Best Ways to Monetize Your WordPress Blog Without Selling Products

Most tips for making money online start with the same premise: you will need a product to sell.

A course. A service. A physical product. A coaching offer. Make the item, attract the audience, convert the visitors.

However, a very large number of WordPress sites such as portfolio blogs, niche content hubs, hobby sites that turned into a business are not centered around a product at all. They are centered around an idea, a subject, a point of view. And for these sites, the usual monetization guide doesn’t quite apply.

What makes it even better is that there are several other ways to do it.

You don’t have to sell a product to have a business model

Content was always valuable. The problem is choosing a way of extracting that value.

If a blogger has a WordPress site such as a travel diary, a tech commentary site, a recipe collection, or a personal finance resource, there are quite a few genuine ways to generate income that would require no product, no checkout page, and no customer service inbox.

The three main ones:

CPM advertising

CPM advertising pays you based on the number of people who see your content, regardless of whether they click anything or buy anything. So, your traffic is the product here.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing programs pay you a commission when one of your readers follows your recommendation and buys a product from the third party. So, your influence is the product here.

Sponsored content

Sponsored content is when you get paid partly or fully to write about a brand or a topic that resonates with your audience. So, their attention is the product here.

Each method has its place. However, not all methods are equally available to publishers at all stages.

Starting with CPM Ads Makes Sense

Affiliate marketing demands that you have both the right niche and a large volume for people to trust you. A well-placed affiliate link in a high-intent article can generate meaningful income but it requires building the authority that makes it work consistently over time.

You have to pitch to the potential brand, prepare a media kit, and usually meet a minimum audience threshold before a brand will take you seriously if you want to pursue sponsored content.

CPM advertising on the other hand doesn’t require any of that.

If you have traffic on your site – and we are talking here about any meaningful number of monthly visitors, you can start making money from it today.

The idea behind this model is straightforward: you get paid by a network for every thousand times your content gets displayed. The number of people reading your articles will determine how much you get paid. You don’t have to set up a sales funnel. You don’t have to negotiate. You don’t have to wait before a commission clears.

This is generally the right move for those bloggers who have created an audience but have no product. It turns existing traffic into income without changing anything about how you write or what your site is about.

And by the way, here are some of the best cpm ad networks for small publishers.

Early Monetization Mistakes to Avoid

Most bloggers who find it hard to make money from ads are not necessarily victims of low traffic. They tend to be victims of issues they have created for themselves.

Too many ad units. When CPM revenue feels small the first instinct is to add more ad placements. More ads, more impressions, more revenue… Seems logical! The reality is that page speed decreases, the reading experience worsens, and readers start to leave. Fewer, well-placed units consistently outperform pages that are full of ads.

Not paying attention to placement. An ad that is loaded below the fold and that is never scrolled to will result in zero impressions. Placement is ultimately what makes the difference between whether your inventory will be visible at all or not. The ad placements that are seen in most cases represent a lot more value than in most cases sidebar units that most readers simply never reach.

The Road from CPM to a Mixed Model

CPM advertising does not represent a final destination. It is your base.

A reliable stream of revenue from your traffic makes it possible for you to add other channels with higher yields. Affiliate programs that you have a natural content alignment with. A piece of sponsored content here and there, as your audience will begin to get the attention of the right brands. At some point, if the niche is there, a product that converts your most engaged segment of readers.

Every step builds on the previous one. CPM revenue keeps the lights on even in months when affiliate links don’t convert. The affiliate income will be at a peak level when the product that you recommend goes on sale. When the ad rates are seasonally low, sponsored content serves as a way to fill the gap.

Those bloggers who are able to generate a steady income scaling over time using content and never launching a product are just stacking revenue channels that are compatible on top of an audience that they have already created – beginning with the one that requires the least and growing from there.

Work with the traffic that you have earned already. Everything else will come ​‍​‌‍​‍‌​‍​‌‍​‍‌naturally.