordpress plugin for twitter Discuss | Bury | News | Make Money with WordPress A Simple Strategy Caroline Middlebrook [...]
[...] how you can use WordPress to build small niche sites and I wrote a post about how this can become a good income stream if you can find the right niches. I used this technique for a few months for my AdSense project and [...]
Hi Caroline
From a fellow Essex person, hello. I lived in the up market part of Essex….Harlow. LOL. I really love your blog and just found it on google. Great content and I too am learning about monetizing blogs so perfect timing for me to find you. The fact your a fellow Essex is a bonus to.
Got to dash and register for your stuff so I look forward to all you have to offer and enjoying your blog.
Jay Roberts
UK
Jay Roberts´s last blog ..Affiliate Jump Review – Amazing.
Great Article , I considered it phenomenal
I look forward to more great postings like this one. Does This Site have a RSS I can subscribe to for anymore information from you?
This is my first time i visit here. I found so many interesting stuff in your blog especially its discussion. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not the only one having all the enjoyment here! keep up the good work
You should always add all posibilities visitors can make donation or payments on your blog, not everybody has a paypal account but everbody has a mobile phone, add an extra button where your visitors can pay by sms or make a phone call, for more info visit http://www.paygol.com/micropayment/wordpress
ok..i mean that author lady is like 40 something, and got lucky telling the story when she worked in the internet field back in the day until 2007 and makes side money. if we all do that, there’ll be too many stories, and everybody earning pennies – there’s already too much stuff out there – everybody wanting the free ride writing about some BS story – or blogging about makeup on youtube. everybody’s an expert – well none of them are – and it’s all wasted adsense money. the more there are the more its going to be the $30 blog a month. that’s no way of living. basically, all people hiding behind their little phones, and blogs, and tweeties and bs — it’s all to buy time and hope and prey they can somehow make money not working. well, it doesnt work, and all the people claiming to make money online are just bragging. they have a wealthy granny. there’s 2 ways to make money: buy and sell stuff with ridiculous markups or have talent that needs no further explanation. that’s it. now go back and get a job you all – pls dont write a blog about something no one cres. you are stealing bandwith of thr site sthat are really important and are wasting adsense dollars of some poor smal company out there.