WordPress powers ~40% of the websites online. Over 4oo million people visit it each month. The ease of use of WordPress has made it extremely popular in the online business world. We will also let you know how much can you earn with these business models at a bare minimum and give you a roadmap to get started. So let’s get started.
Offer WordPress Consulting Service
Many of the WordPress site owners aim to rank on top of search engines. You can earn a fortune by providing these sites with several marketing services to achieve these goals. Let’s look at what services you can provide to these website owners and make a living.
Become a Freelancer
Freelancers are self-employed people who aren’t associated with just one company. They might work for many businesses simultaneously. The main advantage of freelancing is you get to choose whom you want to work with and whom you want to let go of. Let’s see the earning potential of freelancing as a WordPress professional.
How Much Can You Earn with Freelancing
According to Upwork’s research, the average hourly rate of a freelancer in the USA is $20. (Note: The minimum wage in the USA is ~$10 per hour.) Let’s do some maths: At a bare minimum, if you work 5 hours a day for 20 days a month, you will have a monthly income of: $20 X 5 X 20 = $2000/month. That’s not bad! So the next question you might have in mind is – what service can I provide as a freelancer?
Service You Can Provide As A Freelance WordPress Professional
Web Design: Work as a WordPress backend/frontend developer and design websites for your clientsWordPress Management: Manage WordPress websites by updating plugins, themes, checking website health, etc.Content Writing: Write website content and blog posts for your client to grow their organic trafficGraphic Designing: Design stunning graphics for the websitesCopywriting: Write ad copies for all ad campaigns your client will be running to get trafficSEO Consultant: Device a long-term plan for a WordPress website to grow its trafficPPC Consultant: Plan, run, and analyze ad campaigns for your clients
Where to Start Your Journey As A Freelancer?
The starting part in any domain is always challenging. Before you start, we’d suggest you first decide which freelance niche interests you the most. Once you’re done with that, get a thorough knowledge about it. After doing both these things, you’re now ready to get some clients and see how it goes. There’s no better platform than Upwork to start your career with. Don’t believe us? Here’s an example of a list of freelancers who are developers. Just look at what they charge! With the right set of skills, you can be at the top one day. Freelancing is an excellent choice of career, especially as a WordPress professional. You can keep gaining knowledge, get multiple freelance WordPress jobs, and work with clients worldwide. This gives you both money and exposure. You can also try Toptal or Codeable to offer your WP development service.
Open A WordPress Service Agency
Opening a WordPress service agency is one of the best ways to earn. Agencies are the best way to get a 7-figure business up and running. Yes, it’s tough, and there are a lot of issues when you scale it from 10 to 100 clients, but the ROI is exceptionally high. Your WordPress agency could be in any category we talked about in the freelance part. The business model of freelance and agency is more or less the same. You find clients and serve them well. There’s just one catch – when you open an agency, you outsource work rather than do it yourself. So when you open an Agency:
You find clientsYou find freelancers/employees to serve those clientsAll you do is client interaction and management
How Much Can You Make With An Agency?
The valuation of a typical digital marketing agency is calculated between 5X to 10X their annual revenue. So, for example, if you can make $12ooo annually, you can expect a revenue of $60k to 120k for your agency in the long run. But remember, it takes time and dedication to do this.
Where to Start Your Journey When Opening An Agency
Starting an agency will require significant capital. You need to set up your websites, test and hire skilled WordPress professionals, invest in finding WordPress jobs online, and so on. So it’s best if you first collect the capital you want for the agency and then try hitting the road.
Develop & Sell WordPress Themes
Every website needs a theme to make it look attractive. Creating themes could be a great WordPress job online if you’re a web designer. You don’t need to be a coding ninja to do so. Just some basic coding skills and knowledge of UI/UX will do. You can take inspiration from these three brands:
Themeforest: Has the most extensive WordPress theme collectionCreative Market: Browse from 8000+ themes for business and personal useMojo Marketplace: 700+ unique themes with great UIs
How Much Can You Earn by Selling WordPress Themes
The cost of 1 WordPress theme on an average on Envato is: ~$60. Let’s say you create two themes worth $60 each. Theme A & Theme B. You get a total sales of 20 on Theme A and 30 on B monthly. This brings your total revenue to $3000. Usually, any marketplace charges you a commission of 25% (yes, that’s huge). That’s $750 in your case. This means you can earn ~$2.2k by developing a theme and selling it on a marketplace. Note: We didn’t take the time invested in building these themes into consideration. You can save the commission marketplaces take by selling the theme on your own website. You just need to think of a great way to bring high-quality traffic.
Where to Start Your Journey As A WordPress Theme Developer
Here’s a roadmap from start to end on building a WordPress theme that sells. Step 1: Select a niche and start designing the theme. Step 2: Ensure you develop a theme that’s mobile responsive. Step 3: Follow the WordPress coding principles of designing a theme. Step 4: Have ready-made page templates in your theme for all possible pages one might design. Step 5: Create a user-friendly theme options page where users will make changes in the theme. Step 6: Choose a marketplace to sell – you can choose any one of the above three we mentioned. Step 7: Set a price and start selling.
Develop & Sell WordPress Plugins
After WordPress themes, WordPress plugins could also be a great thing to develop and sell. Like themes, plugins play a crucial role in running a WordPress website. But there’s one downside when you decide to develop a plugin. The market is already quite competitive. So make sure you create a plugin that isn’t replaceable by any other. The key to building a plugin that sells is identifying WordPress users’ problems and designing a plugin that addresses and solves them easily.
How Much Can You Earn by Selling WordPress Plugins
Let’s see how much you can make by selling a single plugin with at least 50 sales a year. Assuming your plugin costs $30 a month and you get a total of 50 sales a year. Your revenue will be: $30 X 12 X 50 = $18,000/year = $1500 a month. If you sell it on some marketplace, you lose ~$300, bringing your revenue to $1200 a month.
Where to Start Your Journey As A WordPress Plugin Developer
A marketplace like codecanyon would be perfect to start with. If you want to sell a plugin on your website and not give commission to any marketplaces for it, you can leverage a platform like easydigitaldownloads to set up your store.
Create & Monetize A WordPress Blog
Creating a blog with WordPress and exploring ways to monetize it can be a game-changer to you. The beauty of this method is that when you have a blog getting decent traffic and money, you can replicate the same business model in different niches and get great results. For example, if you create an affiliate website in the cooking niche and earn $1000 per month, you can create five such websites over time and make $5k a month! Let’s look at ways to monetize your WordPress blog and bank some cash.
Display Advertisements
In Display advertising, you show audience ads in the form of graphics. If visitors find the ad interesting, they click on it to know more. This click will get you money. To manage everything effectively, you can leverage platforms like buysellads or a plugin like AdSanity. Did You Know: The average CPC of display advertising is $0.58, and the CTR is 0.35%.
Affiliate Marketing
The concept of affiliate marketing is simple. You (as a blogger) promote a company’s product or service. You get a unique affiliate link for each product you promote. When a visitor visits the product page via your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you get a commission for it. Suppose you’re interested in selling digital marketing products and WordPress themes. Two brands that give a great commission rate are Envato & SiteGround. When you have a significant number of visitors coming in monthly, tracking all the essential affiliate metrics and KPIs becomes necessary. Platforms like ShareASale or CJ could help you with it. With ShareASale, you can even get started for free.
Google Adsense
Earning money by displaying blog-relevant ads on your website is also a great idea. Google Adsense can help you with it. In 2021, over 38.3 million websites leveraged Google Adsense to show ads and earn per click. To get started, you need to have a website with some blog posts. You need Google’s approval to display ads on your website and earn from them. Note: The average CTR of Google Adsense across all industries is 1.9%.
Earn Money Online By Flipping Websites
Flipping websites refers to buying an abandoned website or creating it from scratch and selling it. The simple logic behind this business model is you increase the website’s revenue/traffic and then sell it to the highest bidder. When you create a website from scratch to sell, keep these points in mind:
Find a niche that’s profitable and scalablePick a traffic generation method and stick to itDoing SEO is a must as buyers are more comfortable paying for sites with organic trafficChoose just one way of site monetization
How Much Can You Earn by Flipping Websites
The earning potential of the flipping business depends on the business model you leverage. So if your website makes $1k a month, you can sell it for $30k or more.
Where Can You Start Selling WordPress Websites
You can leverage platforms like Flippa, FE International, Empire Flippers to sell your websites. Pro Tip: Flipping isn’t just limited to websites. You can even buy and sell domain names on platforms like sedo.com.
Become A Youtuber
YouTube has over 2 Billion users that log in every month. S0 making WordPress-related videos and earning could be a highly successful business model. The YouTube market is quite saturated, but you can earn a significant sum of money from it with proper planning and strategy. But how to be a Youtuber as a WordPress professional? It’s easy! Start curating videos on any one category of WordPress. You can start with a category like ‘Cool WordPress Hacks’ and then move on to the WordPress category as a whole.
How Much Can You Earn by Making Videos On YouTube
On average, a Youtuber earns $3 to $5 per 1000 video views. According to Tubular Labs, the average number of video views an educational video gets is ~5000. That means you can earn about $20 per video. If you try uploading one video a day, you can earn $600. It’s not much, so we recommend doing this as a side gig for a few hours to make extra money. After some point, when you go viral on YouTube, that’s when you can earn a boat-load with it.
Where to Start Your Journey As A Youtuber
Step 1: Start by boiling down your niche and limiting it to 1 category in WordPress Step 2: Know your target audience and make videos accordingly Step 3: Create a channel that catches your audience’s eyes Step 4: Plan your content well, know when to upload which video to get maximum views Step 5: Study YouTube SEO thoroughly and implement it for every video you make Step 6: Invest in video quality as that is what will matter the most Step 7: Be consistent Step 8: Keep track of all important metrics and KPIs via YouTube analytics
Create & Sell Courses
The rise of digital education due to Covid has skyrocketed the eLearning industry. By 2025, the e-learning market will be worth $325 Billion. Yeah, you heard it right, Billion with a ‘B.’ Students now prefer enrolling in a great course and educating themselves sitting at home, rather than going to some college. Why? There are two reasons for it.
Students are not comfortable paying a hefty fee to collegesThey learn five times more when they enroll in courses when compared with colleges
eLearning isn’t just limited to students. Companies are also trying to leverage courses to train their employees.
How Much Can You Earn by Selling Courses
To calculate this, let’s head to Udemy. Here’s a course we found ranking 1st for WordPress courses. You can see the price of the course originally is $130. But it’s currently brought down to $20. The total enrollments on the course are 90,702. If half of these students bought the course at its original price and the other half got a discount, the total earning of the course would be close to 7 Million. That’s some gigantic revenue.
Where to Start Your Journey As A Course Creator & Seller
Step 1: Create a course that solves the problem of your target audience. Creating a high-quality course is the key, as your business relies on it. To do so, make sure you create what your audience likes. You can search for trending topics by looking at Google trends. When you’re done finalizing the topics of your course, research a tool that you can leverage to create a stunning course. One tool we’d suggest is iSpring Suite. From making professional videos in the iSpring studio to organizing quizzes, it lets you do everything in one place. Step 2: Find a tool to manage enrollments. When your course has thousands of enrollment, you want a membership plugin to manage enrollments, payments, customer care, etc. Here are some of the best tools to do the same.
LearnPress: A WordPress LMS plugin for creating, managing, and selling coursesRestrict Content Pro: Gives roles to people and manages subscriptions with ease.Buddyboss: Gamify your courses and customize your brand the way you wantTeachable: Best tool for beginners to create their first courseMemberpress: Sell and manage membership the right way
Step 3: Select a platform to sell your course. If you plan to sell your course on some marketplace, you can leverage a platform like Udemy.
Set Up A Dropshipping Store
The last way to make money as a WordPress professional on our list is by opening a dropshipping store. Dropshipping isn’t easy, but the ROI is extremely high once you set your store and have everything in place. The best thing is you don’t have to give anyone any commission for the product you sell. The profit is all yours. It might take you years to build a successful dropshipping store, but if done right, the store will pay off amazingly.
How Much Can You Make With Dropshipping?
There’s a high possibility that you can earn in the range of $1000-$5000 in the starting few months. Later on, as you keep getting traffic, you keep making more.
Where to Start Your Journey As A Dropshipper
Well, if you love WordPress, WooCommerce is the best platform on which you can open a store. But if you’re a beginner and want an extremely user-friendly platform with a less learning curve, we’d suggest you go with Shopify.
What’s the Best Way to Make Money As A WordPress Professional? 💰
Making some money as a WordPress professional isn’t hard. But if you want to make a full-time career, it takes effort to build something that can give you profit and a stable income. So there’s no one best remote WordPress job to earn. It depends on what you want to do, and the time you’re willing to put in. If you want to earn as a WordPress professional part-time/on side, you can create a blog and earn via ads. If you’re willing to devote your time totally as a WordPress professional, freelancing, opening an agency, or a dropshipping store is the best way to earn a high income with time. And finally, if you like management and tracking KPIs, it’s best to go with Affiliate marketing or selling courses. Want to accept payments through your website? Here are the best plugins to accept payment on WordPress sites. Here is everything you need to know about orphaned content on WordPress.
