80+ Proven Ways to Monetize Blog/Website for Smart Passive Income

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by Saurabh K

In this article, you will find well researched and proven ways to monetize your blog or website. With all the proven ways you can make smart passive income from your blog or website.

Monetizing a website/blog is a tricky thing. There are several methods, platforms, ads, affiliates and a lot more which you can use to make money online from your blog.

Monetizing your blog essentially which means you have to add some things into it or make several changes that help your blog to become profitable or make money platform for you.

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There are many different ways that can help you to monetize your website/blog. But what if there is no or less traffic to your blog.

Less traffic is equal to less or no income and a huge number of visitors to your blog is equal to a smart passive income for you. Refer “10 killer ideas to promote your blog to grow traffic” and make your blog a money-making platform.

So, what are that smart and profitable money-making ideas? And how you can monetize your website/blog for smart passive income. Below are 80+ ways to proven ways to monetize your website/blog. Check them all. 

How to Monetize Your Website/Blog for Smart Passive Income

# Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular and effective strategies to monetize your blog or website. Selecting products and promoting them on your blog will make you earn from selling each product with an affiliate link.

Pro Tip: Only Promote Products from the Interest of your Potential Audience.

So start with finding products and promote them to your blog and plan a promotional newsletter for email subscribers. Your audience will surely purchase the product by clicking on an affiliate link you shared if the product or the service resonates with them.

There are several networks/individual companies where you find products to promote. Explore popular affiliate networks to monetize your blog.

#1. Commission Junction: This is a massive network that offers reliable products with on-time payments.

#2. ShareASale: This network offers mostly clothes, accessories and other offline goods that you can promote on your blog or website.

#3. Clickbooth: This network offers CPA and CPG.

#4. GlobalWide Media: Another popular affiliate network that offers lots of options.

#5. ClickBank: This is the leading affiliate network that offers a high percentage of payouts for digital products.

#6. Rakuten Marketing: A network with many leading brands that you can use to monetize your blog or website.

#7. Amazon Associates: Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce platform, let you sell their products via Amazon Associates. It offers as much as 10% commission of the advertising fees on the products sold using your affiliate links.

Read Also: How to Build an Email Marketing List Quickly for Your Blog

# Sell Ad Space

This is a basic but very effective way to monetize your blog by selling ad space. This can be handled manually, but there are two more efficient ways with which you can manage them. One is using a network, and another is using plugin/resource.

There are certain places where you can let advertisers know that your blog or website is selling ad space.

#8. BuySellAds: This is one of the most popular ones that manage to advertise for publishers and advertisers.

#9. PropellerAds: PropellerAds provides a professional-grade advertising solution such as Native ads, Interstitial ads, and Web Push Ads.

#10. Carbon: This is an ad network owned by BuySellAds, focuses on the design and development industries, a great source to monetize from ads if you are a blogger.

#11. AdBuff: it offers CPM and CPC Ads by connecting Advertisers with Publishers via their platform. It is quite easy to use and the terms are very straightforward.

#12. Adversal: Adversal has a Self-Serve Ad Platform that offers Native Advertising focusing on the regional or local ads. You need to have a quality blog to join them.

#13. AdRotate Banner Manager: Similar to WP AdCenter, this WordPress plugin lets you manage ad sales directly from the WordPress dashboard.

#14. AdSanity: This is another popular WordPress plugin that offers some great features to manage ads. The pricing for this plugin is $29.

#15. Ad Inserter – Ad Manager & AdSense Ads: This is another free WordPress plugin that used to display ads on your WordPress site on almost any position you can think of.

#16. WP AdCenter: Finally, this popular and comprehensive plugin allows to place banners anywhere on your site. Advertisers can SignUp and select the place of Ads and can pay you via PayPal.

# Serve In-text Ads On Your Blog

Similar to selling ad space, another one of the most popular and majorly accepted by all the bloggers’ way to monetize your website is In-text Ads. In-text Ads is the creative way to serve the ads inside, upside, at the end of content, and at so many places on a blog or website.

It has been noticed that the audience attracts more to In-text Ads type and Click Through Rate of these ads are higher as compared to other ways of promotional ideas.

Google Adsense, probably one of the popular platforms that we all blogger know but which are the others? Let us explore them as well.

#17. Google AdSense: This is one of the easiest ways that are provided by Google.

#18. Infolinks: Infolinks, one of the popular advertising networks in the world, offers a great option for in-text ads.

#19. Bidvertiser: This is one of the great ways that offers inline text ads, banners, pop-unders and more. The bidding system lets you choose amongst the best bidders and undoubtedly you earn the highest.

#20. Skimlinks: Skimlinks converts your outbound in-text links into affiliate links and you receive the commission from each sale using your link.

#21 Media.net: These in-text ads and contextual ads of Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads are powered by Media.net.

#22 Sovrn //Commerce: It works similar to the Skimlinks. You can easily double up your earnings if you use the service on the product pages such as a fashion store.

See Also: Top 10 Best Google AdSense Alternatives to Monetize Your Blog

# Set up an eCommerce Store

Apart from having just content on your blog or website, you can set up a store on your site and sell products of your own. This is one of the great ways to monetize your site with 100% profit making an idea.

There are several significant resources with which you can create your own shop setup.

#23. Shopify: Nowadays, this is a very popular e-commerce platform that provides lots of features that can help you to monetize your website or blog.

#24. OpenCart: OpenCart is an online store management system that lets you create a self-hosted e-commerce site easily.

#25. Magento: This is an open-source e-commerce platform that is extremely popular.

#26. BigCommerce: As like Shopify this e-commerce platform also very high that provides many features.

#27. DPD: This is the great e-commerce platform which is high or selling digital products.

#28. osCommerce: As like Magento this is also an open-source e-commerce platform.

#29. WooCommerce: This is a free WordPress plugin for the e-commerce platform where also premium add-ons are available.

#30. Cart66: This is a premium WordPress e-commerce plugin.

#31. WP e-Commerce: As like WooCommorce this is another free WordPress plugin with premium add-ons are available.

#32. E-Junkie: This is another popular e-commerce platform for selling digital products.

#33. Gumroad: This resource makes very easy to sell your digital products.

# Introduce Your Own Affiliate Program

If you have an online store and selling a product online then launching your own affiliate program can undoubtedly increase the sale. Promoting your products on your blog may have limitations to reach a more potential audience.

The smart way is to allow publishers to promote your products and offer them attractive commissions for each sale from their referral. This is an effective and quick way to increase the sale, and you can make money by blogging as well as selling your products online.

There are some modern tools, which offer excellent features to manage your affiliate program. Check them all below.

#34. iDevAffiliate: iDevAffiliate affiliate software provides you with affordable affiliate program software for you to start your affiliate tracking!

#35. OsiAffiliate: Omnistar Affiliate Software provides you with affordable affiliate tracking software to grow your business. Over 14,000 companies use the software.

#36. Ambassador: Easily build customized referral campaigns to engage customers, affiliates, influencers, employees, colleagues, and other advocates across all digital properties.

#37. Jrox: Create your own affiliate marketing program with the JROX Affiliate Marketing Software.

#38. Post Affiliate Pro: Sit back and watch your revenue grow with Post Affiliate Pro. It is the leading affiliate software, trusted by more than 30,000 companies worldwide.

# Sell Membership

The excellent option to monetize your blog or website is selling a membership. By offering members access to some exclusive content or resource, you can produce recurring revenue.

If your blog is about design and development, then there are so many design and development industries that are offering some software, in-depth exclusive courses with membership.

Try them and you can monetize your blog by promoting and selling membership.

#39. aMember: This is the most popular software that manages membership websites. This software links a wide variety of CMSs and platforms. The starting price of this software is $179.95.

#40. Wishlist Member: This is the most popular WordPress plugin, and the pricing of this plugin is $197.

#41. Restrict Content Pro: This WordPress plugin is known for its robust membership managing system. The pricing of this software is $42. It doesn’t include any extensive features but yes it is very user-friendly.

#42. Member Mouse: This is a WordPress plugin which is a robust membership plugin, and the monthly price of this plugin starts with $19.95.

#43 SubHub: This is also a good software that has the starting price is $97 per month.

# Hosting Affiliate Programs

Hosting affiliate programs can help you to make little extra money. Nowadays, this option is a new trend to make money online.

Almost every hosting company offers an affiliate program with which you can make a few more extra bucks to add to your monthly income.

With the attractive and highly paid affiliate programs, hosting companies also provide attractive ads that you can place on your blog and encourage your visitors to click and buy a hosting plan.

There are several popular and new hosts that you may want to consider i.e. SiteGround, InMotion Hosting, Kinsta, Flywheel, DigitalOcean, Cloudways, Pagely, Site5 and many more.

Read More: 10+ Best Premium Hosting for High Traffic WordPress Website (Reviewed and Compared)

#44. Bluehost: An Extremely popular host that provides an effective affiliate program.

#45. WPEngine: This host is specialized in managing WordPress hosting and offers the feature like high affiliate commission for referrals.

#46. HostGator: This is another leading host like Bluehost that offers a generous affiliate program.

#47. Media Temple: This host is known as a leader in the hosting industry which has a potentially lucrative affiliate program.

See Also: What is SEO Friendly URLs Structure In WordPress?

Publishing sponsored posts is another great way to make money by leveraging the success and popularity of your blog. This option is more popular a few years ago but still, it is the trend today.

#48. PostJoint: It accepts paid content for your blog.

#49. SocialSpark: It is a kind of unique marketplace. Here you can find Instagram influencers for your product review and their promotion.

#50. SponsoredReviews: With this, you can get connected with advertisers looking to pay for blog reviews.

#51. Izea: Using this can connect with influential content creators.

# Generate and Sell Access Online Courses

Today, there are many online training and education websites, and it is a huge part of the industry. The most likely audience demand online training related to design and development. There is a site named Udemy that allows you to sell your own course to a huge crowd of audience.

This task is a little bit time consuming and obviously need hard work too to create an online course. But if you are offering online tutorials and do not want to limit promotion only on your blog then give a try to well-known online courses platforms generate and sell your online courses.

#52. Udemy: Udemy is an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 40000 courses and 12 million students.

#53. Pathwright: It has everything you need to create your own online school, sell online courses, and grow your learning community

#54. CourseMercant: A Shopping Cart system designed for the sale of online courses, face-to-face courses, conferences, webinars and training materials.

#55. OpenSesame: It offers the broadest, deepest, freshest catalog of business training sessions in the world. With over 20,000 courses from the world

#56. ProProfs: Knowledge Management Software for Quizzes, Tests, Training, Flashcards, Knowledge Base. Get started with our knowledge management software.

#57. Digital Chalk: It is a complete solution for creating and delivering your training online.

# Gate Premium Content

Another and well-known money-making strategy for every blogger. If you have a large, loyal fan following then, you can start to gate premium content.

There are few resources that can help you to monetize your selling access to premium content on your blog or website.

#58. Pivotshare: This resource sells the premium video content

#59. Piano: For access to premium content it built a revenue stream which is based on the payment

#60. Cleeng: This sells premium content like video, e-books, live events, and newspapers.

# Sell Your Products Via Auctioning

You might think that how can you sell your products via auction. But yes you can do this too.

There are several themes and plugins which offer to build your auctioning system on your blog or website.

Below are a few popular plugin and theme I know which can help you to set up an action system.

#61.Ultimate WordPress Auction Plugin: Ultimate WordPress Auction plugin helps you to create auctions on your site very easily. The features of the plugin are quite straightforward and flexible.

#62. WordPress Auction Plugin: WP Auctions is an advanced auction plugin that lets you host auctions on your blog or website. It uses AJAX powered popup to ensure the clean and seamless user experience.

#63. Responsive Auction Theme: This WordPress auction theme help you build an online auction website without writing a single line of code. It offers an in-built bidding system for your users, along with the buy-now options, and finally, add to cart and shipping options. You can also collect users’ feedback using directly from the auction or shipping page.

# Include a Job Board On Your Website

To monetize your blog or website starts including a job board. You can create an industry-specific job board and for that, you can charge companies to post a job listing to be seen by your audience.

To set up your own job board here are some of the options.

#64. webJobs: Web Scribble is software helps you to create a job board on your site. It is a complete recruitment management software with many essential features.

#65. WPJobboard WordPress Plugin: A WordPress job board plugin with lots of SEO and design features to list the jobs on your blog or site.

#66. Nine to Five WordPress Theme: Nine to Five is a powerful WordPress job theme, help you create and manage job postings right from your WordPress dashboard with lots of customization options.

#67. Jobify WordPress Theme: Another powerful job listing WordPress theme to create a job posting website. It offers live searching and filtering to narrow down the job listing. Customizable layout for main pages and can easily monitor and approve the job submissions.

# Podcasts

In this technology world, there are so many bloggers that make money by publishing podcasts. Because of their popularity, they got some additional opportunities for ad revenue and sponsorships.

There is a resource with which you can also publish a podcast.

#68. Podtrac: This resource connects podcasters and advertisers.

#69. Anchor: Anchor is a complete online platform, which allows you to create your podcast using their tool for free. Similar to Spotify you can also distribute and monetize your podcast directly from the portal.

#70. Spotify: The best place to create and publish your podcasts. You can also embed those podcasts on your blog and monetize from the same.

# Use WordPress Affiliate Plugins

We all know that WordPress is one of the most popular CMS to build a blog or website.

According to BuiltWith there are more than 27 million and increasing live sites are using WordPress to run their blogs or websites. And I hope you are also using WordPress CMS for your blog.

There are several affiliate plugins with which you can use to automate your affiliate links and can add them to blog posts’ content.

Such plugins are made to save time and can automate the system to promote products within the content. Check out some of the popular WordPress affiliate programs you must consider.

#71. Shortlinks by Pretty Links: The plugin allows you to clock your affiliate links and generates your domain links as per your choice. This plugin is available for free, you can use it to promote any affiliate program.

#72. Amazon Associates Link Builder: The official Amazon Associates Program plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create links of Amazon products directly in your posts.

#73. ThirstyAffiliates Affiliate Link Manager: Similar to the Pretty Links, this plugin lets you create the redirect links of your domain to any affiliate program. You can also track the clicks on the link using the plugin.

#74. EasyAzon – Amazon Associates Affiliate Plugin: Another Amazon Associates Affiliate plugin let you easily create the text affiliate links of any available product on Amazon.com right from your WordPress post editor.

#75. Easy Affiliate Links: Easy Affiliate Links another free alternative to Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates to manage and create cloaked affiliate links and their tacking.

# WordPress Plugins for Blog Monetization

Apart from all the above strategies, there are some more WordPress plugins that you can promote on your blog for monetization.

Each of these plugins has its own unique functionality. So let see what those plugins are.

#76. Sabai Directory: This is the plugin that allows you to add a directory to your site, and also it helps you integrate with PayPal to accept payment for directory listings. The pricing of this plugin is $29.

#77. WP-Insert: This is the free plugin with which you can insert ads into specific locations in between your content.

#78. WP Auto Affiliate Links: This is another free plugin that automatically creates affiliate links in between your content based on keyword and yes your choice of affiliate programs.

#79. Bloom: Similar to the OptinMonster, Bloom helps you to collect emails using the email opt-in forms on your site. It shows you various types of stats i.e. email list and allows you to share some freebies with your user when they sign-up for the newsletter.

#80. MonsterInsights: The plugin bridges the gap between WordPress and Google analytics. Shows major site stats in your dashboard and you can create customized tracking using the premium version of the plugin.

#81. OptinMonster: This is a comprehensive lead generation software, which helps you to get new subscribers and collect their emails.

#82. WP Rocket: One of the best plugin to improve the page loading speed of a WordPress site. Only available as a premium version dramatically increase the site speed. However, one can also increase the WordPress site speed using this guide.

# WordPress Themes for Monetizing Your Site

Furthermore, there are a few WordPress themes which could do wonders and add handsome value to your monetization portfolio, if you promote them effectively. Here is the list of awesome WordPress themes which you should promote to monetize your blog.

#83. Divi: Divi WordPress theme is a theme builder that lets you design and customize each and every part of your WordPress theme without coding. It’s easy to use drag and drop user interface allows you to create the perfect websites of your choice.

#84. Genesis Framework: The Genesis Framework lets you quickly and easily build awesome WordPress websites. It offers a secure and search-engine-optimized foundation for the child theme you use to build your site.

#85. WP Astra: A fast and lightweight modern WordPress theme available for free. However, it’s premium version offers way more that features and customizable options to create any kind of site efficiently.

#86. GeneratePress: Similar to WP Astra, GeneratePress is a very fast and responsive WordPress theme available for free. It offers various customization modules with the premium offering.

Concluding the Ideas to Monetize Blog or Website

Well, these are some of the tools and platforms which you can use to monetize your blog or website.

These tools will help you more if you can ensure a good amount of traffic on your site. Because the income is directly proportional to your traffic and there are of course other ways for you to monetize your blog or website.

Do you have any other idea to monetize your blog or website, do share the same with us in the comments section below.

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