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You’re looking to make some money online, and you want to make it fast.
While most online ventures take time to generate returns, there are ways to make fast cash – and one of them is by using WordPress.
What Is WordPress?
In simple terms, WordPress is a website creation platform. You can create all sorts of websites on it, such as an eCommerce website, a course creation site (where you host online courses), a membership, a business site, a podcast, and more.
Basically, it is a place where you can create a website that showcases the services or products you have to offer to your audience. There are multiple ways to utilize WordPress, but we’ll be talking about 3 more realistic ways we can monetize WordPress within 48 hours.
Some of the best ways on how to make money with WordPress in 48 hours are:
- To create an eCommerce store
- Do affiliate marketing
- Have paid advertisements on your page (via writing blog posts)
We’ll be breaking these three topics down in a bit.
Hosting Providers
Before we get to the monetization part, you’ll have to make sure you have a proper web hosting platform for your website. This is also called a hosting provider.
In simple terms, it helps your website to be available and functional on the World Wide Web. If it looks daunting or confusing, it isn’t. Just pick a plan, get the support team to migrate or integrate with WordPress for you, and you’re good to go.
Some popular hosting providers include:
- Bigscoots – I am using this to host my WordPress website and I am absolutely in love with it. After much research and trying out several others, Bigscoots won me over with their efficient customer service. On top of that, my WordPress site is now loading significantly more quickly than it used to be when I was using other hosting providers.
Pricing: Starts from $5.95 per month
- Bluehost – Bluehost is undoubtedly one of the most popular web hosting providers for WordPress because of its affordability. However, from personal experience, customer service isn’t the speediest nor the best; and there are many downtime periods (where your website will not load or work). I used to use Bluehost, and the speed of my page load was frequently an issue as well.
For your information, a page that loads slowly will affect user experience, leading to higher bounce rates (your reader opting back out before the page fully loads) and affect your website’s performance.
Pricing: Starts from $2.95 per month
- Cloudways – Before I tried (and signed up with) Bigscoots, I actually opened an account with Cloudways because they had a 3-day trial. I found the platform confusing and reached out for help from their support team because they offered free migration services (ie moving the website and all its contents from one hosting provider to another).
The support took days to reply to me, and the migration never happened. After waiting around for a few days for them to get back to me, I gave up and canceled the account, moving on to Bigscoots. They eventually got back to me but their reply was totally different from what I’d been asking, so I did not write back.
There are other hosting providers you can check out, such as:
- Siteground – good reviews, but do not cater to customers outside of the States
- HostGator – mixed reviews from other bloggers in the community, but reasonably priced for rookies.
Right! Now that you know what WordPress and hosting providers are, let’s get to talking about monetization methods!
How To Make Money With WordPress In 48 Hours
1. Create A Website
The first step will be to create your website. This is so exciting! First things first – sign up with WordPress for free and select your hosting provider (as detailed above). Once that is done, you will need to go through the steps below. I recommend you go and create your free account right now before you go on to the next steps.
1) Selecting a theme (design and look) for your site – there are tons of free templates you can use. In case you feel overwhelmed, there are walk-through videos that show you how to use these templates easily.
2) The next step will be to create your main pages – About Me, Contact, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and your main page (which will reflect your eCommerce website, online store, digital products, or blog posts, to name a few examples).
This can sound like a lot of hard work, but there is an easy way. I wish I had known about it earlier! It would have saved me so much effort and time. There is an amazing free WordPress course by IMark Interactive that makes WordPress so much easier to understand. He gives you a step-by-step guide on what WordPress themes you should use, what WordPress plugins you should have and other important aspects of WordPress that would take us forever to figure out – let’s face it, the WordPress dashboard can get pretty daunting for the new blogger!
3) The next thing you’ll have to decide on is what niche you want to be in. Whether you’re blogging, selling your own products, or using your Amazon affiliate program, you’ll want to know who your target audience is. This is so that the content you create on your page will attract your dream readers and potential customers to purchase from you or opt into your freebie (more on that in a bit).
Some examples of niches include:
Skincare
Travel
Health
Parenting
Lifestyle
Finance and Credit
Marketing
Gardening
Family
Home Decor, and more.
4) Get a domain ready. Popular places to purchase domains at affordable prices (usually below $10) are Namecheap (my absolute favorite), GoDaddy, and Flippa. Hook the domain you’ve bought to your website (don’t worry – the help articles on each of these platforms will show you how!) and you’ll have a real, actual, live website – in just a few hours!
5) Not sure what to name your website? Check out suggestions or use a name generator here!
2. How To Make Your First $1,000 On WordPress
Here is where we break down the three main ways to monetize your own website.
a. Start an Ecommerce Store
WordPress has plugins that allow you to set up your own store, much like Shopify, where you can list out the things you want to sell. If you already have a customer base and ready things you can sell and ship out, this will be the easiest way to start making money online. Simply share the website with your customer base or on social media, and direct them to your online store to start making purchases.
It may take you a bit of time to add all your products, but do not wait until everything is added before you start sharing the link. This is a common mistake website owners do – they wait for their sites to be ‘perfect’ before launching them. If you are looking to make money with WordPress in 48 hours, then launch the site, start promoting the link, and add your products as you go.
b. Start an Ecommerce Store
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to passive income, though not necessarily the fastest. You may get lucky, though – if you get enough traffic to your website, someone may just use your affiliate links to purchase something and get you a commission.
Affiliate marketing is where you use a customized link to share either a digital or physical product from a site (like Amazon) or a person (another blogger, influencer, entrepreneur, and more). When your readers click on these links (also called affiliate links) and purchase something, you will stand to get a percentage of the sales (also known as a commission).
We don’t want to simply sell all sorts of affiliate products, however. To gain and keep the trust of your followers, an affiliate product that you recommend should be something you think can really help your readers or followers, and better yet, something you have personally tried before. A good quality affiliate program ensures that you always promote ethically and sincerely, and get compensated in a fair manner.
Once your site gains traction and sees more online traffic, the chances of people clicking on your affiliate links will increase. You can continue making passive income this way for years to come. Many bloggers make a full-time income with affiliate marketing. Here’s a highly popular course on affiliate marketing that I highly recommend, because Carly just rocks in everything she does, and she has a huge following of bloggers.
c. Display Advertising On Your Site
Many new bloggers and business owners reach out to certain sites to have advertisements placed on their websites. I’m sure you’ve seen many of these before – they can be a sticky banner at the top, or be on the sidebar of a page.
Every click (even those that do not result in purchases) may make you some money (though not necessarily significant, unless you have a lot of traffic to your site). While this is good news, too many advertisement banners can affect user experience, so make sure that they are only placed at great places on your pages and blog site so they do not annoy your website visitors who are trying to get information from your blogs.
Some advertising companies will require your website to be mature and have a lot of organic traffic before they post banners on your website, but there are also some that work with beginner bloggers. One of them is Google Adsense. More information about it here.
A note to remember: Ads may not make you a ton of money unless you have high traffic going to your site daily. Continue to focus on building your website’s branding and reach until your ads make significant revenue over time.
3. Create High Quality Content
Getting traffic is key to your website’s growth. (We’ll be talking about that in the next section). However, keeping that traffic there is a whole different story.
The content that you put out for either your blog or your shopping site has to be absolutely targeted, useful, and contain no fluff. People go to your website for answers, and they expect valuable content that allows them to make informed decisions or gives them extra knowledge.
This may take more time to do, but let’s start with your very first blog post. Learn to do keyword research. Some of the best tools in the market for these are Ahrefs, RankIQ, and Ubersuggest.
Among these three, RankIQ is my favorite – it is affordable and makes churning out posts really easy. The other 2 tools mentioned will require you to do keyword research yourself – but with RankIQ, the app does it for you. It does not require a lot of learning (as with the other Search Engine Optimization – SEO tools) and makes it really easy for new bloggers to write posts that will rank on Google.
As you go on, you’ll have to plan out your content creation process so you can write blog posts consistently. But for now, let’s get that first blog post out and we’ll talk about how you can drive traffic to your very own blog next.
How Beginner Bloggers Make Money
This section does not only apply to bloggers, but to all entrepreneurs starting a website on WordPress.
Social Media Platforms
To drive traffic to your site, one of the fastest ways to gain traction is to leverage social networks. Here are a few of the top suggestions:
Pinterest is one of the most popular choices for bloggers. Some bloggers get hundreds of thousands of traffic to their blogs from Pinterest monthly. The more traffic you have, the more Google views your site as an authority website.
This is a long-term process of course, but if you already have a smattering of followers on Pinterest, you’ll need to try and direct them over to your blog with well-designed Pins. If pinning on Pinterest is new to you, I’ll recommend this quick course that has helped many bloggers grow their brand on Pinterest.
You can either share your links in Facebook groups (where allowed, or you may need to pay to post) and direct group members over to your website. Facebook groups can be finicky – some posts will get a high rate of response, and some absolutely none. It will be great to check out the trend of when the group is most active and respond to posts before you share yours.
YouTube videos
If you have videos on YouTube and get a steady number of monthly page views, share your link in your videos or in the comment area, directing your viewers to your website. YouTube depends a lot on keyword research for SEO purposes. You’ll need to ensure you use keywords that can get your videos found. Consistent content creation is also important.
Other social media platforms
If you have more followers on Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram than you do on Pinterest and Facebook, by all means, share your link there. Share it three times a day in the form of reels, stories, and posts. Remember, the aim is to make money with WordPress in 48 hours!
If you have affiliate links to share on your social media platforms on top of your own website links, that can help you to make money even more quickly – but remember to offer only things that your audiences really need, and always stay ethical.
Freelance Writing
On your ‘About Me’ page, if you write well and have some background in freelance writing, talk about it in your bio and treat it as a portfolio. Offer your services as a freelance writer.
Add one to two blog posts to your site, and then reach out to small businesses, local businesses, and companies to offer to write for them.
You can either offer to collaborate and write in exchange for money – here is a list of the best 35 freelance writing sites you can get hired on fast, or you can offer to guest post for these companies and link back to your own website in an effort to get more backlinks. The more backlinks from reputable sites you get, the more your domain gains authority over time.
Link building is essential to keep your blog relevant for years to come.
With every job or guest post you get to do, add those to your website portfolio to show that these are the companies you’ve written for. Soon you’ll have a decent amount of names on your site, making your portfolio a really strong one. You’ll even find that people are reaching out to you and offering to pay you to write for them.
Long Term Strategy
The main goal of having a site with WordPress is not only to make some fast cash but also to ensure you are able to grow it and monetize it for a long time. Many will tell you that you can make money blogging, but you will have to understand that the big numbers do not come in immediately.
Creating a website on WordPress is not part of the numerous get-rich-quick schemes we often see. You may see bloggers and entrepreneurs claim they make $10,000 from blogging or selling a course overnight. There are many factors that affect your figures – the number of traffic your website gets daily, the number of followers you have on your social media, and the number of people you have on your email list. It takes time and involves a lot of work and a lot of learning curves to be able to do things the right way, to eventually grow your brand and make long term passive income.
Here are a few ways you can consistently drive traffic to your website (not immediate results, but great for the long run).
- Write SEO-optimized posts in a bid to rank on Google. If you want in-depth training on SEO, I’d recommend this free masterclass by Mike Futia, one of the best SEO experts in the Internet space. If you want an easier way to write SEO-optimized posts without worrying too much about keyword research, I’d recommend RankIQ – it’s perfect for beginners and not too overwhelming.
- Go to Reddit and Quora threads, join the conversation, and share links to your site when it’s allowed, and when it makes sense to do so.
- Create an amazing free opt-in (a lead magnet) in an effort to grow your email list. This is when someone lands on your page, sees a freebie you’re offering and gives you his email address in return for the free offer. It makes sense that this free offer has to be highly targeted toward your audience and relevant to your niche.
Growing an email list is every blogger’s dream (on top of ranking on Google Search, of course). Once you have a significant number of people on your list, you will be able to start nurturing them with proper emails and eventually offer them your digital courses, share affiliate links, and more. The opportunities are endless.
I joined this membership with Liz Wilcox and it’s worked wonders for my email list. It’s only $9 a month, and she gives you tons of templates you can use to write your emails in a jiffy. If you finally have some people on your list, I suggest you hop into this membership and start growing it and adding more people to it. Liz gives great ideas for lead magnets and opt-ins as well.
Conclusion
Do free WordPress blogs make money?
Yes, they absolutely do. Even if you do not see money come in at first, with diligence and constantly producing new and relevant content, driving traffic to your site, and having your posts SEO optimized, you’re well on your way to having a monetizable asset.
In a nutshell, here is what you can do in the next 48 hours – let’s go!
